Colleagues and students are warmly invited to join the School of Modern Languages and Cultures’ guest lecture

Dr Stephan McDowall (University of Edinburgh)

Imagining China in Britain’s Long Nineteenth Century

Wednesday 4 February at 3.30 pm in the Boyd Orr Building, Room 709B.

Abstract: In 1847, the noted Scottish botanist and plant hunter Robert Fortune characterised the transformation in Western views of China brought about by the conclusion of the First Anglo-Chinese War thus: “the curtain which had been drawn around the celestial country for ages, has now been rent asunder; and instead of viewing an enchanted fairy-land, we find, after all, that China is just like other countries.”  As many scholars have noted, this moment ushered in a period in which views of China were informed by the more rational and reliable first-hand accounts sent back by travellers, traders, soldiers and missionaries, whose freedom to explore was established by a series of treaties signed over the course of the nineteenth century.  It marked, in other words, the end of the British chinoiserie fantasy.
Or did it?  In this talk, I will argue that this commonly repeated assumption is misleading in two ways.  First, it underestimates the extent to which late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century observers had already begun to demand more ‘reliable’ sources of information about China than the paintings on their soup bowls.  And second, it ignores the significant, but vastly underacknowledged role that British fantasies of ‘Chineseness’ continued to play not only in shaping the views of the British public at home, but also in structuring and defining the first-hand experiences of travellers. Here I will discuss some of the ways in which such fantasies were presented and consumed. Rather than trying to read some nineteenth-century sources as more ‘accurate’ than others, I see the relationship between fact and fantasy as constantly evolving and mutually-generating across the course of the long nineteenth century. 

Followed by refreshments