Imperial Nostalgia: Spanish Travel Writing in China (1870-1910)

Spain was one of the centers of European Sinology prior to the 18th century owing to the travel accounts and reports of missionaries. By the 19th century, however, Spanish authors had produced only a scattering of travel writings in China because of the lengthy distance and limited relations between the two countries. As a consequence of the forced “Open Door” policy of China following the First Opium War (1839-42) and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, both of which greatly facilitated travel between Europe and Extreme Orient, there was a prolific production of Spanish travel narratives toward the end of the 19th century.

The Spanish travel chronicles of this period in China have been largely ignored in the history of literature. There are few global studies on this topic, with the exception of a substantial body of scholarship by Lily Litvak,¹ García Romeral-Pérez’s valuable bio-bibliographical studies,² and Gayle R. Nunley’s insightful work Scripted Geographies: Travel Writings by Nineteenth-Century Spanish Authors.³ Although critics have recently shown some interest in individual studies, such as those on Luis Valera,⁴ Eduard Toda,⁵ Adolfo de Mentaberry,⁶ Enrique Gaspar⁷ and Enrique de Otal y Ric,⁸ there are even fewer compendium-style works about these writings.

Nevertheless, the Spanish travel narratives in China deserve a thorough examination since these constitute a particular and important vision of an “Orientalized” country towards an Asian nation during a critical and complicated historical moment. The period framed in this study (1870-1910) corresponds to the beginning of the commercial relationship between Spain and China⁹ and testifies to the dramatic agony of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), as well as the irreversible decline of Spain. Although the Orientalist discourse clearly emphasizes the social-political factors that shaped the judgment of the writers, given the complexity of the encounter of East and West, one has to take into account the diversity of the observers, which may not fit neatly into the categories of Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Said focuses on powerful nations such as Britain and France, yet the presence of Spain in the new era of colonialism is characterized by powerlessness in all respects (Togores Sánchez, Extremo Oriente). Although Spanish travel writings have common Eurocentric and ethnocentric ideologies and strategies, their overall vision of China is not as triumphant and confident as that adopted by British and French travelers. As David Martínez Robles indicates, the imperialist sentiment at the end of the 19th century was much less rooted among intellectuals and politicians of Spain (112), where the main concern of the empire was social instability and national crisis. Spanish travel chronicles therefore offer a unique perspective from a Western empire that shared a similar fate with the Other: both being traditional and decadent nations. Moreover, the identity of Spain itself as a European country was problematic because of its peripheral role in Europe during this time period, as Nunley indicates, “The image of Spain as an exotic... space with respect to European cultural identity was so ubiquitous both within Spain and beyond . . .” (Scripted Geographies 125). This, in turn, affected the textual process of identity construction in the interpretation of travel experience.

Considering these facts, the present study consists of an analysis of Spanish travel literature on China from 1870 to 1910 with a focus on how the complex image of China manifested the anxiety of recovering the lost imperial prestige. It also examines how this is related to its identity reconstruction, and in particular how the interpretation of the Other represented a difficult reconciliation between the imperial ambition and the self-consciousness of national crisis. The study has selected travel writings by Spanish diplomats, who constitute one of the main groups of travelers in China. In addition, due to their professional practice and concrete diplomatic purposes, main issues such as imperial anxiety and auto-critique addressed in these writings help to develop themes for this study.

Spain’s ability to identify itself as an imperial power and even as a part of Europe had reached a...