Century of Travels in China – Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s

Douglas Kerr is a professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong, and has been visiting scholar at Oxford and London universities.

There are now many courses on travel writing at universities around the world. Both teachers and students will find much to illuminate their field in this collection of essays, not least because China, as itself an empire, poses different questions from those answered by Mary Louise Pratt and Edward Said. The reader will find a wide range of studies, from the post-Romantic nature of reminiscences of the Amherst embassy in the context of the opium wars, through the contrasting attitudes of the great and good, such as Lords Elgin and Lugard and the Webbs, to the grassroots eye-view of missionaries in disguise passing as Chinese, reflections on landscape, photography, the reception of Chinese cuisine, on to the Modernist perspectives of W. H. Auden and William Empson and finally to a political redefinition of travel as fellow-traveling in a study of Agnes Smedley's participation in the Long March. China opened itself in a variety of ways, as well as being 'opened up,' long before it joined the WTO. -- T. J. Cribb, Fellow Emeritus, Churchill College, Cambridge