Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842-1907 (review)

Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842-1907, by Susan Schoenbauer Thurin; pp. xvi + 253. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999, $44.95.

Many readers may have derived their sense of Victorian ideas about China from John Stuart Mill's assessment in On Liberty (1859). China, Mill instructed, was "a warning example" of a stagnant culture, its people "stationary--have remained so for thousands of years" (qtd. 6). However, as Susan Schoenbauer Thurin shows, Victorians with experience in China had views more finely shaded, more attuned to events in British-Chinese relations over a span of sixty-five years than Mill's comment might suggest. Thurin's careful contextualizing of travel writing by six Victorians is one of several strengths of Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China.

Throughout, Thurin correlates attitudes in travel narratives to events used to force or justify British presence in China: the first and second Opium Wars, the lengthy Taiping Rebellion, the Tientsin Massacre, and punitive treaty provisions following incidents deemed threatening to Britain's "rights." Readers with a sketchy sense of this history will appreciate Thurin's efficient overview of the circumstances of the first Opium War (1839 to 1842) and of significant events and issues through the balance of the century. For travelers or long-term residents in China these often prompted difficult, even contorted negotiations between solidarity as British citizens embracing the imperialist mission and respect and affection for China's culture and people. Thurin's treatment is a welcome reprieve from works that mine Victorian travel narratives simply to catalog imperial arrogance, or alternatively to celebrate "self-actualization." Instead, she begins with the complexity of China's semicolonial status, and the relationship between missionary activity and the "opening" of China to the opium trade--putting it in the context of mounting Chinese dissatisfaction with corrupt Manchu dynasty rule, as well as Victorian preconceptions formed by eighteenth-century fantasies of "Old Cathay." This complexity runs through all of Thurin's readings, which also incorporate the variables of class, gender, and purpose of travel.

Beginning in 1842 at the conclusion of the first Opium War and extending to 1907 with the end to the legal opium trade, Thurin's selections represent a spectrum of experience. From the hundred or so British books of travel to, and description of, China in these years, Thurin balances texts by long-term residents and adventure travelers, men and women, those with commercial or tourist interests, those who scorn or embrace transplanted British enclaves, or who applaud or deplore either missionary or merchant activity. She draws on thirteen works by two merchants, three "globetrotters," and a "woman of empire."

By beginning with merchants' narratives, Thurin directly addresses the foundation of the British presence and the creeping misgivings felt (or not felt) by some of Britain's formal and informal agents. Robert Fortune, a former working-class "garden boy," collected Chinese plants for the Royal Horticultural Society, with results supporting Mary Louise Pratt's assessment of specimen-collecting as an imperial venture (Imperial Eyes [1992]). However, the RHS, profiting from Fortune's work yet ever mindful of his origins, treated him shabbily, reminding him (in lieu of a commensurate salary) of "the distinction and status which you could not have attained in any other way" (qtd. 31). Bruised by the RHS, Fortune accepted an East India Company offer that made him the foremost British expert on tea and a contributor to the development of India's tea cultivation. Certainly Fortune's career is a casebook for the destructive interventions to which Pratt points, but Thurin enriches her story by considering Fortune's naiveté in his relations with London institutions, his affinity and respect for Chinese culture, and his bafflement when his informed views appeared to please no one fully, and failed to affect either opinion or policy. Reviewers, for example, denigrated his appreciation of Chinese garden design and naturalized cemeteries--a subject inseparable from judgments on ancestor...