Qing Travelers to the Far West
Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China

This fundamentally new interpretation of the Qing reveals how Sino-Western engagements transformed traditions, institutions, and networks of communications.

Jenny Huangfu Day (Author)

9781108457729, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 March 2020

283 pages, 12 b/w illus. 1 table
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg

'Delightful. Highly recommended. All academic levels.' Kristin Stapleton, Choice

Prior to the nineteenth century, the West occupied an anomalous space in the Chinese imagination, populated by untamable barbarians and unearthly immortals. First-hand accounts and correspondence from Qing envoys and diplomats to Europe unraveled that perception. In this path-breaking study, Jenny Huangfu Day interweaves the history of Qing legation-building with the personal stories of China's first official travelers, envoys and diplomats to Europe. She explores how diplomat-travelers navigated the conceptual and physical space of a land virtually unmapped in the Chinese intellectual tradition and created a new information order. This study reveals the fluidity, heterogeneity, and ambivalence of their experience, and the layers of tension between thinking, writing, and publishing about the West. By integrating diplomatic and intellectual history with literary analysis and communication studies, Day offers a fundamentally new interpretation of the Qing's engagement with the West.

List of figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The traveler
2. The envoy
3. The student
4. The scholar
5. The diplomat
6. The strategist
Epilogue
Appendix 1. Zhigang's passage on the White House visit in the 1877 and 1890 editions
Appendix 2. Selected passages that appeared in the Chushi taixi jiyao (1890) but not in the Chushi taixi ji (1877)
Glossary
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Asian history [HBJF]