This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

What does it mean for a piece of writing to be dangerous?

Writers love to say that ideas are powerful things, but does an idea itself have power?

Or does the power come from the context in which the idea exists?

Of course, that's an impossible question to answer, an even more abstract version of which came first, the chicken or the egg.

But for an idea to be truly dangerous, it first has to be treated like a threat to the status

quo, even within something as seemingly trivial as escapist fiction.

In the early 1910s, China was undergoing a massive upheaval. The imperial rule of the country

came to an end after 2,000 years, with the Republic of China taking its place. The end of the

Qing dynasty was, in some ways, a culmination of China's growth into a world

of global collaboration.

Foreign relations had taken off in the late 19th century, and cultural imports like cinema

began to reshape how the people of China expressed and entertained themselves.

In the process, some relics of the old world fell away, and others found themselves

reborn in the 20th century.

Now, this Republican period saw a boom in what would later be called the Mandarin Duck

and Butterfly genre of fiction.

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