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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Every generation of historians rediscovers and then forgets the history of Western views of China: the slow process in which the admiration of Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, Jesuit missionaries and other European visitors to China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire turned to contempt as nineteenth-century Europe gained the upper hand in world politics and economy. Many negative perceptions - that China was weak; the government despotic and venal; the people supine, hypocritical, and dirty; and that nothing in China ever would change without European intervention - were inversions or new readings of material the more admiring Jesuits and others had put forward. To tie them to sharper observation of Chinese realities, as scholars do when they speak of the “revelation” of Chinese weakness, of “a new literature of hardheaded appraisal,” or of “new information” and “a fresh domain of realistic reportage,” is to buy into the discourse’s own representation of itself as Did reality inform imagination or vice versa? In his history of the Chinese revolution, John Fitzgerald presents Defoe’s claim that “One English, or Dutch, or French, man of war of 80 guns, would fight and destroy all the shipping of China” as a result of the real experience of buccaneer Captain George Anson’s successful bullying of Canton’s officials to let him into the port proper, while merchants were limited to the outer harbor, on his way home loaded with Spanish gold in 1743. But Crusoe’s Farther Adventures had appeared in 1719 (and Defoe died in 1731). It is more likely that Anson’s presentation of himself as a firm, manly Britisher rightfully opposing the obstructionism of timorous Chinese officials with pathetically insufficient arms was shaped by Defoe’s fiction, and by the basically Sinophilic Le Comte. The French Jesuit’s letters on China (based on a ten-years’ stay) had appeared in English in 1737, and included the observation that if only “Lewis the Great” were not so far away in France, he could easily conquer the Chinese empire, for the Chinese are “but mean soldiers.” Since Anson was specifically instructed by George II, when he set out in 1740, to come home by way of China if convenient, it is highly probable that his reference material included Le Comte’s book; indeed one of the early, unofficial accounts of his voyage drew heavily on it. Perhaps Le Comte’s observations and Defoe’s literary spleen were what gave Anson the confidence to confront the Cantonese authorities with the unequivocal demands to let him into the port - if that is even what really happened. For Anson’s bluster, expressed in his statement that “the Centurion alone was an overmatch for all the naval power of that Empire” is mitigated by the details of his account: his strident demands were accepted only after he had earned the Viceroy’s gratitude by helping to put out a fire.
1 Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 456, on the repeated forgetting of Mao Zedong’s “evil” side. I would like to thank Edward Countryman, Prasenjit Duara, Charles W. Hayford, Mark Selden, and Bruce Tindall.
2 To give just three examples from different decades, Arnold Rowbotham, “The Impact of Confucianism on the European Thought of the Eighteenth Century,” Far Eastern Quarterly 4 (1945): 224-42, cited in Porter (see below); Michael Edwardes, East-West Passage: The Travel of Ideas, Arts and Inventions between Asia and the Western World (London: Taplinger, 1971); David Porter, Ideographica: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). The most comprehensive work is Donald Lach’s multi-volume Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965-1993). For a clear and polemical single volume, dense with facts, see John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). A short treatment appropriate for undergraduates is D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
3 Edwardes, East-West Passage, 107. Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 42. Alain Peyrefitte, The Immobile Empire, trans. Jon Rothschild (New York: Knopf, 1992), 490, treats the increasingly negative evaluations of China in successive 19th-century reports on the Macartney mission as an increasing willingness to risk Chinese displeasure by telling the truth.
4 Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Being the Second and Last Part of His Life, Written by Himself (London: W. Taylor, 1719; reprint London: Constable, 1925), 266. John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 114. The textual conservatism of European writing about China is deep: Defoe asks about the Great Wall whether British soldiers or engineers would not “batter it down in ten days” (Farther Adventures, 281): an expression echoed in the Communist Manifesto.
5 Louis [Lewis] Le Comte, Memoirs and remarks…made in above ten years travels through the empire of China… (orig. French pub., 1696; English trans. pub. London: J. Hughes for O. Payne, 1737), 73.
6 Pascoe Thomas’s 1745 account of the Anson voyage “uses Le Comte for many pages,” according to Percy G. Adams’s introduction to Richard Walter’s official Anson’s Voyage Round the World in the Years 1740-44 (reprint: Dover, 1974), xiii. For Anson’s instructions from the king, see Sir John Barrow, The Life of George, Lord Anson: admiral of the fleet, vice-admiral of Great Britain, and first lord commissioner of the admiralty, previous to, and during, the seven years’ war (London: J. Murray, 1839), 29-35.
7 Walter, Anson’s Voyage, 390, 381-3. See also Peyrefitte, Immobile Empire, 51.
8 Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 113.
9 Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Between ‘Crockery-dom’ and Barnum: Boston’s Chinese Museum, 1845-47,” American Quarterly 56.2 (2004): 271-307, 275, 276.
10 Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 47. Readers may find useful John R. Watt, “Teacher Introduction and Study Guide to ‘Qianglong Meets Macartney: Collision of Two World Views,’“ Education About Asia 5.3 (2000): 1-18.
11 Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 47.
12 Barrow, Life of George, Lord Anson, iv.
13 John Barrow, Travels in China containing descriptions, observations, and comparisons, made and collected in the course of a short residence at the imperial palace of Yuen-min- yuen, and on a subsequent journey through the country from Pekin to Canton (London: A. Strahan for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1804), 186, 108, 59, 617-8. Sir John Barrow, An autobiographical memoir of Sir John Barrow, bart., late of the Admiralty; including reflections, observations, and reminiscences, at home and abroad, from early life to advanced age (London: J. Murray, 1847), 75ff, 133.
14 Barrow, Life of George, Lord Anson, 77.
15 Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 11-12
16 Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 168 for quotation. It is curious that Rogaski explicitly places her work in relation to Fitzgerald’s (2), yet mentions neither his discussion of personal cleanliness nor Sun Yatsen, unless my eye has missed the references.
17 Galeote Pereira, trans. C.R. Boxer, “Certain reports of China …” in Boxer, South China in the Sixteenth Century: Being the Narratives of Galeote Pereira, Fr. Gaspar da Cruz, O.P., Fr. Martin de Rada, O.E.S.A. (1550-1575) (Pereira orig. pub. c. 1560; London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), 14.
18 Gaspar da Cruz, trans. C.R. Boxer, “Treatise in which the things of China are related …” in Boxer, South China in the Sixteenth Century (da Cruz orig. pub. c. 1570; London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), 142.
19 Defoe, Farther Adventures, 271.
20 Pereira, “Certain reports of China.,” 8-9.
21 da Cruz, “Treatise in which the things of China are related,” 120-21.
22 Barrow, Travels in China, 98-9, 527. Rogaski points to a change in perceptions of Tianjin in particular: from the admiration of Sir George Staunton on the polite but vain Amherst mission, 1816 (Staunton had been a precocious language expert on the McCartney Mission), to the disgust of the triumphant Lord Elgin in 1858. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity, 54-5.
23 Barrow, Travels in China, table of contents.
24 Barrow, Travels in China, 76, 349. For quotation and a discussion of this passage see Porter, Ideographia, 214.
25 Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 11.
26 John Rule, Albion’s People: English Society, 1714-1815 (London & New York: Longman, 1992), 32-33, 40-41.
27 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 197-201.
28 Barrow, Auto-biographical Memoir, 1, 5, 7, 17, 42.
29 Peyrefitte, Immobile Empire, 20, 140. Barrow, Travels in China, 105, 117-8. The question of whether Macartney should kowtow to the Qianlong emperor was resolved by Macartney’s going down on one knee. In his Auto-biographical Memoir (84), Barrow notes, after describing how he and the others followed suit, “I told Lord Macartney what we had done, and he said it was perfectly correct.” Barrow also advised the later Lord Amherst mission on how to manage the problem (Auto-biographical Memoir, 116-7). This incident is often used to show the Chinese obsession with ritual; it shows the British obsession just as clearly. Both were still societies centered on rank.
30 Barrow, Travels in China, 115. Barrow, Autobiographical Memoir, 80. In Peyrefitte, Immobile Empire, 148-9
31 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (1939), translated by Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1982; reprint 1994), esp. part II, “Civilization as a Specific Transformation of Human Behavior.”
32 Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992), xii-xiii. Thanks to Alexis McCrossen for this book. Parenthetically, Bushman notes a mid-19th century American obsession with tiny feet (p. 295). Does this account for American missionaries’ obsession with Chinese women’s bound feet?
33 Bushman, Refinement of America, 42.
34 Barrow, Travels in China, 178-80.
35 Rule, Albion’s People, 41; McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, 197-201.
36 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, 29.
37 T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 22. On tea replacing taverns, see Bushman, Refinement of America, 184-5, and John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 11.
38 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 304. The Victoria and Albert museum’s website has a funny comic-strip video, consulted March 17, 2007. For just one later but vivid example of what tea could signify, see Wilkie Collins, Basil, (1852, 1862; reprint New York: Dover, 1980), 120-21, where a mysterious clerk becomes even more mysterious in his epicurean finickyness about his tea, “while other tradesmen’s clerks… were drinking their gin- and-water jovially, at home or in a tavern.” According to American historian George Brown Tindall, the tea at the Boston Tea Party was more likely Chinese than India tea (personal communication, 1997).
39 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 34-5.
40 Bushman, Refinement of America, 76.
41 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 154. Bushman, Refinement of America, 184.
42 Bushman, Refinement of America, 71. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 38-9. For silk and porcelain see Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol II, book 1, pp. 95-109 (with other textiles and ceramics); and vol. III, book 4, pp. 1602ff.
43 Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 265. Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 266-7. For a Western picture of a Chinese woman embroidering, see Shelagh Vainker, Chinese Silk: A Cultural History (New Brunswick: British Museum and Rutgers University, 2004), 193.
44 For special soap to clean silk, see Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 63.
45 Barry Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans: Themes and Variations, 9000 BC - AD 1000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 43.
46 Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden, “Introduction,” in their edited volume The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 year perspectives (London: Routledge, 2003).
47 Robert Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 112-117.
48 Julie Emerson, Jennifer Chen, and Mimi Gardner Gates, Porcelain Stories: From China to Europe (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum and University of Washington Press, 2000), 252. Moreover, Wedgewood’s innovative division of labor was derived from his reading of Pere F. X. d’ Entrecolles’ (1664-1741) reports on the process of mass production of porcelain in China; see Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 100-101.
49 Marks, Origins of the Modern World, 99, 108. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 294-5. See also Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2001), 312-7.
50 G. Hertz, “The English Silk Industry in the Eighteenth Century,” The English Historical Review 24.96 (1909): 710-727, p. 711.
51 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, 36, 37, 266.
52 For the use of yellow, see for instance Vainker, Chinese Silk, 138-140. Even the vaunted “modern” practice of branding products to appeal to a mass market of consumers had appeared in Ming China: see Gary G. Hamilton and Wei-An Cheng, “The importance of commerce in the organization of China’s late imperial economy,” in The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 year perspectives, edited by Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden (London: Routledge, 2003), 190ff. For a discussion of the trope in Western scholarship of fashionless China, and a consideration of the place of material goods in claiming high social status in late Ming China, see Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 169ff. McKendrick et al. cite Braudel, on whom see Mark Elvin, “Braudel and China,” in John A. Marino, ed., Early Modern History and the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of Braudel’s Mediterranean (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2002): 225-254. On printing, see for instance Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), 109-115.
53 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, 103, 127, 129-30, 139; 239.
54 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution: “Baubles” 20, 62, 81, 199, 200, 329, tea: 26, “East India Goods” 39.
55 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 45.
56 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 51.
57 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution: 80 on Spitalfields; 337, note 1, for Franklin.
58 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 84. Defoe, Farther Adventures, 275.
59 Lydia Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” Critical Inquiry 25.4 (1999): 728-757. See 733 for the quoted phrase, 738. I am grateful to reviewer Prasenjit Duara for this and other references.
60 Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” 731.
61 For additional discussion of McKendrick and related scholarship, see Gary G. Hamilton and Wei-An Cheng, “The importance of commerce in the organization of China’s late imperial economy,” in The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 year perspectives, edited by Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden (London: Routledge, 2003), 187ff.
62 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 57.
63 Porter, Ideographia, 186-192. See Porter for a series of representations of the Chinese emperor showing clearly the change in European thinking about China.
64 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 111, 136. Historian Prasanaan Parthasarathi writes: “Although the ‘India factor’ in European industrialization has largely eluded the gaze of the modern historian, eighteenth-century Europeans were keenly aware of it.” See his “Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the Eighteenth Century: Britain and South India,” Past and Present 58 (1998): 79-109, 108.
65 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 329, 305-17.
66 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 330, 231.
67 Tchen, New York Before Chinatown, 3-4, 24.
68 Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 115.
69 William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 104. Thanks to Alexis McCrossen for this source.
70 Larry Rohter, “For a Brazilian Choreographer, Dance as an Obstacle Course,” The New York Times, Thursday, October 22, 2009, C5.
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