The Sacred Order

When sleuth Nayland Smith steals evil Dr Fu-Manchu's 'Sacred Order', the Devil Doctor himself faces death at the hands of the Si-Fan organisation.

When Fu-Manchu allows the intrepid Nayland Smith to snatch the 'Sacred Order ', a symbolic ancient emblem, the Si-Fan secret society accuses him of sacrilege: and the penalty is death! The desperate Devil Doctor takes Smith captive, and it falls to Dr Petrie to engineer his friend's escape. But where is the Sacred Order?

Author Sax Rohmer, who wrote the Fu-Manchu stories, had hoped to conclude his saga with the third novel in the series, The Si-Fan Mysteries (1917) - the most recently published when this film serial was made in 1923. But the public - and his publishers - demanded more, and so the novels eventually continued, with Daughter of Fu Manchu (1931). Only his own demise could provide Rohmer with escape from his most famous creation: the last book in the series, Emperor Fu Manchu (1959), was published the year he died.