Sherlock and China 1 – The Enduring Popularity

I read with interest (as letter writers to the London Times say) that the new Sherlock Holmes film opened to a strong weekend box office in America. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, cinema audiences were split between some nonsense called Avatar and Holmes. The young opted for Avatar and some sort of 3-D thing while cinema goers in their late thirties and early forties (my own rather aging demographic) plumped for Holmes and Watson. In Europe the film appears to be popular too, not surprisingly especially in the UK (if Holmes, Watson, Ritchie, Law and nineteenth century London aren’t winners in Britain then what is!). Apparently the film has been passed by the Chinese censor and will be released in cinemas on the mainland on January 19th. It’ll be interesting to see how it does.

I suspect that a similar demographic split in audiences may occur in China as in America – the youth will all want Avatar (opens January 4 in China apparently) and the older folk Sherlock Holmes, though my few visits to the cinema in China reveal that audiences are overwhelming young. Of course the movie will be available on DVD pretty quickly I expect too and nobody really knows how many of those sell and who watches them (more than go to the pictures though!)

All this reminded me that you don’t hear Holmes mentioned so much in China these days. But you used to, indeed back in the 1980s and 1990s Holmes was a major ice breaker. I can’t remember how many business meetings in those early days involved interminable ‘getting to know you’ sessions looking for common ground and finding it with Holmes. I recall one long and involved negotiation involving myself and my business partner in Peking trying to extract some data from a Chinese government body that resulted in endless meals. It was the 90s some time and Chinese officials were pretty rough and ready, chain smoking and sitting around cold and pretty spartan offices compared to these days. At some point one of the officials asked me where I was from in England? I told him London and his eyes lit up as he shot back with, ‘221b Baker Street’.  Turned out he was a Sherlock Holmes nut, devoured Conan Doyle and was a student of, what I understand is called the discipline, of ‘Sherlockian’ studies. A return to London and a package of Holmes and Watson keyrings, coasters and other Baker Street memorabilia to Peking saw the deal get done – elementary, my dear Watson!

Holmes still appears all over China – most pirate DVD shops I visit have box sets of the old 1980s Jeremy Brett (left) as Holmes TV show and in China and Hong Kong I’ve found pretty much all the Basil Rathbone (above)/Nigel Bruce series lying around. Conan Doyle seems to have been one of those authors who stayed in print in China and was deemed acceptable – the Chinese appreciate his intellectual capabilities, cold rationalism and pragmatism I guess. If you were advocating what we used to call ‘scientific socialism’ then Holmes’s deduction methods and reasoning suited your purposes – a centrally planned economy?, the inevitable march towards communism? once again elementary my dear Watson. Also, surely Holmes is closer to a Judge Dee, van Gulick’s take on the genre of magistrate fiction in China where deductive reason and Confucian logic solve crimes rather than the private eye or rogue cop genre of hard boiled and noir detectives of later ages (which were politically problematic too – all those Americans with cars and big houses and loads of stuff to steal)?

I also think Conan Doyle played a major role in shaping many Chinese people’s impressions of London and England. I remember in the late 1990s the British Council and the British Consulate in Shanghai commissioning a survey of Shanghainese attitudes towards Britain. They were pushing the whole Britpop, Cool Britannia thing  at the time (which inevitably looked really bogus being sold by the upper middle class twats of the British Council and cheap suited minor diplomats trying to be ‘street’). They didn’t like the results – the Shanghainese saw London as foggy, damp, grey and full of top hatted gentlemen walking past Big Ben. In other words the London they liked and imagined was Victorian London, the London of Conan Doyle’s Holmes. The British Council et al of course ignored the findings completely and continued right on presenting an image of Britain nobody much understood or appreciated – better to have just shipped them some Holmes DVDs and Baker Street memorabilia to go with the smog they manufactured themselves over those years.