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Travel and Business 71 Negrero, sí, fue don Nicolás Tanco — Reinaldo Arenas A year after arriving in Amoy (Xiàmén [ ], Fújiàn province) as an agent for a British-Cuban company, Nicolás Tanco Armero proposes an exercise in observation to his readers of Viaje de Nueva Granada a China:1 Let us start by observing the Chinaman in himself. Isn’t this the strangest being a European or an American can face? It is true that the Indian of our Pampas; the ferocious Bedouin, or the savage Malay and Bengalese from the other part of Asia, are creatures that cause surprise because they present to man his primitive state. But, could you compare this surprise with that of looking at a Chinaman? Look at his physical complexion in which one can recognize features from every race: those shaved heads, always shining, with the beautiful ponytail or tresses floating on their backs; those very long faces reflecting vices and also intelligence; that careless poise facile and graceful: everything, everything in his aspect points to a being sui generis, a truly peculiar type. (373) Several issues that involve shifting worldviews and positionings to accommodate the author’s own perspective arise from this paragraph. To begin with, in Spanish the ‘strangest being’ posed in the rhetorical question is further displaced and singularised with the use of the Latinate ente (from ens). The description of the Chinaman by Tanco Armero follows here, as often happens 4 Travel and Business: The First Colombian in China Jacinto Fombona Ｐ０７１－０８６（Ｖ１） 72 Jacinto Fombona throughout his texts — the blueprint of a naturalist or geographer who records observations of an object under scrutiny. Everything that is notable must be and is considered, discussed and classified according to a set of empirical guidelines whose archaeology might be traced back to Francis Bacon’s essay ‘Of Travel’, written as ‘directions’ to the young traveller on how and what to observe when travelling abroad.2 In broad and general terms, Tanco Armero’s travel writing is an exercise in Enlightenment thinking, characterised by a process of analysis and a system of reference that seeks to standardise the resulting observations. In this vein, a book by one of the founders and secretary of the Royal Geographical Society of England, Colonel Julian R. Jackson, entitled What to Observe or the Traveller’s Remembrancer, offers a convenient summation.3 Given Tanco Armero’s education in London and Paris, it is not far-fetched to venture that he knew of this title in particular, or else was familiar with similar books on the subject. Jackson’s book itemises the set of directives that Tanco Armero seems to be following when writing about his travels, and the knowledge he maintains he sought to acquire and make public for his readers. As Jackson states in his introduction: ‘The object of this Work, as its title indicates, is to point to the uninitiated Travellers what he should observe, and to remind the one who is well informed, of many objects which, but for a Remembrancer, might escape him’ (2). Notably, Jackson talks of his book not as a guide for travel, but a ‘remembrancer’, pointing on the one hand to a hierarchy of formal knowledge that guides for tourists would lack, and, on the other, making a gesture towards the kind of useful knowledge travellers, already formed within a profession, must ‘remember’ to direct their eyes to and really profit from in their travels. Such a gesture of remembering points writes to the moment and poses a narrating ‘I’ that, as in an autobiography, takes the double role of acting and telling. The distance between the narrating self that observes him/ herself as a traveller and the actor/observed-self can vary considerably. In the case of Tanco Armero, the scene of writing is framed by the vicissitudes and joys of travelling as a retelling of very recent events in the author’s life. There are striking similarities between the table of contents of Jackson’s book and Tanco Armero’s own chapters about his travels in China especially, as well as visits to Cuba, Egypt and Palestine, the United States, England and France. He is quite meticulous in describing, as the ‘remembrancer’ recommends, aspects of history, population, uses and traditions of everyday life, religion, fine arts (or lack thereof), science, literature and a long etcetera, all in order to ‘take nations as they are’, as Jackson urges his readers. In Recuerdos de mis últimos viajes...

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