How Somerset Maugham’s China connection gave him a wealth of stories
The writer sought out expatriates in Hong Kong and other outposts of empire and used their tales of boredom and betrayal in his works – not always to the delight of his sources
December 16 marks the 50th anniversary of the death one of Britain’s most famous and celebrated writers, a man who was greatly influenced by his travels in China and Southeast Asia. Although William Somerset Maugham was born and died in France, and his ashes were scattered in England, some of his most admired work was inspired much closer to these shores.
Maugham was already a successful novelist and playwright when he made his first four-month journey to China via Hong Kong with his private secretary and lover, Gerald Haxton, in 1919. This and subsequent trips to Asia provided a rich source of material that was to help forge his reputation as a writer able to capture the hypocrisy, isolation and repressed agony of formal expatriate life with an exquisite sensitivity.
The China expeditions inspired a critically acclaimed series of vignettes and short sketches titled On a Chinese Screen and arguably his most entertaining novel, which was inspired by a notorious scandal revealed to him while in Hong Kong.
The Painted Veil, published in 1925, is set in Hong Kong, where young frivolous heroine Kitty Fane, recently married to the devoted but dull and taciturn microbiologist Walter, finds her social standing much beneath that which she had enjoyed in England.
“Their house stood in the Happy Valley, on the side of a hill for they could not afford to live on the more eligible but expensive Peak,” writes Maugham, never slow to pick up on petty social hierarchy.