The Chinese child star who wowed the US in the late 19th century, before returning as an even more impressive young woman

The petite performer’s remarkably sweet and strong voice, dusted with just the slightest of childhood lisps, delighted the crowd.

But it was the little mimic’s extraordinary talent for singing her selections in the exact manner of the popular performer she first heard render them that, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, invariably sent otherwise jaded vaudeville crowds into “raptures of delight”.

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As the Foo troupe toured, and to placate public demand for more of the performer voted by New York crowds “the most charming child on the boards”, special afternoon shows overseen by Chee Toy’s mother were added.

At these events, crowds of women and children, Chee Toy’s principal audience, came to meet her and receive autographed photos.

A remarkable phenomenon in a country that had, a little over 15 years earlier, passed the China Exclusion Act and where a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer felt it necessary to inform readers that Chee Toy and her mother were, “contrary to the general occidental idea of Chinese females, an attractive pair”.

A columnist for the Stage section of the Washington Evening Star, writing in January 1900, gave some hint of what lay behind the five-year-old performer’s hold on the American public.

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“The tiny soubrette breathes the perfume of child sweetness about the stage like some dainty bloom from an Asiatic conservatory. She has none of the trite mannerisms of precocity. She is as natural as sunshine and as autocratic as a prima donna.”

Chee Toy remained an overwhelming crowd and media favourite right to the end of the troupe’s wildly successful first US tour, but little did anyone suspect, when the Foo family returned to China in May 1900, it would be more than a decade before a much older and even more formidable Chee Toy returned to America to take vaudeville by…