The Chinese Settlement. The Chinese Settlement was created by Li Boyuan and appeared in Bingshan Xuehai (1903). In the year 2499 a group of Chinese immigrants return home to Quanzhou. But China, like the rest of the world, is neither cheerful or peaceful, so the immigrants decide to establish a new settlement somewhere in the world. The immigrants gather together 11,495 men and women from Quanzhou and leave in thirteen ships which are filled with advanced technology, including binoculars and wireless telephones. The ships cross the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Red Sea looking for somewhere suitable before landing at the South Pole and founding their new colony there. The fame of the Chinese Settlement grows, and a worldwide diaspora of oppressed peoples, including Jews and blacks, emigrates to the Settlement, creating a utopia which is open only to the oppressed non-whites of the world.
The pre-Revolution history of Chinese science fiction–and I mean everything, even the newspaper serials and dime novel-equivalents, not just the canonically accepted works of early sf by canonically accepted authors–has yet to be written, at least in a European language. Works like Bingshan Xuehai, which lack the level of metaphor that lit. critics crave and require to discuss, are either not covered or are scantily referred to. Let us hope that right now some diligent Chinese or Chinese-reading sf fan is busily digging into library and newspaper archives and creating a masterwork of Chinese sf history which will then (again, let us hope) be translated into English.