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1 Sketching China and the Self-Portrait of a Post-Romantic Traveler: John Francis Davis’s Rewriting of China in the 1840s Tamara S. Wagner WhenJohnFrancisDavispublishedhisSketchesofChinaintheearly1840s,hecapitalized on a significant increase in China’s appeal to the imagination, yet even more importantly, his work spanned crucial shifts in Britain’s political, commercial, and cultural attitudes to China over the course of the nineteenth century. A contradictory as well as complex text, the book encapsulated most effectively changing responses to China that were propelled by Romantic literary legacies, on the one hand, and early Victorian imperialist commercialism, on the other. As such, it indeed remarkably bridged two different sets of attitudes to the Celestial Empire. The 1840s significantly saw a strikingly ambiguous fascination with a country with which the British Empire was at war, and which yet also promised new commercial resources and a source for new literary imaginaries. Davis’s revision of his Sketches of China is therefore of peculiar interest for his retrospective reworking of the China of his youth and, at the same time, for self-consciously registering the need to update his descriptions to reflect the ongoing shifts in popular perceptions. In thus revamping the impressions of the past, doubly filtered through Romantic aesthetics and commercial interests, Sketches does, in fact, more than simply testify to marked revisions in the conceptualization of China or anticipate its changing “semi-colonial” status. Instead, it often engages, I seek to show, very critically with prevailing discourses on “the East” and the way it was imagined in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. In order to bring out the double lens of this vision of China, I shall therefore also align Davis’s reconsideration of his own responses with that of other nineteenth-century writers, both Romantic and Victorian. I shall then in particular highlight the implications of Davis’s awareness of discourses of superiority, both occidentalist and orientalist. Born in 1795, Davis was a sinologist who had been appointed writer in the East India Company’s factory at Guangzhou (Canton) in 1813. It was primarily because of his linguistic abilities that he was chosen to accompany Lord Amherst on a diplomatic 14 Tamara S. Wagner mission to what was at the time considered fascinating terra incognita. Davis was then twenty-one, barely of age, and had only lived in Guangzhou for three years. His residence in China was ultimately to last for over two decades. In 1834 he was appointed joint commissioner with Lord Napier and later became chief superintendent of trade, second governor and commander-in-chief of Hong Kong until he left in 1848. When he died in 1890, he had seen both opium wars and their repercussions. As an administrator, he proved extremely unpopular, but he significantly contributed to the textual “representation ” of China in nineteenth-century Britain. His oeuvre, in fact, consisted of a bulk of travel writing, commentaries on China’s foreign politics and history, “miscellaneous” essays on various parts of Asia, from Western Tartary to British India, as well as translations of Chinese classical literature and a detailed study of Chinese poetry: Poeseos Sinensis Commentarii: On the Poetry of the Chinese was published in Macao in 1834 and continued to be reprinted regularly until the 1960s. Most importantly, however, when Davis drew on earlier diplomatic missions for his Sketches, the “opening” of China may have seemed still remote, yet speculation on commercial advantages was already part and parcel of his detailing of information he deemed useful for military strategies. It is this reconstruction of the commercially viable as well as the strategically useful that makes especially the works he published during or towards the end of the First Opium War (1839–42) striking points-of-entry into farreaching shifts that irrevocably changed foreign travel in and travel writing on China. He indeed considered his knowledge of China of particular importance because of the war, and that regardless of the fact that his material referred to a China of nearly three decades ago. Commerce had of course been a powerful incentive to exploration from the beginning of British-Chinese relations. During the war, however, the circumstances that had led to it needed to be revaluated, and that perhaps particularly because opium had become an icon as much of British Far Eastern trade as of colonial dependency, of a twofold imperialist addiction that permeated society abroad as well as at home. Partly in response to this demand, partly to come to terms...

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