ANYONE WHO HAS BEEN to a formal banquet in China will be familiar with the sea slug, usually served in thick slices in a gloopy sauce and viewed by not a few visitors to China as designed specifically as a form of culinary torture for westerners. I once ate a fantastic sea slug dish, which had been marinaded in Shaoxing wine and soy for a whole week by a little old lady who used to cook for the family that owned the Wing On department store in Shanghai before 1949. However, Father Laureati’s description in the Jesuit Lettres Édifiantes et Curieuses de la Chine (1702–76), strikes a more familiar chord: ‘It may be a delicacy to the Chinese but not to us. Europeans cannot bear to look at it because of its deformity, and that may be why they find it repugnant to eat.’

Repulsed by sea slugs, the Jesuits who came to China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries faced another familiar problem. The eighteenth-century missionary Father François Bourgeois confessed to finding Chinese difficult, writing in one of the Lettres Édifiantes et Curieuses:

I assure you that it has nothing in common with any known language. Each word has a single form and there is nothing you might find to help you talk about the type or number of things one is talking about. As for verbs, there is nothing to tell you who it concerns, how and when things happen and when it is singular or plural … I was told that ‘shu’ meant ‘book’. I assumed that each time the word ‘shu’ reappeared, I could conclude that we were talking about books. Not at all: ‘shu’ could also mean a tree, so I was torn between book and tree. But that is not all, there is ‘shu’ great heat, ‘shu’ to tell a story, ‘shu’ dawn, ‘shu’ rain, ‘shu’ charity, ‘shu’ accustomed, ‘shu’ to lose a bet, etc. and I’d never finish if I went through all the meanings of the same sound …

Having spent the past forty years reading anything on China I could lay my hands on, in everything I’ve written, with the exception of Hand Grenade Practice in Peking: My part in the Cultural Revolution (2000), I have always wanted to convey my enjoyment of the work of other writers on China and to try to encourage any readers I might have to explore these works. I always find a bibliography, with all its potential, as rewarding as a text, though I may be unusual in this. However, a problem does arise when trying to define what one means by ‘writer’.

Since an enormous number of visitors to China from the seventeenth century onwards were moved to write an account of what they saw, did that mean they were all ‘writers’? Is a writer simply someone who has had a book published, even a very bad book? Is a journalist automatically a writer? Or is one looking for greater lyricism or more lasting insight? Such questions bedevil me as I contemplate compiling an anthology of writers writing about China; in particular, writers who actually went there.

Constrained by an elegant but somewhat restricted format, I have to select which writers to include. It is easy to reject Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu series as they have nothing to do with China, although they do illuminate the widespread fear of the ‘Yellow Peril’; it is equally easy to discard Ernest Bramah’s romances about K’ai-lung unrolling his mat and unleashing a torrent of platitudes, which belong to the ‘Confucius, he say’ school of misleading views. Sheer prejudice moves me to exclude Han Suyin.

One writer I overlooked was Graham Peck who, of all the residents in Peking in the late 1930s and early 1940s – among them George Kates, John Blofeld and the extraordinary and hardly believable David Kidd – wrote with the greatest sympathy about Chinese of all classes in Through China’s Wall (1941) and Two Kinds of Time (1950). I found out more about Peck from Peter Rand’s China Hands (1995), which like Patricia Laurence’s Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China (2003), despite the many errors in the latter work, reveals the crossing of paths of writers and journalists in China in the 1930s.

Perhaps it is only when you start comparing accounts of China and seek to extract useful organisational links that you recognise certain universal truths, such as that all Old Etonians in China in the 1930s were captivated by birds, in particular the flocks of Peking pigeons with humming ‘whistles’ attached to their legs. Robert Byron, architectural historian and writer, author of The Road to Oxiana (1937) and First Russia, then Tibet (1933), wrote to his mother from Peking in 1935, ‘[The Chinese] have such delightful habits. Every day at dawn and sunset, thousands of pigeons fly over the city with whistles attached to their legs – the sky is full of sound – a deep note’. Osbert Sitwell wrote in Escape With Me! (1939) that ‘an intermittent music floated down from the sky … a flock of birds was manoeuvring’ and he was enlightened by his Chinese servant, ‘Master, worry and puzzle: has not heard pigeon make whistle before?’ Even Peter Fleming, adventurous traveller and The Times journalist, rarely seen without a rook rifle, described in News From Tartary (1935) the Peking courtyard where he took breakfast:

Sparrows chirped among the demons and dragons of the eaves. Overhead, against the blue sky, a flashing cloud of pigeons wheeled in formation: there were tiny bamboo tubes fastened to their wings, and these made a kind of piping drone, a queer music which rose and fell and was unlike any other sound. It was very peaceful.

There were so many British writers and aesthetes drawn to China in the 1930s that they tripped over each other. It was Old Etonian Harold Acton’s decision to stay in China in 1932 that drew Robert Byron and Osbert Sitwell there. Acton also took Virginia Woolf’s nephew, Julian Bell, under his wing, thus touching the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group. Japan’s invasion of China drew Christopher Isherwood, author of Goodbye to Berlin (1939) and W.H. Auden, one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Their Journey to a War (1937) recounts meetings with, among others, Mao Zedong’s right-hand man Zhou Enlai, photojournalist Robert Capa, gangster Du Yuesheng, and Fleming, who, too, had come to witness the war. Isherwood compared his own soaked trousers, shirt ‘with a large burn on the front’ and shoes ‘shrunken and stiff with mud’ with Fleming’s ‘khaki shirt and shorts, complete with golf stockings. Strong suede shoes, waterproof wristwatch and Leica camera’. Fleming, he says, looked as if he had stepped ‘straight from a London tailor’s window advertising Gent’s Tropical Exploration Kit’. As they travelled together, Fleming ‘eyed the copses for signs of game’ and delighted his pacifist fellow-travellers by exclaiming, ‘How I wish I had a rook rifle!’

Acton avoided such excursions, preferring his courtyard house in Peking and the company of his students at Peking University. Delighting in life there, he would certainly have stayed forever had things turned out differently. Apart from translations and memoirs, he left a deliciously satirical and somewhat catty novel, Peonies and Ponies (1941), describing expatriate life in Peking. He satirised himself and his absolute passion for all things Chinese in the character of Philip Flower, who adopts a young Peking Opera singer in the hope of learning more about the ancient arts of China. Unfortunately, the boy is obsessed with all things modern and western: checked plus fours and horn-rimmed spectacles instead of silk gowns.

I was particularly interested in Acton’s character Rosa Hawkweed, whose ‘luscious romances about life in Ningpo were remarkable inasmuch as the authoress had never been within a hundred miles of the milieu she had chosen’. There are probably quite a few people that Acton had in mind here, and it is a salutary reminder that, such was the hunger for China books in Europe and America, a number of bogus works were concocted.
     Acton’s description might be an oblique reference to Vicki Baum, author of Shanghai ’37/Nanking Road (1939), whom he met in Peking in 1934. She does not mention China at all in her autobiography and, whilst the characters in Shanghai ’37 are very much stereotypes of good and bad, rich and poor, the scenes of destruction owe much to news photographs. I sometimes wonder about Nora Waln, author of The House of Exile (1939), supposedly an autobiographical account of life and love in an extended Chinese family – it is often used by anthropologists. To me, the story is somewhat unlikely and the dialogue implausibly stilted. Some of the same awful language invades Elizabeth Cooper’s My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard (1914), which seems to me to have been completely invented. The early editions are also illustrated with photographs of Japan. The cover of the 1914 edition is decorated with the silhouette of a Japanese pagoda with the characteristic long finial, surely a design that anyone familiar with China would have challenged. Waln only wrote one other book, on Nazi Germany, but Cooper, a professional journalist, was also guilty of My Lady of the Indian Purdah (1927).

Or should André Malraux, though not the model for Rosa Hawkweed, take the prize for inventiveness? His novel La Condition Humaine/Man’s Fate (1933) is often taken to be a blow-by-blow account of revolutionary struggle in Shanghai. Malraux visited the city, briefly, in 1932 and had been involved with left-wing activities, particularly publishing in French Indochina, although his main money-making venture was stealing sculpture from the temples at Angkor. He was imprisoned for this in Phnom Penh in 1924, which didn’t stop him from acquiring Gandharan heads in 1930, which he said he found detached from their bodies ‘by desert winds’.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Malraux’s varied career was his growing conviction that he had been a significant revolutionary figure in China. He told the writer and critic Edmund Wilson in 1933 that he had become a ‘Kuomintang commissar in Indochina and later in Canton’, and when he visited China as France’s Minister of Culture in 1965, he noted that Zhou Enlai had ‘hardly changed’, although they had never met before and it was Zhou Enlai, not Malraux, who had been political commissar at the Huangpu military academy in Canton …

Though not always as self-aggrandizing as Malraux, the invention, and second-hand information, of writers has always played a significant part in Europe’s knowledge of China. For reasons unknown, Shakespeare’s (very few) references to China are negative, for he uses the term ‘Cataian’ to hint at sly trickery and unreliability. In Volpone (1605), Ben Jonson goes further: ‘I have heard, sir, that your baboons were spies and that they were a kind of subtle nation near to China.’ Daniel Defoe, on the basis of no personal knowledge, seems also to have disliked and disapproved of China, disparaging the Great Wall in The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) as ‘something like the Picts’ walls so famous in Northumberland’ and inventing a house made entirely of porcelain. He was famously angry with the innocent Queen Mary, accusing her quite wrongly of responsibility for the fashion for Chinese blue and white porcelains in British houses, but this may have been because one of his many business ventures was a not very successful brick and tile factory near Tilbury. Milton and Swift both made mention of Chinese sail-powered wheelbarrows, but not much else, and these same intriguing vehicles were depicted in The Costume of China (1805) by William Alexander, an artist who accompanied the first British diplomatic embassy to China under Lord Macartney in 1792–94.

Diplomatic memoirs can be most informative. I enjoyed first Baron Redesdale, Algernon Freeman-Mitford’s The Attaché at Peking (1900), though his grand-daughter, Nancy Mitford, described them as monstrously boring. He was in Peking when the Xianfeng Emperor’s coffin was carried to the Eastern Tombs, and noted that no members of the public were supposed to see the catafalque, and that ‘the members of the legations receive an official notification not to show themselves’. I found this particularly interesting as I have been working on various aspects of Qing funerals and Freeman-Mitford’s account provides evidence that traditional practices were still in place in the mid-nineteenth century. By contrast, a French diplomat, Paul Claudel, better known for his plays Le Partage de Midi and the Soulier de Satin, wrote with no great accuracy in 1909, ‘I attended the joint funeral of the poor little emperor and his appalling mother-in-law [in fact, aunt]’, indicating that imperial protocol had changed dramatically. Claudel’s writings on China comprised a series of short descriptive pieces about pigs, the legend of the bell-maker’s daughter and the festival of the dead in Fuzhou, and only a few sections of the second of his Five Great Odes (1907) contain China references – to dust, yellow earth, camels and battlements.

Another diplomat-poet whose most frequent reference was to dust was Marie-René Auguste-Alexis Saint-Léger Léger, who wrote under the pseudonym Saint-John Perse and served in the French Legation in Peking between 1916 and 1921. His major poem, Anabasis (1924), was translated into English by T.S. Eliot, who described it sufficiently vaguely as ‘a series of images of migration, of conquest of vast spaces in Asiatic wastes, of destruction and foundation of cities and civilisations of any races or epochs of the ancient East’. Léger corresponded with the writer Joseph Conrad, telling him in 1921 to keep away as ‘China is surely the country least suited to a seaman … the whole of China is nothing but dust’. But, like Milton and Swift, he passed on a description of a sail-powered wheelbarrow: ‘On the approaches to the desert I have even run across nomad carts rigged with a sail as though they were at sea.’

I have to admit a personal passion for China memoirs, which often tell one less about China than about the authors and their absolute determination to avoid going native. Oliver Ready’s Life and Sport in China (1903) is a guide to keeping hunting dogs, what to shoot and what to eat for Christmas lunch, which offers barely a nod to China except to note that, as native dogs were ‘useless for sport’, being stupid and lacking a keen sense of smell, importing hunting dogs was essential to the sportsman, despite condemning them to an early death either from dysentery or ‘worms in the heart’.

It was Ready, too, who, because British men felt they had to ride horses for exercise, proposed riding around the city walls of Jiujiang, thus terrifying the local inhabitants. He also led the singing of ‘God Save the Queen’ on the lawn of the British Consulate at 2a.m. to the further delight of the local people.

His behaviour, and his delight in it, recall the time I spent at Cambridge University when students found drink, noise and frightening people fearfully good fun and college porters attempted to quell riots by shouting, ‘Stop being so bloody childish, sir!’ Ready’s memoir is politically incorrect to a degree, like so many others, particularly in his description of servants and peddlers. Most British residents in China were firmly convinced that they were being cheated, but Ready went to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate the wickedness of the milkman, purchasing a ‘lactometer’ before assaulting the man and discovering a hollow bamboo tube filled with water strapped to his arm.

One of the few correctives to the incessant complaints about the deceitfulness of Chinese servants in treaty port memoirs comes in Mrs Elsie McCormack’s Diary of a Chinese Baby (1920), in which a European baby, abandoned by his parents to the care of his Chinese amah, recounts placidly how the amah didn’t worry about dirt, letting the baby drop his rattle in the street and then suck it again, letting him eat dumplings (his mother is unaware that he has ever had any solid food), and generally spoiled him. Pearl Buck’s account of her Chinese amah was non-fictional, but no less fond, as was Brian Powers’ in The Ford of Heaven (1984); the loving warmth of a Chinese amah was something no children back at home were lucky enough to know. Contrast these accounts with Nancy Mitford’s account of her childhood and the cruel nannies encountered even within the British Royal family: the spankings, withholding of treats and their skill at making their charges cry unattractively as they were shuffled into the drawing room to meet their somewhat unfamiliar parents. Despite the dangers and differences, one can sense the warmth and love for children that prevailed in China.

I have spent many pleasurable hours reading politically incorrect China memoirs in the ‘ironworks’ around the old British Museum Reading Room. Before the construction of the millennial Great Court, the whole area around the Reading Room, haunt of Karl Marx, Lenin and Sun Yat-sen, was filled with shelving – six floors of Victorian ironwork. The first floor in the section known as the East Tangent was where all the books on foreign life in the East were shelved, with Pig-Sticking in India next to Houseboat Days in China and Head-Hunting in Borneo. I was not unfamiliar with the ironwork shelving as my father, who worked in the British Museum Library for many decades, used to park my brother and me there during school holidays with a pile of Beano and Dandy comic-book albums, held in the library thanks to the broad terms of the Copyright Act, and normally forbidden at home.

     Many of the titles of the books shelved in the ironworks include a personal pronoun, indicating the possessive and personal nature of the experience of China. Starting with Frederic Henry Balfour’s Leaves from My Chinese Scrapbook (1887), a very small sample includes Frits Holm’s My Nestorian Adventure in China (1924), David Morris’s China Changed My Mind (1945), Harold B. Rattenbury’s China, My China (1944), Bernard Llewelyn’s I Left My Roots in China (1953) and J.B. Powell’s My Twenty-Five Years in China (1945).

In the early 1970s, when tourists were gradually allowed back into China after the violence of the Cultural Revolution had largely passed, the authorities reinforced this ‘personal, possessive’ approach to China by assuring a stream of visitors that they were ‘the first’ to see this or that. I remember being mildly puzzled when it was announced that President Pompidou of France was ‘the first’ to visit the Yungang caves since the Cultural Revolution, thus obliterating a visit that I thought I had made in 1976. It may be that, in the past, experiences beyond the treaty ports were similarly managed and controlled to enhance the personal, possessive nature of the outing with a little competition.

Certainly, Martha Gellhorn’s memories of her journey to the Sino-Japanese war front in 1941 were to some extent poisoned by memories of the Mr Ma who accompanied her everywhere and controlled her every movement, although other factors conspired to make the experience one she preferred to forget:

‘In fifty years of travel, China stands out in particular loo-going horror’.