ABSTRACT
An iridescent metal dragon glints on the traffic island opposite the Limehouse exit of the Docklands Light Railway. It is there to commemorate what was once Chinese Limehouse, now all but erased from the physical site of Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields in London’s regenerated Docklands. The idea of Limehouse, however, remains charged with significance and the most intriguing evocation of this vanished district is the Limehouse fiction of Thomas Burke (1886-1945). This study takes as its focus Burke’s celebrated collection of Chinatown stories, Limehouse Nights (1916) in order to investigate a fascination that by the 1920s had become a veritable cult of Chinatown.
