China on their minds

CHINA: The Lure of China: Writers from Marco Polo to JG Ballard By Frances Wood Yale University Press, 283pp. £19.99

CHINA: The Lure of China: Writers from Marco Polo to JG Ballard By Frances Wood Yale University Press, 283pp. £19.99

PERHAPS THESE days the only way to travel to Peking is by way of France: there the media refuse to call it Beijing, as “Pékin” has now been claimed as part of the French cultural repertoire.

As this colourful book demonstrates, that reflex is not only a case of French imaginings. Ever since its discovery by the West, China has acted as a lure for the adventurous. As Curator of the Chinese collections in the British Library, Frances Wood is superbly positioned to line up this parade of explorers and missionaries, celebrities and commentators, collectors and romancers. All have felt compelled to come to China – and it seems as if China, in her words, “made writers of them all”.

In return, these writers have made China – at least as we in the West have come to imagine it. And, being writers, the China they made turns out to be, for the most part, heavily laced with fantasy. Drawing on her earlier work ( Did Marco Polo Go to China?in 1996) Woods again raises the question of whether or not Polo ever arrived there. In the same chapter, Woods observes that many believe the "longest journey" taken by his medieval contemporary, Sir John Mandeville, "was to the nearest library" – his Travelsbeing a seamless compendium of at least 16 other works. In this feat of literary creation, Mandeville is later matched only by Arthur Waley: a self-taught curator (again, at the British Library) whose elegant translations of A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poemsin 1918 made him, together with Ezra Pound, the inventors of Chinese poetry for our time. Yet Waley never visited China, fearful (in the words of a friend) that, feeling "so much at home in Tang China . . . he could not face the modern ugliness" of actuality.

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Indeed, for many of these writers, inventing China became a way of inventing themselves. As Woods demonstrates, apart from his fictive persona, "Sir John Mandeville" probably never existed at all. Others, such as Edgar Snow (author of Red Star Over China– an account of the early Communist movement under Mao), are known today only through their books on China. Still others have fabricated an entirely factitious image through their China adventures: that of André Malraux being the most outrageous. In a deliciously malicious chapter, Woods dissects the cheap chinoiserie of Malraux's Asian novels (the most famous being La Condition Humaine): all based on an "extremely cursory visit" to China. More tawdry was Malraux's claim that he had personally been involved with Chinese revolutionaries. In 1965, while once again visiting China as the French Minister for Culture, Malraux is said to have observed that Zhou Enlai "had hardly changed" – although no evidence exists that they had met before.

What this book demonstrates is that China has often provided the stimulus for vivid imaginations, earlier occasioned by an exotica of a China now largely disappeared: camel trains at the gates of old Peking; whistles attached to the pinion feathers of pigeons, so that they hummed as they flew; the vivid, ever-changing street life; the characters and chancers drawn to this extravagantly alien place. Even today, observing Westerners in China reminds me of the early American West, where the confidence man was a stock-in-trade of the new frontier.

But here the critical frontier is that which bounds our own imagination. What Woods understands – and what her book addresses – is the need now for a primary sense of connection with China: that we Westerners have been there before, that we have tried to digest it through our writing, that there are in fact pioneer ancestors who have brought not only China to the West, and the West to China, but have changed China – and, in turn, been changed by what they have changed.

Given that this is its stated theme, the book disappoints even as it entertains. Perhaps it is best accepted as a light-hearted romp through Western incursions and excursions: prettily illustrated and amusing, full of vivid chatter but missing in almost every encounter a sense of the weight and consequences of that particular occasion. This is particularly true of the chapter on the Irish-born Lord McCartney, who in 1793 led the first – disastrous – British diplomatic mission. From Woods’s impressionistic account one has no sense of the scale of its failure, which was ultimately to result in the British invasion of China, during the First Opium War of 1839-42: a pivotal event in modern Chinese views of history.

What else is missing? Reflections on big questions. Why, for instance, are some kinds of Westerners (from exemplars here: children, gay people, women) more successful than others in encountering China? Could this be because they are already marginalised, living both inside and outside conventional Western societies, and thus adept at crossing boundaries? Accordingly, chapters on “Bloomsbury in China” and “Childhood in China” – as well as Woods’s profiling of largely unknown women writers – prove topics both lively and informative. Of course no book of this kind can escape becoming uneven. There would be a case for cutting thin chapters (such as that on Daniel Defoe) and enlarging the compacted ones (such as “Jesuit China”). One finishes unsatisfied: too much space is devoted to quotations largely undigested by commentary. Unhelpful also is the weak index; here an uncertain tool for tracking names within this glorious gallimaufry of people, pictures, and purple prose.

Jerusha McCormack is visiting professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, where she helped to found the Irish Studies Centre in China. Her latest book,

China and the Irish

, has just been published by New Island