Organizer and Chair: Jinhua Emma Teng, Harvard University
Discussant: Dorothy Ko, University of California, San Diego
That travel leads to greater knowledge of the Self as well as the Other is almost a truism in the study of travel literature. Our panel seeks to breathe new life into this truism by exploring how voyages away from China during the Ming and Qing raise questions about the "larger self" (or da wo) that is the Confucian state and its centrifugal world view. The three papers take up travels away from China, to various kinds of Others-travels which test the Confucian concept of "self" but leave it intact in the end.
Emma Teng's paper examines the construction of the "savage" in Qing travelogues of Taiwan, such as Yu Yonghe's Pihai jiyou (1697). Teng argues that the representation of "savages" as figures from antiquity in this literature can be either a means of denigrating or romanticizing cultural difference. In either case, the "savage" is set at arm's length from the civilized world.
Anthony St. George's paper on Dong Yue's Chaoxian fu (1488) examines an encounter with the Korean culture which has adopted many Chinese cultural practices. St. George argues that it is their adherence to Confucian practices, not the strangeness of their culture, which distinguished Koreans in China's eyes. Again "otherness" has been figured so that the importance of cultural difference is denied.
Marion Eggert's paper on Lin Qian's Xihai jiyoucao (1849) examines how identity is challenged by travel to America. Eggert shows that the establishment of a stable identity as a traveler involves the ability to encounter the Other without losing a sense of self-sameness.
These papers tell us that new kinds of Others tend to provoke new forms of marginalization, so that the Confucian self can maintain its position at the center of the world.
Our commentators, Ellen Widmer and Dorothy Ko, are currently engaged in the study of travel literature. Widmer is translating a 1903 piece about a voyage from China to Russia; Ko's latest project touches on missionary travels to China in the nineteenth century. Both are well prepared to interrogate the question of Self and Other in the light of Confucian concerns.
China in the Face of Civilized Barbarians: A Reading of the Chaoxian fu
Anthony St. George, Harvard University
China's relationship with its various neighbors has elicited reactions ranging from fear and contempt to respect and admiration. While the Eastern Barbarians (Dongyi, e.g., the tribes of the northeast, the Korean peninsula, and Japan) were generally well regarded, it was the people of the Korean peninsula that stood out among them. Because of her similar cultural practices, Chosôn Korea had been dubbed "Little China," a status that often made self-definition a complex one, both for Koreans and Chinese. How does the subject maintain his identity in the face of an other so similar?
In 1488, the Ming Envoy Dong Yue wrote the Chaoxian fuafter his visit to the Chosôn court. Written for the Ming emperor, the thirty-one sections of this fu present the reader with the landscape, fortifications, buildings, flora, fauna, and various cultural practices witnessed by the author. While Dong's reaction to what he encounters is generally positive, a closer reading reveals that he is unable to escape the limitations of the genre or his Sinocentric worldview, in places even replaying the role of the mythic educator Jizi. Through the rhetoric of the fu , Dong is able to praise many of Korea's practices while also maintaining its subordinate barbarian status through elision and understatement.
In this paper I will examine a subject's reaction to an encounter with a culture that has adopted many of his own cultural practices and how the subject maintains his sense of identity in the face of such an encounter.
The Other as Figure from Antiquity: Indigenous People in the Late Imperial Travel
Literature of Taiwan
Jinhua Emma Teng, Harvard University
To numerous travel writers in the Ming and Qing, a journey to Taiwan, an island of "primitives," seemed to be a journey into the past. The comparison of the "natives" to people from antiquity became a common means of figuring cultural difference in the travel literature. Deng Zhuan'an's "Discourse on the Resemblance of Savage Customs to those of Antiquity" (Fansu jin'gu shuo, 1830) is a prime example.
In examining the Ming and Qing travel literature, we find that writers who employed this trope of Other as figure from antiquity argued variously for the inferior and the superior character of the natives. I term these two modes of writing the "discourse of savagery" and the "discourse of primitivism." By "discourse of savagery," I mean a discourse which links the natives to backwardness and cultural inferiority; by "discourse of primitivism," I mean the romanticization of the natives as "noble savages" who have preserved an ancient righteousness. My paper presents a discussion of both these discourses in the travel literature of Taiwan, demonstrating that the co-existence of these modes indicates an ambivalence on the part of writers toward the relationships between "savagery" and "civilization" and "Chinese" and "Other." Moreover, I argue that the "discourse of primitivism" was often used to critique the degeneration of Chinese society. I draw on various examples of travel literature from the late imperial period, focusing on Chen Di's Dongfan ji (1603), Yü Yonghe's Pihai jiyou (1697), Lan Dingyuan's Dongzheng ji (1722), Huang Shujing's Taihai shichai lu (1736), and Deng Zhuan'an's Lice huichao (1830).
Discovered Other, Recovered Self: Layers of Representation in an Early Travelogue
on the West (Xihai jiyoucao)
Marion Eggert, University of Munich
The history of Chinese acquaintance with the Extreme West is a long and complex one, marked by processes of forgetting as well as acquiring knowledge. The centripetality inherent in Confucian culture succeeded time and again in pushing awareness of Western things back to the margins of cultural consciousness. This can still be witnessed in the history of the first of the travel records to the West that helped bring about a change of awareness in the l9th century, the Xihai jiyoucao.
The author, Lin Qian (b. 1824), working as an interpreter for English speaking merchants in Xiamen, accompanied a group of them to the USA in 1847. He returned to China in 1849 and composed his travel account the same year. It eventually reached the hands of Xu Jiyu and Zuo Zongtang, who both wrote colophons in the 1860s, but was forgotten later until its rediscovery in 1980. As involved as its way into publicity is the organization of the short text itself: the "main text," a pentasyllabic poem of 50 verses, sits like a nut in its shell, being surrounded by a preface and complementary poetry by others.
In this paper, I will first trace the literary traditions of travel writing that inform this text and the ways in which they serve to soften the impact of his extraordinary experience on the traveler himself as well as on the audience to which he is reporting. In my analysis of the narration of the text, I shall concentrate on the manifold ways the narrator's sense of identity is threatened by his experiences, and the equally intricate ways it is recovered and restructured through different layers of self-representation. Lastly, I shall show how the successful establishment of an identity as a traveler-who can experience the Other without losing his sense of Self-is intertwined with convincing descriptions of the Other as real.
Foreign Travel through a Woman's Eyes: Shan Shili's Voyage of 1903 (Guimao
lüxing)
Ellen Widmer, Wesleyan University
This paper focuses on Shan Shili's travelogue Guimao lüxing , an account of her journey with her husband, Qian Xun, to Japan, Korea, and Russia. The ostensible mission of the journal is to instruct gentlewomen about the world outside China, and it is careful to show proper deference to her diplomat husband, whom it presents as virtually always at her side. Nevertheless, the author has a keen eye for detail, and the journal offers rich commentary on the state of China's economic, political and cultural relations with the countries through which the author travels, and with the world at large. My presentation will point out some of this journal's more interesting observations, especially concerning the threats posed by "modernization" to traditional feminine virtues, and it will address the question of how this very late Qing account positions itself with regard to other travel literature. These include the travel narratives to which it makes direct reference, as well as fictions of the same vintage that invent scenes of travel abroad. Finally, as a foil, I will invokeMary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes, which links foreign travel in the West to imperialist attitudes. By contrast, Shan's dignity, elegance, and snobbery come out as a defense against China's weakness, not as part of an effort to conquer the world.