J. O. P. Bland

John Otway Percy Bland (15 November 1863, Malta – 23 June 1945, Ipswich), who wrote as J. O. P. Bland, was a British writer and journalist, best known as the author of a number of books on Chinese politics and history. He lived in China for most of the period 1883–1910.

Family and early life

Bland was born on 15 November 1863 in Malta, the second son of the ten children of Major-General Edward Loftus Bland (1829–1923) and Emma Frances Franks (d. 1894).

He was educated at Victoria College, Jersey and Trinity College Dublin.

A planned career in law was curtailed while he was still at university, and his father arranged for him to be considered for an appointment in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service.

Career in China

Bland arrived in China in 1883, and worked in the Customs from 1 July 1883 until 31 January 1896, serving in Hankou, Canton, and Peking, serving there as Inspector-General Sir Robert Hart's Private Secretary from 1894 to 1896. From early in his career he began writing light verse about life amongst the foreign expatriate communities in the Chinese treaty ports, collected in Lays of Far Cathay, in 1890. He married an American, Louisa Dearborn Nickels (b. c.1864), widow of M. C. Nickels and daughter of a Pacific Mail Line skipper, Captain H. C. Dearborn, in Shanghai on 29 November 1889.

In 1896 Bland resigned from the Customs to take up the position of Assistant Secretary to the Shanghai Municipal Council, which governed the Shanghai International Settlement, succeeding to the Secretaryship the following year on the retirement of the incumbent, R.F. Thorburn. This was not initially an onerous position, and Bland began to develop a parallel career as a free-lance journalist. As a Customs employee he had been forbidden from writing to or for the press, but now, as well as starting a humorous weekly, The Rattle, he penned more light verse, and commenced an association with The Times as its Shanghai correspondent. Verse and Worse was published in 1902 with illustrations by Willard Dickerman Straight, who had joined the Customs in 1902, and with whom Bland struck up a friendship.