Debating China: Romantic Fictions of the Qing Empire, 1760–1800

Abstract

This chapter is focused on the European fascination with a different other from those which are at the present time more commonly discussed in Romantic scholarship, the Celestial Empire of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). The Qing Empire was certainly a debatable and much debated land in the mid- to late eighteenth century. The Qing was debated in different ways as scholars, diplomats, travellers and missionaries attempted to assess the nature of its structure and the validity or otherwise of its customs and religions and the status of its unique and complex languages. This is the period in which the status of China shifts from a generalized idealization and admiration to one of degradation and often contempt.¹ Earlier admiration by the philosophes of the empire as an enlightened despotism with a rational system of bureaucracy and a superior civilization gave way to disappointment with an allegedly stationary and stagnant tyranny, countenancing superstition, infanticide and female foot-binding. David Porter has influentially argued that what underlay Western responses to China in the eighteenth century was ‘an implicit model of legitimacy’ in religion and language which China appeared to validate in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries before a neo-classicist backlash rendered its culture increasingly unintelligible and illegitimate.² Ros Ballaster has recently argued that Chinese culture was feminized in the eighteenth century and that fictional representations of China serve as the ‘location of a destabilizing illegitimate cultural and political agency’, identified with a feminine excess, a process that becomes increasingly apparent in the travel writing of the period.³