“Curious Kisses”

It was at the end of the 1890s that the reading public first became aware of Limehouse as London’s Chinatown. Sax Rohmer’s Limehouse, a place of “dark narrow streets and sinister-looking alleys,” was a straightforward exploitation of current press anxieties which makes the Chinatown fiction of his lesser known contemporary, Thomas Burke, appear all the more remarkable (Rohmer 1919: 115). While it is through the figure of Rohmer’s evil genius Dr Fu-Manchu that Chinese Limehouse retains its hold on our imagination today, Thomas Burke with his scandalous tales of Limehouse love made a formative contribution to the ‘queer spell’ that the very idea of Limehouse came to exert during the early twentieth century. It was Rohmer who used this term in a 1957 article, “How Fu Manchu Was Born.” He explains his character’s genesis in “the sordid drama of Limehouse, with its orchestral accompaniment of river noises, [ … ] its frequent fog effects and sinister, sadistic crimes” that had cast its “queer spell” over him. Although the earliest Fu-Manchu stories pre-date Burke’s Limehouse Nights: Tales of Chinatown (1916) by some years, Burke’s idiosyncratic articulation of the Limehouse effect is, I think, an unacknowledged or unconscious influence on Rohmer’s reminiscence here. ¹ What I want to explore in this chapter are some of the socio-cultural aspects surrounding the “sordid drama” of Limehouse that account perhaps for Burke’s relative obscurity, despite having been a widely read and respected author in his day.