"A Truthful Impression of the Country": British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880-1949 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: "A Truthful Impression of the Country": British and American Travel Writing in China, 1840-1949 Frances Wood (bio) Nicholas R. Clifford . "A Truthful Impression of the Country": British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880-1949. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. xxi, 231 pp. Hardcover $39.50, ISBN 0-472-11197-3. In the Victorian iron-work book stacks built around the old Round Reading Room in the British Library, there was a section of shelving where all the old books on residence, exploration, and travel in the East were packed tightly together. Pig-sticking in India rubbed shoulders with A Parson's Holiday in Burma (1882) and the delicate diaries of vice-regal ladies. I spent many happy semi-illicit hours there reading China memoirs before they were moved to the new British Library building where the basement storage areas are somehow less inviting. For an enthusiast for such material, Nicholas R. Clifford's book is a very welcome and thought-provoking event. Not only is the content wide ranging and well ordered and the bibliography and notes most useful, but Clifford also writes with great wit of the political incorrectness of much early travel writing, for example in his reference to Isabella Bird's description of the exotic, vibrant life of the Canton [End Page 391] streets, whose noises "drowned out the sound of Edward Said sharpening his critical pencils in the next century." The period covered by the book is, Clifford explains, one during which the West moved from high imperialism and all that that entailed to the beginning of the end of imperialism, with India, for example, already independent of British rule. The certainties of the late Victorian and Edwardian traveler, which included the fundamental certainty of moral and physical superiority, were gradually transformed into the uncertainties of the 1930s when a significant number of British and American aesthetes effectively fled their homes for a sort of sanctuary in the East. Clifford refers back to "Jesuit-Enlightenment China" and forward through Maoism and beyond, but he is right to view his chosen period as that which offers the most, and not only in quantity. From the sort of views expressed in 1895 by the ghastly George Morrison, including his opinion that "due to an arrested development of the sensory nervous system, the Chinese felt pain less than did Westerners" (unpardonably echoed during the Vietnam War), to the support given to BAT and Standard Oil for introducing China to the civilizing delights of the West, Clifford traces a change in attitude between the two World Wars. Then, far from condemning China as dirty, cruel, and backward, there was almost a return to Jesuit idolatry. Instead of Western superiority, the aesthetics of the East prevailed through translations like those of Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley. Waley's first collection of poems (1916) and its evocation of the "willow-pattern world" was so universally popular that Sir George Sitwell, father of Osbert, Edith, and Sacheverell, determined to paint the cows in his meadow blue and white in homage. It was this aesthetic side that appealed to English and American intellectuals such as Harold Acton, Osbert Sitwell, Robert Byron, George Kates, William Empson, Robert Winter, Graham Peck, and Julian Bell, all of whom spent considerable periods of the 1930s in China, many intending to stay permanently. For Peck, Acton, and Kates, in particular, the Japanese invasion meant the end of their idyll, and, as Clifford notes, from the late 1930s, as conditions deteriorated with the war and the Japanese advance, journalists took over the narrative as the aesthetes and the cruise ships carrying tourists were forced away. This is a book that will be very useful to sinologists and the general reader, and it should offer great pleasure to both, through its witty style, as well as much stimulation to thought. The differences between, for example, the Indian memoir of the nineteenth century, written mainly by those who spent many years in the country, and descriptions of the fashionable short stay in China in the 1920s and 1930s by Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham, Peter Quennell, Bernard Shaw, and Aldous Huxley, for example, demonstrates the change in...