Organizer: Susan Naquin, Princeton University
Chair and Discussant: Jonathan Hay, New York University
Scholarship on Chinese travel is a relatively recent phenomenon, and has concentrated on travel writings, the individual traveller's experiences, and the genre of travel writing itself. With this panel we propose to take a different approach, rare in scholarly work either inside or outside the China field.
The papers on this panel will treat the tourist guidebook literature for three Chinese cities-Canton/Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Peking-in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In our view, such guides should not be taken at face value as transparent windows on the past but, instead, can be understood as highly conscious constructs that reflected contending and changing images of these cities.
Through inclusion and exclusion, mapping and listing, different guidebooks reveal the interests of different groups and were often aimed at different audiences. Each attempted to define what the city should mean both to visitors and to residents, and each was part of a conversation about the city that included both Chinese and foreigners. Moreover, these books capture at a local rather than national level the uneasy and varied changes in self-perception taking place during a crucial era when China was becoming "modern" and redefining itself as part of a wider world. City guides can be understood, therefore, as symptoms of and instruments in the struggles to redefine China at a time when these cities (like many other tourist sites) were becoming the foci for international as well as domestic tourism. The papers will spell out these issues.
Defining Paradise: Conflicting Representations of the Entertainment Industry in
Late Qing Shanghai
Catherine Vance Yeh, University of Heidelberg
To describe the city of Shanghai and to stake a claim for its definition was a preoccupation of the inhabitants of this emerging metropolis at the turn of the last century. This situation created an unusually large and diverse body of city guides with complex and conflicting images of Shanghai. While it may be expected that such a city would articulate its own importance and create its own image, the fact that the new Shanghai was created by foreign intervention and was largely governed by foreigners greatly complicated the issue for Chinese and foreign inhabitants alike.
There are four main groups of Shanghai city guides, the products of traditional wenren-intellectuals, of big commercial presses, of foreign missionaries, and of foreign travelers and travel companies.
This paper will compare the "leisure and entertainment" sections of these guides, and study how this highly culture-bound concept is handled in the context of a struggle for the definition of the city. The image of Shanghai was at stake and it was fought over in part on the issue of the role of these leisure and entertainment establishments. Behind each presentation was a set of assumptions about the city's role and function leading to radically different images of the city as well as of its inhabitants.
Guidebooks and Peking Identity
Susan Naquin, Princeton University
The Ming and Qing tourist literature for Peking presented a set of sights for literati visitors from elsewhere in China in which sites and history were stressed. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a new genre of genuine guides emerged, portable and useful, intended for a more diverse elite; these books were notable also for the extensive space given over to Peking opera, its troupes and its stars. In the later part of that century, foreign language guides begin to be published. They were sold to visitors from the West and then Japan, and characterized by pictures, detailed maps, and an interest in shopping. Increasingly, Western, Chinese, and Japanese steamship, railroad, and travel agencies produced regularly up-dated handbooks that were encyclopedia in this kind of detail. In the early decades of the twentieth century, images of the traditional city were frozen in a spate of nostalgic books (many written by Manchu bannermen) commemorating the rapidly vanishing life of court and palace; such works formed the basis for a large literature about what became a romanticized (mis)rememberedgu du Beijing, "Old Peking."
These different genres presented different versions of Peking, and represent different assertions about what was important about the city, worth seeing, worth visiting, worth remembering. Moreover, they can be understood as sometimes complimentary, sometimes competing versions of what Peking was and what it meant to be a native of the capital.
Living in Guangzhou: Written Guides
David Faure, Oxford University
If guidebooks are written accounts of how to get where, there appear to be no guidebooks for Guangzhou published in Chinese before the twentieth century. Yet the British Library holds a slim street-by-street guide to nearby Foshan published in 1830, and there were several well-known guidebooks to the pilgrimage sites of Mt. Luofo. If there was not a Chinese guidebook for Guangzhou, it was not because no one had heard of guidebooks.
Nor was it because of a lack of scholarly interest in the city. In the 1820s and 1830s, there was intense interest among Cantonese in Guangdong history. Scholarly texts were published along with songs, stories, religious manuals, jokes, and a wide range of sundry subjects. Although I know of no guidebooks as such, enough is said in this published material to described the special features of the city and its surroundings. One might say that Guangzhou was too large to appear a unity. None but historians knew Guangzhou as such; visitors and residents saw only parts of it-residences, some religious relics perhaps, or its business quarters.
This situation changed in the twentieth century. Foreigners were precursors for the guidebooks to Guangzhou. However, when these Chinese guidebooks did appear, the city had become more prominent within the new Chinese nation. A study of Republican era Guangzhou guides shows, however, that they were not for tourists: these were guidebooks for a daily life with a national character, the epitome of the new citizen for which one could find no equivalent in dynastic China.