On a Chinese Screen
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This book offers a sharp, poignant, and often humorous critique of colonialism through a master storyteller's eye for detail and human folly.
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Book Summary
A series of vignettes from W. Somerset Maugham's travels in China, capturing the cultural clashes, colonial ennui, and spiritual emptiness of Western expatriates. Through encounters with missionaries, diplomats, and locals, the book critiques Western arrogance while mourning the erosion of Chinese tradition under modernity.
In 'On a Chinese Screen,' Maugham presents a mosaic of characters and scenes that expose the absurdities and tragedies of colonial life in early 20th-century China. From the Englishwoman who recreates a Cheltenham parlor in a temple to the sinologue buried in a dictionary, each portrait reveals a profound disconnect between East and West. The Mongol chief rides through a trade route indifferent to modernity; a cabinet minister laments the decline of Chinese civilization; and a vice-consul casually discusses an execution over cocktails. The book contrasts the sublime beauty of Chinese art with the hollow rituals of expatriate dinner parties, where boredom and hypocrisy reign. Through the rolling stone who traveled China disguised as a poor man, the sea captain who defied mutiny, and the old woman performing a libation to the gods, Maugham explores the search for meaning in a world of displacement. The fragment of a Greek statue near Tibet stirs a longing for home, while the impenetrable strangeness of China remains. Ultimately, the book is a meditation on cultural misunderstanding, the futility of superiority, and the quiet dignity of tradition.
Reading guide
Go deeper in On a Chinese Screen
Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
The Taipan
The Taipan runs Jardine's, gives generously to charity, plays a decent round of golf, and has never once set foot in the Chinese city beyond his own compradore's office. He is a bachelor by policy — marriage, he says, is no use to a man in China — and he prides himself on hating the country and the people with the same cheerful thoroughness he brings to a billiards tournament. His unfathomable frivolity, that grey-haired man singing Lily Elsie ditties nine thousand miles from home, is what makes him the treaty port's most admired and most unsettling fixture.
Mr. Wingrove
Mr. Wingrove lives among missionaries who call the Chinese lying, cruel, and dirty; he alone insists on their good-nature, their devotion to parents, their love of children. But when a Chinese teacher steps into the room, his face contorts with physical repulsion before he forces it into a pleasant smile, and his measured praise comes out in a voice not quite his own. He will not read his books, will not go home, will not see what he loves — a man martyring his own soul with passionate exasperation, and the narrator watches him with the excitement of an explorer sighting new country.
Robert Webb
Robert Webb is the peacemaker and promotion-marked official every treaty port likes: a good table, a pleasant piano, better-than-average bridge, blue friendly eyes, and the tact to be His Britannic Majesty's Consul without portentousness. He keeps photographs of a son at Charterhouse and a daughter now nineteen and married — a girl he last saw as a child, and whom he speaks of with a curious, peevish evasion when asked about going home. His long separation is one of the quiet tragedies of China life, and it shadows every agreeable evening he spends among men who will never leave.
The Mongol Chief
A Mongol leader encountered during the narrator's travels.
The Consul
The Consul belongs to the closed circle of number ones and managers — Jardine's, the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Bank, the A.P.C., the B.A.T. — who dine together in evening clothes worn more from duty to country than comfort. They talk of racing, golf, and shooting; they distrust any man who studies Chinese, hire interpreters for twenty-five dollars a month, and suspect that those who go in for the language grow queer in the head. China bores them, and they bore each other, and their stifled, silent dinners are the treaty port's true portrait.
Captain Boots
A sea captain, likely a rough and experienced mariner.
Cultural Clash and Misunderstanding
The book repeatedly contrasts Western and Chinese values, customs, and worldviews, highlighting the mutual incomprehension, prejudice, and often absurd attempts to impose one culture upon another, as seen in the transformation of a temple into a Western-style home or the disdain for Chinese language and art among expatriates.
Colonial Ennui and Isolation
Expatriates in China are depicted as trapped in a monotonous, insular social life, bored with each other and indifferent to their surroundings, while individuals like Birch experience profound loneliness and homesickness, cut off from both their homeland and the local culture.
Futility of Western Superiority
The narrative critiques the arrogance of Westerners who believe in their racial and technological superiority, yet are shown as spiritually empty, corrupt, or hypocritical, while the Chinese philosopher argues that Western dominance rests solely on the machine gun, not on moral or cultural excellence.
Loss of Tradition and Modernity
The book mourns the erosion of ancient Chinese civilization—its temples, philosophy, and social order—under the pressure of Western influence and modernization, embodied by the 'last philosopher' and the students who tear down the old without building anything meaningful in its place.
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