Ching Ching was created by E. Harcourt Burrage and debuted in “Handsome Harry of the Fighting Belvedere” (The Boys’ Standard, 1876). Burrage (1839-1916) was one of the most prolific penny dreadful authors of the nineteenth century and was popularly known as “the boys’ Charles Dickens.”¹ He wrote hundreds of serials for various journals, and was noted for being a staunch opponent of corporal punishment for schoolchildren; none of the boys in his stories are ever beaten by their masters. Burrage was better regarded by the press than most of the other boys’ novels authors and was seen as someone who “carefully avoided all that tends to immorality,” a statement rarely heard with regards to other authors of penny dreadfuls, boys’ novels, and story papers. Ching Ching was one of Burrage’s most popular creations–“Ching Ching became the only serious rival to Jack Harkaway [see: Jack Harkaway’s Adventures]”²–and went on to appear in nine different story paper serials over the next nineteen years, with hardcover editions of the serials being published as late as 1900.

Ching Ching is a Chinese teenager who leaves Peking for undisclosed reasons. In his first appearance he is found hiding in the hold of a pirate ship by “Handsome Harry” Marsh, who is sailing around the world in his ship the Belvedere. In “Handsome Harry of the Fighting Belvedere” Ching Ching functions primarily as comic relief, playing pranks and telling tall tales. But Ching Ching (later “Ching-Ching”) proved to be popular with the readers, and so Burrage began writing sequels to “Handsome Harry” in penny dreadfuls and serialized books. These sequels feature Ching Ching as the protagonist, portraying him as a more traditionally heroic figure. He continues to speak in the racist pidgin dialect common to Asian characters in the fiction of the time: “Lovely lady...let me axe ob you to accept dis money dat I win, so dat you may supply him to charitable porpoises.”³ Despite his pidgin speech, Ching Ching quickly transforms from comic relief to an extremely capable adventurer, quite different from most contemporary portrayals of Chinese men. (But see ‘Bail Up!’ and The Beautiful White Devil). He is a tall tale teller and a deft magician, a type of precursor to Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung (see: The Wallet of Kai Lung). He is wily, always cheerful, and filled with aplomb. He is equally willing to confront and outwit a highwayman as he is to put an end to a worldwide conspiracy that controls Russian Nihilists, German Socialists, and French Communists. He becomes respected enough by the London police to be brought in to solve a mystery when all other attempts fail. As the London inspector who asks for Ching Ching’s help says, “He has a master mind...Ching Ching will do things his own way or not at all¼and when his way fails there is no more to be done.”⁴ His adventures usually verge on the picaresque; there is always an overarching plot, but Ching Ching’s wanderings are given as much emphasis as the international settings. A surprising number of them are mysteries, albeit told in penny serial style, with nods made to Sergeant Bucket (see: Bleak House) and Sherlock Holmes (see: The Sherlock Holmes Adventures), among others.

resists conventional Victorian stereotypes about the Chinese. He does not exhibit meekness or cowardice, but shows “boldness and bravery.” Ching-Ching, who may seem “thin to painfulness,” is able to surprised and defeat his enemies by first playing into their preconceived notions of the weak and effeminate Chinese male and then revealing that “every inch” of him is “steel.” Through tricksterism he is able to retain his personal autonomy in a world where characters...hate the Chinese for being a “cursed, ugly race.” He can dupe those more powerful than him. Instead of being a victim of practical jokes as other stereotypical Chinese characters were, Ching-Ching is more often than not the perpetrator of tricks on others. He is capable of causing chaos but also of restoring order.⁵

Moreover, Ching Ching’s eventual wife is white. “In the early Ching-Ching stories, Ching-Ching’s charms attract women from all parts of the world, albeit mostly lower-class white women or foreign women, suggesting that as a Chinese seafarer he was only suited for females of similar class.”⁶ While interracial marriage is unusual in Victorian popular fiction (but see Around the World in Eighty Days, At War with Pontiac, and Westward Ho!, among others), interracial relationships were a recurring trope in Victorian fiction.⁷

By his wife Annette Ching Ching has a son, Young Ching-Ching: “the fact that Young Ching-Ching is a mixed-race child does not became an issue in any of the stories. In fact, he speaks and acts like a typical naughty British boy, leading other boys to cause commotion at school and wreak havoc around the village.”⁸ In fact, so Westernized does Ching Ching become that he hosts Christmas parties: “the idea of a Chinese man seated at the head of a table hosting a Christmas dinner in an English village was probably previously unimaginable...Ching-Ching gradually becomes an ‘upright citizen’ and even an authority figure as the Ching-Ching series progresses.”⁹

In sum, the Ching Ching Adventures, while written in the tedious prose of the penny serials, contain a strong example of racial and cultural counterprogramming on Burrage’s part.

Print: E. Harcourt Burrage, Cheerful-Daring-Wonderful Ching-Ching. Sequel to “Handsome Harry.” London: W. Lucas, 1900.

¹ John Springhall, “Disreputable adolescent reading: low-life, women-in-peril and school sport 'penny dreadfuls' from the 1860s to the 1890s," in Mike Huggins and J.A. Mangan, eds., Disreputable Pleasures: Less Virtuous Victorians at Play (New York: Frank Cass, 2004), 117.

² Springhall, “Disreputable adolescent reading,” 117.

³ E. Harcourt Burrage, Handsome Harry of the Fighting “Belvedere” (London: Hogarth House, 187-), 150.

⁴ E. Harcourt Burrage, Ching Ching on the Trail (London: T. Harrison Roberts, 1895), 4.

⁵ Shin-Wen Chan, Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851-1911 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 68.

⁶ Chan, Representations of China, 69.

⁷ See for example Robert Young’s Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race: “It is striking that many novelists not only of today but also of the past write almost obsessively about the uncertain crossing and invasion of identities: whether of class and gender–the Brontes, Hardy or Lawrence–or culture and race–the Brontes again...Haggard, Conrad (not only The Secret Agent, but also of course in Heart of Darkness, the imbrication of the two cultures within each other, the fascination with the “magnificent” African woman, and among many other novels, his first, Almayer’s Folly, the story of an inter-racial marriage), James, Forster, Cary, Lawrence, Joyce, Greene, Rhys. So much so, indeed, that we could go so far as to claim it as the dominant motif of much English fiction.” Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (Abingdon: Routledge, 1994), 2.

⁸ Chan, Representations of China, 70.

⁹ Chan, Representations of China, 70.