On a Chinese Screen

Maugham, W. Somerset (William Somerset), 1874-1965Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.8

Word count: 280K words
Chapters: 29

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.On a Chinese Screen by W. Somerset MaughamAuthor: Maugham, W. Somerset (William Somerset), 1874-1965,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Apr 25, 2015

Editor's review

On a Chinese Screen is a collection of travel sketches W. Somerset Maugham wrote after journeys through China around 1920. It consists of dozens of short pieces: wharves, inns, missionaries, consuls, merchants, laborers, chair-bearers—figures of every sort flicker past under the author's cool, faintly ironic gaze. Maugham's strength lies in withholding moral judgment, letting observation rest on detail and leaving readers to feel for themselves the dislocation and awkwardness of East-West encounters in the colonial era. This approach makes the book both a literary essay and a piece of circumstantial evidence about slices of old Chinese society. For Chinese readers its value lies less in systematic knowledge than in a restrained, humorous, slightly detached posture of observation—a useful comparative text for understanding how Westerners wrote about China in the early twentieth century. Suited to piecemeal reading on a commute or before sleep; it does not aim at plot momentum, and a few pages yield a complete portrait.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers who enjoy Maugham's fiction and want to see his nonfiction
Readers interested in the social scene of the early Republic of China and the history of Sino-foreign contact
Readers who prefer short sketches and fragmented reading that can be picked up and put down at will
Students and enthusiasts studying travel literature and cross-cultural writing

Not a good fit for

Readers expecting systematic modern Chinese history or data-based verification
Readers accustomed to strong plot and long narrative structures in fiction
Readers with little patience for, or easily offended by, a colonial-era Western perspective

Reading tips

Read one piece at a time, two or three per sitting, pausing briefly before continuing.
When a passage involves missionaries, merchants, or officials, note the author's attitude as you go.
Read alongside other Western travel accounts of China from the same period to observe similarities and differences in writing conventions.
No need to read in order; pick chapters by type of figure that interest you first.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book a novel or a travelogue?

It is not fiction but a collection of travel sketches and character portraits from Maugham's journey in China. Each piece stands alone with no continuous plot, closer to literary observation notes.

How difficult is the original English?

Maugham's prose is plain and his sentences are not long, making it a relatively accessible English essay collection. However, it includes period place names, official titles, and missionary vocabulary, so keep a dictionary handy.

Are the portrayals of China in the book reliable?

They reflect the observations of an early twentieth-century British writer working within his own cultural framework. The details are vivid but the perspective is limited; read it as a literary text and historical circumstantial evidence rather than an objective record.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Maugham, W. Somerset (William Somerset), 1874-1965 Author

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) was a British novelist and playwright. Twenty-four of his works are held in this collection, covering novels, short-story collections and plays, with representative titles including Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, The Trembling of a Leaf, The Circle, Liza of Lambeth and On a Chinese Screen. His writing ranges widely in subject, often depicting human weakness, emotional entanglement and exotic settings in a cool, restrained tone; his narratives are clear and his characters sharply drawn, combining readability with irony. His works circulated widely in twentieth-century English literature and have influenced both popular and serious fiction. As public information is limited, his detailed life and career are not elaborated here.