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.
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.
Bland returned to China just once more in 1920 before his death, but the years after he left were those which saw him carve out a new career as a freelance writer and commentator, mainly on Chinese affairs.
He became best known, however, as co-author, with Sir Edmund Backhouse, of two best-selling accounts of recent Chinese history, China under the Empress Dowager (1910) and Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking (1914).
Backhouse, already widely known as a Sinologist, supplied the source materials for the volumes, while Bland, who had some talent as a writer, fashioned them into readable manuscripts.
Unfortunately for Bland, Backhouse was a fantasist and forger, and attacks on the veracity of the key source used in China under the Empress Dowager, the so-called 'Diary of His Excellency Ching-Shan', commenced even before it was published.
[2] British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's 1978 biography clearly laid out the lifelong pattern of fraud, forgery and deceit that had mostly engaged Backhouse's energy.