A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking's Foreign Colony

Julia Boyd has brought to life in a most accessible way the extraordinary collection of people from all walks of life and a variety of nationalities who made up the expatriate community in China in the years between the death of the Last Empress and the Communist Revolution in 1949. Adventurers, refugees from Bolshevism, cranks, charlatans and frauds (Sir Edmund Backhouse not the least of these), mystical priests like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and acute observers of a vanished world like Daniele Varè make up the cast of characters and they tell a fascinating story. Anyone with an interest in China as it begins to play a more significant role in world affairs should read this most enjoyable and illuminating book.

A gripping and visit account drawing on original and contemporary sources.

Excellent overview of life in old Peking in a very readable style.

Well researched and vividly told, with plenty of fresh, first-hand material and clear insights.

I was drawn to this book, having just read Paul French's brief series of portraits of 1920's and 1930's Beijing, 'Badlands'. He rather sniffily mentions Julia Boyd's 'Dance with the Dragon' as being 'worth mentioning' , which is a double-edged comment - so I decided to buy the Kindle edition.The book describes Peiping (= Beijing when it was no longer the capital; 'jing' = 'capital' in chinese, thus Beijing = northern capital and Nanjing = southern capital) from around 1900 to 1949 - in other words, from the time of the Boxer rebellion until the internment of foreign nationals after Pearl Harbour and the end of the war, and up to the Revolution/Mao's reconquest of Beijing. It particularly describes the jeunesse doree (gilded youth) life of foreigners in a city which was no longer the capital, where the country was falling apart, firstly under warlordism and then under Japanese incursions, and where foreigners were isolated (or isolated themselves) from chinese society.This book provides an excellent, if at times superficial, review of the decades of the first half of the last century of the expat Beijing community. Superficial, in that there is little mention of the different factions of the Manchu court during the Boxer rebellion; little or no discussion of the murder of Pamela Werner (for which see Paul French's excellent 'Midnight in Beijing'); little discussion of one of the most fascinating characters of the period, Edmund Backhouse; and little in-depth discussion of why what was going on politically was happening.Julia Boyd writes in an easy style and this book is readable. Nevertheless, I've only awarded it four stars because, apart from the above, she relies too much on her American sources (the US was only one of the eight foreign powers and, at that time, not the most important). Rather more critically, she often quotes at length vignettes of female American expats whose lives are of less immediate interest; and I couldn't help feeling that there was a hidden feminist agenda, i.e. look at the day-to-day lives of these (US) women, whereas she writes little on the areas I've mentioned above. This is a pity, because while her sources give a lively and fresh view of Beijing, the book omits the more important events that were happening. Maybe Julia Boyd would argue that this is the purpose of her book, simply to give a portrait of the daily lives of the foreign community in their isolated and gilded bubble; in which case, it succeeds admirably.

This book offers a fascinating and well-written account of the foreign community living and surviving in Peking (Beijing) between the end of the Qing Dynasty and Mao’s communist revolution in 1949. It is a story full of detailed descriptions of people and places, and provides not only a highly readable history of China at the time but also an insight into the relationship between the expatriate community and the Chinese. Well worth reading.

This is a very readable book. The author skilfully weaves together people-stories drawn from a wide variety of sources and places them in the context of Chinese history in the first half of the 20th century. She wisely confines her study to the foreign community in Peking and explores its relationships with the Chinese people. This works out pretty well but in the space allowed it would be unrealistic to expect an in-depth analysis of all the characters who appear but there is enough to whet the appetite for wider reading to discover more about Hart, Jordan, Backhouse, Liddell, the Snows and others. It was not mentioned but Dorothea Soothill (later Lady Hosie) shocked someone from the Legation community by going to stay with Chinese friends during the Revolution. There is a quote in which Sir Alexander Hosie said he could not bridge the gap between white and yellow but more could be made of the contrast with his wife who Sir Alexander admitted was 'interested in and interersting to' all kinds and colours of people. Julia Boyd gives the impression that her acquaintance with the Hosie story is superficial by referring to Sir Alexander Hosie, who came from Aberdeenshire, as an Englishman! Some might think that unforgiveable.Nevertheless, this book is well worth obtaining for its overview, stimulation and grasp of the foreign community's general lack of cross cultural engagement.

Julia Boyd, author of "A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking's Foreign Colony," is both the wife of a senior British diplomat with Asian experience and a former staff member of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. This background helps explain key aspects of her book: its relative concentration on the British element of Peking's multinational foreign community and her access to unpublished materials and memoirs. "A Dance with the Dragon" examines life in Peking between the end of dynastic rule in the early 20th century and the rise of Communist control in mid-century. Its flow is chronological with a plethora of historical detail studded with personal memories of foreigners living in the capital city. The number of specific foreigners cited is dizzying and is perhaps best suited for readers with some direct knowledge of that community itself. Also, there is need of further explanation on some broader issues of Chinese history. Despite the author's undoubted writing skills, I found the book a tedious read. In this regard, it is worth comparing to David Kidd's "Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China," a superb, emotionally moving account of the impact of the Communist takeover on the wealthy Yu family into which this American had married.

I ordered this book based on having enjoyed the author's Travelers in the Third Reich, and also that I had relatives living in China 1911-1937. This book covers a few years prior, after the Boxer Rebellion, and through WWII. Western knowledge and appreciation of Chinese history and culture has always been sketchy, even to those living there as it happens. China will be a huge part of our future so steps taken to know them are worthwhile. THis book helps.

The entertaining and informative narrative history of expatriate life in Peking/Beijing over the first half of the 20th century, 'A Dance With The Dragon : The Vanished World of Peking's Foreign Colony', shows author Julia Boyd has an eye for good anecdotes, and flair for retelling them.This book is a great read for old China hands and newcomers alike who want not only to be entertained, but also to better understand, through experiences of expatriate residents from 1900 to 1949, the extraordinary trajectory of China from the late Qing Dynasty to the present. Anyone who has lived in or visited this ever-fascinating city, or has read widely about it, is likely to find new stories unearthed by Boyd. She has mined a treasure trove of published and unpublished memoirs, official reports, correspondence and other works.Boyd writes with a vast palette of colourful characters and stories, illustrating a spectrum of mutual ignorance, misunderstanding, congeniality and enlightenment that always has characterised foreign and Chinese interaction. Yet this is not a preachy or tendentious book: Boyd presents her narrative, and allows readers to reach their own conclusions. She succinctly states her conclusions at the very end of the book, writing in part: '...if much of the architecture of the city has changed beyond recognition, so too has that image of China once perpetuated by the expatriates who are the subject of this book and whose insensitivity and ignorance were to leave such a scar. China played its own part of course in mutual misunderstanding, and the foreigners had no crystal ball. Nevertheless (with honourable exceptions) they stand guilty of a massive failure of imagination.'The green-tile-roofed traditional Chinese buildings and later structures of the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) Hospital in downtown Beijing are well-known as one of the most prestigious hospitals in the Chinese capital, often used by the senior Chinese leadership as well as foreigners. Less well-known is the background Boyd relates about founding of the hospital by American Protestant medical missionaries in 1921 with an $8 million donation by John D. Rockefeller, who intended that it should be one of the world's best. From 1915 to 1947, the Rockefeller Foundation poured $45 million into the PUMC, its largest grant to any single project. Boyd relates how Sir Reginald Johnston, the Scottish tutor to China's last emperor, Pu Yi, successfully insisted -- against suicide threats by elderly imperial concubines, and the indignation of palace eunuchs -- that the last emperor should receive his first pair of spectacles at the PUMC hospital. The apotheosis of the Chinese Revolution, Dr Sun Yat-sen, himself a qualified practitioner of Western medicine, chose the PUMC hospital to be treated for his terminal liver cancer, dying there in March 1925 -- followed by riotous scenes as Nationalists and Communists immediately contested ownership of his political legacy.Many travelers through China today who encounter courteous and efficient officers of the Chinese Customs Service are unaware that it is the direct institutional descendant of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, which was established and led over 40 years, until 1911, by Sir Robert Hart, a Chinese-speaking Irishman honoured and trusted by the Chinese Government as one of their most loyal, effective and incorruptible officials. Hart was famous in his time as an administrator and for his understanding of China. Less well-known is that he maintained a 20-member Chinese orchestra known as The IG's Own, who played western music; and that he had three children by his Chinese mistress.Among many other colourful characters on Boyd's pages:* Sir Miles Lampson, the six-and-a-half-foot tall British ambassador notable for duck shooting at the Summer Palace, for shooting game from British gunboats whenever he had the chance, and for diplomatic dispatches pretentiously written in the third person;* Roy Chapman Andrews, the swashbuckling American explorer-paleontologist whose expeditions in China and Mongolia from his base in Peking for nine years (in a 47-room courtyard house formerly occupied by his friend, London "Times" correspondent and Chinese Government adviser G. E. Morrison) helped to inspire the movie character, Indiana Jones;* Sir Edmund Backhouse, the very odd British aristocrat, China scholar and longtime Peking resident who perpetrated elaborate literary hoaxes, and claimed to have had multiple sexual encounters with Manchu aristocrats of both sexes, including the Empress Dowager Cixi;* Joseph W. Stilwell, the Chinese-speaking US Army officer, later General, who was posted to Peking with his family, travelling widely in China from the early 1920s. Drawing on Mrs Winifred Stilwell's unpublished memoirs, Boyd shows a lesser-known aspect of "Vinegar Joe" as a connoisseur of Chinese art, a man whose sympathies for the Chinese people were such that he held a farewell banquet for 12 rickshawmen before departing Peking as the Second World War loomed; and* Edgar and Helen Snow, the American correspondents who were Peking's original trendy Left dilettante couple, who competed in sycophantic writing about the Chinese Communists -- who may have been ethically superior relative to the rampantly corrupt Nationalists but were not as irreproachable as depicted by the Snows.The Kindle edition is well formatted, easy to navigate, and free of the errors often seen in e-book transfers. The bibliography is an excellent guide to further reading.

Outstandingly enjoyble and thoroughly researched account of the foreign community in Beijing from the Boxer Rebellion to the founding of the PRC in 1949. The dramatic and turbulent story of China's transition from Imperial to communist rule unfolds as the backdrop to a very motley crew of diplomats, socialites, scholars and charlatans. Julia Boyd's book is impeccably researched, but she never allows her fine scholarship to interfere with readability. Highly recommended.

A fascinating background of the relationship between the foreigners who came to and attempted dominate its trade and yet stand apart as its superiors. During the horrors of the Boxer Rebellion to the excesses of the Forbidden City, foreigners from England and Europe tended to mingle mostly with themselves --while enjoying extravagant living in their own legations. Written after research of original materials -- letters, diaries, and articles by those who experienced those hardly believable times, A Dance with the Dragon creates a vivid picture of a China, once disdained for its backwardness and brings into focus the China of today.

,was written with a very slanted bias, but covered a lot of the exotic world of the foreign fascination with Peking, which sadly, with the exception of a few monuments has been obliterated, into an ugly, smog choked city that reminds me now of Los Angeles in the 1970s.

Boyd gives a nice view of the luxury and life enjoyed by Westerners living in Beijing's Legation Quarter before World War II.

This book was a little tedious. The anecdotes were not very interesting or amusing and the characters were not very well drawn. It was hard to understand if this was meant to be a serious look at the foreign community in Peking or a light flit through the early 20th century in China.

This book was so much better than I expected! Lots of history easy to read...and not so much vapid politicians going to dances. Call it history lite...a great beginning for a further study of China for those interested.

More interesting histories of the expats who lived in old Peking, a vanished world that ended with World War II.