On a Chinese Screen

"In fifty-eight sketches of Chinese life and character, Maugham describes the China he visited in 1919 and 1921. He presents a remarkable range of the European types then resident in China: missionaries and their wives, Catholic priests and Catholic sisters, consular and diplomatic officials, taipans and businessmen, soldiers and seafarers, and all the flotsam and jetsam of European communities in the East. Maugham includes Chinese portraits as well: an official so sensitive to beauty in all its myriad forms and yet so grossly venal in his public life, and a clerk who lives a life of danger and incident and yet is bored and turns for romance to magazine stories. Maugham depicts a China that has been almost totally transformed since 1949, for the treaty ports have gone, the privileged expatriate communities have vanished, and the visitor is no longer free to wander at will over China. On a Chinese Screen not ony has an appeal for the general reader, but is also now an important historical document."--Back cover.