[2] The story was serialized in a shorter version in the Diário de Portugal and, with the addition of six chapters, it was sold as a book in 1881.

He was also accused of plagiarising the idea from a story by Alphonse Daudet, although The Mandarin was accepted for serialization in the French Revue Universelle Internationale in 1884.

[3][4] Teodoro, a poor Portuguese civil servant in Lisbon, receives a visit from the Devil in disguise who offers him the chance of inheriting unlimited riches if he rings a bell placed on a book by his side, which will lead to the death of a rich Mandarin, Ti Chin-fu, in distant China.

Keates describes the novella as a "brilliant mischievous essay in fantasy chinoiserie, irreverently subverting the trope, created half a century earlier by Balzac in La Peau de chagrin, of the Oriental curse masquerading as a blessing".

[7] Another reviewer considers that the choice made by Teodoro was a “reworking of the ‘Mandarin paradox’ first posed by French writer Chateaubriand in 1802”.