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University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap This paper is made available online in accordance with publisher policies. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item and our policy information available from the repository home page for further information. To see the final version of this paper please visit the publisher’s website . Access to the published version may require a subscription. Author(s): Jon Burrows Article Title: ‘A Vague Chinese Quarter Elsewhere’: Limehouse in the Cinema 1914–36 Year of publication : 2009 Link to published article: / 10.3366/E1743452109000946 Publisher statement: © Edinburgh University Press ‘A Vague Chinese Quarter Elsewhere’: Limehouse in the Cinema 1914–36 Jon Burrows Introduction To help ‘set the scene’ for this essay, I will begin with an interesting example of self-reflexive cinematic scene-setting. The film in question, Betty Chester the Well-Known Co-Optimist Star Singing ‘Pig-Tail Alley’, is a sound short produced in Britain in 1926 using the DeForest Phonofilm system. It begins with the conceit of an off-screen voice telling Betty Chester, a musical comedy performer famous for her association with a long-running stage revue called The Co-Optimists, that she has accidentally wandered onto the wrong set. Chester finds herself in front of a backdrop representing a dingy side street in the East End dockside district of Limehouse. Forced to scrap her planned performance and come up with a new song that will suit the location, Chester thinks aloud about what material would be most appropriate. ‘I must do something about Pig-Tail Alley and Chinamen and dope and all really sinister things like that’, she says. This is a telling demonstration of