magic, modernity, and orientalism: conjuring representations of asia

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Magic, Modernity, and Orientalism: Conjuringrepresentations of Asia

CHRISTOPHER GOTO-JONES

Modern Asian Studies / Volume 48 / Issue 06 / November 2014, pp 1451 - 1476DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X13000498, Published online: 23 April 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0026749X13000498

How to cite this article:CHRISTOPHER GOTO-JONES (2014). Magic, Modernity, and Orientalism:Conjuring representations of Asia. Modern Asian Studies, 48, pp 1451-1476doi:10.1017/S0026749X13000498

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Modern Asian Studies 48, 6 (2014) pp. 1451–1476. C© Cambridge University Press 2014doi:10.1017/S0026749X13000498 First published online 23 April 2014

Magic, Modernity, and Orientalism:Conjuring representations of Asia∗

CHRISTOPHER GOTO-JONES

Leiden University, Leiden, The NetherlandsEmail: [email protected]

Abstract

This article inquires into the cultural and political nexus of secular (stage) magic,modernity, and Orientalism at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues thatthese three arenas interacted in important and special ways to both shape andreflect the politics of knowledge of the period. In doing so, it draws attention to theways in which secular magic has been overlooked as a historical phenomenon andhighlights its utility in furthering our understanding of the great problematics ofmodernity and Orientalism; in particular, it suggests that magic actually providesan unusually vibrant and clear lens through which to view the politics of the Otherand through which to explore issues of tradition and the modern.

Focusing on two historical cases—the ‘Indian Rope Trick’ challenge issued bythe Magic Circle in the 1930s and the astonishing ‘duel’ between the ‘Chinese’magicians Chung Ling Soo and Ching Ling Foo in 1905—this article considersthe ways in which discourses of origination, popular ideas about esotericism andthe ‘mystic East’, and questions of technical competence interacted and competedin the culture politics of the early twentieth century.

The frame: magic, modernity, and the Orient

Throughout history, magic has occupied a special place on the marginsof society, defining the contours of experiences that are in some wayexceptional or outside the normal and everyday. To some extent, thisvariously privileged or denigrated position at the frontiers of human

∗ The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Netherlands Organizationfor Scientific Research (NWO) for awarding the ‘VICI’ grant that has made theresearch for this article possible, in the context of the overall project: ‘BeyondUtopia—New Politics, the Politics of Knowledge, and the Science Fictional Fieldof Japan’.

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experience echoes the location of religion and even science.1 All threeof these fields seek to provide knowledge and experience of realmsotherwise inaccessible to everyday processes of cognition. At varioustimes in Western history, magic has been differentiated from religion(especially from Christianity),2 or it has been contrasted against therise of modern science.3 Appropriately enough, the interrelating andinterleaving of magic with both religion and science at different timeshas enabled the category to become evasive and tricky—the shape anddimensions of magic seem illusionary, artificial, or simply amorphous.According to particular ideological demands, magic can be paired withscience as a kind of experimental and practical engagement with orattempt to master the natural world, hence shunning religion as adenial of the essential vitality of human agency in the world; on theother hand, magic can be paired with religion as a kind of appealto transcendental realms of knowledge and power, hence shunningscience as a denial of mankind’s spiritual ascendancy over an ostensiblymechanical natural world.4 Both characterizations commit a kind ofepistemic violence, obscuring the nuances of each category in thename of simple juxtaposition, often for ideological purposes. Butsuch deployments succeed in highlighting at least two fascinatingfeatures of magic: first, magic can be seen as implying a pluralistictype of worldview, encompassing both the conditions of the possibilityof scientific method and the contradictory plausibility of transcendent

1 There is a wide and interesting literature on this question. Arguably the fieldbegins with the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, whose influential 1925 essay,‘Magic, Science, and Religion’ is a landmark. (Reprinted in Malinowski, B. (1992).Magic, Science, and Religion, and Other Essays, Waveland Press, Illinois). Two influential,recent texts from a more historical perspective have been: Styers, R. (2004). MakingMagic: Religion, Magic, & Science in the Modern World, Oxford University Press, Oxford;Tambiah, S. (1990). Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality, CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge.

2 It has always been the case that certain esoteric traditions and sects withinChristianity (and other religions) have been exceptions to this principle. In generalthese have been represented as heterodox schools.

3 The classic study in this area, now rather dated, is Thomas, K. (1971). Religion andthe Decline of Magic, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London. An excellent and recent generalintroduction is Goodrick-Clarke, N. (2008). The Western Esoteric Traditions: A HistoricalIntroduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

4 Such debates are the substance of recent work, such as that by McWilliams, S.(2012). Magical Thinking: History, Possibility, and the Idea of the Occult, Continuum, Londonand New York; Lehrich, C. (2007). The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice, CornellUniversity Press, Ithaca and London. Bell, K. (2012). The Magical Imagination: Magicand Modernity in Urban England, 1780–1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,explores the empowerment of urbanites through the ‘magical imagination’.



M A G I C , M O D E R N I T Y , A N D O R I E N T A L I S M 1453

or religious truths that confront those methods; and, second, magic isestablished as a plastic category that includes both esoteric practicesand technological innovation (where one may be routinely camouflagedor performed as the other)—in other words, it affects the resolutionof a basic epistemological and ontological contradiction. That is,even without a simple or stable definition, magic gives us a (non-conventional) way to think about and make sense of the world aroundus, and it also gives us techniques and technologies for living in andcontrolling that world.

In the modern period, the idea of magic has also become intertwinedwith powerful political and cultural discourses around the existenceof the ‘Other’.5 Indeed, the domain of magic itself is conceived of as aradical ‘Other’ to ordinary life.6 In addition, the field of critical culturalstudies has provided fertile ground for work in gender studies and post-colonial studies, both of which have dealt with questions of marginalityand liminality in various ways, often under the conceptual umbrellaof epistemic violence or the ‘politics of knowledge’. It is in this period,for instance, that the literature begins to explore the contradictoryassociation of, on the one hand, women with the esoteric and‘primitive’ practices of magic and, on the other hand, men with modernand technology-driven stage magic. This distinction tends towards theconventional (yet deeply problematic) association of modernity withreason and masculinity, and hence the marginalization of apparently‘female’ qualities as vestiges of a pre-modern condition.7 Ironically,in the context of magic, this marginalization is simultaneously anempowerment: the witch becomes a symbol of the mysterious anddangerous power of women to disrupt the ostensibly rational principlesof a ‘masculine’ modern society.

5 In fact, this tendency is not unique to the modern period. In his account of thePersian wars, Herodotus attributed to the Persian Magi magical powers, while callingon the Greeks to embrace reason. The apparent Orientalism of Herodotus is laterpicked up by the twentieth century anthropologist Malinowski, whose Argonauts area clear reference to the Greek adventurers and bearers of rationality who discover themagical beyond the margins of civilization. Malinowski, B. (1922; reprinted 1978).Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Routledge, London and New York.

6 During, S. (2002). Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic, HarvardUniversity Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, p. 39.

7 The association of women with the Orient and the Orient with the feminine hasbeen central to the discourse. In recent years, new perspectives on this issue have beenpresented by thinkers such as Lewis, R. (1995). Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininityand Representation, Routledge, London and New York.




In parallel to this discourse about the role and place of womenat the mystical margins of modern society, since the 1970s therehas been an increasing awareness of the ways in which Westernsocieties have sought to represent non-Western cultures as lingeringexemplars of pre-modern, esoteric, and spiritual practices.8 Indeed, forsome, this parallel can be stretched to the association of many non-Western (especially Asian) societies with the feminine, in (artificial)contradistinction to the apparently masculine values of the so-calledWest. Since the powerful (and controversial) work of Edward Said,it has become impossible to read nineteenth and twentieth centuryaccounts of encounters with Asia without a consciousness of this post-colonial politics of knowledge.9 Indeed, for many commentators, Saidhas effectively transformed the meaning of the word ‘Orientalist’ fromits nineteenth century usage (someone who studies the Orient or Asiabroadly defined) into its (post)modern usage (someone who attributesromantic or fantastical qualities to the non-Western world, or whodeploys a quasi-fictional Orient as a representation of these qualities).

One of the core ideological issues that has arisen from thisdiscourse is the question of whether Orientalists are genuinelyinterested in understanding the Orient at all, or whether they aremore interested in understanding themselves and hence make useof the Orient as a canvas on which to paint their own fantasiesof alien societies (or magical domains) as a mechanism of self-reflection (that is, the invention of a society that represents theinstantiation of values opposite to those that the Orientalist wouldlike to see as characteristic of his/her own society). Hence, in thecase of Orientalism and magic, we see the demonstration of twocompeting trajectories: one, the self-identification of the West asrational and post-spiritual; and, two, the desire of the West to exist ina world replete with magic, mystery, and spiritual vitality. Of course,this tendency towards the instrumentalization of the Other (whereinstrumentalization and fantasization blend together) also raises deepmoral and ethical questions about appropriate conduct towards people

8 For the influential theorist and performer Coco Fusco, the colonial practice ofbringing back to Europe various ‘specimen’ for display and entertainment renderedthe fringes of empire into ‘living expressions of colonial fantasies’, fuelling a contortedimage of the non-Western world in the popular imagination of Europeans andAmericans. Fusco, C. (1994). The Other History of Intercultural Performance, TDR:The Drama Review, 38:1, p. 149.

9 Said, E. (1978). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Routledge & KeganPaul, London and New York.




who are recognizably different from ourselves (whomsoever we mightbe).

In the context of the history of magic, it is fascinating to see howthe precise period highlighted by Said (the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries) was also one in which Western magicians showeda marked interest in representations of the Orient. To some extent,we might simply see magic as an aspect of a more general culturalappreciation of Chinoiserie (which began in force a century earlier) orJaponisme (which took Europe by storm in the late-nineteenth century,after Japan finally opened its doors to foreign trade).10 These aestheticmovements in Europe and North America reflected a more generalpublic enchantment with the colourful cultures of distant coloniesback in the metropolitan centres. This is the period of the greatworld fairs and international expositions, where nations such as India,China, and even the rapidly industrializing Japan would routinelyrepresent themselves in quasi-mystical ways, deploying performancesthat emphasized the traditional and aesthetic elements of theirculture, rather than emphasizing their tremendous technological orindustrial developments—this tendency has come to known as ‘self-Orientalism’.11 At the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, for instance,the ‘Imperial Japanese Troupe’ performed the famous ‘Butterfly Trick’and other feats of conjuring.

The impact of this cultural environment at the turn of the twentiethcentury was potent in both Europe and the United States. It is worthremembering, however, that this cultural pattern was not limited tothe entertainment industry nor to the general population. Indeed,this was also the great age of anthropology, in which classics of thatemerging discipline were read eagerly by scholars and the educatedclasses. Within this picture, then, we might include the seminal (ifby now deeply controversial) works of Frazer, Malinowski, Mauss,and others, for each of whom (albeit in different ways) the margins

10 From the early seventeenth century until 1853, Japan remained under a formalpolicy of sakoku (closed country). It was only after the forcible opening of its bordersthat open trade and communication from Japan recommenced in the mid-nineteenthcentury, although evidence also suggests that sakoku was neither perfectly noruniformly observed prior to that point.

11 In recent years, the power of self-Orientalism is often associated with theimperatives of the tourist industry. It is also visible in the cinema and other commercialactivities, where the importance of being recognizably (that is, stereotypically) from aparticular country or tradition is a market asset. Famous examples would include theexplosion of ‘Chinese’ films modelled after Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon,2002.




of European empires were sites of encounter with ‘primitive’ oreven ‘savage’ peoples still steeped in the unearthly powers of ‘realmagic’.12 Through these accounts, high society, as well as the generalpopulation, were exposed to the idea that the most potent kinds ofmagic came from places beyond the everyday experience of the modernEuropean or American; the idea that geographical distance fromthe metropolitan centre acted as an analogy for historical distancefrom the darkly mysterious history of esotericism in the West becameprevalent.13

However, the case of magic in this cultural history is not onlyparticular but also special. The so-called ‘Golden Age’ of magicexactly coincides with this period, witnessing the emergence of JeanEugene Robert-Houdin, Harry Houdini, David Devant, Dai Vernon,the Maskelynes, and others, such as William Robinson (Chung LingSoo). Modern magic was increasingly clearly associated with conjuringand technological progress; part of the joy of performance magicin this period was the mysterious potential of modern technology—magicians’ patter would be full of references to scientific advances, thepowers of electricity, and mechanical devices.14 There was an explosionof magicians who adopted stage-names involving academic titles such

12 See, for instance, Frazer, J. (1890, 2 volumes; reprinted 1911–15, 12 volumes).The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Macmillan, London; Malinowski,‘Magic, Science, and Religion’, reprinted in Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion, andOther Essays; Mauss, M. (1902; reprinted 2001). A General Theory of Magic, Routledge,London and New York.Provocative work in this kind of direction was done by thegreat philosopher Walter Benjamin, who was fascinated by the ways in which theprocesses of modernity and modernization generated opportunities and sites forthe surfacing of the so-called ‘primitive’ within modernity itself. As Christopher Stahlputs it, ‘Benjamin believed that the modern imitative technologies staged fantasticimages of the Other, drawn from the recesses of the cultural imagination, which hadmaterial and political effect.’ Stahl, C. (2008). ‘Outdoing Ching Ling Foo’, in Coppa,F., Hass, L. and Peck, J. (eds), Performing Magic on the Western Stage, Palgrave, New York,p. 154.

13 This climate provided an enabling condition for contemporaneous commentatorsto wonder whether the stage performances of ‘Chinese’ magicians were really tricks,or whether they were authentic cases of ‘real magic’. David Abbott, for instance, whowitnessed a performance of the torn and restored paper trick by the (authentically)Chinese Ching Ling Foo in 1909, reported for the April issue of the magazine TheSphinx that he was unsure whether it was really a trick, or whether it was madepossible by ‘some queer Chinese substance that he could fuse together’ (p. 9). Withthanks to Christopher Stahl (ibid) for finding this quotation.

14 The fascinating connections between technological advancements and magicalinnovation are entertainingly documented in Dawes, E. (1984). The Great Illusionists,David & Charles, New Jersey.




as ‘professor’ or ‘doctor’.15 From the standpoint of gender studies,it is notable that this shift towards the association of magic withtechnological advancement witnessed a concomitant shift towards itsassociation with men: stage magicians in the modern period havebeen overwhelmingly male (even though their assistants have oftenbeen female), whereas the mysteries of ‘real magic’ (in the senseof the occult, the spiritual, or the irrational) have been increasinglymarginalized within Western societies and remained associated withwomen to a significant extent (although not completely), or with theOrient.16

However, at the same time, this Golden Age also saw apowerful counter-Enlightenment (or Romantic) embrace of the occult,especially in the form of spirit-mediums. A number of magiciansexploited this reaction to disenchantment with the modern world asan opportunity to reclaim the mysterious origins of their apparentpowers.17 This tendency was famously denounced by the legendaryHarry Houdini, who invested considerable time and money exposingthe very mundane techniques of fraudulent spiritualists in thename of modern values and in defence of the modernity of magicitself.18 In the United Kingdom, the great John Nevil Maskelyne

15 Further evidence of the association of magic with science in this period isprovided by the fact that the eminent science journal Scientific American carried regulararticles detailing the technology of magic and famous stage illusions. Many of thepieces were later collected into an edited volume by Hopkins, A. (1897). Magic,Stage Illusions, and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography, Munn & Co., NewYork. Hopkins acknowledges the contributions made by Robinson to the articles, andRobinson himself had written previously under his own name in the same journal.Both the articles and the book caused something of stir within the magic community;Steinmeyer notes the irritation of Harry Kellar, for instance, who felt that Robinsonhad betrayed his tricks to Hopkins (Steinmeyer, J. (2005). The Glorious Deception: TheDouble Life of Chung Ling Soo, Carroll & Graff, New York, p. 173).

16 The stereotype associated with this being the witch from European and Americanhistory or, combining these categories to some extent, the gypsy in the contemporaryperiod. As Simon During notes in his excellent monograph, ‘One reason whyentertainment magic came into the hands of white men during this period of expansionwas that belief in real magic was still ascribed to those at the margins.’ During, ModernEnchantments, p. 107.

17 This tension between the disenchantment and the counter re-enchantment ofmodernity is captured well in Landy, J. and Saler, M. (eds) (2009). The Re-Enchantmentof the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Animpressive intervention on the side of enchantment is During, Modern Enchantments.

18 Houdini appears to have started his crusade while still president of the Society ofAmerican Magicians (whose cardinal rule was: Do Not Expose!), when he published anarticle exposing some of the practices of so-called spirit-mediums in 1922. Silverman,K. (1997). Houdini: The Career of Ehrich Weiss, HarperPerennial, New York, p. 285.




(inventor of the pay-toilet, from whom we get the expression ‘tospend a penny’)—one of the founders of the Magic Circle—alsodevoted considerable energy to debunking spiritualism, including byestablishing the Occult Committee of the Magic Circle in London.After Houdini and Maskelyne, the differentiation between (modern)magic as a technology and craft, and (pre-modern) magic as an esotericor spiritual practice became particularly stark.

Somewhere between these tendencies in the Golden Age of magicwas the space opened up by the aesthetics and politics of Orientalism.A number of stage magicians chose to participate in the West’senchantment with the so-called ‘East’ by taking on the personaof the Arabian genii, Indian yogi, Chinese mystic, or Japanesesorcerer.19 Taking this symbolic step into the colonial margins ofEurope enabled performers to appropriate the language and tropes of

His campaign took him all the way to the White House, where his proposed bill (tocriminalize fraudulent spiritualism) was eventually defeated, apparently because ofthe number of politicians involved in the spiritualist movement.

19 In his early years, even Houdini participated in this practice, appearing as a‘Hindu fakir’ in a turban to perform ‘Indian magic’ at the 1893 Chicago Fair. However,three more substantial and famous examples would be: Ben Ali Bey, who was reallythe German actor and magician Max Auzinger (1839–1928). His stage name wasadopted after a brief alliance with the unsuccessful ‘Orientalization’ of his real name,as Maxitan A-Uzin-Ger. Auzinger was a pioneer of the ‘Black Art’ that became veryinfluential at the end of the nineteenth century, in which a carefully front-lit (butotherwise dark) stage enabled anything covered in black fabric to remain invisible tothe audience (including the magician’s assistant). Sometimes, this effect is amplifiedby directing a light into the eyes of the audience, giving them the impression that thestage was brightly lit and simultaneously making it difficult for their eyes to adjust tothe darkness there.

At about the same time, the English magician and juggler William Peppercorn(1847–1891) performed under the (Italian) name D’Alvini but in the guise of aJapanese magician. The Italian name was a connection to his famous cousin, theItalian clown Governelli. D’Alvini claimed to have travelled and performed in Japanin 1866; his ‘Tycoon Troupe’ (presumably named after the anachronistic translationof Shogun as Tycoon) did include a number of Japanese jugglers when he touredEurope and the United States.

D’Alvini’s connections with Japan are not well substantiated, despite his claim tobeing the ‘Jap of Japs’. The real pioneers of Japanese magic in Europe were theAndersons. The daughter of the family, Lizzie, was performing the famous JapaneseButterfly Trick as early as 1867. The first recorded Japanese magicians in Europe werepart of ‘The Japanese Troupe’ and the ‘Imperial Japanese Troupe’, who performed atthe 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where the Butterfly Trick was also performed.

Perhaps the most intriguing personality (foreshadowing the case of Ching LingSoo, which we will consider later) was Soto Sunetaro (1858–1910), who passed asauthentically Japanese in many circles until he died in New York. Even his deathcertificate carried the name Soto Sunetaro until it was (quickly) corrected to readWellington King Tobias, son of John and Maria King Tobias.




‘real magic’ without confronting the dominant narrative of Westernmodernity: locating magic in distant and apparently mystical orspiritual territories, which most audiences had never encountereddirectly, facilitated the development of esoteric characters on the stageand affected a grand style of misdirection, displacing the problem ofmagic in the modern world to the ‘pre-modern’ peripheries, or drawingon an origination in such peripheries as a means to claim authenticmagical potency.20 Hence, Western audiences could retain their faithin their own progressive, industrial modernity while enjoying thefantasy that magic continued to thrive in the ‘mysterious East’. Inaddition, this geo-cultural displacement also afforded Western menthe symbolic opportunity to appropriate the increasingly feminizedrealm of spiritual and esoteric authenticity; while the European malewas supposed to be rational and devoted to technology, the Orientalmale was represented as somehow retaining his connection withthe more mystical and spiritual forces of the cosmos. It can be nocoincidence that at the turn of the century America’s first dedicatedmagic periodical (later to become the organ of the Society of AmericanMagicians) was named Mahatma.21

In other words, magic provides an excitingly diverse and variedlandscape for our understanding of the historical engagement withthe politics of imperial modernity at the turn of the twentieth century.

The performance: from Indian ropes to Chinese rings

The most famous instance of this convergence of magic, modernity,and the Orient is undoubtedly that of the fabled (and probablylegendary) Indian Rope Trick.22 This famous trick, which itselfappears to have been an illusion generated by Orientalist mystique,involves a magician, a length of rope, and an assistant (usually a young

20 Classic works of magical theory from this period, especially those in the traditionof Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, the so-called father of modern magic, invariablyemphasized the importance of a magician giving the impression that his/her tricksmight be achieved through genuinely magical means (or, at least, the importance ofnot contradicting this impression).

21 Mahatma (the Hindi and Sanskrit title of honour given to a ‘great soul’) waspublished in New York City from March 1895 until February 1906.

22 Most histories of magic agree on this. See for instance, Clarke, S. (2001). TheAnnals of Conjuring, The Miracle Factory, Seattle, especially Chapter 13, ‘OrientalConjuring’.




boy). There are numerous and various descriptions in the literature,but the basic effect sees the magician cast an ordinary rope into theair, which becomes suddenly rigid enough for the assistant to climb itto the very top, at which point he either descends once again and therope crumbles into a coil or, in the more spectacular versions, the boyvanishes completely.

Although there appear to be a number of pre-modern accounts ofeffects resembling this incredible feat,23 it first came to the attentionof Western readers in an article in the Chicago Tribune on 8 August1890. The journalist John Elbert Wilkie wrote the article under apseudonym (Fred S. Ellmore = Fred Sell More) and then, four monthslater, published a retraction in the same newspaper, saying that theoriginal article had been an experiment that had garnered far moreattention than he had expected. In fact, the article had created a stormthat had still not completely subsided in the world of magic. It spreadrapidly around Europe (and was translated into a number of Europeanlanguages, usually without the retraction), provoking a number ofpeople (especially in Britain and France) to claim that they too hadwitnessed the illusion while in India, creating a potent mix of imageryabout the mysterious colonial margins of the British empire, whichitself seemed to provide an enabling condition for people to believein the story. As is well known, the genre of Victorian travel writingis full of texts exhibiting an intriguingly fluid mixture of reportage

23 The earliest account is usually ascribed to the great explorer, the MoroccanBerber Ibn Bat.ut.ah, who travelled to China in the fourteenth century and recordswitnessing something similar involving a chain rather than a rope in 1346. Ibn Bat.ut.ahwas an approximate contemporary of Marco Polo. He travelled even more extensivelythan the European hero, who is also sometimes cited as an early witness of the IndianRope Trick, although he makes no mention of it in his accounts. Hence it is presumedthat Polo has been conflated with the ‘Moroccan Marco Polo’. A later account, alsooften cited, is that by the Chinese author Pu Songling, who includes an account of asimilar effect in his collection of supernatural stories, Strange Tales of Liaozhai, whichfirst appeared in 1740. Pu Songling appears to have claimed that his was an eye-witness account. In the context of our interest in the turn of the twentieth century,it is worthwhile to note that his book was translated into English for the first time in1880, and that it was a frequent source cited by Western scholars and journalists inaccounts of the White Lotus Society and the Boxer Rebellion, which both did muchto corroborate the notion that China was a centre of ‘real magic’ even in the modernage of empires. Indeed, it is worth noting that all of these old sightings of the IndianRope Trick supposedly took place in China.




and the fantastical—unsurprisingly, those texts dealing with magicalperformances appear to be no exception to this tendency.24

The legend of the Indian Rope Trick, hoax or not, was resilientand contagious—Western publics wanted to believe in it (and manystill do today)—so the debate about its veracity continued intenselyfor the next 30 years. In fact, some of the most powerful scepticsabout the Indian Rope Trick were to be found in Britain, in theprestigious Magic Circle, which held a public meeting in 1919 atwhich the Circle concluded that the trick was a hoax, even though bythat time a number of prominent magicians were already performing(rather crude) versions of it in their shows, most famously HowardThurston. In 1933, the Magic Circle issued its famous ‘challenge’ toanyone who could successfully perform the Indian Rope Trick in fulland in natural conditions.25 The challenge was orchestrated by theCircle’s (newly re-established) Occult Committee, which had beenstarted by John Nevil Maskelyne in 1914 as a body to investigateand expose fraudulent spiritualists and to combat investment in thesupernatural. Maskelyne, like Houdini, had been adamant about thedemarcation of modern magic from pre-modern superstition, whichhe regarded as dangerous.

The real point of contention in 1933 appeared to be whether anIndian fakir or yogi could actually perform magic that a Westernstage magician could not: was there really a mystical or magical secretaccessible only to these mysterious and exotic men from the East? Or,were the stories of past performances simply folk stories, and were themechanized, modern performances of versions of the trick (such asthose by Thurston) really all that was possible? In seeking to unmaskOrientalism, the Magic Circle offered 200 guineas to find out.

In 1935, a magician named Arthur Derby, under the assumed nameof Karachi, accepted the challenge, claiming to have learned theeffect from a Gurkha soldier during the Great War. However, therewas much controversy around both the man and the performance.An academic in Cambridge asserted that it would be very unlikelythat a Gurkha would have any such knowledge;26 others questioned

24 An excellent (and influential) example in the history of magic would beBurlingame, H. (1891). Around the World with a Magician and a Juggler, Clyde PublishingCo., Chicago.

25 The challenge stated that the rope had be thrown up into the air and defy theforce of gravity while someone climbed it and then disappeared.

26 See Lamont, P. (2004). The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, Little, Brown, London,p. 137.




(rightly) whether Karachi was really Indian or just an impostor; and,finally, it seemed that the trick he proposed (to make a rope risevertically from his lap and then have someone climb it) was notactually the complete version of the trick proposed in the MagicCircle’s challenge.27 Further controversy ensued when the MagicCircle proceeded to refuse Karachi’s own challenge that he couldmeet their test.

Of particular interest for our purposes here is the way in which thisepisode played out in the context of British imperialism at the start ofthe twentieth century. Even as late as the 1930s it remained the casethat the Orient retained an aura of mystery and magical power thathad been lost by Europe and, especially, the United States. Indeed, themagic of this aura was so powerful that the world’s premier magician’ssociety felt compelled to address it directly. In many ways the OccultCommittee of the Magic Circle was declaring war on Orientalismitself; its implicit challenge was for someone to prove that beingfrom India was in itself a condition of magical empowerment, thatreal magic really existed on the margins of empire. Against this, theMagic Circle stood as the bastion of modern magic, representing inits own society the techniques of modernity as applied to stage andentertainment magic and illusion. If the Indian fakir could reallydo magic that members of the Magic Circle could not, then maybeOrientalism was not a fantasy after all, maybe the colonial marginsreally did sustain real magic—perhaps Great Britain’s much vauntedmodernity was second best to magic after all?28

In the end, consciously or not, this is why the Magic Circle refusedto accept the counter-challenge of Karachi. First, he was not claiming

27 A full and interesting account is given in Lamont, The Rise of the Indian RopeTrick, especially Chapter 7. This book builds on important earlier work by Lamont:Wiseman, R. and Lamont, P. (1996). Unravelling the Indian Rope-Trick, Nature, 383,pp. 212–213; Lamont, P. and Wiseman, R. (2001). The Rise and Fall of the IndianRope Trick, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 65, pp. 175–193. The articlein Nature was a landmark in the contemporary discussion of the Indian Rope Trick asa hoax.

28 It should be recalled that scepticism about industrial modernity and the embraceof the apparently romantic power of the occult was asserted forcefully by a number of(sub)cultural movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bothwithin the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere. By the 1930s, parts ofthe Nazi party were invested in the exploration of occult powers and sometimesthe relationship between the occult and the Orient. A formative and influentialdiscussion is Goodrich-Clarke, N. (1985). The Occult Roots of Nazism, Aquarian Press,Wellingborough. A detailed treatment of Orientalism in the Nazi’s orientationtowards the occult is beyond the ambitions of this article.




that he could perform the version of the Indian Rope Trick that theMagic Circle found so entrancing. His counter challenge was muchmore in the spirit of the ‘magical duel’ between stage magicians thathad been prevalent 30 years before, in which competing magicianstried to best each other in knowledge and technique, but neither madeany pretence of esoteric mystery;29 the stakes in a magical duel wereabout mastery of stage magic, not about a confrontation between stageand ‘real’ magic—hence, in such a duel the Magic Circle had nothingto gain and nothing to prove.30 And, second, it was increasingly obviousto everyone involved that Karachi’s connection with India, fakirs, andyogis was almost wholly inauthentic. He was following in the wake ofa vibrant tradition of Western performers from the late nineteenthcentury on who had deliberately adopted the guise of an ‘Oriental’in order to add some extra mystery to his performance and persona.Intriguingly, Karachi’s case reveals that the politics of this practicewas changing by the 1930s, since, as we will see in the case of ChungLing Soo, at the turn of the century the authenticity of an ‘Oriental’magician seems to have been judged more on the basis of the style of hismagic than on the origin of the magician himself. Chung Ling Soo (theAmerican magician whose real name was William Robinson) famouslywon the epithet of the ‘Original Chinese Magician’ over Ching LingFoo (the Chinese magician whose real name was Chee Ling Qua),ostensibly because audiences associated his stage persona and act with‘Chinese-ness’ more than they associated an actual Chinese man withChinese-ness. For Karachi, however, neither the ‘Indian-ness’ of theIndian Rope Trick, nor of his assumed name, nor of his story about theGurkhas were sufficient for him to be seen as authentically ‘Oriental’.The politics of race and identity had changed significantly through theGreat War and into the interwar period; while the atmosphere wasnot yet the same as in Said’s 1970s, not even magic could conjure its

29 This convention is wonderfully subverted in the Christopher Priest novel, ThePrestige (1995), which was made into a film of the same name by Christopher Nolan(2006).

30 Indeed, for some members of the Magic Circle, it seems that the OccultCommittee’s agenda was too aggressive in these terms, seeking as it did to place themystery of the Orient itself on trial. Lamont quotes the melancholy of one member’sresponse to the Committee’s challenge: ‘Why must we have our dreams shattered?The world would be dull, miserable and intolerable if we believed only what ourstep-mother Science would have us believe . . . Science is already robbing us of ourRomance . . . We all love mystery and many of us would like to possess the mysteriousreputation of the fakir, but [instead] we are always trying to expose him as a fraud.’Quoted in Lamont, The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, p. 125.




way back into the nineteenth century. Karachi, a fake Asian, couldnot manifest the confrontation between modernity and the Orient;unmasking Karachi would not unmask Orientalism.

The case of Chung Ling Soo, however, is a powerful representation ofthe ways in which Orientalism, modernity, and magic interact, not onlybecause it sets the scene for Karachi and the Indian Rope Trick later,but also because of the way it calls direct attention to the intertwinedproblematics of origination, authenticity, and performance.31 Thegeneral features of the story of William Robinson/Chung Ling Sooare well known to historians of magic; they have been evocativelypresented by Jim Steinmeyer in his excellent biography.32 However,Steinmeyer’s thorough and entertaining book does not aim to unpackthe mysteries of Orientalism itself. Indeed, Orientalism appears injust one (one-page) section of this book, and there it is not consideredas a category in the politics of knowledge but rather in terms of its morecontemporaneous usage as ‘a broad popular taste for exotic Easterncultures that had simmered through the last years of the Victorianera’.33 Hence, there remains a need to interrogate the relationshipbetween this fascinating case, Orientalism, magic, and modernity.

The salient aspects of the ‘glorious deception’ of Chung Ling Soocan be summarized as follows: William Ellsworth Robinson (1861–1918) spent much of his early career as an assistant and managerto some of the great magicians of the nineteenth century, mostfamously Alexander Herrmann and Harry (Heinrich) Kellar. He wasan engineer and inventor of illusions, greatly valued by his employers,and also a magician of great technical skill. However, he was not

31 As late as 1923, somewhat in the wake of the Chung Ling Soo episode,practitioners of magic were visibly wrestling with these problems. James Elliot andHoudini even went so far as to raise the question of whether ‘Caucassian [sic]’magicians made Oriental magic better, by ‘Occidentalizing’ and ‘Modernizing’ whatthey called ‘Asiatic modes of thought’. For them, this was a matter of technical (andtechnological) development and excellence, having nothing to do with esoteric ormystical powers (on the topic of which Houdini was an outspoken detractor). In otherwords, the question was whether Oriental magic could be improved by moving it intomodernity, rather than leaving it ‘closely wedded to mediaeval interpretations’. Sucha question might have been a paraphrasing of the Magic Circle’s challenge a decadelater. Elliot, J. (1923) (Houdini, ed.). Elliot’s Last Legacy: Secrets of the King of all KardKings, Adams Press Print, New York, pp. 43–49.

32 Steinmeyer, The Glorious Deception. Other influential resources (from which muchof the historical data in this section are drawn) include: Karr, T. (ed.) (2001). TheSilence of Chung Ling Soo, The Miracle Factory, Seattle; and Dexter, W. (1955). TheRiddle of Chung Ling Soo, Arco Publishers, London.

33 Steinmeyer, The Glorious Deception, p. 213.




naturally charismatic and lacked a strong stage presence, which madeit difficult for him to launch his own stage career. After witnessingthe ‘Black Art’ of Ben Ali Bey (Max Auzinger) in Germany in 1886,Robinson caught his first glimpse of the power of an Oriental stagepersona as a device to enchant an audience, placing them for amoment into a space of willing disbelief at least partially becauseof the apparent mysteriousness of the East itself. The very nextyear, back in New York, Robinson adopted the name and personaof the Egyptian mystic ‘Achmed Ben Ali’, appearing at the prestigiousvaudeville theatre, the New Century Museum, on Rhode Island, wherehe attempted to replicate not only the mystery of Arabia but also theBlack Art pioneered by Auzinger in Europe.

For our purposes here, there are three noteworthy elements to thisepisode. First, Robinson recognized the theatrical value and libertyafforded by the adoption of a stage persona recognizably different fromhis own—a basic principle of stage performance. Second, Robinsonappears to have intuitively connected the emancipation associatedwith such a persona (specifically in the performance of magic) with theguise of Orientalism (in the sense that it was a fashion redolent withexoticism at the time). And, third, Robinson (like many magicians ofhis age, before and since) establishes a precedent of unashamedly‘borrowing’ the effects of inspirational or successful competitors,complete with the spirit and atmosphere of their acts. In fact,Robinson’s performance as the ‘Egyptian mystic’ was certainly hismost successful performance until that time; his discomfort aboutspeaking in front of audiences was mitigated by the pantomime offoreignness that he performed. Intriguingly, when Robinson startedto work with Harry Kellar, Kellar is reported to have insisted thatEgyptian mystics were inferior to Indian fakirs, and hence thatRobinson’s persona should not be Egyptian but Indian, and thus hisstage character was changed to Nana Sahib,34 who was billed as the

34 It is not clear whether Kellar or Robinson were aware that Nana Sahib was afamous rebel leader who played an important role in the Indian Rebellion of 1857,mysteriously vanishing without a trace after inflicting two bloody defeats on the Britishand then suffering a complete defeat himself. However, in 1880 Jules Verne publishedhis novel, La maison à vapeur (The House of Steam), which features Nana Sahib (indeed,one of its alternative titles is ‘The End of Nana Sahib’), and it seems plausible(given their interests in automata and mystery) that Kellar and Robinson wouldhave been familiar with the novel’s representation of a steam-powered, mechanicalelephant carrying a house around India and with its romanticization of the mysteriousadventures of Nana Sahib.




‘East Indian Necromancer in Oriental Occultism’ on posters whichportrayed him as a wild-looking, white-bearded Indian fakir or yogi.35

Then again, when Robinson returned to the employ of Herrmann,he was advised that neither Egyptian nor Indian magic could matchthe Oriental conjuring found in Constantinople, so his identity waschanged once again, this time to Abdul Khan.36 Like other magiciansof the time, both Kellar and Herrmann professed to have direct andintimate knowledge of the Orient (from travels that are not properlysubstantiated) and Oriental magic.

Hence, by the time the American public encountered a real Chinesemagician in the ‘Ching Ling Foo Troupe of Oriental Wonder Workers’at the China Pavilion of the 1898 Trans Mississippi Exposition inOmaha, William Robinson had already been through various Orientalstage personas and Western audiences were already in thrall toOriental conjuring and magic as a genre of performance. Unable tospeak much English, Ching Ling Foo’s act was conducted withoutpatter—the silence of the magician apparently adding to his Orientalmystique. The signature trick of Ching Ling Foo (born Chee LingQua in 1854 near Beijing) was to produce a huge bowl of water frombeneath a cloth in the middle of the stage without the use of trapdoors;the bowl weighed somewhere between 85 and 100 pounds, making themystery of its earlier concealment and then production all the moreremarkable. In some versions of the trick, the bowl would also containa clutch of apples floating inside or a goldfish or even a child. Soincredible was this trick at the time (and so confident of its beingunreplicable was Foo) that a $1,000 dollar challenge was eventuallyissued for anyone who could duplicate it. Just as the ‘Butterfly Trick’came to represent ‘Japanese magic’ and the ‘Rope Trick’ came torepresent ‘Indian magic’, so Ching Ling Foo’s ‘Goldfish Bowl Trick’came to represent ‘Chinese magic’ even more than the famous andpopular Linking Rings.37

35 Steinmeyer, The Glorious Deception, p. 92.36 Steinmeyer, The Glorious Deception, p. 118.37 Of these effects, perhaps the least well known today is probably the Butterfly

Trick, which is no longer very fashionable, despite its aesthetic beauty. The effect,which has been documented from as early as 1696 in Japan, sees the performer bring acloud of paper butterflies to life with a fan—it was often the finale of a show. It was oneof the first distinctly ‘Japanese’ illusions to find its way to the Western stage after theopening up of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century; a number of European magicians(including ‘Professor and Miss Anderson’ in Hull and ‘Dr Lynn’ in Edinburgh) wereperforming the effect in the 1860s and 1870s. In his memoirs, The Adventures of a




The stage was set, then, for William Robinson to show a morethan passing interest in this talented Chinese magician: an act witha spectacular effect previously unseen in the United States; an actperformed within the aura of Orientalism; and an act that didn’trequire Robinson to develop or deploy charming, witty patter, butinstead required a mysterious, enigmatic silence.

In fact, Robinson encountered Foo in the Boyd Theatre in Omaha in1898, where he was performing together with Alexander Hermmann.The first encounter saw Hermmann himself (somewhat naively)perform the Chinese linking rings for Foo. The second encountersaw Foo perform the linking rings with such virtuosity that he seemedto shame Hermmann, and then he cast the rings aside as though indisgust at their simplicity, moving on to more spectacular ‘Chinese’effects, such as the production of the water bowl and spitting fire. Thenext year, Ching Ling Foo was the talk of New York; his show in theUnion Square Theatre was a tremendous success, and it seems thatRobinson studied him closely during those performances. Thus beganthe magical feud between Robinson and Ching Ling Foo; and whenFoo apparently declined Robinson’s offer to meet his challenge andduplicate the water bowl production, the game was on.

As he had done following his witnessing of the Black Art of BenAli Bey, Robinson resolved to adopt and then outdo this latestOriental(ist) wonder-worker. He adopted the stage name of Hop SingLoo for a tour of Europe, which he quickly changed to Chung LingSoo in advance of his return to the United States, in direct mimicryof Ching Ling Foo (presumably half as a jibe at his foe and half in thehope that he would benefit from the likely confusion of the two ‘exotic’names by the public38—indeed, there is evidence to suggest that theBritish audience of Chung Ling Soo’s first-ever performance at the

Strange Man, with a supplement showing how it’s done (Edward Lamb, 1873), Dr Lynn(John Wesley Simmons) claims to have learned the trick during an official visit toJapan in the early 1860s, but as with much literature in this genre his claims seemrather far-fetched and seems simply to have been an attempt to participate in themagic of Orientalism.

Intriguingly, the practice of attributing an Oriental appellation to a trick (withsometimes only dubious Oriental provenance) was also rather common in this period,presumably in order to add a greater air of mystery and the fantastic to the effect.Before about 1914, for instance, Houdini performed his famous escape from theWater Torture Cell, but thereafter he renamed it the Chinese Water Torture Cell;likewise, his needle-swallowing trick became re-billed as the East Indian Needle Trickat about the same time.

38 In fact, the name Chung Ling Soo is meaningless gibberish in Chinese.




Alhambra Theatre in London, April 1900, genuinely thought that hewas Ching Ling Foo. He was billed as ‘The Great Chinese Magician’.).He bought a (completely nonsensical) Chinese costume, much moreflamboyant and colourful than the one worn by Foo,39 and resolvedto adopt a ‘Chinese’ persona, not only to compete directly with hisnemesis, but also to enable him to participate in the magical aura ofthe Orient and to excuse him from having to speak much during hisact.

In the event, the act developed by Robinson in the guise ofChung Ling Soo contained very little that counted as authenticallyChinese (although he performed inferior versions of Foo’s waterbowl production and fire spitting).40 Instead, the act reproduced thekind of popular stereotypes of the Orient that typified other popularentertainments of the time, such as the Gilbert and Sullivan comicoperetta ‘The Mikado’.41 His brash, colourful clothing and the tweemock-Oriental music spoke directly to his audience’s fantasies of theOrient, allowing him to convince them (as if by magic) that he wasthe authentic article. His magic was exactly what they wanted to seefrom a ‘Chinese’ magician, and this had nothing to do with his ethnicorigin nor even with the particular illusions performed. The key, whichRobinson intuited as early as his first encounter with Ben Ali Bey, wasthe taste of the performance, the aura and atmosphere of the Orientitself, which was more of a product of Orientalism than of anywherein the actual Orient. Ironically and conversely, Ching Ling Foo’s actwas relatively austere and enigmatic—he was an authentic and proudChinese magician who did not wish to stoop to self-Orientalism inorder to participate in caricatures of his own real identity. As a result,audiences began to see Robinson (who jealously guarded his realidentity, encouraging the public to see his stage persona as his realone) as more Chinese than Foo. Robinson was a talented magician andhis audiences were treated to a spectacular combination of virtuoso

39 Later on, Ching Ling Foo would point to the ludicrousness of Robinson’s costumeas evidence that he could not possibly be Chinese, noting (correctly) that nobody fromChina would ever dress like that. By that time, however, the authenticity of Robinson’sChinese-ness was no longer tied to the question of whether he was really Chinese.

40 Later he also added the ‘Chinese Linking Rings’ to his routine, despite the evidentdisdain for this effect exhibited by Ching Ling Foo, presumably because his audiencesassociated it with China.

41 The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu is a comic operetta by Arthur Sullivan and W. S.Gilbert, which opened in London in 1885. It ran at the Savoy for 672 performancesand immediately spread around Europe and the United States with more than 150troupes performing it before the end of the year.




magic (whose actual or virtual Chinese-ness was irrelevant to them)and grand theatre of the most exotic and fashionable kind. With ChungLing Soo, Robinson had finally found his perfect stage persona for thattime, and in it his audiences had found an enchanting combination ofmagic and Orientalism.

Indeed, Robinson deliberately exploited his freedom to manipulateand participate in Orientalist fantasies, entering self-consciouslyinto the discourse around the politics of knowledge at the turn ofthe century. As the British public started to hear about the BoxerRebellion in China and public opinion started to turn against theChinese in London, he toyed with the legends of Boxer ‘spirit soldiers’who were invulnerable to bullets but neatly subverted the narrativeso that he could perform a bullet-catching routine in which hepretended to be executed by the Boxers (Condemned to Death by theBoxers).42

Hence, by the time of the famous duel between Chung Ling Sooand Ching Ling Foo in the winter of 1904, in London, Robinsonhad done a remarkable job of transforming himself into a Chinesemagician. Indeed, the persuasiveness of this transformation illusionhad taken over his life: he brought a travelling exhibition of ‘Chinese’(that is, random, Asian-looking) artefacts with him on tour, andshowed them off in the theatres where he performed; he refusedto speak English in public, instead speaking in ‘Chinese’ (that is,complete gibberish) through a translator (who was actually theJapanese Fukado Kametaro, who also could not speak Chinese andso responded with his own kind of gibberish); and he even publisheda book of ‘Chinese Fairy Tales’ that carried his own picture on thecover.43

Remarkably, then, Robinson himself seemed to shift the landscapeof his competition with Ching Ling Foo towards a battle for theappropriation of Chinese-ness itself. When the two great ‘Chinese’magicians were in the same city competing for the same audience(Robinson at the Hypodrome and Foo at the Empire), the battle cameout into the open. It began in a low-key manner, with Foo attendingRobinson’s show, where (according to Steinmeyer) he snickered in the

42 The bullet catch is closely associated with Robinson, not least because he diedduring its performance at the Wood Green Empire in London on 23 March 1918.

43 I have not been able to locate this book, although a 1910 advertising flyer showsa full-length portrait of Soo on the verso, with a seated Soo under the title ‘ChineseFairy Tales—Compliments of Chung Ling Soo’.




front row and whispered (in broken English) about the ‘foreign devil’who was certainly not really Chinese. The story grew into accusationsthat Robinson was so ignorant about China that he didn’t realizehis attire would earn him a death sentence in the mother country (forinappropriately imitating royalty—and female royalty at that).44 Next,the Daily Express carried a challenge from Foo to Robinson, offering£1,000 if Robinson could perform ten out of 20 of Foo’s tricks, or ifFoo failed to perform a single one of Robinson’s.

Foo’s challenge, then, was not directly to Robinson’s claim to beChinese (which, as a Chinese man himself, he clearly found soabsurd that it required no challenging), but rather was an old schoolchallenge of magical arts and showmanship. However, Robinson’sresponse (provided in ‘translation’ by Kametaro because Soo couldnot speak English) brought the question of authenticity back centre-stage. Indeed, he playfully developed further Foo’s accusations thathe was affecting the guise of a mandarin by claiming this status forhimself, saying that he’d been raised from the peasantry to ‘celestialhonours’ by the empress dowager herself, and hence that it would bebeneath him to consort with a ‘street juggler’ like Foo.

This was a genius response, playing directly into stereotypes ofChinese grandeur and romance, and claiming all those glorious imagesfor Robinson, while displacing the authentic Chinese man into theless glamorous, less theatrical, and less magical role of the ordinarysubject. In some ways, indeed, Foo was hampered from being seenas spectacular in his Chinese-ness precisely because he was actuallyChinese. In hindsight, it was a mistake for him to allow the veracity ofclaims to Chinese-ness to become the stake, because in the end magicis not about truth. Indeed, it is precisely about being creative andimaginative with the common sense of reality, making a new realitywhich is more attractive and contagious than the everyday in whichmost of us are forced to live. It is about showmanship, transformation,and illusion, not truth.

44 The spectacular costumes of Chung Ling Soo were still attracting attention andsetting a particular kind of standard for magicians into the 1950s and beyond. Inhis survey of appropriate magical costuming, John McArdle notes approvingly thatbecause of their ‘association with the mysterious East, Chinese costumes have longbeen popular with magicians’. However, he goes on to point out that many Westernperformers adopting the role of a Chinese magician prefer the flamboyance of clothingreserved for Mandarins, while authentic Chinese performers tend to wear the typicallyless flamboyant clothes permitted to their station. McArdle, J. (1951). Costumes toConjure With, The Linking Ring, 31:7, p. 13.




Eventually, once the impact of his response had been felt, Robinsonagreed to Foo’s challenge, with the proviso that he be separatedfrom Foo by a glass divide. According to Houdini, this proviso wasmotivated by Robinson’s fear that Foo would expose him as a fraudby pulling off his braided queue to show that he wasn’t ethnicallyChinese.45 In his response Foo added one extra modification: ‘thatChung Ling Soo prove before members of the Chinese legation thathe is a Chinaman’.46

There was, of course, no way that Robinson could agree to this lateststipulation. Indeed, it is remarkable that the Chinese community ofLondon had not ‘outed’ him already. But, in fact, they were generallyvery supportive of Chung Ling Soo, since he brought positive andglamorous publicity to their community at a difficult time, whetherhe was really Chinese or not. In the end, the newspaper that wassponsoring the challenge, the Weekly Dispatch, ignored the additionalstipulations of both Robinson and Foo. In a statement that cuts to theheart of the matter, the newspaper announced that ‘it has been soughtin some quarters to change the issue into one of the nationality of therivals. This is a mistake. The public is not interested in the ancestry ofSoo or Foo, it is interested in their conjuring, and this is the questionthe Weekly Dispatch wished to resolve.’47

In other words, the Week Dispatch was trying (rather disingenuously)to sell this event as a magician’s duel like any other from thenineteenth century—a simple test of skill—exactly the kind of duelthat the Magic Circle was not interested in promoting around theIndian Rope Trick 30 years or so later. In the 1930s, the MagicCircle was interested precisely in examining the veracity of the mythsof Orientalism; in 1904, the Weekly Dispatch sought to bracket outthis question (to make it disappear, if you will) precisely in order toenable its performance on the London stage. Its disappearance, inother words, was itself an illusion. The mystique, reputations, andcommercial success of both Robinson and Foo rested largely upon

45 In an editorial note added to James Elliot’s 1923 book, Houdini explains the fearof his friend William Robinson that his identity as a ‘Caucassian’ could be revealedin this way, and that the public was largely unaware of this fact. Never one to miss asopportunity for self-promotion, Houdini goes on to explain how Robinson asked himto come down to London to teach him the Needle Trick (which he thought Foo mightperform as part of the challenge), apparently because Houdini’s method for the trickwas superior to that of Foo. Elliot, Elliot’s Last Legacy, p. 44.

46 Steinmeyer, The Glorious Deception, p. 257.47 Quoted in Steinmeyer, The Glorious Deception, p. 258.




their participation in the aura of the Orient—in Robinson’s case, thishad made the difference between a solid magician technician fromNew York City and a magical superstar from the glamorous Orient.There was no way that the duel between Ching Ling Foo and ChungLing Soo could ignore the manifestly obvious fact that the latter hadfashioned himself as a parody, glorification, and super-Orientalizationof the former.48 It is impossible to imagine that the editors of theWeekly Dispatch were not aware of this, and hence impossible to viewtheir announcement as anything other than commercial cynicism—unable to resolve (or even properly engage with) the complexities ofthe politics of knowledge at the time, the paper sought to exploit themby manufacturing them into a spectacle.

In the end, Foo (who had sent another letter explaining that he sawno profit in participating unless his conditions were met) did not turnup to the duel on 7 January 1905, and so Robinson (who did turn up,this time with a real Chinese interpreter, just in case) was declaredthe winner. The incredible outcome of this was that the public came tosee Ching Ling Foo—the magician from China—as the fake Chinesemagician; it was as though he had taken on his persona in imitationof Robinson’s Chung Ling Soo, when of course the opposite was thetruth. Soo had accomplished an astonishing illusion; the simulationhad become simulacra.49 Foo left England within a month, never toreturn.

Despite its announcement to the contrary, then, the Weekly Dispatchactually succeeded in demonstrating that the London public of 1905was deeply interested in the politics of knowledge and the matterof origination, even if this was a name that it dared not speak (orthat was historically unavailable to it). From the perspective of thehistory of magic, this event provides a neat obverse of the Indian RopeTrick challenge of the 1930s, demonstrating the primacy and powerof stage magic as a means to (out)perform politics—the trick, if you

48 Indeed, the obituary of Chung Ling Soo published in the monthly Magical Bulletin(Volume 6, 1918, p. 41) makes it clear: ‘Chung Lung Soo [sic], whose real name wasWilliam E. Robinson, the famous magician, who had impersonated Ching Ling Fooall over the world . . . was accidentally shot on the stage in London, England, a fewnights ago and died in hospital the next morning.’

49 The simulacrum is a simulation that has established a reality of its own. As JeanBaudrillard himself puts it (citing Ecclesiastes), ‘The simulacrum is never that whichconceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrumis true.’ Baudrillard, J. ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, in Poster, M. (ed.) (1998). JeanBaudrillard: Selected Writings, Stanford University Press, Stanford, p. 166.




will, was a moment of dramatic misdirection in which the public wasled to believe that Orientalism was not at stake when really it was thestake. From the perspective of modern scholarship, one of the mostfascinating (and offensive) aspects of this story is the way in which theChinese magician Ching Ling Foo, who had every right to claim hisown Chinese ancestry and to observe the falsehood of Robertson’s, wasradically disempowered from doing so by the commercial imperativesat work as well as by the pervasiveness of Orientalism in society,which genuinely rendered the real China irrelevant in the face ofthe popular perception of what China was actually like. It was notonly because Foo had poor English that he had no voice; rather,he stood for the mundane Orient itself as it confronted the magicalOrient, which was created in the theatres of London, Paris, and NewYork by white, Western men. And in that conjured reality, it wasSoo not Foo who was most authentic. Soo was the Great ChineseMagician; Foo was a magician from China. The signifiers ‘Chinese’ and‘China’ refer to radically different epistemological realms—domainsof Otherness—separated by the enabling conditions of Orientalismwhich characterized that period, but in which modern audiences nolonger reside today, as Said demonstrates forcefully. Like magic, Foocould be from China without being Chinese, and Soo could be Chinesewithout coming from China—Orientalism, not Soo’s pantomimicalcharade (and not even the training required to carry a bowl of waterbetween his knees), was the secret to the great illusion.

The curtain: Orientalism, performance, and the present

The consideration of the nexus of Orientalism, magic, and modernityreveals some of the ways in which Orientalism has functioned asa kind of magic itself, enchanting and transforming the mundaneinto the fantastical (including through the deployment of its ownmotifs, symbols, language, and technologies). In the end, this is whatall magical performance attempts and, in the appropriate context,Orientalism was a legitimate (and exciting) device of the performerof stage magic at the turn of the twentieth century. Through itwas transformed the mundane, familiar, Western male magician(reliant on craft and technology to accomplish illusions) into an exotic,mysterious, Oriental with the aura of real magic coruscating aroundthe stage. Orientalism became an authentic theatrical device, part ofthe language of stage magic, helping to locate the magician (and the




audience) in a realm of magical possibilities in an industrial age ofradical de-enchantment.50

However, in the present we must also ask the question of thelegitimacy of this deployment of Orientalism in other contexts, notonly historical but also cultural. Even within the duration of the first 30years of the twentieth century, eventful as those years were in so manyways, it is possible to discern a shift in the contextual significance andmoral legitimacy of Orientalism in the world of magic; the outcomesof Ching Ling Foo’s and then the Magic Circle’s challenges couldnot have been more different. As globalization made Europeans moreknowledgeable about the rest of the world, the offensiveness of thiskind of deployment of Orientalism became clear. The Magic Circlewas correct in the 1930s to challenge it. And, according to thesestandards (although not those of London in 1905), Ching Ling Foo

50 So effective was this illusion that confusion persisted for many years about whowas who, when it came to Chung Ling Soo and Ching Ling Foo. In 1940, the periodicalGenii made a list of ‘Ten Questions You Should Be Able To Answer’, number five ofwhich was: ‘Which was the real Oriental, Chung Lung Soo, or Ching Ling Foo?’(Stratton, F. (March 1940). Ten Questions You Should Be Able To Answer, Genii,4:7, p. 218). It should be noted that Genii got Chung Ling Soo’s name slightly wrong,reflecting exactly the kind of confusion that Robinson had aimed for from the start. In1905 the leading magic journal, The Sphinx, carried a short poem in the centre of itsfront cover, apparently etched into a stone monument between the figure of the devil,an English gentleman-magician, and beneath the sphinx itself. The poem confusednearly all the syllables of the two ‘Chinese’ names, but it didn’t seem to matter:

THE MAGICIAN.

The magician’s a man who wonders does work;

He’s sometimes an Englishman, sometimes a Turk,

But always with wand and magic words, too.

He produces enjoyment for me and for you.

There’s Ching Ling Soo and Chung Lung Foo,

Both produce fire and water for you.

There’s Houdini, who from handcuffs escapes,

And Ten Ichi, who gets out of tapes.

There’s Downs and Thurston and others galore

Who have puzzled many and will more.

But on the top, there stands by far

The king of magicians, Harry Kellar.

By Roche, F. (1905). The Magician, The Sphinx, 4:6, cover




had been terribly mistreated; he had been rendered into an instrumentor an actor and forced to participate in the great illusion of hisday—transforming his own heritage into a magical effect. Havingsaid that, it is important to distinguish between the claim that Foowas mistreated in this way, which is undeniable, and the claim thatRobinson mistreated him in a special manner (beyond the way inwhich competition drove magicians of the period into ‘duels’ and publicrivalries), which is at least contestable. Orientalism cannot be reducedto the competition between two individual magicians nor to a tacticemployed by one to best the other. Indeed, part of its magic is theway in which it transforms the people participating in it, making ithard to locate a locus of responsibility. This is one of the basic ethicalconundrums in the wider literature of Orientalism since Said, whichin general (and correctly) asserts that nineteenth century Orientalism(and its legacy) is offensive to us today: Orientalism is the name forthe violence done to Ching Ling Foo in order to enable his dominationby William Robertson.

Today, the association of the Orient with magic and mystery retainsa kind of nostalgia, which itself has come to be recognized as a formof Orientalism. However, it is no longer the case that the generalpublic would assume that an Indian or a Chinese man would besomehow more essentially magical than someone from London orNew York. The rise of street magic51 demonstrates clearly that the‘margins’ in which audiences are willing to suspend their disbeliefregarding magic have shifted from the distant peripheries of empireto the boundaries of domestic society, in subcultures and subversion. Inmagic, the new Orientalism revolves around Brooklyn and Bradford.Meanwhile, Asia, especially East Asia, has become enwrapped in a newkind of Orientalist discourse than we might call techno-Orientalism,which is not entirely divorced from notions of enchantment (as manyscience fiction writers will attest)52 but which associates Hong Kong,Shanghai, and Tokyo with technologies so far in advance of the

51 Superstars who demonstrate this tendency include David Blaine in the UnitedStates (from Brooklyn) and, more recently, Dynamo in the United Kingdom (fromBradford).

52 The idea of techno-Orientalism emerged in the 1990s in tandem with the notionof ‘Cool Japan’, which was sustained partly by the Japanese government itself as akind of self-techno-Orientalism. An influential account is in Morley, D. and Robins,K. (1995). Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries,Routledge, London and New York, Chapter 8. The phrase has also become associatedwith the cultural critic Toshiya Ueno.




everyday that they begin to resemble magic. Contemporary Asiaas a trope in performance culture, then, casts a more natural andpowerful spell at technology trade shows than on the magician’s stage.Orientalism as a device of stage magic now resides in the realms ofnostalgia, which (of course) has a magic of its own.


magic, modernity, and orientalism: conjuring representations of asia

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