“Nothing corresponding to it in China”: Asian Food at London’s International Health Exhibition, 1884

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper considers Britain’s first large-scale Chinese restaurant, situated within the 1884 International Health Exhibition in London. It asks what cultural work this Chinese restaurant and associated tearoom performed by considering two interrelated factors that governed the relationship between Britain and the British Empire, Europe, and the United States and China in the 1880s: The first is the recovery of exhibition culture’s key role in the globalization of “foreign” food. Restaurants like those at the “Healtheries” presented “high culture” versions of Asian food in stark contrast to eateries catering to working-class populations in Limehouse and American/Australian Chinatowns and camp kitchens. The exhibitions worked to elevate Chinese people above stereotyped dog- and cat-eating “universal omnivores.” The second revolves around the situating of China (and Japan) as modern through these exhibition restaurants and their location within an exhibition emphasizing hygiene and industry. I explore how the outward-facing displays of culture and esthetics at such expositions functioned within the networks of diplomacy surrounding Western informal imperialism in China, Qing Dynasty pushback, and intra-Asian competition, alongside new understandings of imperial culture as syncretic and absorptive.