The West As the Other: A Genealogy of Chinese Occidentalism

8. Islands, Intermediaries,and “Europeanization”

EIGHT Islands, Intermediaries, and “Europeanization” Between the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, Chinese descriptions of non-Chinese worlds attracted considerable attention from sinologists in Europe and America. The Gazetteer of Foreigners, The Customs of Cambodia, and The Brief Description of the Barbarians of the Isles were all highly valued. In 1902, The Customs of Cambodia was translated into French by the French sinologist Paul Pelliot (1951 [1902]). Eight years later, The Gazetteer of Foreigners was translated by German sinologist Friedrich Hirth and American sinologist W. W. Rockhill (1911) into English. From the late nineteenth century, The Brief Description of the Barbarians of the Isles was selectively translated into several Western languages. Many European sinologists also paid attention to The Travels of Fa-hsien and other records of foreign kingdoms written by ancient Chinese monks. French sinologist Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat had published his French translation of Fa-hsien’s book as early as 1834. Several English versions of the same book were produced by English missionaries and scholars. In 1886, British sinologist James Legge published A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms in Oxford. All the above translations were annotated with extensive notes detailing names of places that appeared in the original texts. The translated editions contributed a great deal to the accumulation of geographical knowledge about the lands, seas, and peoples in between the East and the West.1 Near the end of the nineteenth century, Biography of King Mu TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 213 TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 213 19/12/13 10:41 AM 19/12/13 10:41 AM THE WEST AS THE OTHER 214 likewise had been published in Western languages. When diffusionism was dominant in Western ethnology, Biography of King Mu functioned as an important archive, serving to prove that there were historical relations in archaic times across great distances. Members of the “diffusionist school” perceived modern civilizations as derivatives of the ancient civilizations of the world. Translations of Biography of King Mu were published at a time when the theory of the “Western origins of Chinese civilization” dominated European archaeological and ethnological studies of China. Diffusionism was widely accepted among Chinese academics between the 1890s and 1930s. As Gu Jiegang (1998a) comments:2 After Sino-foreign communications opened up at the end of the Qing Dynasty, the French scholar Terrien de la Comperie [sic] [Terrien de Lacouperie ] wrote in 1894 [his article] “Western Origin of the Early Chinese Civilization.” [This work] misled a number of Chinese into believing not only that Chinese civilization was derived from the West, but also that the Chinese race itself had crossed [into China] from over the Congling range, and so King Mu’s journey to the West was [actually] a return to his homeland . Relying on Biography of King Mu, they investigated the places through which King Mu had passed. Thus Ding Qian, in his Mu Tianzi Zhuan kaozheng [An Annotated Biography of King Mu], identified the land of Xi Wangmu as Assyria; Gu Shi, [in his] Mu Tianzi [Zhuan] xizheng jindi kao [An Investigation of the Present-day Whereabouts of Places in Biography of King Mu] and [Mu Tianzi Zhuan] jiangshu [Remarks on Biography of King Mu], said it was in present-day Persia and had King Mu going to places even Zhang Qian had never reached. Liu Shipei’s Mu Tianzi Zhuan bu shi [Biography of King Mu: A Supplementary Discussion ] stated that Mount Kunlun [Kunlun qiu] was Sumeru of the Buddhist scriptures and suggested that King Mu climbed to the top of the Himalayas to look south at India. In fact the author of this work [Biography of King Mu] himself says that the distance from Zongzhou (Luoyang) to Yangyu (Hetao) is 3,400 li, and from Yangyu to the furthest northwestern point [of China] is only 7,000 li. At most, he [King Mu] could only have reached Hami [Kumul] in Xinjiang! (p. 19) Following Ding Qian, Gu Shi, and Liu Shipei, Republican-era mythologists such as Wei Juxian (1939) and Ding Shan (1944) continued to deploy diffusionism in their studies of Chinese culture. In their search for the “realistic geography” of the land of Xi Wangmu, diffusionism TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 214 TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 214 19/12/13 10:41 AM 19/12/13 10:41 AM ISLANDS, INTERMEDIARIES, AND “EUROPEANIZATION” 215 became one of the guidelines along which they “discovered” the “Western source” of Chinese civilization. Diffusionism was also used in Chinese ethnology. Ling Chunsheng...