On a Chinese Screen

Traveling up the Yangtze in 1919 and 1920, Maugham filled his notebooks with quick portraits of the people he met, and this book gathers fifty-eight of them into short, sharp sketches. Some catch a Chinese scene in a few strokes, but the keenest are aimed at the Europeans abroad: missionaries, officials, traders, and lonely wives, each revealing how poorly they understand the country around them. Rather than a guidebook, it works as a gallery of character studies marked by Maugham’s cool eye and quiet irony. First published in 1922, it reads today as both travel writing and a study of the colonial mind. This free PDF and EPUB edition collects a slim, observant book that shows the novelist sharpening the human insight of his later fiction.