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“Through the Looking Glass” by Paul French lays bare what many China-based journalists suspect, but never shout about: The glory days of reporting in China are long gone.

The accepted wisdom that the West is obsessed with “the Middle Kingdom” as never before and that “the China story” in the first decade of the 21st century is sexier than at any time through history, French argues, is utter nonsense.

The boom time for foreign journalists in China was from the late 19th century to the first half of the 20th century, French claims, citing among much other evidence an article published in a Shanghai-based newspaper in 1928. The New York Times back then, the China Weekly Review informed its readers, was “running seven or sometimes eight columns of material on China” and sending telegrams to its man on the ground to ramp up his output and meet demand for Middle-Kingdom news.

China during the decades in question, after all, was witness to the opium trade, antiforeign political movements, the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of dynastic rule, the birth of the republic, the rise of warlords, Japanese warships prowling the Huangpu River, a fledgling Communist party for which revolution would not be a dinner party … how can today’s relative stability compete?

“Through the Looking Glass” looks back on an era when the country lured an army of talented journalists aiming to cement reputations in an exotic crucible of political intrigue and personal risk. China also attracted more than its share of chancers and adventurers, crooks and dreamers, spies and oddballs, and with new newspapers and magazines in English, French, German and other languages popping up almost weekly in cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin, many grabbed the chance to make a buck.

French intends his chronologically arranged book to be the definitive account of foreign reporting in China; a source of reference for academics as well as the simply curious. That approach means “Through the Looking Glass” is not always easy going for the casual reader, who must wade through reams of dry facts, figures and dates — liberally spiced, though, with quirky trivia (the Peking Post’s front page one day exclaimed, “Just Arrived — Cheese”; Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post became, in 1916, the only paper in the world to be owned by a dentist).

But there is still much juice within, primarily squeezed from the many personalities, typewriters under their arms, that China attracted. Characters such as Emily “Mickey” Hahn, who arrived in Shanghai in 1935 and immediately embraced the social whirl. “Half tomboy and half femme fatale,” Hahn would attend parties with her pet gibbon Mr. Mills on her shoulder. She also became concubine to a Chinese poet and addicted to opium, writing about her experiences for The New Yorker.

Then there was Shanghai radio announcer Carroll Alcott (the American angered the Japanese so much following their 1937 attack on the city that he was forced to wear body armor, carry a pistol and always be shadowed by bodyguards to avoid assassination) and London Times travel correspondent Peter Fleming, brother of James Bond author Ian Fleming.

There were also British poets WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood. Self-proclaimed “amateur war correspondents,” the pair arrived in 1938, adored Shanghai’s decadence and traveled inland briefly with their compatriot. “Well, we’ve been on a journey with Fleming in China,” Auden then commented flippantly, “and now we’re real travelers for ever and ever.”

The book’s pages are packed with tales of offbeat non-conformists. Their eccentricities and occasional lunacies, their personal misadventures and derring-do, provide this meticulously researched book with its most enjoyable moments.

Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists From Opium Wars to Mao
Paul French
Hong Kong University Press
240 pages
English