Robert Bickers and Paul French
Old China's Secret Worlds Revealed
Foyles, Cabot Circus, Bristol
17 September 2012, 18.30-19.30

China has often remained inscrutable to Westerners but new research is opening up aspects of Chinese history hidden for decades and centuries. In his The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914, Robert Bickers, Professor of History at Bristol University, looks at the way China attracted the attention of British and European powers in the early nineteenth century. He discusses this with Paul French, author of  Midnight in Peking: The Murder That Haunted the Last Days of Old China, the shocking story of Pamela Warner, teenage daughter of the city's former British consul Edward Werner murdered in 1937. Despite an intensive search, the murder was soon forgotten amid the carnage of the Japanese invasion by all but Edward Werner, her father. 75 years later, deep in the Scotland Yard archives, French accidentally came across his lost case file. Unveiling an undercover sex cult, heroin addicts and disappearing brothels, the truth behind the crime can now be told - and is more disturbing than anyone could imagine. Both talk of a hidden China and one that has much to tell us about China today.  

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