Re-configuring Nei/Wai: Writing the Woman Traveler in the Late Qing

Preamble: the Female Kingdom Beyond the Seas

In the Chinese cultural imaginary, there has long existed a radically different world---nüguo or nü’erguo, the women’s kingdom. It is characterized either by a complete absence of men or by the reversal of male-female roles. In Shanhai jing (Guideways through Mountains and Seas, ca. 320 B.C. - A.D. 200), for example, there is said to be “a women’s kingdom to the north of the Wuxian mountain,” “surrounded by water on all sides.” ¹ Historical records throughout the ages also refer to this kingdom, which, despite varying geographical locations, is invariably situated in a radically different zone, the “Great Wilds,” unfamiliar, exotic, and most likely dangerous. ² In the Ming novel Xiyou ji (Journey to the West, ca. sixteenth century), the queen of such a kingdom has to be “pounded into a paste” before the pilgrims can resume their journey. ³ The most elaborate nü’erguo appears in the Qing novel Jinghua yuan (Flowers in the Mirror, ca. early nineteenth century), where “men wear skirts, act as women, and concern themselves with matters of the inside; while women, on the contrary, wear pants, act as men, and concern themselves with matters of the outside.” Once again, the nü’erguo is represented as fundamentally unstable, marked by a significant “lack.” The “good” woman in this kingdom is eager for conversion to the “correct” male/female order. Thus the heir apparent of the Women’s Kingdom has no problem abandoning her title and privileges and travels to the Central Kingdom, where she gladly takes on the full array of feminine conducts, many of which the novel apparently satirizes. Remarkably, although Jinghua yuan features several women travelers, their encounter with the nü’erguo does not occur; the traveler is exclusively coded as male, to whom the foreign/female land poses temptation and threat. ⁴

Now for a more recent example of the nü’erguo. In 1877, Liu Xihong, an attaché of the first Qing ambassador’s suite to Europe, observed thus in his travelogue:

The British are the opposite of the Chinese in every way possible. In state matters, the people are above the king; within the family, the wife lords over the husband; as for progeny, female infants are more coveted than male infants; . . . All these are because Britain is located under the axis of the globe, so heaven and earth are in reverse order. Hence customs and habits are, without exception, lopsided. ⁵

In this late Qing version of the nü’erguo, the apparent “lopsided” gender roles in Britain provide the ultimate illustration of the drastically different, the incorrigible waiyi in Qing terms, or the Other in contemporary critical parlance.

For the late Qing was a period of intensified contact (and confrontation) between different cultures. It was a period of crisis, of nation, of race, and crisis of national, racial identity. This was consequently also when the longing for strict “border control” intensified. As exemplified by our diarist, the literati class was increasingly faced with the task of re-conceptualizing “Chinese culture” vis-à-vis the West. Playing the vis-à-vis, Liu Xihong’s construction of “cultural difference” is more than once transposed onto the gender system, the shocking difference in “the woman’s place” in Britain. Underlying this antipodal picture is the assumption that the traditional Chinese woman at least metonymically represents the Chinese culture, if no longer as easily providing the cosmological norms. For many like Liu Xihong then, the conceptualization of Chinese cultural identity is hinged upon, and imagined through, this normative definition of the Chinese woman, even as the very norms were starting to be questioned within the borders.

What happens, then, when the Chinese woman herself takes to traveling? The last few decades of the Qing saw an unprecedented number of Chinese women gaining access to international travel, as wives of diplomats and as overseas students. How does this figure of the traveling woman, this new cross-cultural imagining, breach the neat borderline between the “us” and the “them,” and de-stabilize the...