was Britain. United Kingdom Though Chinese civilization was admired in 18th century Britain, by the 19th century, the Opium Wars led to the creation of racialist stereotypes of the Chinese among the British public, who cast the Chinese "as a threatening, expansionist foe" and a corrupt and depraved people. Still, there were exceptions to popular racism of the Yellow Peril. In May 1890, William Ewart Gladstone criticized anti-Chinese immigration laws in Australia for penalizing their virtues of hard work (diligence, thrift and integrity), instead of penalizing their vices (gambling and opium smoking). Cultural temper In 1904, in a meeting about the Russo-Japanese War, King Edward VII heard the Kaiser complain that the Yellow Peril is "the greatest peril menacing... Christendom and European civilization. If the Russians went on giving ground, the yellow race would, in twenty years time, be in Moscow and Posen". The Kaiser criticized the British for siding with Japan against Russia, and said that "race treason" was the motive. King Edward said he "could not see it. The Japanese were an intelligent, brave and chivalrous nation, quite as civilized as the Europeans, from whom they only differed by the pigmentation of their skin". The first British usage of the Yellow Peril phrase was in the Daily News (21 July 1900) report describing the Boxer Rebellion as "the yellow peril in its most serious form". In that time, British Sinophobia, the fear of Chinese people, did not include all Asians, because Britain had sided with Japan during the Russo–Japanese War, whilst France and Germany supported Russia; whereas the reports of Captain William Pakenham "tended to depict Russia as his enemy, not just Japan". About pervasive Sinophobia in Western culture, in The Yellow Peril: Dr Fu Manchu & the Rise of Chinaphobia (2014), historian Christopher Frayling noted: Moralistic panic The Limehouse district in London (which had a large Chinese element) was portrayed in the British popular imagination as a center of moral depravity and vice, i.e. sexual prostitution, opium smoking, and gambling. According to historian Anne Witchard, many Londoners believed the British Chinese community, including Triad gangsters, "were abducting young English women to sell into white slavery", a fate "worse than death" in Western popular culture. In 1914, at the start of the First World War, the Defense of the Realm Act was amended to include the smoking of opium as proof of "moral depravity" that merited deportation, a