The Yellow Peril (1929)

We might date the start of an obsession with a Yellow Peril in British popular culture from 1898, its most notable marker being the publication that year of M. P. Shiel’s novelThe Yellow Danger.
 
Shiel had worked this up at the request of publisher Grant Richards from a weekly serial, The Empress of the Earth: The Tale of the Yellow War, fired off a few months earlier for publisher C. Arthur Pearson’s Short Stories magazine after‘some trouble broke out in China’. The ‘trouble’ to which he referred - what became known as the Kiaochow incident - looked set to topple Britain's dominating influence among the European nations in China as, after China’s surprise defeat by the Japanese in 1895, the Western powers engaged in an increasingly ignominious squabble over treaty concessions and spheres of influence.