Download or read book On a Chinese Screen written by W. Somerset Maugham and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maugham spent the winter months of 1919-20 travelling 1500 miles up the Yangtze River. Always more interested in people than places, he gave full rein to a sensitive and philosophical nature. On a Chinese Screen is the refined accumulation of the countless scraps of paper on which he had taken notes. Within the narrow confines of their colonial milieu, missionaries, consuls, army officers and company managers are all gently ridiculed as they persist obliviously with the life they know.