Charles JH Halcombe was born in 1865, the grandson of a member of parliament for Dover in Kent. He left England for Australia at age 15 and spent some time as a merchant sailor. He was shipwrecked twice - in December 1881 off the French coast, and in January 1883 off Cape Horn - and also lived through a mutiny on one of his ships. He spent some time in South Africa from where he departed for Shanghai in 1887 arriving in May of that year at just 22 years of age. He was to spend the next seven years in China. He appears to have worked for a year for the major British-owned Shanghai English-language newspaper, the North-China Daily News, before joining the Imperial Maritime Customs Service as a Watcher. Halcombe remained with the Imperial Maritime Customs Service for some years, gaining a promotion to Second Class Tidewaiter (a customs officer who boards ships on their arrival to enforce customs regulations). He resigned in 1893 while stationed at Kiungchow (Qiongzhou), on the then-remote Hainan Island.

It appears that Halcombe had long harboured thoughts of becoming a published author. given his early stint on the North-China Daily Newsand that he had also apparently been working on a novel and some poems while a customs officer. Unusually, though not uniquely, Halcombe married a Chinese woman, Liang Ah Ghan, the daughter of a Chefoo (Yantai) merchant.