Chiang Yee and His Circle Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950. Edited by Paul Bevan, Anne Witchard, and Da Zheng

While race was to become one of the pivot points of post-1945 British society, politics, and discourse (Marc Matera and others, 2023), the experiences of its Chinese population have remained conspicuously marginal in these conversations. This two-part edited collection foregrounds an overlooked Chinese diasporic intellectual community during the interwar years and Second World War. It centres the Chinese writer, poet, and painter Chiang Yee, best known for The Silent Traveller book series, assessing in Part 1 the reception of his literary and artistic works and himself as an intellectual Chinese man in Britain, his introduction of Chinese arts into British cultural life through publications, lectures, broadcasts, exhibitions, and notedly, designing sets and customs for the British ballet The Birds, along with other key figures of UK–China cultural encounters featured in Part 2 of the collection. Their artistic and cultural contributions refreshed the perception of China and its people at a time when, as editors remind us, the Yellow Peril discourse persisted as an influence in the collective British consciousness.