The Lure of China: Writers from Marco Polo to JG Ballard by Frances Wood
Yale University Press, £19.99
This is not a book about China, its history, society or culture, but rather a book about how the West superimposed its imagination on reality. About how people who had barely visited the country and had the most cursory knowledge of its people – in some cases had never been there at all – shaped the country and its inhabitants in the eyes of Europe. It was, at best, looking at an elephant with the telescope the wrong way around and detail turned into definition. At worst it was to impose Western prejudices and racism on a population that had little say in the matter.
It started with Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville, who wrote travel romances, in the 13th and 14th centuries. Many suspect that Sir John travelled no further than the library. Marco Polo did better, but despite
20 years in China missed the Great Wall and chopsticks, bound feet and tea. Neither were helped by their copyists and translators who felt free to “ad lib” their own additions to already fanciful originals that portrayed an exotic opulence in the midst of grinding poverty.
Then came the Jesuits. The Society of Jesus was recognised by the Pope in 1540 and by 1601 Matteo Ricci, the most famous of China’s Jesuits and whose grave is still preserved in Beijing, was there teaching mathematics, astronomy and cartography. Much appreciated by the emperor’s court, but who stubbornly refused to see the necessity of taking on his religion with his maths. But at least the missionaries provided a wealth of factual information on the limited areas of their concern.
China was simultaneously backward and advanced. It was learning and teaching. Its meritocratic examination system that allowed any middle-class student to aspire to the top and its medical knowledge – that, for example, you could create a resistance to smallpox by inhaling powdered scabs up the nose – was a revelation. But the needs of Western imperialism soon put a stop to that as, to adapt the phrase of Jamaican historian Walter Rodney, Europe underdeveloped China in the interests of opening it up for opium and manufactured goods.
Next came the Old Etonians and the Bloomsbury set. They both saw in China the exotic and erotic. Representing the first, Harold Acton was an aesthete, author and homosexual – the first two were legal, if frowned upon, in England, the third wasn’t. Representing the second was Julian Bell, with his famous affair with Ling Shuhua, the poet and wife of the Dean of Wuhan University, where Bell was teaching.
When the affair was discovered, he did the decent thing and took himself off to the Spanish Civil War where he was quickly killed by General Franco’s forces at the Battle of Brunete.
It wasn’t just the men. There were the novelists Stella Benson and Anne Bridge, who both wrote a series of novels centred round the ex-pat community in China, and Elizabeth Cooper whose knowledge of her subject was cast into doubt when My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard was illustrated with pictures from Japan. Then there were the travellers and explorers who stole Chinese artifacts and the journalists who generally wrote made to measure for their newspaper owners.
Somerset Maugham’s life was an endless peregrination around the world’s exotic spots and yet it is The Painted Veil, that sees betrayal, blackmail and duty turn into love and death in Guangdong, which has been filmed twice, once with Greta Garbo. André Malraux wrote The Human Condition, a novel that is centred on the brutal suppression by Chiang Kai-shek of the Shanghai revolt of 1927, after a short tourist trip. Not that it stopped him from claiming to have served as revolutionary leader in Canton.
This is a curious patchwork of a book that is a collection of vignettes. It is no history of China or even of its English-speaking visiting writers. It is not even a history of frauds, liars and collaborators with foreign interests, rather it is a random walk through literature in and on China by Westeners. The interesting question is whether anything has changed.
I was in Beijing 18 months ago and overheard a group of journalists discussing who had written the best piece on the then recent riots in Lhasa. They were unanimously of the opinion that the prize piece had been penned by one of their number who had not even visited the province. Pictures of Nepalese police beating Tibetan protesters served, they said, as surrogates for the Chinese security forces. Plus ça change…
Glyn Ford
