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Reviewed by:
  • China: A History of the Laws, Manners and Customs of the People
  • Judith Green (bio)
John Henry Gray . China: A History of the Laws, Manners and Customs of the People. Edited by William Gow Gregor. New York: Dover Publications, 2003. xxx, 992 pp. Paperback $34.95, ISBN 0-486-42487-1. (Facsimile of the 1878 edition originally published in London in two volumes by Macmillan.)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries foreign residents and travelers in China produced a vast archive of publications, encompassing every genre from autobiographical memoirs and guidebooks to political tracts and proto-ethnographies. These publications have proved useful both for studies of the representation of China to foreign audiences and as accounts of foreign attitudes and actions within China. The Anglophone travel writing in this archive has been the subject of recent studies by Susan Schoenbauer Thurin (Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China [1999]) and Nicholas Clifford (A Truthful Impression of the Country [2001]). A fantastic resource for scholars in this field are the more than seven hundred items included in Nineteenth Century Books on China, published as a microfiche collection by Chadwyck-Healey in association with the British Library, but unfortunately available in only a handful of libraries worldwide. In any event, there is a place, in teaching and research, for inexpensive and easily portable facsimile copies of nineteenth-century accounts such as John Henry Grays China: A History of the Laws, Manners and Customs of the People, originally published in two volumes in 1878 and recently reissued as a single volume by Dover.

This is an earlier reviewers verdict on Gray's China at the time of its first publication in 1878:

Dr. Gray's book is somewhat wanting in proportion and arrangement for a general view of the laws, manners and customs of the people; it manifests only moderate descriptive powers, and no great skill at grouping his facts so as either to bring out important results or forcibly to present the vital characteristics of the national life and the vital relations of these characteristics.1

E. H Parker (1849-1926), the British-Consul-turned-professor-of-Chinese in Manchester, England, was still more disparaging, commenting in his own reminiscences that Gray's book was "so strange in language that it had to be called in and re-edited" by William Gow Gregor.2 Present-day readers should take note: despite the publisher's claim that this is a "highly readable history of the world's most populous country," the flaws in its organization and clarity have become no less apparent over time. Indeed, if the faults of Gray's survey were obvious to contemporaries, they are even more glaring for readers who have become accustomed to works of reference with standardized entries, cross-referencing, and citations. This, in my view, is all to the good. Gray's China may be user-unfriendly, but its [End Page 426] insistent idiosyncrasies serve to remind us that the past, even the relatively recent past of the late Victorian period, really is another country.

A glance at the contents pages reveals some of the problems of navigation: chapters on such broad subjects as Government (chapter 2), Religion (chapter 4), and Physical Features, that is, geology and geography (chapter 32) sit alongside others on the details of Suicides (chapter 13), Sumptuary Laws (chapter 15), and Pagodas (chapter 21). Furthermore, Gray cannot resist supplementing his descriptions with anecdotes including precise dates, locations, and the names of his acquaintances. A passage from the chapter on suicides gives an example:

Gambling is, either directly or indirectly, a frequent cause of wives having recourse to suicide; and in 1861 a very sad example of this occurred in a large mansion adjoining the house which I was then occupying. My neighbour's fifth wife had incurred the displeasure of her husband—a member of the Ng family—by losing her jewels at play, and, finding the harsh treatment to which in consequence he daily subjected her unendurable, she took a large dose of opium. When, shortly afterwards, the discovery was made of what she had done, the aid of Dr. Dods, a medical practitioner at Honam, was...

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