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The story and history of the Royal Navy submarine was recorded primarily in English despite the fact that Poseidon sank off the coast of China. Official accounts, witness statements, court of enquiry proceedings, all of these would have been written in English, and some of them handwritten at that. Chinese sources were not at the top of my list of those I needed to consult. Chinese press accounts and archival material would add nice local color to the story but little more, I thought. Except for an interview with Ah Hai, the Chinese assistant who escaped from the torpedo room, or statements from Yuta’s crew, it did not seem that Chinese-language material, if it existed, would have much to contribute to the overall story. This was perhaps the biggest mistaken assumption of the entire project. Aside from a seeming lack of relevance to the research, working in Chinese presented other obstacles. In China, library facilities, depending on their location, are not always welcoming of visitors, foreign visitors in particular. Many books or departments are available only to people with specific academic credentials in those fields. The idea of the citizen historian does not yet exist in China, especially not when history is considered something for the state to decide officially. For example, when I wanted to look in the Beijing National Library at copies of newspaper accounts of Poseidon’s sinking, the section manager for periodicals had to be convinced to let me in. Once I was admitted, I could look at original copies of the North-China Daily News, northern China’s English-language newspaper of record in 1931, but I was not permitted to make notes or to photograph the pages. However, other libraries and archives in places such as Shanghai do not have rules nearly as draconian but rather policies similar to those of facilities in the West. For what ultimately appeared to be a few paragraphs of description, it seemed a lot of effort for little return. Chapter 14 The Rosetta Stone 138 Poseidon Part of the online research process included repeating keyword searches at regular intervals, approximately every three months. Often, it is not the top results that change, or where new ones appear; those often come up farther down on the page or more than five pages into hundreds of pages of results. Normally, I would check the first twenty pages of links about every three weeks. Relatively early in the search, I had located most of the primary online sources. However, regular checks for previously undiscovered sites continued. Online searching evolves both with the technology and as more information becomes available. This time, the keywords teased out something different. On a particularly deep dive into the results, a Chinese-language page popped up, pointing to a site based in Taiwan.1 It billed itself as the diaries of Paul Draken, the fictional son of a British diplomat based in China and a woman from Xinjiang, China’s northwestern region. Draken, a Zelig or Forrest Gump-like character, appears serendipitously at major events in China in the early decades of the twentieth century, a pre-Harry Potter half-blood prince. Written and published as an online novel by Crayon Yao, an author, entrepreneur, and former Taiwan naval officer, China Pearl, as the Draken story is known, includes an extensive English-Chinese glossary of the people, place names, and events cited in the story. The Google search had stumbled upon this glossary. There, under listings for the letter “P” was the first iteration I had seen of HMS Poseidon in Chinese: Haishen Hao（海神號） , literally, “Sea God,” hao being the same designation as the Japanese maru, to indicate a ship’s name. It made sense. Searching for Haishen Hao brought numerous results. Far too numerous, in fact, as Poseidon, the remake of the 1972 adventure film, The Poseidon Adventure, in which the cruise liner was given the same name when translated in Chinese, was hitting cinemas in the US and other markets. Although it did not receive cinematic release in China, the wide availability of pirated DVDs ensured its popularity, and Internet message boards were full of reviews and fan comments. It also created a lot of content noise that I had to screen. Adding more search terms, like “1931” and “Weihai” began to narrow the results, and those phrases were entered into Google and Baidu, China’s leading search engine. As in English, it was Google that provided the best results, in this...

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