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Nicholas Clifford. "A Truthful Impression of the Country": British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880-1949. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. 239 pp. ISBN 0-472-11197-3, $39.50.
China has long held a privileged place in travelers' imaginations. Its aura of mystery and untold riches endured through the eighteenth century, but as industrialization and empire building took hold in the West, travelers found China compelling for its combination of ancient civilization and contemporary backwardness. That combination forms the basis for the view of China in Nicholas Clifford's "A Truthful Impression of the Country," which studies the changing response to China in travel accounts from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the Communist revolution of 1949. Clifford is specific about what his book is not. It is not a study of images of China, or of the travelers themselves, or the influences that shaped their point of view. Clifford maintains that "political and ideological presuppositions" control the discourse about China. Excluding feminism from such discourse, he claims that the changing view of China arises from "generations," not gender. The intent of "A Truthful Impression of the Country" ? an objective reporting of travelers' observation of China. The value of this objectivity is based on the assumption that travelers sought out experiences aimed at understanding the true nature of Chinese culture and people, thus giving the travelers' observations an authenticity that journalists and professional sinologists failed to achieve. Tracing these observations over seven decades, Clifford finds a correlation between travelers' views and the progress of Western politics and ideology.
To develop his argument, Clifford takes an expansive approach. He includes the writings of twenty-four British and fourteen United States travelers who visited China, starting with Constance Gordon Cumming's tour of the treaty ports in 1878-79, and ending with reports from...