Ross G. Forman demonstrates how integral China and the Chinese were to the Victorian imagination and reassesses British imperialism in Asia.

Ross Forman is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

Introduction: topsy-turvy Britain and China; 1. The manners and customs of the modern Chinese: narrating China through the treaty ports; 2. Projecting from Possession Point: James Dalziel's chronicles of Hong Kong; 3. Peking plots: representing the Boxer Rebellion of 1900; 4. Britain 'knit and nationalised': Asian invasion novels in Britain, 1898-1914; 5. Staging the celestial; 6. A cockney Chinatown: the literature of Limehouse, London; Conclusion: no rest for the West.