As the name implied, it was a sequel to The Talons of Weng-Chiang, if an indirect one. Set during the Fourth Doctor and Romana I's quest for the Key to Time, it also served as something of a bookend to that earlier television serial. Whereas the serial had featured expatriate Chinese in London, the novel was set mostly in Shanghai. Moreover, because of the franchise's obvious British bias, Shadow is one of the few Doctor Who stories in any media to deal with the runup to World War II in Asia — much less the Chinese perspective on the coming war.