Francis de Croisset’s 1936 Le Dragon Blesse

Belgian born, French naturalised Francis de Croisset visited China in 1934 and wrote up his travels, in the “style of an English gentleman”, in Le Dragon Blesse: Impressions de voyage en Extrême-Orient (The Wounded Dragon, published in 1936). Croisset was a playwright and opera librettist and while he evinced an interest in the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and other such political stuff, he was essentially the archetypal sojourner – enjoying dinners, parties, embassy receptions and the like mostly.

I am not one of those hardy “travellers” who leaves home with a bar of chocolate and a map – I like the five star life, so de Croisset appeals to me. He never travelled in China with less than ten suitcases and feels for his European hosts and their problems with housekeepers and cooks and, being French, has strong opinions on food and enjoys a regal banquet or five. As ever, past accounts of China feel oddly contemporary – de Croisset mourns when he sees an ancient temple destroyed for no particular reason and is romantic and sentimental about a past, lost ancient China he can’t quite touch. I particularly appreciated (in these days of shorts and t-shirts as de rigeur among ex-pats and their brats in Beijing in even the best restaurants!) that he insists on arriving by rickshaw to a dinner at the Bolivian Embassy in a dinner jacket despite dust storms and intense heat. Good man!