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China of the Tourists 113 But whence are you, and whither do you make return? Over the mountain passes; through the Great Wall; to Kalgan — and beyond, whither? . . . Eunice Tietjens, Profiles from China (1919)1 This chapter looks at women travellers in China between the late 1870s and the early 1920s. Beginning with the two earliest, and probably most famous, journeys of Victorian women in the Middle Kingdom — those of Isabella Bird and Constance Cumming — the essay poses the question of whether their journeys served as more prescriptive itineraries for later women travellers and, in fact, established the frameworks of what we could call a Grand Tour of China. The chapter focuses on female travellers of both British and American nationality. Given that the period under investigation is characterised by an increased assertion of women’s rights in the West, the focus on women and their desire to express independence and learn more about otherness is especially pertinent. Even if these contacts with alterity happened in a highly mediated and often compromised form, it would still, in many cases, help these travellers to (re-)assess their own position and identity as Western women. Most important, however, the choice of texts by women results from the basic fact that it was mainly women, and not men, travellers who, in this forty-year period around the turn of the nineteenth century, wrote China travel and guide books. A look at Chadwyck-Healey’s bibliography of ‘Nineteenth-Century Books on China’2 reveals that, of the 733 books on China published in the 7 China of the Tourists: Women and the Grand Tour of the Middle Kingdom, 1878–1923 Julia Kuehn 114 Julia Kuehn (long) nineteenth century, only about ten percent (categorised as ‘Geography’, as they map and describe the country) were travelogues, and these also include the works of Bird and Cumming. The large bulk of works on China is by (British) men and about ‘Politics and government’, ‘Economics and commerce’, ‘Anthropology and sociology’, ‘History of China’, ‘Religion and philosophy’, and ‘Literature and the Arts’. All in all, there are fewer than twenty women writers mentioned in the bibliography, but it is particularly noteworthy that their (travel) writings emerge chiefly from around 1880 when their male counterparts focused visibly on socio-political and economic questions concerning China. Representative titles by male authors at the turn of the century include The Chinese, Their Present and Future: Medical, Political, and Social (1891), China in Transformation (1898), China and the Present Crisis (1900), China and the Allies (1901), China in Convulsion (1901), The Awakening of China (1907), The Coming China (1911) and China Revolutionized (1913).3 As such, the travelogues by women from these years are important and exceptional, and arguably preserve an older tradition of a genre in which men specialised in writing political, historical or economic accounts of a country. The shift from nineteenth-century British women to primarily American women travellers in the twentieth century requires a more detailed historical positioning. Women writers continued with the travel writing tradition, but Colin Mackerras suggests in Western Images of China that America replaced Britain as the central Western image-formulator for China in the early twentieth century.4 If the imperialist British view of the Middle Kingdom was largely built on economic and political interests which necessitated an image of China as backward and in need of external governance, twentieth-century American views of China were, arguably, more positive, if no less ideological. The end of the Qing dynasty and the 1911 Revolution were consistent with America’s belief that China was finally moving in a direction suitable to Western political, economic and social interests, and Americans wished to encourage this trend by furthering relations and knowledge between the two countries. From the late 1920s, the American journalists Edgar Snow, Anna Louise Strong and Agnes Smedley would — in support of the Communist creed — report on the country’s political changes to a Western audience. At the same time, Chinese intellectuals such as the writer Lin Yutang and opinion-maker Madame Chiang Kai-shek went to the United States and addressed the American people, also trying to further Sino-American relations. Even Pearl Buck’s hugely popular novels, starting with East Wind, West Wind (1930) and The Good Earth (1931), helped create a more favourable image of China in modern Western societies, and travelling to the Middle Kingdom was certainly not discouraged as the [18.117.165.66] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 09:36...

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