I venture the great Li H'sen Chang himself would have appreciated that...

 

One of the questions that comes up in various Doctor Who threads from time to time is the racism or otherwise of the Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang - the epic 6 part adventure that closed the 14th season of the program.  There is much to recommend this serial.  

Tom Baker dresses as Sherlock Holmes (I think of the Man with the twisted lip in the opium den), there are hansom cabs, the production design is lavish with real theatres and fantastic sets, Magnus Greel is a homage to the Phantom of the Opera, producer of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, there is the double act of Henry Gordon Jago (a satire of the Good Old Days who inhabits the Palace Theatre built by Richard D'Oyly Carte before it became a Music Hall?) and Lightfoot the pathologist (Dr Watson reference?) ... it's all jolly good fun with many elements of Victoriana interwoven including ... less fortunately Fu Manchu ...the 1912 brainchild of Sax Rohmer whom Li H'sen Chang himself looks suspiciously like.  Fu Manchu was always controversial from the first publication.  Indeed even as early as 1980 the Peter Sellers parody "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu" was picketed by protesters.  It was a box office bomb anyway however so they need hardly have bothered...

Matters are made slightly worse by the casting of a white actor John Bennett with uncovincing make-up which I've always excused in my head as being the result of him being 500 years old.  Magnus Greel is also played by a while actor but he's so hideously deformed it doesn't matter but ...

The producers explained their casting of John Bennett in make-up to be down to the difficultly of finding Chinese actors in London at a time when they were all Burt Kwouk who was probably otherwise engaged trying to kill Inspector Clouseau.  However, this excuse seems wafer thin when we consider that the cast included several actual oriental actors - so why not use one of them?  Tony Then who played Ho was a Singaporean actor who was primarily a dancer, Vincent Wong who played was actually Jamaican-British (presumably with Chinese heritage) and John Wu who played simple "Coolie" was ...well, who knows?  What we do know is that having them all playing nincompoops and thugs is a little racist.  Only Chang has something approaching sympathy to his character and he's still a psycho who's been accomplice to Greel's Jack-the-Ripperish antics.  "Despicable Chang has other intentions" indeed...

But all this got me thinking about Fu Manchu - was he actually the model for Li H'sen Chang as we all suppose?  We can't ask Robert Holmes because he went to the Great Palace of Jade in the mid 1980s... 

Chung Ling Soo

... but I did discover there were certain supposed models that Sax Rohmer might have used for Fu Manchu who are quite interesting.  Notably a famous 19th century magician called Chung Ling Soo who looks not a bit unlike Li H'sen Chang.  Chung Ling Soo died (like many others) performing a bullet catch... Li H'sen Chang also performs a magic bullet trick with Tom Baker's Doctor ... "Please to be very quiet.  Chang shoot many peasants learning this trick".  Coincidence?  

To make things murkier Soo was not really Chinese, his act was simply stolen wholesale from real Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo resulting in them having a bitter feud over many years.  Foo hailed from the US so Soo simply borrowed bits of his act hoping no one in the notice... in the same way that some UK comedy acts ripped off US comedy acts in the 80s and 90s before VHS and DVDs circulated more widely and they couldn't get away with it anymore.  Although the feud was quite complicated.  Foo said he would pay $1000 dollars to anyone who could explain one of his tricks.  Soo said he knew how it was done but that Foo refused to pay up...

People were shocked when Soo died to discover that he was not (like John Bennett) really Chinese at all.  He concealed his true identity (William Ellsworth Robinson) by simply speaking in broken English, saying very little on stage and keeping his private life very private.  It seems there was a long pattern of what would now be called cultural appropriation at work not just in the creation of Fu Manchu or Li H'sen Chang but going right back to 19th century... so maybe John Bennett playing a fake Chinaman is historically accurate?

What we are to make of all this in any analysis of Li H'sen Chang?  Well, it is more than possible that some of this was known to Robert Holmes.  We don't know.  I've often theorised that Henry Gordon Jago is in fact "The Father of the Halls" Charles Morton who would have been running the Palace Theatre at that time ...

... although, of course, if Jago's theatre is really modelled on the real Palace Theatre well ... that's on Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road so the River Fleet could not really be going underneath... it goes up through Holburn towards Kings Cross... and he's more likely to be modelled on Leonard Sachs than any real historical character but then trying to figure out how much reality there is in fiction is kind of part of the fun...