Eighteenth-Century England’s Chinese Taste

Commenting on David Porter’s The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2010), this review article argues that the book, by excavating the suppressed memory and history of English receptions of things Chinese, defamiliarizes and problematizes our common notions of early modern English culture. It effectively challenges whiggish historiography of England and reinstates the importance of foreign or Chinese constituents in the making of English culture. Nevertheless, this article also suggests that although Porter has successfully showed the dynamic force of Chinese things in English society and exposed ambivalent desires of English men for those things, there remain critical issues of gender differences in attitudes to Chinese things, the geography of English orientalism, and methodologies of reception history worthy of further investigations.