Lion and Dragon in Northern China

In 1898, Britain seized a small peninsula on China's northern coast as a strategic counterweight to German and Russian ambitions. Weihaiwei would remain under British control for thirty-two years, but this book isn't about flag-raising ceremonies or diplomatic cables. It's about the people who lived there long before empire arrived and continued living afterward. Reginald Johnston, a young British official who would later become tutor to the last emperor of China, spent years in Weihaiwei learning Mandarin, collecting folk stories, and observing the daily rhythms of a coastal community where fishing villages rubbed alongside mountain temples. He documents everything: how families were structured, what crimes were punished and how, which gods received offerings and why, the rituals of birth and death, the tensions between old customs and the first whispers of reform. The result is a remarkably intimate portrait of a place caught between worlds, recorded at the exact moment before modernity swept it away. Johnston writes with genuine curiosity and respect, yet the colonial frame remains inescapable, lending the whole enterprise a bittersweet quality: a document of preservation that is itself a record of what's already being lost.