Creating Chinatown: Three Cultural Paradigms in Burke’s “Limehouse Nights”Stories

In late 19th and early 20th-century British popular literature, the rhetoric of “Yellow Peril” and Sinophobia was prevalent, portraying China as a barbaric and dangerous entity. However, with the outbreak of World War I, British intellectuals began to actively study and borrow from the spiritual essence of classical Chinese culture, leading to a fascination and admiration for China. Positioned between these two contrasting literary trends, Thomas Burke, through his writings on London’s Limehouse Chinatown, embraced multiple cultural influences, resulting in novels that exhibit a fusion of cultures. Burke’s short story collections “Limehouse Nights” and “More Limehouse Nights” present three cultural paradigms: firstly, Burke absorbs and reconfigures the aesthetic heritage of the 18th-century “Chinoiserie” ; secondly, influenced by popular culture elements such as melodrama and the working-class struggle for cultural hegemony, Burke integrates urban melodrama and slum romance narrative elements into his “Limehouse Nights” stories; thirdly, traditional Chinese cultural elements such as ancient folk tales, ethics, and aesthetic techniques also influenced Burke’s later Limehouse writings.