This article studies British and American—and, more generally, Western—travel writing on the Five Hundred Genii Temple (in Chinese, the Hualin Temple 华林寺), Guangzhou (then Canton), from 1849 to 1912, with a focus on local tour guides. By placing the writing in local cross-cultural interactions under the travel-to-tourism transition in China, it becomes clear that the guides, who themselves had little voice in travel writing, fundamentally shaped travel and writing in their dynamic relations with the guided and the local.
The Buddhist temple was unique in its locality in Guangzhou’s Western Suburb (in Chinese, Xiguan 西关) business area, outside the Chinese walled city and near foreign districts (see the location of “T. of 500 Genii” shown in fig. 1). Its attraction to a wide range of westerners lay mainly in its main hall, which contained five hundred Luohan 罗汉 statues and thus resembled a Western pantheon as a whole structure (fig. 2). Local cross-cultural interactions during the period under investigation made the temple a more convenient site for foreign travel than before, generating travel writing in abundance. In many cases, local guides, either foreign expatriates or Cantonese guides, accompanied or led the trip.
“Map of Canton by Rev. D. Vrooman,” remade by John G. Kerr, Reference Kerr1880. Source: Kerr, Canton Guide, attached page.
“Interior of Temple of Five Hundred Genii in Canton,” 1870. Source: Photographs from the India Collection at the British Library, photo 337/3(33), no. 437, Primary Source Media, Nineteenth Century Collections Online. Reproduced under Gale Terms of Use.
The temple was a signifier of China, serving as the British, the American, and the general Western “typical Other” of the time. Travel was an “encounter with otherness,” and travel writing was a record and reflection of that.Footnote 1 A traveler/tourist hierarchical binary was thus prominent—and is of central scholarly concern—in the Chinese context, by which superior travelers “exemplified independence and originality” with “new findings and in-depth understandings” on the geographical space called China and the people identified with that space.Footnote 2 This identity issue prompted travelers to demonstrate distinctive, generally “more intimate,” relations with the Chinese Other.Footnote 3 Julia Kuehn, among others, describes “a transition from travel to tourism in China” around the 1880s: while many earlier visitors showed characteristics of “explorers … on Chinese grounds,” later arrivals tended to be “satisfied merely to touch the surface.”Footnote 4
However, with China being the traveled-to and written-about Other under investigation, I primarily sort the corpus of the studies by Western literary genres, themes, and authors. The constructions (and disruptions) of otherness—and the distinction and transition between those processes—were thus often considered from a colonial, hermeneutical perspective with the geographical space called China and the Chinese population there as background.Footnote 5 When attention is paid to the Chinese “receptors’” or “travellees’” side of travel encounters, little focus is placed on the particular historico-geographical contexts or the cross-cultural interpersonal processes in which travel and writing took place.Footnote 6
To build upon the scholarship, I apply a local or “place-based” approach, using the word in the sense that it is ostensibly subordinated to its larger counterparts (especially the global and the national as Arif Dirlik, among others, discusses),Footnote 7 and recontextualize it in the studies of Victorian travel writing on “semicolonial” China.Footnote 8 This approach centers on travel writing’s production on—and by—one or several “unbounded, relational” sub-China context(s),Footnote 9 ranging from regions (like the Pearl River Delta) and cities (Guangzhou) to districts (the Western Suburb) and sites (the temple). As Dirlik argues, such an approach “is crucial to revealing the complexities … that are disguised in national or global narrative.”Footnote 10 I by no means ignore the global context or the Chinese context. I see diverse metropolitan contexts as where the writers’ cross-cultural journeys started and were mainly read.Footnote 11 I recognize the “semicolonial” condition, namely, China interacting with the multilayered, generally informal, and fractured colonial powers, as the common context for the writers’ travel experiences and as a relatively distinct context in the Victorian world.Footnote 12 My intervention is to show that travel writing was not finished on this level but “cowritten” by the local contexts and their socio-spatial cross-cultural dynamics. Through this approach, I find the guides, who were the mediating agents for travel—and the “negotiating” agents for themselves via travel, largely sidelined by both travel writers and scholars of Victorian travel writing—of particular significance for travel and writing, and travel writing studies.Footnote 13
A local approach to this topic is hitherto lacking and potentially constructive; it speaks to the essence of the studies. Travel and travel writing are destined to involve the local.Footnote 14 Rereading travel and travel writing on the ground lends nuances based on local specificities back to the writing of the time, rethinking established categorizations like traveler/tourist and generalizations like travel-to-tourism transition. By bridging Chinese and foreign sources, it also advances the studies’ contribution to the understanding of cross-cultural dynamics in localities as manifestations of “contact zones” and places of “transculturation”—as Mary L. Pratt and Regenia Gagnier, among others, discuss—in semicolonial China.Footnote 15
This article discusses the temple primarily as a site of travel rather than one of religion. The travel writing corpus includes accounts written mainly by Britons and Americans—who were the dominant groups—but also Frenchmen, among others. The period stretches from the hall’s 1849 establishment to 1912, after which the temple experienced several confiscations and shrunk to a smaller scale. To examine the encounters with otherness, the corpus excludes records by “expatriates” (following the use of the term by Robert Bickers) who stayed in the local rather than briefly visited the local: as these expatriates had their own occupations and livelihood based in the local, they should be considered already part of it rather than those who encountered it.Footnote 16 Included texts are found primarily in visitors’ travelogues but also in their newspaper articles, memoirs, and more.Footnote 17 I use Chinese local chronicles as well as Chinese and foreign guidebooks, official documents, and monographs about Guangzhou as sources for contrapuntal reading.
From Hwa-lin-sze to the Five Hundred Genii Temple
The temple was itself the product of a long history of interplay between diverse sociocultural forces. Established in 524 ce by the eminent South Indian monk Bodhidharma, it was named the Hualin Temple—meaning “Magnificent Forest Temple”—by Chinese monk Zongfu in 1655.Footnote 18 From 1846 to 1849, its abbot Zhiyuan, by order of the emperor, painted copies of the images of the five hundred Luohan statues from Jingci Temple 净慈寺, Hangzhou (then Hangchow), and led the project to build the Wubai Luohan Tang 五百罗汉堂—meaning “the Hall of Five Hundred Luohans [statues]”—according to the paintings. Concurrently, the temple’s other components, including the main hall and the stupa, were renewed and enlarged.Footnote 19 Its structure then remained unchanged until 1912, after which several sections of the temple were confiscated and auctioned intermittently by the Republican governments (1912–49).Footnote 20
Luohan—in Sanskrit, “Arhat”—in early Buddhist schools means a perfected person who has achieved enlightenment and is freed from the bonds of desire, which is the goal for those of Buddhist faith; such an image attracted nineteenth-century westerners primarily as it was considered a symbol of Oriental spirituality.Footnote 21 The tradition of the five hundred Luohans evolved primarily in Chinese Buddhism and lacks basis in the classical sutras, which were diachronically changing and regionally diverse.Footnote 22 Notably, it reminded Western visitors of their cultural-architectural convention of a pantheon, most of whom recognized the one in Guangzhou as the sole “Chinese pantheon.”Footnote 23
The temple was inextricably linked to its locality in Guangzhou’s Western Suburb (the area on the western side of the western city wall, see fig. 1), an area known for commerce.Footnote 24 Particularly, the temple and its surroundings were historically sites of “temple fairs” 庙会.Footnote 25 For foreigners, due to its location outside the walled city and its proximity to the restricted foreign business zone, the Thirteen Factories 十三行 (1685–1856) (fig. 1), the temple was one of the few sites they could occasionally get close to even before the 1842 Treaty of Nanking. While the treaty would allow them to enter the city legally, it was not put into practice until the Second Opium War (1856–60).Footnote 26 Afterward, it became a more convenient site for foreign visits. The establishment and development of the nearby Shamian 沙面 (then Shameen) concession (1861–1945) (fig. 1) contributed to that.Footnote 27 A rumor among foreigners about Marco Polo as one of the Luohans (fig. 3) further increased its appeal.Footnote 28 However, the five-year occupation of the city by British and French militaries (1857–62), the prevalent xenophobia among the Cantonese population, and the ongoing Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) in southern China meant that the area was quite unsafe for visitors until the mid-1860s.Footnote 29
“A statue of Marco Polo, along with a container for offerings, in the Temple of 500 Genii in Canton,” around 1910. Source: Photographs from Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution–Noncommercial–No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.
In this context, before the construction of the hall, few foreign accounts had mentioned the temple. The earliest was seen in 1833 in the Chinese Repository published in Guangzhou, in which the temple was accurately referred to as “Hwa-lin-sze,” following its Cantonese pronunciation.Footnote 30 After the completion of the hall, the temple received its popular Western names—used interchangeably in Western accounts—of which “Temple of the Five Hundred Gods,” “Temple of the Five Hundred Sages,” and finally “Temple of Five Hundred Genii” (fig. 1) dominated among the many variations.Footnote 31 These names reflect misinterpretations of the temple. They not only reinvented what the Luohans were but also incorrectly implied that the hall was the entire temple and isolated it from its local setting. However, these misinterpretations only became more rampant in the following decades as Western tourism in Guangzhou grew, in which the local guides played a crucial role.
Expatriate Guides, Travelers, and Receptions
This section traces travel to and writing about the temple from 1849 to the mid-1870s, bringing local expatriate guides to light. Their roles became increasingly important, as they transformed from city introducers to local acquaintance middlemen, and even to active conversation coordinators. Accordingly, visitors’ understandings of the temple progressed from “the Pantheon of Canton” being positioned within a socio-spatial system, to a pantheon of local hybridity, and, later, to a pantheon of cosmopolitan commonality. The expatriates’ careful guidance and hands-off approach—namely, their undemanding and open demeanor—helped create a reliable foundation and encouraging environment for the visitors’ explorations. Local interaction and comprehension expanded and deepened, with a sense of affinity outweighing strangeness and otherness. The guides, however, remained unhighlighted throughout the writing.
In Guangzhou’s turbulent 1850s and early 1860s, the temple, like most attractions in and around the city, was not a site that foreigners could visit freely. Visitors usually had to be accompanied by expatriate friends (mostly officials, businessmen, or missionaries) who knew the route and security situation, possessed basic knowledge about the place, and could translate or find an interpreter.Footnote 32 Led by the guides, they were taken to several sites in an itinerary, stopping at the temple en route. These visitors’ typical accounts would follow this formula: first, there would be a basic description of the visitors approaching the filthy and shabby building, which led them straight into the interior Luohan hall; a panoramic portrayal of the hall was then followed by detailed descriptions of several individual statues; occasionally, the narrative would proceed to a record of conversations with local people, mainly to figure out the meaning of what the visitors were looking at; based on limited experience, the accounts pervasively used the “pantheon” metaphor, with the Luohans generally conceptualized as “primitive demons,” implying aesthetical-architectural sublimity and sociocultural exoticism, which were often projected onto the whole of China.Footnote 33
Martha N. Williams, an American female traveler who explored southeast China for a year, was one such visitor, albeit a special one. As the wife of Dwight H. Williams, the American commissioner at Shantou (then Swatow), her privileged status meant that her Guangzhou trip in February 1861 was accompanied by “a Chinese linguist,” several “foreigners who are in the service of the Imperial Government,” and, most importantly, John G. Kerr, an American medical missionary who helped establish the acclaimed Canton Hospital, also known as Ophthalmic Hospital or Boji (Pok-Tsai) Hospital.Footnote 34 A Guangzhou resident from 1854 to 1901, Kerr’s broadness and depth of local knowledge would be demonstrated in his Canton Guide, continuously in print from the late 1870s (later renamed Guide to the City and Suburbs of Canton).Footnote 35 Under his guidance, Williams’s itinerary was evidently more comprehensive than others, covering Guangzhou up to the “Imperial Presence Hall” and down to the “Dog and Cat Market” (151–232). Furthermore, her writing did not simply follow the itinerary’s sequence but substantially reorganized it to show her train of reflection. Though the temple visit was during the later part of the trip, her account of it was resituated at the beginning of chapter 9 (198–219), which is about temples in Guangzhou. Based on her personal experience of wandering through several Chinese cities and Kerr’s patient and in-depth introduction, Williams’s comprehension of the “Chinese pantheon” reflected both common features and distinctiveness:
The Temple of the “Five Hundred Gods” was one of the most remarkable places that we visited in the Western Suburb…. This large apartment was nearly filled with images … placed on shelves eight or ten feet in height, and arranged in a sitting posture, facing each other, with long passages between…. It deserves to be called the Pantheon of Canton. (199–200)
Although Williams, like others, related the Luohan images to “the demonology of the Buddhists” (198) and constructed her depiction of the temple by starting with its visual resemblance to Western pantheons, she went beyond these superficial observations. Reading the excerpt alongside Williams’s overall account of Guangzhou (153–232), it becomes clear that she was able to contextualize the temple in the local context based on her travel experience in China and the guidance from Kerr. Calling the temple “one of the most remarkable places … in the Western Suburb” and pointing out many of its special features (198–201), she had grasped the temple’s marginal status within Chinese society and Guangzhou’s urban geography, compared with the Confucian Temple (204) in the walled city (as “C. T.” in fig. 1), for instance, as well as its unique position in terms of Buddhism and Buddhist architectures relative to other Buddhist temples all without five hundred Luohans (198–206). She made the daring assertion that “It deserves to be called the Pantheon of Canton” because, as she clearly understood, it was not only the sole “pantheon” within Guangzhou, but it was also a rare sight in other places and thus unique to Guangzhou. Conceptualizing the local as a multifaceted socio-spatial system that was not unlike metropolitan one(s), she accurately perceived the temple as a site that was unusual for both foreigners and most Chinese people (200). In this way, Williams disrupted the pervasive discourse of otherness that was projected on the temple as a synecdoche of all of China and demonstrated the generative potential of “contact zones” to foster cross-cultural understandings in the local.Footnote 36
For common visitors, the site itself was already difficult to reach without the guides’ company. For privileged visitors like Williams and the renowned English author Albert Smith,Footnote 37 a further localized understanding of the temple could hardly be gained without the guides’ mediation. During the period of unrest in Guangzhou, local geographical and social barriers meant that expatriate guides were indispensable to travelers. Accordingly, the local that was conceived by the guided was one that was primarily codified by the guides.
Since the mid-1860s and 1870s, as the security situation in Guangzhou improved and many expatriates and local Cantonese became acquainted in the Western Suburb, more people came to enjoy the experience that was once exclusive to Williams. Concurrently, a new form of temple visit emerged: expatriates often hosted receptions in collaboration with their Buddhist clerical friends, who were generally hospitable toward visitors. In response, visitors displayed a when-in-Rome attitude, adapting to local customs and practices. In an anonymous account for the Manchester Courier, a British journalist, led by Guangzhou British officials, wrote:
We were taken [by the guides] to visit the high-priest in a very comfortable apartment, where he received us with many “chin-chins,” begged us to sit down, and ordered tea and sweetmeats for us…. We followed the custom as far as we could. Having brought a bottle of sherry with us, we requested the old gentleman to take a glass, which he readily did; but one of the other priests excused himself on the ground, as explained by our interpreter, that he was “very apt to get drunk.”Footnote 38
In these receptions, Chinese clerics “readily” challenged Western stereotypes of Buddhist monasticism. It was also found that they ate meat on some occasions and had various kinds of hobbies.Footnote 39 These nuanced findings could not be made without the meetings and observations led by the guides, which also brought about a rhetoric of intimacy between “us” and “them,” in contrast to westerners’ commonplace “solitary quest” travel experience in China.Footnote 40
Through the guides’ introductions, some visitors built long-term relationships with locals. John Thomson, a pioneering Scottish traveler and the first photographer known to have documented China for publication in the Western world, traveled extensively across the country in the late 1860s and early 1870s, during which he visited Guangzhou several times. In Thomson’s first trip to the temple in 1869, he was introduced by English officials from the Canton customs office to the temple’s abbot and found:
The rooms he occupied were … adorned with a variety of rare and beautiful flowers…. The old gentleman had spent half his lifetime in this secluded place, and was greatly devoted to his flowers, discoursing on their beauty with an eloquent fondness, and expressing his delight to discover in a foreigner kindred sentiment of admiration…. Two years afterwards I visited the temple again…. I met with the same kind hospitality at the hands of the Abbot and the priests in his care.Footnote 41
Through close, private interactions, a common language on appreciating flowers created a “foreigner kindred sentiment.” Having visited the temple several times and been familiar with people there, Thomson and his fellows gradually found the clerics more open-minded, held more facets of personality, and shared more similar interests with themselves than expected: “At length we discovered, when a number of the monks had joined our party, that the shaven, silent, thoughtful-looking inmates of the cloister could unbend if they chose, and take a natural and ardent interest in the current gossip of Canton.”Footnote 42 For Thomson, among others who came multiple times, the image of the previously “secluded place” was subverted, turning the temple into a stratigraphic space with changing nuances over time.Footnote 43
More than others, the Luohans commanded the interest of the visitors. Receiving diverse explanations, visitors’ understandings of the Luohans gradually changed from vaguely demonic, superstitious figures to more specific hybrids of classical Buddhism and ancestral worship, like “deified ancestors” or “effigies of saints out of the Buddhist calendar representing [passed-away] men of different Eastern nationalities.”Footnote 44 In Thomson’s later visits, he noted that “Emperor Kien-lung,” who gave significant patronage to Buddhist temples during his reign (1735–96), had lately become one of the Luohans.Footnote 45 The temple became a socialized and historicized cross-cultural hub that incorporated classical (Indian) Buddhist elements and imperial Chinese influences.
The visitors’ exploration was generally undertaken with empathy and respect, demonstrated in a calm and humble tone. This helped them reflect upon the Western Suburb as the immediate context of the temple, which explained the clerics’ openness to the visitors. Some did not necessarily approve of this combination of religiosity and secularity, since it conflicted with their religious ideal of having sacred space separated from the profane. Nevertheless, they indeed grasped a lived genius loci, with many appreciating the cultural differences.Footnote 46
These accounts provided more than anecdotes. Much of the local information the visitors received was critically examined. Concerning the alleged Marco Polo Luohan, Thomson wrote of inquiring about it during his discussion with the abbot and noted that “careful inquiry proves this statement incorrect, as there is no statue presenting the European type of face, and all the records connected with them are of prior antiquity.”Footnote 47 In his later book, he further clarified that all the Luohans had been described in local documentation, “which runs back beyond Marco Polo’s age.”Footnote 48 Thomson was able to give the assertion because Chinese documents had come to his attention through interpersonal communication, which he prioritized above popular rumor among foreigners.
Arguably, this time represented a local knowledge boom for westerners. Though expatriates had acquired some local information, most of their works would only be published later, mainly due to the hitherto lacking publication resources in the region. The textually vague local required and encouraged visitors to explore and document. It was the era for travelers, by definition. Notably, the era relied heavily on the guides’ introduction and relaxed guidance that made cross-cultural communications effective and their work inconspicuous throughout, down to overcoming linguistic barriers—only a few accounts briefly mentioned that the guides brought “interpreters.”Footnote 49 Moreover, they quietly held control over where visitors went and whom they met. In this way, the guides repositioned themselves as hidden mediators and let the clerics act as local introducers in place of themselves. The guided, consequently, felt they were exploring the local themselves.
Of Guangzhou expatriates as guides, the most impactful one was John H. Gray, Guangzhou’s Anglican chaplain since 1852 and the inaugural archdeacon of Hong Kong from 1868 to 1878. His lengthy guest list included American politician William H. Seward, Austrian diplomat Joseph A. Hübner, and British travel writer Margaretha Weppner.Footnote 50 Unlike the case of Williams with Kerr or Thomson with the British officials, Gray’s guests hailed from diverse backgrounds of religion and nationality, often different from his own, despite the ongoing power struggles between those bodies, particularly between Britons and Americans in Guangzhou.Footnote 51 Moreover, Gray furthered both the connection-building and the hands-off approach of guiding. He actively created a friendly atmosphere to promote mutual interactions while maintaining an undemanding demeanor.
In 1870 William H. Seward, the previous United States secretary of state (1861–69), who negotiated the 1868 Burlingame Treaty to foster cooperation with China, visited Guangzhou and the temple. Gray introduced Seward to the clerics, and they
… were kindly received by the monks…. The brethren showed by their conversation a vague knowledge of foreign countries. They feared that the disasters which have befallen France may encourage Russian aggression against China. They understand something of the great civil war in the United States, and rejoice in its results…. At the service, the monks kindly seated Mr. Seward on a wooden bench, the only thing of the kind in the temple, in a good position to see the ceremony.Footnote 52
Seward’s cordial visit, led by Gray, showed the highest standard of guest reception. Although not mentioned, it is certain that Gray, as the only mediating discussant, helped direct the conversation based on the guest’s interests. Seward shared a common language of international and American politics with his “brethren,” and the privilege of sitting on the bench would have been impossible without the work done by Gray and his group. These occasions closely preceded the hall visit, creating a holistic spatial experience that reinforced Seward’s initiative of cross-cultural comprehension:
Its pantheon contains images not only of gods of whom the Greeks or Romans never dreamed, but of more gods than they ever worshipped…. In its centre, a gigantic, triple-carved statue, in a sitting posture, representing Buddha in his three “states”—the face looking to the left, symbolic of oblivion, or the past; that looking forward, expressive of activity, the present; the third, looking to the right, contemplation, or the future…. [It] is a temple dedicated to a religion, older than our own, which presents, in a vague, misty way, two of the principles of the Christian Church: one, the incarnation of the Supreme; the other, His presentation in three persons, one and indivisible. Are these analogies merely accidental coincidences, or are they different outgrowths of the same innate ideas, or are they shadowy forms of a common revelation? (262–63)
Seward’s description was full of “borrowed” religious implications that related to his political appeal. What he acquired from the local experience, arranged by Gray, and how it facilitated his metonymy are noteworthy. Calling the hall “its pantheon” implied his awareness that it was only one part of the temple, which many visitors confused. Rather than the refrain on primitive idolatry, core ideas of Buddhism were raised, like the “Past, Present, and Future Buddha.” A logical connection was made between the “pantheon” and classical polytheism.Footnote 53 Based on these understandings, the pantheon was conceptualized as a celebrated cultural-religious landscape: its aesthetics not merely an object for appreciation but also a means for reflexive “common revelation.” When encountering differences, like “heathen deities,” Seward traced shared “innate ideas” and conceptualized them as “ideal conditions of human existence” (263). Seward constructed a sense of commonality by assigning cherished values, especially antiqueness, to both his metropolis and the perceived local. The ideology that located the two as at different rungs of a linear development was largely concealed and potentially disrupted by the two temporal systems in “analogy” with each other (263), which revealed a more liberal discourse even compared to that of Seward in-office.Footnote 54
All these depended on the fact that Gray went further than other guides in collaborating with the locals and tactically promoted a mutually contributory conversation. It should also be noted that the guides, despite their significance as mediators and coordinators, were often merely mentioned in stylized acknowledgments and rarely highlighted in visiting narrations. This textual absence is a point I will return to later in my discussion.
Gray, however, did not stay in Guangzhou throughout. As the archdeacon of Hong Kong, the commissary of the Diocese of Victoria, Hong Kong (1867–78), and rector of Hunsdon, Hertfordshire (1881–84), he was busily moving between Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Britain. With the development of global and regional transportation, booming guidebook publications in the Pearl River delta, and an improving security situation in Guangzhou, it was also the period when foreigners gained freer access to the city and suburbs.Footnote 55 During Gray’s periodic absences and after his departure, with some other expatriates like Kerr coming and staying but leading very few visitors, the guiding role was taken by a rising Cantonese agent.
Cantonese Guides, Tourists, and a Curious Sight
Ah Cum, a Cantonese man who claimed to have been educated by Gray, was the first professional local guide who targeted foreign clients. This section traces travel and travel writing from the late 1870s to 1912, largely under the monopolistic and manipulative arrangement of Ah Cum and his relatives like Ah Cum Jr., among other Cantonese tour guides.Footnote 56 Visitors experienced superficial local encounters, visiting the temple as a curious sight. The sense of otherness prevailed, with the guides themselves often becoming the focal Other.
Before her 1878 trip to the temple, celebrated Scottish travel writer Constance F. Gordon-Cumming, who was eager to find a prime guide—as she always did—wrote:
This morning we secured the services of a guide who has long been a servant of Archdeacon Gray, who is the great authority on all matters of local interest…. I had been greatly counting on the privilege of making his acquaintance, on the strength of an introduction from Sir Harry Parkes, but to my great regret, find that he has returned to England. So we had to console ourselves with the second-hand erudition of Ah Cum, whom the Archdeacon carefully instructed in all points most certain to interest travelers, all of whom are therefore deeply indebted to him for this living guide.Footnote 57
Gordon-Cumming’s account indicated that Ah Cum not only learned from Gray about what sites—and what rhetoric introduced them—were most likely to interest foreigners, but he also inherited Gray’s interpersonal network among foreigners. Given the opportunity, Ah Cum devoted himself to the guiding role as a full-time occupation, even having business cards printed “in English fashion.”Footnote 58 These advantages soon led to their monopoly within the local tourist industry, despite regular competition since the late nineteenth century.Footnote 59 Other local guides were not mentioned by nearly as many visitors as them.
Meanwhile, the trips of Ah Cum and other Cantonese guides showed characteristics different from those of Gray among expatriate guides. These trips further highlighted curiosities for foreign visitors and were much quicker. Their clients usually visited ten or more sites within a day trip. The group was kept moving, with no time or chance for close observation and interaction. These were reflected in the clients’ accounts. Skillful writers like Gordon-Cumming, though highly interested in the temple, eventually left only one short paragraph on it, with descriptions no more insightful than those in published guidebooks.Footnote 60 However, these accounts featured the Cantonese guides as the authoritative commentators during the visits. Two anonymous female correspondents from Dundee Courier, guided by Ah Cum, noted: “We hadn’t time to make sure of the five hundred, but we took the guide’s word for it, who said, ‘Me makee count, five hundred olla there.’ He described them as the works of various artists, and the priests who gathered round us corroborated his remarks.”Footnote 61 Both the locals’ corroboration and Ah Cum’s Cantonese pidgin English endowed him with more authority, which was granted to the agent positioned as the local Other.Footnote 62
With time, this authority was extended to the very beginning in deciding where to visit and which object to gaze at. British navy lieutenant Peter S. Dixon’s account was representative:
There is, of course, a list of the regulation sights to be visited in Canton as anywhere else. Our guide [Ah Cum] suggested “The Temple of the five hundred Genii” and we agreed…. One of them represented, as the guide pointed out with a grin, Marco Polo, the first European who visited China.Footnote 63
Guangzhou became “as anywhere else,” the temple was one in “a list of the regulation sights,” and attractions were “suggested” and “pointed out” by the guides.Footnote 64 Such changes have been primarily ascribed to Gordon-Cumming among her cohort, who “turned distant places into tourist sites … [and thus] marked a transition from travel to tourism in China.”Footnote 65 In these scenarios, however, it is the guides and the visitors that mutually effected the changes, in the sense that the visitors’ exposure to what they perceived to be local was limited to—and restricted by—their interactions with the guides, while other locals were largely excluded.
Adding to that, Cantonese guides focused mainly on attracting tourists efficiently, leading to a lack of accuracy or clear communication in how they conducted the tours. This was testified to by incorrect details in numerous accounts. Caroline S. Shunk, an American army officer’s wife, recorded her 1909 visit:
The Temple of the Five Hundred Genii is dedicated to the five good spirits of which I wrote you—who visited Canton two thousand years ago, mounted on rams. This temple contains five hundred images, some of which we saw, including one of Marco Polo, who looked like a pirate in a shovel-hat. Ah Cum pointed to his image, saying, “He much please American.” We were not sufficiently elated to satisfy Ah Cum, however, so he took us back to Marco Polo, adding severely, “He great American.”Footnote 66
In the first sentence, Shunk confused the temple with another called Wuxian Guan 五仙观 (fig. 1)—called by foreign visitors the Temple of the Five Genii (as “T. of 5 Genii” in fig. 1)—and transplanted the latter’s legend to the former. Here, language was evidently not the problem: Ah Cum’s English was widely said to be very understandable and was rated the best among the locals.Footnote 67 Reading through Shunk’s Guangzhou account,Footnote 68 it becomes clear that it was because she was being led to too many sites in a single trip that the two temples had become confused in her memory. This was a commonplace phenomenon in tourist experiences around the turn of the century, when many sites were crammed into the guides’ itineraries. As commented in a popular guidebook, “He [a tourist] would only lose his way and probably get somewhat mixed in his ideas at the amount of curiosity displayed on his behalf [by the guide].”Footnote 69 Notably, in this way, Western guidebook producers were competing with Cantonese guides within the tourist economy.Footnote 70
Shunk’s punch line was Ah Cum’s introduction to Polo’s statue—here, Ah Cum changed the Venetian traveler’s nationality at will to match the visitor’s potential interest. While it could not be judged from the context whether it was also a joke that Ah Cum was playing on Shunk, in such scenarios, visitors generally formed two interrelated impressions about the guides and gradually projected them onto the whole of the Chinese population: first, that the Chinese sought to ingratiate themselves with foreigners, and second, that their local knowledge was, at best, vague.
The first impression, especially as the new century progressed, was of “Canton [as] more Chinoiserie than Chinese,” as one writer recalled.Footnote 71 Yet this new local Chinoiserie was different from the conventional Western manifestation of China.Footnote 72 It was not Western-oriented but arranged for westerners by Cantonese hosts. The power relation was reversed here, as “the host [was] in control of the act of hosting and, by implication, also over the people being hosted.”Footnote 73 Notably, this hosting role was endorsed by both their presumed local identity and by Gray among foreigners.
Moreover, the Chinoiserie controlled by the guides was actively disrupting cross-cultural interaction. This exemplified “transculturation”—“[h]ow metropolitan modes of representation [were] received and appropriated on the periphery” as Mary L. Pratt discusses, or how “cultures borrow[ed] from and use[d] each other,” in Regenia Gagnier’s words.Footnote 74 Commercial tourism became the metropolitan mode of representation that was appropriated by the locals, who “to various extents determined what they use it for.”Footnote 75 Ah Cum was trying the methods he had grasped from Gray and his guiding experience to appropriate metropolitan baggage, like curiosity toward the Other and nationality of the self, and to turn it into commercial opportunities by managing local accessibility and transparency. The beginning was the “metropolis’s obsessive need to present and represent its peripheries and its Others continually to itself,”Footnote 76 as I have shown earlier. In the reigning global colonial (and capitalist) circuits, the local episode, for the metropolitan visitors, was the loss of the so-called authentic Guangzhou and China and the “genuine” cross-cultural interaction that it implied.
For the second impression—of the locals’ perceived ignorance—it was mostly developed from the visitors’ negative experience with the guides, who gave an impression of the unreliability of the Chinese as a whole. British missionary John A. Turner, who traveled in southern China for five years, recorded a Chinese “fable” about the Luohan statues told by the guide and commented: “But like all else they [the Chinese] tell you, it serves to cover their profound ignorance of their own history and everything else.”Footnote 77
Having witnessed and gradually confirmed in public discourse the unseriousness of the guides and their representativeness of Chinese people, most foreigners became similarly unserious, giving up hope for accurate knowledge.Footnote 78 Meanwhile, the Cantonese locals and clerics, as part of this changing cross-cultural condition managed by the guides, might also have changed. Turner, two years later, in his travelogue Kwang Tung, related it to the increasingly mercenary attitude of the locals: “Scarcely any information can be obtained from the attendants, at such places, for they seem to know nothing, except that you have come to fee them.”Footnote 79 The transculturation of commercial tourism became a metropolitan/local reciprocal process, in which “the Chinese pantheon” became a glimpse of chaos, with its “original” local connotations undermined. In this process, the guides as local informants were sometimes deauthorized, but they were at once identified as representatives of the local chaos to which they led.
From the turn of the century, stereotypical images, partial understandings, and false information prevailed, which became even more conspicuous as the accounts were often short, due to the authors’ tight visiting schedules. This was connected to the travel-to-tourism transition of Western travel in China, with the changing constitution of visitorsFootnote 80 and the rise of “rampant Sinophobia” under imperialism.Footnote 81 Turner, for instance, as a representative of an increasing number of missionaries, was writing in support of a growing interventionist appeal. However, it is also noteworthy that the authors were ultimately facing the temple in a local context that was as multifaceted as it had been for earlier visitors, yet most of them could no longer grasp its local complexity and depth. What had changed most markedly in the travel process was the guides. As demonstrated above, many of the (mis)understandings were made in the guides’ gradual reshaping of local encounters. The guides, together with the guided, were the makers and writers of such (mis)understandings.
Discussion and Conclusions: Travel Writing in the Local
The temple was important as a local site in Guangzhou. “The Pantheon of Canton” was more important as a local cross-cultural site of travel. On this second level, its popularity lies in its proximity to foreign districts and its seeming resemblance to a Western pantheon. For Victorian visitors, it represented the ideological Other but was (ostensibly) aesthetically related to the self. To explore it required overcoming linguistic and sociocultural obstacles. While guides helped, they occupied an in-between space to exert influence. Moreover, for visitors, proving themselves as “travelers” became a challenging task at Guangzhou’s “regulation sites,”Footnote 82 which many people had already explored and documented. This onsite competition for “new findings and in-depth understandings” reinforced the significance of the guides.
In earlier years, the guides had been foreign expatriates who offered careful guidance and a hands-off approach, with their roles shifting from introducers to mediators and coordinators. Nuanced local understandings developed, leading to increasing empathy and a sense of commonality that challenged their presumed otherness. Around the 1880s, local Cantonese guides began to lead, restricting and distorting cross-cultural interactions, imparting a superficial view and a revived sense of otherness that peaked around the turn of the century. The guides, by enhancing or diminishing local interactions, significantly altered travel encounters.
In A Century of Travels in China, Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn argue that “Travel writing moves in a liminal space between knowledge of the self and the encounter with and understanding of the Other.”Footnote 83 However, when tackling liminal spaces, scholars often focus primarily on the self: the backgrounds and ideologies of travel writers and the metropolises from which they hailed. The Other largely remains othered in critical research. Yet the traveled-to and written-about Chinese Other in this period was undergoing drastic changes in diverse local contexts, with travel itself and other external impetus at play. It was also the very “distant” Other for the West geographically and culturally,Footnote 84 bringing about dramatic encounters on travel’s local side. The local was of particular significance in the process of travel and travel writing in China as the encounter with otherness.
Rereading travel and travel writing as a local process requires delving into the dynamics and nuances on the ground. In this article, I have shown that travel and writing were far from Britons and Americans encountering a monolithic Other but involved considerably more players and higher cross-cultural complexity on the part of the local. In particular, my account advances discussion of the travel-to-tourism transition by introducing a local perspective: Guangzhou’s regional unrest, development of the transportation and publication industries within the area, and especially the changing local guides were interrelated factors that not only reflected such a transition but also contributed to it.
The local approach also furthers reconsideration of (often binary) categories including “traveler/tourist,” “foreign/Chinese,” and “metropolitan/local” in the contact zone by examining how they often overlapped, were sometimes reversed, and remained irrevocably intertwined. Visitors became privileged “travelers” only partly because they came with a different cross-cultural morality or initiative. More prominently, they were guided to appropriate local historico-geographical and interpersonal contingencies, while the “tourists” were less so. The “British” Gray could be said to be more “local”—in terms of (promoting) local understanding—than the “Chinese” Ah Cum he had educated, who appropriated “metropolitan” tourism, obstructing the “local.” This “presence of concrete cultural practices” on the local level reveals not just fluidity of the identities but also the ways in which they were stirred by their reciprocal relations.Footnote 85
However, one question remains unsatisfactorily resolved in the identities and the relations. The guides’ cross-cultural motives and strategies are blurred in the documentation. In Gray’s case, no detail about his rapport with Buddhist clerics, nor his attitude toward them, was clearly discussed in his monograph on Guangzhou, while an inconsistency was divulged when he described his Chinese clerical “friends” as “persons whose souls are so completely covered with the leprosy of idolatry.”Footnote 86 In Ah Cum’s case, it is likely that no autobiographical account exists, to the extent that noting his marginalized yet lucrative livelihood and brokering leverage in texts risked incurring persecution during xenophobic turmoil like the Taiping Rebellion and the Boxer Rebellion.Footnote 87 The lack of candid records by the guides themselves should be contextualized in the contact zone of “semicolonial” Guangzhou and China, where “hybridity actively sought to evade attention,” a condition that reflected back on the travel writing.Footnote 88
Yet it is in this lack of autobiographical documentation that the significance of the guides, together with the very process of (Victorian) travel writing in the (Chinese) local, is best revealed. The guides, who themselves left no word on travel writing, led the travel and were concurrently traveled and written. Being mediating agents in the encounter with otherness, they cowrote travel writing and the cross-cultural dynamics therein. Expatriate guides, though contributing a lot during the travel process—often as the de facto coordinators—were obscured in the writing. This was partly due to their evading attention and avoiding (visible) local attachment, but more importantly due to the travel writers’ furtive trope that depicted them merely as introducers—as part of the self, therefore demonstrating their “independence and originality” as legitimized “travelers” in the local. Conversely, Cantonese guides, though diminishing the process, were very much highlighted, as travel writers widely regarded and strenuously portrayed them as part of the local Other—so much so that they often became the synecdoche for the Chinese Other. Cantonese guides, with double endorsements from foreigners and from their native-born and performed local identities, were made overtly central both to travel, managing the encounter with otherness, and to writing, in which they became the focal Other. Travel writing in the contact zone was a process of discursive empowerment with identity construction. Behind the constructed identities lie the shifting relations between the guides, the guided, and the local, with the agents positioning themselves and one another in relation to the local.
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