On A Chinese Screen
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Summary
Maugham spent the winter months of 1919 travelling fifteen hundred miles up the Yangtze river. Always more interested in people than places, he noted down acute and finely crafted sketches of those he met on countless scraps of paper. In the resulting collection we encounter Western missionaries, army officers and company managers who are culturally out of their depth in the immensity of the Chinese civilisation. Maugham keenly observes, and gently ridicules, their dogged and oblivious persistence with the life they know.
Reviews
Evoke the nostalgic China of "old China hands," replete with rickshaws, coolies and singsing girls...satisfying accounts of the follies and foibles of the British diplomats and expatriates who stubbornly ignore the native culture and labor to create little enclaves of Chelsea and Soho in Asia
Los Angeles Times
