Fah Lo Suee

85 ALBERT EMBANKMENT, LONDON SE1, ENGLAND

Real Name:

Unknown. Fah Lo Suee is a childhood name, a term of endearment, not a legal identity. Sax Rohmer never disclosed her given name. Marvel later published her as Zheng Bao Yu; that form is an alias of convenience after the Rohmer license lapsed, not a revelation of what Rohmer withheld.

- Fah Lo Suee (Chinese: 花露水, Pinyin: Huā Lùshuǐ, English: floral dew water; Rohmer’s gloss is “Sweet Perfume.”) The romanization is Rohmer’s own, not Wade-Giles and not standard Pinyin. 花露水 is ordinary Chinese for a floral toilet water. The nickname is intimate, almost domestic. The woman who wears it is not.

Aliases:

Personal Use: Fah Lo Suee, the Lady of the Si-Fan, Madame Ingomar, Koreâni, Queen Mamaloi, Mrs. van Roorden, Zheng Bao Yu.

Nicknames: Sweet Perfume. Shang-Chi’s “half-sister,” which is accurate about blood and insufficient about everything else.

Known Relatives:

Shaka Kharn (ancestor), Dirk Struan (great-grandfather), Ling Kai Sung (great-grandmother), Sir William Clayton (paternal grandfather), Shan (adoptive paternal grandfather), Ling Ju Hai (paternal grandmother), Shan Ming Fu / Dr. Fu Manchu (father), Princess Sonia Omanoff-Singh (mother, deceased), Shan Lan Fu (paternal uncle), Shang-Chi (half-brother), Moving Shadow (half-brother), Kwai Far (half-sister), Fleurette (surrogate sister), M’nai / Midnight (surrogate brother), Leiko “The Black Lotus” Smith (either daughter or granddaughter).

Lovers of record include Phillip (later the Mad Slayer) and Maximillian Zaran. She declared love for Sir Denis Nayland Smith more than once. He did not marry her. The hunt did not allow it.

[ Sirens of the Si-Fan by Rick Lai. ] [ Partners in Crime: Fu Manchu and Carl Peterson by Rick Lai. ] [ The Daughter of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer. ] [ Master of Kung Fu #100. ]

Physical Traits:

She is the Doctor’s daughter in the face. Long, almond-shaped eyes with a fire behind them; heavy jet-black lashes; a perfectly oval, Orientally dark face; dull gold hair; a small aquiline nose; full red lips; a slim ivory hand. The eyes are the weapon. Petrie, who had already met Kâramanéh and Fu Manchu, still called them unlike any human eyes he had known. In the comics her voice is low and throaty. It purrs. It can snarl.

The Elixir Vitae keeps her in the apparent prime of life. When Fu Manchu withholds it, she becomes an old woman in hours. That is not aging. That is a leash.

The earliest known description of Fah Lo Suee is as follows:

… I glanced up…to meet the gaze of a pair of wonderful eyes. Never, in my experience, had I seen their like. The dark eyes of Kâramanéh were wonderful and beautiful, the eyes of Dr. Fu-Manchu sinister and wholly unforgettable; but the eyes of this woman who was to be my traveling companion to London were incredible. Their glance was all but insupportable; they were the eyes of a Medusa! … Long, almond-shaped, bordered by heavy jet-black lashes, arched over by finely penciled brows, their strange brilliancy, as of a fire within, was utterly uncanny. They were the eyes of some beautiful wild creature rather than those of a woman. Their possessor had now thrown back her motor-veil, revealing a face Orientally dark and perfectly oval, with a clustering mass of dull gold hair, small, aquiline nose, and full, red lips. … Her long coat had fallen partly open, and I saw, with surprise, that it was lined with leopard-skin. One hand was ungloved, and lay on the arm-rest—a slim hand of the hue of old ivory, with a strange, ancient ring upon the index finger.

[ Dr. Petrie, The Hand of Fu-Manchu (The Si-Fan Mysteries), 1917. She is not yet named. ]

A later witness, less literary and more frightened:

She was dark—sultry … she was coldly sensual … her voice was low, throaty—it seemed to purr, and yet there was no doubt that she was capable of a snarl … her eyes … actually seemed to glow in the darkness of my bed chamber. And I don’t mind admitting that I was frightened …

[ Lord Robert Greville, Master of Kung Fu #26. ]

Occupation:

Criminal intelligence. Lady of the Si-Fan. Sometime Dragon Head of splinter factions. Sometime officer of MI-6. Objective: power that can be held. Not Ming restoration. Not the East against the West. Those are her father’s sermons. She wants the apparatus.

Formerly leader of the Oriental Expediters and the Golden Daggers. Formerly a presiding member of the Council of Seven. Formerly a highly placed official inside MI-6. Last seen, in the original continuity, without that rank. The circumstances of the fall are not recorded.

Known Base of Operations:

Mobile. Formerly a private fortress in China. Formerly MI-6 headquarters, London. Formerly operations out of Switzerland, Egypt, Haiti, the Arctic, South America, and New York. Wherever the Si-Fan can be split, bought, or stolen, she has kept a room.

Group Membership:

Celestial Order of the Si-Fan (Lady of the Si-Fan; intermittent Dragon Head of breakaway lodges). Council of Seven. Oriental Expediters (leader). Golden Daggers (leader). MI-6 (later). Sublime Order of the White Peacock (by inheritance of her father’s standing, never as a true believer in its mysticism).

Affiliations:

Bolo, Kimba, Chankar, Tarrant / Sir Herbert Griswold, Melissa Greville, Kâramanéh (intermittent), Ki-Ming, Maximillian Zaran (intermittent), Wild Tiger / Deng Ling-Xiao (if the Cursed Lotus identification is accepted; this reference prefers that it is not). Uneasy, temporary, and always reversible alliances with Shang-Chi, Sir Denis Nayland Smith, Black Jack Tarr, Clive Reston, Leiko Wu, James Larner, and Freelance Restorations Limited.

Enemies:

Sir Lionel Barton, Rima Barton, Cho Lin, Death-Dealer / Li Ching-Lin, Ducharme, Fu Manchu (typically), Robert Greville, Shan Greville, Mad Slayer / Phillip, Shadow-Stalker, Shang-Chi (typically), Sir Denis Nayland Smith (typically), the Si-Fan lodges loyal to her father, and anyone who mistakes her last alliance for a character.

Skills & Abilities:

- She is not Fu Manchu’s equal in science, and she is not Shang-Chi’s equal in a room. She is their equal in will, and she is quicker than either of them to change sides when the board requires it. That is not weakness. It is the talent that has kept her alive in a family where loyalty is a method of dying.

- Hypnosis is the family art. Her eyes can hold a man. Mimosa, the ruby eyes of the Golden Beetle of Seth-Amon (worn, for a time, as earrings), and a voice that purrs finish what the glance begins. Nayland Smith, who had fifty years’ practice at not looking into Fu Manchu, still looked into hers and went under. Robert Greville died of her kiss. Clive Reston took a spider tattoo on his chest and begged to be taken with her.

- She inherited the Elixir Vitae and the political problem of depending on the man who mixes it. Fu Manchu can make her old. That fact governs more of her career than any manifesto.

- She commands men. Golden Daggers, Oriental Expediters, breakaway Si-Fan, Death Angels, a helicopter, a boat on Lake Geneva, an Arctic flight, an MI-6 office. She prefers other people’s hands. When she uses her own, it is usually a gun. Griswold, Phillip, Cho Lin, Ducharme, and a missed shot at her father are the record.

- She is a linguist, a hostess, a forger of mortgages, a cutter of deals with the next leadership of a service, and a woman who can overwrite a confession tape with her own voice. Tradecraft, not kung fu, is the craft.

- She understands theater because she was raised by a man who never entered a room except as an entrance. Poisoned lipstick, a leopard-skin lining, a bamboo message left under a childhood tree, a taunt that reads “Fooled again, little spirit.” The spectacle is not vanity. It is how a smaller army occupies a larger mind.

History:

Fah Lo Suee was born in 1897, the daughter of Shan Ming Fu and Princess Sonia Omanoff-Singh, a Russian intelligence asset who had become the Doctor’s mistress during the exchange of information that produced, among other fruits, the Chinese Eastern Railway agreement. Sonia had little loyalty to Russia. She had been working for Russian Intelligence to avoid the Siberian mines. Shan Ming Fu found her useful and not objectionable. That is not a love story. It is an origin.

In July 1900, at the height of the Boxer Rebellion, Sonia failed to warn him of a Russian move into Manchuria. He treated the silence as betrayal and poisoned her. The death was attributed to Maharajah Gungadhura. Shan Ming Fu took the child. [ Sirens of the Si-Fan by Rick Lai. ] [ The Devil Doctor: The Early History of Fu Manchu by Dennis E. Power. ]

She is therefore mixed in the same way her father is mixed, and then mixed again. He was the illegitimate son of Sir William Clayton and Ling Ju Hai. She is the daughter of that man and a Russian princess who sold intelligence for survival. Anyone who needs her to stand for “the East” has not read the genealogy. She stands for herself.

When she was a young child, Fu Manchu showed her the moon and said, “Someday I shall have the power to move one world, my daughter… and thus rule another!” More than fifty years later she would watch him try. [ Master of Kung Fu #48, flashback. ]

In 1917, still unnamed, she is presented to a gathering of the Si-Fan in England as the Lady of the Si-Fan, the woman whispered of among Hindus as destined one day to rule the world. She is a teenager. Petrie sees her on the train to London and cannot look away. The meeting is raided by Nayland Smith. Father and daughter escape. Fu Manchu is believed lost at sea. Under her leadership the Si-Fan continues to fall into disarray. That is the first lesson: she can be given the order, and the order will not hold without him. [ The Hand of Fu-Manchu. ]

By 1928 Smith is an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard. Fah Lo Suee assumes leadership of the Si-Fan and all of her father’s agents. She hosts the Council of Seven at El-Khârga, Egypt. She clashes with Smith, Petrie, and Shan Greville. Fu Manchu returns, prevents her from killing Smith and Greville, and resumes the Dragon Seat. She is relegated to support. The pattern is set: she takes the organization; he takes it back; she remains the one person inside it who might match him. [ The Daughter of Fu Manchu. ]

The 1930s are a war of usurpation conducted as a romance. She and Fu Manchu hunt the relics of El Mokanna. She hypnotizes Greville and steals them. She declares her love for Nayland Smith and offers to help him defeat her father — including a scheme to program Si-Fan warriors with the murderous gifts of Jack the Ripper. On 23 May 1932, in Cairo, she smuggles Smith into Fu Manchu’s base inside a sarcophagus. The Doctor knows. He takes her with him when he runs. [ The Mask of Fu Manchu. ] [ Master of Kung Fu #100, flashback. ]

She is against the planned marriage to Fleurette. She declares for Smith again. Fu Manchu orders her death. In The Trail of Fu Manchu she is forced to take poison. He later revives her. Revival, in this family, is not mercy. It is reuse.

In The Drums of Fu Manchu she reappears as Koreâni, a dancing girl, her memory wiped. She recovers it and departs for Haiti. In The Island of Fu Manchu she is Queen Mamaloi, a voodoo priestess at Christophe’s Citadel, still aiding the man who erased her. Bart Kerrigan still calls her Koreâni. The name is a reminder that her father can unmake a person and hand the body back a costume.

In 1951 she presides over the Council of Seven in Manhattan — Fah Lo Suee, Emir Abdulla al-Abbas, Sir Mostyn Bierce, Dr. Griswal, Colonel Otto von Seidler, Selwyn Orson, Captain Cooper. Orson is FBI. Smith and Raymond Harkness take the table. She is the one who gets out. Fu Manchu abandons her. [ The Wrath of Fu Manchu. ]

Rohmer leaves her there: the equal who will not stay, the heir who cannot inherit, the woman Smith would not take, the daughter the Doctor would rather empty than admit.

Fah Lo Suee in Marvel Comics:

The Fu Manchu novels are treated as in-continuity for the Shang-Chi universe. Her first Marvel appearance is Master of Kung Fu #26 (March 1975), “Daughter of Darkness!”, by Doug Moench and Keith Pollard. The issue is an Egypt story because Rohmer’s daughter was an Egypt story. Moench knew which book he was in.

Before that issue’s present, she had already met Shang-Chi twice in Honan.

The first time, around 1964, Fu Manchu introduced them and left them alone. She observed, flatteringly, that he was being trained as a master assassin, then said that a day might come when both of them might want Fu dead. He did not understand her. He would. [ Master of Kung Fu #26, flashback. ]

The second time, around 1966, she showed him a bonsai. Which was more beautiful: the small tree, meticulously trimmed, or the large tree, shaped by nature? He could not choose. She pointed out that nature is not evil, whereas human agency can be, and that he himself was being slowly shaped by their father’s hand. She asked whether he would choose to be shaped by time and season’s change or by the hand of man. She also told him that being the son or daughter of Fu Manchu was enough — all that one may hope to be — and never a brother or sister to anyone. [ Master of Kung Fu #28, flashback. ]

That is the most honest thing anyone in the series says to him before Smith tells him the truth about Petrie. Smith tells him his father is evil. She tells him what the evil is for: a boy being trimmed into a weapon. She does not say it to free him. She says it to recruit him.

Around 1967 she visits Honan with a white lover, Phillip. As punishment for the 1932 betrayal, Fu Manchu gives Phillip the appetite of Jack the Ripper. She lets the Mad Slayer escape. Fu withholds the Elixir. She ages. She bargains: restore the drug, and she will hunt the man she loved. He agrees. She leaves. Shang-Chi is still a child in the fortress, watching. [ Master of Kung Fu #100, flashback. ]

In Master of Kung Fu #26 she hypnotizes Lord Robert Greville, son of Shan, and uses him to open Seth-Amon. She wants the ruby eyes of the Golden Beetle. Fu Manchu wants to keep them from her. Smith looks into her face and is lost again. Six Si-Fan come out of sarcophagi; a seventh coffin holds the mummy whose eyes are the rubies; a bomb is under the stone. She takes the gems and Greville. Greville dies on the sand of her poisoned lipstick. Fu’s helicopter leaves. Smith and Shang-Chi do not know if she got out.

She got out. In #27 Fu tells his Council that she has the eyes and is recruiting Si-Fan to her own service. In #28 Shang-Chi goes to her fortress. He will not choose her side or their father’s. She sends assassins. Shadow-Stalker turns. Shang-Chi lifts the ruby earrings off her in the fight. She escapes. The sibling war is now a war.

She becomes a regularly featured character in the Moench/Gulacy years as the mind behind the Oriental Expediters and the Golden Daggers. Master of Kung Fu #44 is the return: Smith shot, Petrie the mole, the sister at the edge of the Swiss board. In #45 she sets Bolo and Kimba on Shang-Chi and Reston, claims Fu Manchu is behind the MI-6 assassinations, and offers Shang-Chi a place in her Si-Fan. He refuses. Reston is dragged onto her boat.

In #46 she doses Reston with mimosa and leaves a spider tattoo on his chest. Shang-Chi and Leiko, in Expediter gear, board her Arctic flight. Fu Manchu is digging a giant oyster for the skull of Shaka Kharn, maker of the elixir. She is not there to save the world from the moon. She is there to take the plot.

#47–50 is the freeze and the fire. She shoots Griswold when he panics. Fu Manchu’s men wreck her troops. Leiko offers her a place with the heroes. She takes it because the alternative is dying with everyone else when the Doctor knocks the moon from orbit. She tells Tarr the plan. Larner dies at her feet blowing the mountain. Shang-Chi seemingly kills their father in orbit. She has survived another succession war without succeeding.

She is not done. In the Zeck years she overwrites Shockwave’s confession tape with her own voice. The team debates whether she is with MI-6. A packet that might have explained Fu Manchu’s South American resurrection is a taunt: “Fooled again, little spirit.” She brings Zaran back to her father and appears to slither into grace. In Morocco she hypnotizes Tarr, then unmasks the play: she is cutting a deal with the next MI-6 leadership, she erased the tape, she helped Smith escape, and she wants a joint strike on Fu Manchu in New York. Smith refuses to trust her. He is correct and irrelevant. At Pier 23 she is waiting as ordered; Fu Manchu puts a dagger in her back for the deceit. She lives. The Doctor’s nuclear bomb does not.

That is how she enters the Service. Not as a convert. As a professional who has noticed that the British state is another apparatus, and that an apparatus can be occupied.

By Master of Kung Fu #100 she has found Phillip. The Mad Slayer lunges. She shoots the man she loved. She leaves Shang-Chi with the hope that he has truly killed the man who cursed them both by being their father. He has not, not yet. She knows the difference between a funeral and an ending.

As an MI-6 official she summons Smith to protect Pavane from Razor-Fist (#105). She dumps Zaran with mimosa (#109). She arrives in Africa too late for the blue diamonds of Operation: White Heat (#113). She puts Melissa Greville on Li Ching-Lin, who is Death-Dealer, her father’s man (#115). She offers Smith forged mortgage papers to save Stormhaven if Shang-Chi will eliminate the rival. Smith burns the forgeries. He was already hunting Li. Someone Shang-Chi knows had tipped him. The games do not get cleaner because she has a desk.

In #118 Fu Manchu, his elixir failing, intends to drink her blood. Shang-Chi frees her. In the fortress she kills Cho Lin, Shang-Chi’s teacher, and Ducharme. She misses her father. Shang-Chi, who can forgive a great deal of family, cannot forgive the ruthlessness. He sends her out with Reston and Tarr and faces the Doctor alone. The long war ends, for a time, without her in the room. That is the correct room for a son who has become a person. It is not her room. Her room is the one with the files.

In #122 she warns Smith about Carrington Scullers. It is a professional courtesy. It is also the last beat of the original run in which she is useful to him.

After Bleeding Black, Shang-Chi returns to seclusion. Tarr, Reston, and Leiko go back to MI-6. Reston and Leiko marry. Fah Lo Suee no longer holds any high-ranking position in the Service. The circumstances are not revealed. [ Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu MAX #1–6, in-world 1990–1993. ]

Journey into Mystery #514–516 (1997) sends Shang-Chi against a Hong Kong drug lord called Cursed Lotus. It has been suggested that Cursed Lotus is Fah Lo Suee, embittered by the fall from MI-6. The suggestion is tidy and, in this reference, wrong. None of the original cast appears except in a photograph. The likelier reading is Leiko Smith, the Black Lotus, Fah Lo Suee’s daughter or granddaughter. “From father…to daughter” can skip a generation and still be the family business. [ James Reasoner; Win Scott Eckert. ]

After Master of Kung Fu #125, Marvel could not always print the Rohmer names. Fu Manchu became, among other things, Zheng Zu. Fah Lo Suee became Zheng Bao Yu. The rename is a legal scar, not a baptism. Later Marvel uses — Hai-Dai, Doom Maidens, bio-engineered Brood — belong to Marvel’s Shang-Chi, not to this one.

The Character:

Most villainesses in this tradition are furniture that walks: the Dragon Lady, the temptress, the daughter used as proof that the mastermind has a private life. Fah Lo Suee will not sit in the furniture.

She is a pragmatist. The Publication History on this site has said so in fewer words than this page can afford, and the words remain the right ones. She is not interested in the misguided idealism of Fu Manchu. She seeks the best way to power. She shifts alliances often. Typically she is an enemy of Shang-Chi and company. Sometimes she is an ally. When last seen in the original continuity she had become a highly ranked official in MI-6, and then she was not. The desk was never a redemption. It was a better board.

That is the whole trick, and it is why she is the one person who might match the Doctor. Fu Manchu has a cause, a code, and a plan measured in decades. She has a situation. He will lose a piece rather than become someone who bargains away the shape of the world. She will bargain away the piece, the father, the lover, the Service, and the brother, and keep the shape of herself. He is total. She is tactical. A maniac is boring. A zealot is legible. A woman who will join you this week because joining you this week is how you survive the moon is not legible, and that is why Smith never trusted her, and why he kept looking into her eyes anyway.

Rohmer gave her the love plot because pulp required it and because it was true in the only way that matters. She falls for Nayland Smith, the one man her father could not finish. Of course she does. Smith is the other will in the saga. To take him would be to take the war. Smith does not take her. The hunt is his marriage. Petrie has Kâramanéh. Shang-Chi will have Leiko Wu. Fah Lo Suee gets Phillip, who is turned into Jack the Ripper for a 1932 insult, and Zaran, who is dumped when the office no longer needs him, and Reston, who is dosed and tattooed and left screaming on a shoreline. The men she can have are instruments or wreckage. The man she wants is the enemy. That is not the Dragon Lady’s appetite. It is the tragedy of a person who can only respect a mind built on the same scale as her father’s, and who is not permitted to keep one.

She is also the first truth-teller in Shang-Chi’s life. Before the assassination of Petrie, before Smith in the wheelchair, she takes a boy to a bonsai and asks him to see that he is being pruned. She is not kind. Kindness would have been to steal him. She wants a partner in the overthrow. When he refuses to choose, she tries to kill him. When the moon is coming down, she stands with him. When their father needs her blood, she shoots the teacher and the servant and misses the only shot that would have made her free. Shang-Chi is furious at the ruthlessness. He is right. He is also the son who was allowed to become a person. She was never allowed. She was presented to the Si-Fan as a future empress, emptied into Koreâni, aged into a beggar for elixir, and offered a British office as if a file cabinet could do what a childhood could not.

Fu Manchu can have nations, poisons, disciples, and time. He cannot have an equal who will stay. She is that equal. She will not stay. That refusal is the character. It is why she is sometimes the most dangerous person in the series and sometimes the only adult in the room. It is why the original Shang-Chi, the man of Honan and MI-6 and the fisherman’s retirement, is incomplete without her. He broke from the father and tried to be good. She broke from the father and tried to win. The book needs both children. One of them has a credo. The other has a desk, a gun, a bottle of mimosa, and the patience to wait until the credo requires help.

Call her a villainess. Call her an ally. Call her Sweet Perfume, Lady of the Si-Fan, Koreâni, Queen Mamaloi, an MI-6 rank, a legal alias invented when the license died. She is the daughter who learned the only lesson the Doctor could not teach on purpose: that an empire is a tool, that a tool can be stolen, and that the thief who lives is the one who never confuses the tool with a faith.

Clarifications:

Fah Lo Suee should not be confused with:

- Kâramanéh, Petrie’s wife, Fu Manchu’s former instrument, who is sometimes paired with her on the page and is a different woman with a different claim on the Doctor’s machinery.

- Xu Xialing of the 2021 film, a sister invented for a different father in a different story. The resemblance is genealogical marketing. It is not continuity.

- Princess Ling Moy (Daughter of the Dragon, 1931), Fah Lo See (The Mask of Fu Manchu, 1932), and Lin Tang of the Christopher Lee pictures. Cinema renamed her because the name is difficult and because studios preferred a fresh trademark. Myrna Loy’s Fah Lo See is the most famous shadow. The original is Rohmer’s, then Moench’s.

- Cursed Lotus of Journey into Mystery #514–516. Possibly her. In this reference, probably not. See History.

- Marvel’s Zheng Bao Yu as a “real name.” Zheng Zu was how later comics filed Fu Manchu when they could not say Fu Manchu. The daughter received the same filing. The woman Rohmer wrote remains unnamed except by a perfume.

For a more detailed exposition of Fah Lo Suee’s activities, See: Chronology.