ABSTRACT

What did Sun Yatsen make of Edwin Collins and his household in 1896-97? What did Edwin Collins and his household make of Sun Yatsen in 1896-97? How and why did these individuals come together and start their writing collaboration? Professor Wong in the 1980s considered these same questions, and had only the surviving Slater’s Detective Agency records on which to base his conjectures. In early summer 2013, during its final six-month incarnation in a suburb of North London, I was fortunate to unearth at the British Library Newspaper Section at Colindale a preciously rare microfilm copy of a 1911 local newspaper interview with Edwin Collins in which he addressed himself explicitly to answering these very questions.