Iain Duncan Smith, a promising candidate to lead Britain's Conservative Party, said in an interview published Sunday that his great-grandmother was Japanese.
"I certainly have a very interesting family background," said Duncan Smith, viewed as the rising son of the Tory party, in the interview with the Sunday Times.
Duncan Smith reportedly said that he is one-eighth Japanese as his grandmother was one of eight children of Leonard "Leo" Shaw, an Irish-born adventurer, and Ellen Oshey, part of a Japanese samurai family.
The shadow defense secretary's great-grandparents lived in a house just outside old Beijing, on a lane that translates as "the street of the sweetwater well," the newspaper said.
Duncan Smith, the son of a World War II fighter pilot and a ballet dancer, said his great-grandfather had been captain of the steamship Maha Chikri, which King Rama V of Siam used on his royal visits to Europe.
Shaw, a distant relative of Bernard Shaw, the dramatist who wrote Pygmalion and Man and Superman, married Ellen around 1880 at the age of 60 and went on to father eight children by her, the newspaper said.
"She was a beautiful woman with very dainty features, a stark contrast to my grandfather with his enormous beard," Pamela Duncan Smith, Duncan Smith's mother, was quoted as saying.
"Both sides of my family were in far-flung corners out in the east. Both lived interesting lives in difficult and trying times," Duncan Smith was quoted as saying.