Origins
Many sources credit Kaiser Wilhelm II with coining the phrase "Yellow Peril" (German: gelbe Gefahr) in September 1895. The Kaiser had an illustration of this title — depicting the Archangel Michael as an allegorical Germany leading the European powers against an Asiatic threat represented by a golden Buddha — hung in all ships of the Hamburg America Line. It was ostensibly designed by the Kaiser himself. Wilhelm changed his mind after his abdication in World War I, saying that he should not have bothered to warn Europe of the Yellow Peril, writing that "We shall be the leaders of the Orient against the Occident! I shall now have to alter my picture 'Peoples of Europe'. We belong on the other side! Once we have proved to the Germans that the French and English are are not Whites at all but Blacks". He declared Germany as "face of the East against the West" instead of being in the west, and wished for the destruction of the western countries like England, France, and America, declaring the French to be "negroids", and stating his disgust at the racial equality Britain was allowing for blacks.
In 1898, the British writer M. P. Shiel published a short story serial entitled The Empress of the Earth. The later novel edition was named The Yellow Danger. Shiel's novel centers on the murder of two German missionaries in Kiau-Tschou in 1897 and features the Chinese villain, Dr. Yen How.
Read more about this topic: Yellow Peril
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)