The Chan's Great Continent, China in Western Minds [Hardcover]

Jonathan D. Spence (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1998

China has transfixed the West since the earliest contacts between these civilizations. Now Jonathan Spence, our foremost historian of Chinese politics and culture, tells us, in his elegant new book, how the West has understood China over seven centuries. Ranging from Marco Polo's own depiction of China and the mighty Kublai in the 1270s to the China sightings of three twentieth-century writers of acknowledged genius-Kafka, Borges, and Calvino-Spence explores Western thought on China through a remarkable array of expression. Peopling Spence's account are Iberian adventurers, Jesuit missionaries, Enlightenment synthesizers, spinners of the dreamy cult of Chinoiserie, American observers such as Bret Harte and Mark Twain, and diplomats from Lord Macartney to Henry Kissinger. Their visions, alternately coarse and subtle, generous and vicious, outline the West's image as readily as they do China's. China has commanded the attention of the West for seven centuries, and here Spence once again compels our attention with his new history of China's presence in Western minds.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Distinguished Yale historian Jonathan D. Spence examines the influence that China has long exercised on the Western imagination. Drawing on literary, historical, and travel writing from the 14th century to the present, he shows how the fabulations of medieval writers such as Marco Polo gave way to more factually minded reports from business travelers and diplomats. This then turned again to the exoticism of poets such as Ezra Pound and Charles Baudelaire, and in our time, returned to the realism of writers such as Pearl S. Buck and Edgar Snow. Spence's tour of these various ways of perceiving China yields a vigorous and interesting book that is of a piece with his many other studies of Chinese history. --Gregory MacNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Chinese historian par excellence Spence (The Search for Modern China) has taken on the formidable task of exploring how Westerners have thought about China. He starts not with Marco Polo, but with the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck, who came into contact with the Chinese inhabitants of the Mongol capital of Karakorum in 1253, some 20 years before the better-known Venetian's travels purportedly started, and ends with the recollections of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Included in the discussion are not only firsthand accounts by Jesuit missionaries, early diplomatic emissaries and, later, observers of the Communist revolution, but also works of fiction by those who had been to China (Pearl Buck, Victor Selagen) and those who had not (Daniel Defoe, Oliver Goldsmith, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges). The overriding theme is that most Western thought on China has been colored by the religious, political, economic or personal agendas of those doing the observing, or as Italian novelist Italo Calvino says in Invisible Cities, his novel about Polo and Kublai Khan, "the listener retains only the words he is expecting.... It is not the voice that commands the story, it is the ear." As in any such broad survey, the discussions of individual figures and the passages from original texts included are far too brief; however, in this case, they merely stimulate the reader's appetite to explore them further. Spence's book will appeal not only to those interested in history and literature, but to anyone looking for a perspective on contemporary discourse about China.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 279 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1St Edition edition (September 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393027473
• ISBN-13: 978-0393027471
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,742,290 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A curious fish, January 30, 2003

By 

Dale A. Favier (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds (Paperback)

~
This is an odd book, one of those curious fish that escape the nets of genre. Is is history? Sort of. Literary Criticism? Perhaps. Cultural anthropology? In a way.

It's well worth reading, but it's not an entirely successful book. In a way Spence's great virtue is his downfall here. He's too generous and open a reader, too ready to take the Western traders, soldiers, missionaries, and men of letters on their own terms. He'll follow them anywhere -- and the result is a rather unfocused phantasmagoria, a bewildering palimpsest of Chinas. One of Spence's main points is that the Chinas in Western minds have no necessary connection to each other, or to the "real" China -- and it's a point well-taken -- but the result is a diffuse and slightly out-of-focus book. It's history in the strict sense, when it intriguingly evaluates Marco Polo's credibility. It's history in the 19th Century vein (that's praise, in my book) when it presents the tragedy of an isolated missionary's wife betrayed to an unmerited violent death in the Boxer rebellion. It's cultural anthropology when it evaluates Mark Twain's simultaneous racism and anti-racism. It's pure literary criticism as it meditates on Kafka, Malraux, and Borges. It's very good in each mode. But the different modes don't really inform and enrich each other. The book remains a collection of disparate pieces, each very good of its own kind, but it never reaches the higher unity that we look for (maybe unfairly, maybe unwisely) in a cross-disciplinary book.

Still it is a great read, and its sheer variety (and the display of Spence's remarkable virtuosity) is entrancing. It may be disorienting, but it's never boring. Anyone whose fate makes them one of that other species of curious fish -- those who swim in between the East and West, being wholly of neither the one nor the other -- will want to read it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting read, June 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Chan's Great Continent, China in Western Minds (Hardcover)

This book offers an interesting portrait of China from the time of Marco Polo (13th century) to present day. As with all of Spence's books, the level of detail is sufficient yet not overwhelming. The book recounts numerous passages by various travelers who visited China over the course of 700 years. Would recommend this book to anyone interested in Chinese history or to anyone interested in learning about how the West has viewed China past and present.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good examination of how others view China, June 18, 2001

By 

Tracy Davis (California, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds (Paperback)

In Jonathan Spence's "The Chan's Great Continent", the author takes an interesting approach to Chinese history: examining how the West viewed China (and usually tranformed it into their own image). I really enjoyed the first half of the book, and thought that Spence's idea of Marco Polo possibly not really reaching China proper a very interesting and provocative theory, which I do agree with, based on the evidence. However, as I read the later chapters, there seemed to be endless repetition of the same points: Westerners who used Chinese characters to point to evils in their own society; Westerners who saw China as an earthly paradise superior to the West; and racist views on how Chinese were treated in the West, especially America. Not that I don't think these points important, but frankly, I became confused by the last chapters, dealing with the 20th century; I think the book runs out of steam by the last third, and Spence does not go into detail with some of the authors and events that he is describing. If you know little about China, the later chapters will not help your understanding. I do recommend this book, but knowledge of Chinese history would be beneficial to fully comprehend the excellent points Spence makes.