Duncan Jepson is an author, filmmaker
and lawyer who lives in Hong Kong. He
writes here about the inspiration for his
first crime novel, Emperors Once More.
For Emperors Once More, I wanted to
explore the anger caused by the feeling of inferiority.
Not just personal experiences but where it haunts
society and history – but I also wanted to this to be
the motivation for a crime story which I hoped might
have a broader appeal. I liked the idea of a narrative
about a criminal who was engaging in heinous acts of
violence and trying to induce mayhem for larger
intentions. The reaction to colonialism and Western
influence in Asia by generations of Chinese who felt
inferior to imperialism and then economic power,
now long gone in many respects, offered a
psychology to explore. And hopefully I have been
able to create a character who had both personal and
historical motivations for their actions.
The “Hundred Years of Humiliation” refers to the
period from the First Opium War until the Chinese
Revolution during which China and the Chinese
people experienced defeat at the hands of a variety of
imperial powers, though several times by the
Japanese. The Boxer Rebellion stands out as the
exception during this period, when rural folk sought
retribution on Chinese Christian converts because
they felt that the Christian god had brought the year
or so of drought that had killed their means of
surviving. The Boxers, believing themselves
impervious to bullets, escalated their anger from
Chinese to foreigners and were ultimately utilized by
the Empress Dowager in the war in 1900 against the
imperial powers that had been pressuring Beijing for
concessions.
Suddenly though it started to rain and the Boxers,
ignoring the war, simply disappeared back to their
fields leaving a mixed legacy of courage and
madness. They were brave to face British, French,
German, US, Russian and Japanese soldiers when the