Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (review)

In the first decade of the eighteenth century, George Psalmanazar, a blonde and fair-skinned Formosan, became known in Western Europe through the multi-editioned and widely translated publication of his Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan.¹ The book contained descriptions of Formosa's clothing, religion—the annual sacrificial consumption of eighteen thousand young boys' hearts was a salient feature—ceremonies, and alphabet. Psalmanazar passed his English days in Formosan style: he burned lamps through the night, since Formosans did not sleep, and ate his raw meat highly spiced. He was invited to teach the Formosan language at Oxford, and received respectful attention in numerous contemporary publications.² Doubt and skepticism took their toll, however, and Psalmanazar's forgery was soon public, although its details were known only after the publication of his posthumous memoir/recantation. He died in 1763, remaking himself post-imposture as an accomplished Hebraist, coauthor and editor of Samuel Palmer's A General History of Printing, and admired friend of Samuel Johnson. For a time, though, the Formosa that Europeans knew was Psalmanazar's Formosa, and his story is a reminder of that textual Asia that has long existed in oblique relationship to the actual place.

David Porter's Ideographia is a selective exploration of that textual China (Psalmanazar's Formosa is not in his purview), as it existed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western Europe—England primarily—in four discursive scenes: written language, religion, chinoiserie, and trade. Although it joins a large corpus of works on Western representations of China, Porter's book might be indicative of a new trend. To date, such studies have been dominated by scholars in the China field broadly defined: Rey Chow, Arif Dirlik, John Fairbank, James Hevia, Lionel Jensen, Donald Lach, Lydia Liu, Liu Kang, Colin Mackeras, Donald Mungello, Haun Saussy, Jonathan Spence, Wang Jianwei, Wang Xiaoqiao, John Wills, Bin Wong, and Zhang Longxi constitute a partial list. Porter, who is a professor of English at the University of Michigan, does not use Asian languages. Ideographia, along with recent conference papers and publications by English department scholars in the United States such as Robert Markley, Lucinda Cole, and Ronald Schleifer might be an indication that the study of representations of China is gaining currency in English literary studies, and that mastery of the Chinese language no longer constitutes an entry requirement.³

Asian Studies scholars should welcome this development. The isolation of China from general scholarly discourse—an isolation for which the field of sinology bears some responsibility—has had deleterious effects on Western European and Chinese studies. This turn is also to be expected. Both the new historicism and postcolonialism, two dominant critical orientations in English literary studies over the last two decades, have given central focus to early modern representations of the other. To date, this has been mainly the colonized, conquered enemy, or enslaved other. The other that is China is other still. Porter's analysis, proceeding from a claim for the centrality of the Chinese other to a variety of early modern European discourses, tells some of the story of the rhetoric and topoi of that particular othering.

Ideographia is delimited historically by two scenes of European-Chinese encounter: the first Jesuit mission to China in 1563, and the last British trade mission to China in 1816. Prior to 1583—Marco Polo notwithstanding—there was relative silence; afterward came the Opium War, marking not only the insertion of China into more familiar narratives of imperialist coercion and conquest but the end of any relatively "pure" scene of a Chinese statist or diplomatic discourse uninflected by its encounter with modern global military and political power. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, therefore, give Porter, a "relatively unique opportunity afforded by an early modern contact zone that is not overtly or predominantly colonialist to examine other, equally interesting kinds of cultural work the discourses of encounter may...