Adventure, Disguise and the Empire: Far Eastern Representations in Captain Charles Gilson’s Held By Chinese Brigands

Lodged at the height of the imperialist era in China, the British officer and writer of sensational and adventure fiction, Captain Charles Gilson became a proponent of disseminating the race-based, classist, and imperialistic assumptions vastly prevalent in Victorian England via his extensive literary output. While such a stance remained in tune with the popular notions of China as a declining polity, it nevertheless provided a valuable analytical lens of delving into Western perceptions of the Orient during a period of significant geopolitical flux. His extensive body of works, frequently set in exotic locales and featuring thrilling exploits and escapades, time and again employed the vision of an “inscrutable” East, thereby becoming reflective of the widespread contemporary fascination with, and simultaneous misapprehension of the Far East. Furthermore, this misrepresentation of the colonial space also concurrently impacted the means by which cultural identities could be constructed through the usage of the genre of adventure fiction, thereby explicating the manner in which ethnocentric biases could influence the ways in which the target readership received and understood the complexities inherent in China’s modernity and its cultural heritage. The current paper aims to examine Gilson’s 1921 novel Held by Chinese Brigands in the light of the above discussion, locating it in the context of early 20th century discourses that profoundly shaped Sino-British and broader foreign interactions of the era.