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IN 1905, THE BRITISH WRITER Robert Harborough Sherard (18611943), a friend of Oscar Wilde and erstwhile Paris correspondent for The New York World, penned a vivid memoir of his two decades pursuing literary adventures in the French capital. After recounting in detail his meetings and conversations with such towering figures as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas fils, Sherard recalled, in a somewhat nostalgic tone, another literary friendship:
I must not conclude my list of princes and potentates without mentioning the name of Marquis and General Tcheng-Ki-Tong, for some time chargé d'affaires at the Imperial Chinese Embassy in Paris. Tcheng-Ki-Tong was a Parisianized Oriental of a very peculiar type. He was a man of literary tastes, and contributed largely on Chinese subjects to the leading French papers. He was the author of a number of books on Chinese questions. At the same time he was ardently attached to the pleasure of the capital. It was said of him [...] that tucking up his pig-tail under his hat, and in European costume, he used to attend the public halls and dance as wildly the cancan as any Valentin-le-Désossé of them all.1
Who was this General Tcheng-Ki-Tong? What were these "books on Chinese questions"? What kind of images of China-and of the individual cultural mediator-emerged from these writings? Most interestingly, how did a diplomatic representative of the Qing Empire become such a notable public figure in 1880s-90s Paris? Finally, how might the story of this individual transformation shed light on the nature of cross-cultural interactions in the late nineteenth century and help us rethink existing conceptions of French exchanges with Asia in a period generally associated with expanding European imperialistic encroachment abroad and in the colonies and emerging Chinese anxieties about national survival? In other words, how was a Chinese diplomat-writer able to construct the identity of a bicultural and bilingual cultural mediator and thus demonstrate the possibilities for cosmopolitan self-fashioning and personal agency in the "age of empires"? This article traces the way in which Chen Jitong carved out a niche as a bicultural writer as he repeatedly inserted himself into print in late nineteenth-century France. Focusing on the rhetorical strategies Chen employed in Les Chinois peints par eux-mêmes and especially Les Parisiens peints par un Chinois,...