| rdfs:comment | - The Yellow Peril was the perceived East Asian (primarily Chinese) threat to Western civilisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It commonly influenced fiction, including that of HP Lovecraft and the Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. It is an apt addition to The Yellow Mythos given the association of Carcosa and the Yellow Codex with the far east, and the racial tensions depicted in The Repairer of Reputations.
- The Yellow Peril is an "oriental" criminal and/or political mastermind, a character originating in the xenophobic days of the late 19th century, but popular ever since. As an expression of the "mysterious East" gone wrong, this villain traditionally had, or seemed to have, mystical powers. Often he had a beautiful daughter, who either turned from her evil ways to work with the good guys, or was herself a scheming villain, at least as bad as he, in her own right. Sometimes he would speak in a thick and oddly-pronounced dialect. Compare its polar opposite, Asian Gal with White Guy.
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| abstract | - The Yellow Peril is an "oriental" criminal and/or political mastermind, a character originating in the xenophobic days of the late 19th century, but popular ever since. As an expression of the "mysterious East" gone wrong, this villain traditionally had, or seemed to have, mystical powers. Often he had a beautiful daughter, who either turned from her evil ways to work with the good guys, or was herself a scheming villain, at least as bad as he, in her own right. Sometimes he would speak in a thick and oddly-pronounced dialect. The "mysterious Chinaman" grew to be such an cliché in mystery stories of the early twentieth century that, in 1929 Ronald Knox, included in his "Ten Commandments" the rule that "No Chinaman must figure in the story." In what was presumably an attempt to avert the racism inherent in this trope, several 80s and 90s Animated Adaptations of properties with Yellow Peril villains colored them green. Mandarin in the Iron Man cartoon, Dr No in James Bond Jr and Ming the Merciless in both Defenders of the Earth and the 1996 Flash Gordon series, are examples of this. One may think this was now a Discredited Trope, but in fact it is alive and well, although the individual "yellow" villain is often replaced by Triads, Yakuza, Chinese Communism, or sinister "Asian" businessmen. The idea, in America at least, was probably spurred on by the mass-migration of many thousands of Chinese workers from China in the 1800s. This large movement led many Americans to mistakenly think of Chinese people (and by extension, all Asians) as mysterious and expansionist. The fact that the workers weren't allowed to integrate with whites and often couldn't speak English didn't help matters. It later turned out that it was Japan that was expansionist -- China was in no shape for world domination at that point -- but hindsight is 20/20. See also: Inscrutable Oriental, Dragon Lady, Japan Takes Over the World, China Takes Over the World. For the Web Comic of the same name, see Yellow Peril. Compare its polar opposite, Asian Gal with White Guy. Examples of Yellow Peril include:
- The Yellow Peril was the perceived East Asian (primarily Chinese) threat to Western civilisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It commonly influenced fiction, including that of HP Lovecraft and the Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. It is an apt addition to The Yellow Mythos given the association of Carcosa and the Yellow Codex with the far east, and the racial tensions depicted in The Repairer of Reputations.
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