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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
This week it is..... The Yellow Peril
The supposed danger of Oriental hordes overwhelming
the West.
The phrase ‘The Yellow Peril’ is no longer used in anger,
so to speak. The threat of Oriental hordes swarming
west and engulfing ‘civilised’ societies was a widely held
fear in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
A pre-cursor to the yellow peril was the yellow terror.
This was initially used to denote the deadly Yellow
Fever - also sometime known as American Plague. An
outbreak of the disease was reported in October 1878 by
the Iowa newspaper The Dubuque Herald Iowa:
The Yellow Terror - The list of new cases does not
diminish.
Just a few years later, in October 1894, the Wisconsin
Daily Gazette used the term to describe a Chinese
general, whom it likened to both Wellington and
Napoleon. They helpfully provided a sketch of the
‘inscrutable’ commander:
THE YELLOW TERROR OF ORIENTAL WARS - GEN.
YEH OF THE IMPERIAL CHINESE ARMY.
He Is the Wellington of the Flowery Kingdom - His
Field Tactics, However, Resemble Those of the Corsican
Conqueror of Europe, and Ought To Be Successful.
The yellow was clearly an allusion to skin colour,
although not to the cowardice suggested by the American
term yellow bellied, which was coined later.
The fear in the West of the mysterious, and many
believed unknowable, Orientals was as real at the turn
of the 20th century as the fear of Muslims at the start of
the 21st, and just as misguided.
The term Yellow Peril was coined following Japan’s
military defeat of China in 1895 and was generally
applied to Japan. It has been reported as being coined
by the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, in September 1895. If
the Kaiser did coin the phrase then the date is incorrect
as the term was used earlier that year by the Hungarian
General Turr, in an assessment of Bismark. This was
reported in several US newspaper at the time, including
the Ohio paper The Sandusky Register, June 1895:
“The ‘yellow peril’ is more threatening than ever. Japan
has made in a few years as much progress as other
nations have made in centuries.”
It is true that the Kaiser was virulently anti-Japanese/
Chinese and he commissioned a painting which was
intended to encourage Europeans to cooperate to
beat back the Eastern menace. The painting, which
was made into a widely used poster, shows a distant
Buddha-like figure (not unlike General Yeh) sitting in an
approaching firestorm while an Ayran messenger warns
the womenfolk of various countries of their impending
doom.
The fear of invasion continued into the 20th century and
was bolstered by various portrayals of sinister Orientals
in books and films. Prominent amongst these was the
English writer Sax Rohmer’s creation, the insidious and
diabolical genius Dr. Fu Manchu. By the outbreak of
WWI, the lack of any actual invasion and the fact that
the Kaiser and his ilk had by then better things to think
about, talk of the Yellow Peril began to fade.
Is there an English phrase or saying that you would
like to know more about?
Email it to us on [email protected]
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