Society

Binchun adopted the dual genre of prose and poetry to resolve his conflicting and ambiguous roles in the mission. By alternating between a private traveler and an imperial envoy, he created an order of the world which maintained the classical topology while respecting the expectations of a wide range of readers. When he wrote as a private scholar, as in his journal and occasionally in poems, he recorded his social interactions and personal sentiments in a down-to-earth fashion. When he assumed the persona of an imperial envoy, a role he adopted in many of his poems, he recast foreign countries as tributary states, and their rulers as petty kings who modeled themselves after the Chinese emperor. The hyperbolic language of poetry, or “the rhetorical schemata of seeing,” as it was termed by literary scholar Xiaofei Tian, allowed him to present the mission as a triumph of the Qing’s civilizing influence over small oceanic states, and enabled him to praise foreign rulers without compromising the China-centered hierarchy.Footnote ²⁸ These two genres were disseminated through two overlapping channels: his journal was submitted to the Zongli Yamen and published, first by his family, then by commercial publishing houses, and translated into English and Japanese. His poems, on the other hand, mostly circulated among the literati interested in poetry who knew him through personal connections.Footnote ²⁹

Binchun’s exploitation of the poetic genre followed a long tradition in East Asian diplomacy and cross-cultural exchange. In the fourteenth century, Ming Taizu, founder of the Ming dynasty, negotiated China’s relationship with a rebellious Chosŏn Korea precisely in this medium. As Dane Alston has observed, the exchanges of poetry between Ming Taizu and Korean envoy Kwŏn Kŭn allowed the two sides to engage in a “subtle negotiation of regimes and their respective identities” when formal negotiations broke down.Footnote ³⁰ In the early 1860s, to build rapport with Western diplomatic representatives, Minister Dong Xun, a belletrist himself, translated Longfellow’s “Ode to Life,” transcribed it on a silk fan, and presented it to American minister Anson Burlingame. The fan was taken as a compliment by Burlingame, who regifted to it Longfellow himself, but Fang Junshi, Dong’s secretary in the Zongli Yamen, interpreted it as a means to morally transform barbarians, to “make them more Chinese.”Footnote ³¹

Binchun’s use of poems, like those of Ming Taizu and Dong Xun, was not merely an expression of his feelings and sentiments, but consisted of a strong performative component. In the metaphorical space of the poem, Binchun was able to style himself an imperial envoy, a knight-errant, a Confucian scholar on a private journey, and a Buddhist disciple, depending on the circumstances he faced. Rhyming in different emotional keys afforded him a degree of control over the meaning of the mission, and to initiate and develop friendship with foreigners.Footnote ³² He wrote poems to commemorate social events, to express gratitude to his hosts, to deliver compliments, and to give out as parting gifts. The poems all had notes appended to them with brief descriptions of the occasion, and many were cross-referenced his journal.

Binchun’s meeting with French sinologist Marquis d’Hervey Saint-Denys (De Liwen) demonstrates how this performative aspect of poetry exchange worked. The marquis apparently called on his hotel on a rainy day with a gift in hand: a collection of Tang dynasty poems, selected and translated into French by himself.Footnote ³³ Delighted to find a soulmate, Binchun recorded in his journal that the marquis was “an extremely artistic person, fond of wine and poetry, and had no interest in advancing his career whatsoever.” Two days later, when the marquis returned for another visit, Binchun presented a return gift, a poem in the form of an octet, which reads in part,

Figure 1.2 Binchun in Manchester, 1866

(courtesy of Tong Bingxue)

In Binchun’s rendering, the marquis partook in a distinctly Chinese cultural form and shared the sentiments of a Chinese scholar. “Pure talk” (qingtan) was a favorable pastime in the Six Dynasties (220–589 AD) among scholars who, dismayed at the chaos of their age, shunned public service and embraced the private society of like-minded friends. In this vein, the marquis rejected official service in the French government for the pursuit of Chinese poetry, a form of literature he evidently held in higher esteem than that of his native language. It was for this reason that Binchun referred to him as “someone who truly knows me,” and later in the poem, “an old friend.” The marquis conformed to the image of a “Confucian amateur” described by Joseph Levenson: a “genteel initiate in a human culture, without interest in progress, leanings to science, sympathy for commerce, nor prejudice in favour of utility.”Footnote ³⁴ In rendering the foreigner as a pure-minded Confucian gentleman, Binchun made a roundabout statement that Confucian culture had a universal appeal in Europe.

To be sure, in most of his meetings, Binchun needed interpreters to render his words and poems into foreign languages, thus surrendering some control over how messages were delivered, but the more important point was made through the repertoire of poetry performance. The drinking, toasting, and conversations with foreigners gave him a way to know the other in a friendly, even intimate, manner, and the knowledge thus gained supplied fresh material for his poems.

When depicting foreign customs and the reception of the mission, Binchun adopted the bamboo branch poetry (zhuzhici) genre, sets of four seven-character lines composed in a witty, jovial, or lighthearted manner about social practices, everyday events, and exotic objects of distant lands. Bamboo branch poetry had its origin in the folksongs of the Sichuan basin in the Tang dynasty, and it differed from other mainstream poetic traditions in that it was rarely used for weighty themes or expressions of personal frustration, but invited the poet to momentarily assume the perspectives and voices of others. In the Ming and Qing dynasties it became a favorite genre of imperial envoys and literati travelers. While in the Tang and the Song it had been mostly for the occasional literary play, Ming and Qing literati and armchair travelers expanded the use of the genre, using it to add a touch of zest and spontaneity to textual accounts of historical events and geography of foreign lands. You Tong, an esteemed scholar in the early Qing, for instance, composed hundreds of bamboo branch poems on eighty-six regions beyond the Qing’s territorial boundary, taking his materials from Ming historical and envoys’ accounts. He had never visited any of those places.Footnote ³⁵ In this respect, Binchun’s use of this genre for documenting his travels was a natural choice, and so was its result in yielding a striking similarity between previous envoy poems and his portrait of European societies.

On a practical level, Binchun’s use of poetry also rendered the etiquette and agendas of his European hosts less important and helped him adopt a ritual and aesthetic interpretation of the mission. Poems describing his meetings with European monarchs resembled those written by Ming dynasty envoys to Korea and Annam and celebrated his travels as evidence of the Qing’s imperial reach.Footnote ³⁶ He reported delight when he learned that a poem he had written on the Netherlands polders had been transcribed on “hundreds of thousands of sheets of newspapers” and “spread all over the ocean countries.”Footnote ³⁷ Upon his visit to a zoo in Amsterdam, he discovered that the curator had laid out Chinese paper, ink and brush, entreating him for a quatrain. His wish granted, the curator clutched the poem tightly in his hands, leaving with satisfaction. Among the fans of his poems were members of the Swedish royal family. The queen, who was a Dutch princess, intimated to him that she felt honored that Binchun had graced her home country with such beautiful verses.Footnote ³⁸ The king personally arranged his visit to all places of interest in the palace, with the queen pointing out to him objects of significance.

Palace style poetry was one of the main vehicles Binchun employed to transform European monarchs into Confucian-style rulers. The following excerpt is taken from a set of poems he composed for Leopold II of Belgium (Binchun’s notes in parentheses).

Leopold II of Belgium had briefly traveled to China in 1855, as the poem indicated, but his main purpose was to explore possibilities for new treaties and trade expansion. Having succeeded to the throne less than a year before Binchun’s arrival, in 1865, Leopold II’s generous reception of the mission was likely motivated, at least in part, by a desire to secure Belgium’s own treaty with the Qing. It was a goal which his father had been unable to achieve, mostly because of Belgium’s lack of military power.Footnote ⁴⁰ Binchun rendered Leopold II’s travel to China as a pilgrimage to the civilized center by a vassal ruler, and the poem resembled those written by Vietnamese envoys to the Ming and the Qing courts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.Footnote ⁴¹ This narrative was reinforced by his interlinear notes within the poems, which provided a historical account of the visit supported by dates and figures. Ironically, Binchun’s description of the military parade captured perfectly Leopold II’s intention of showing off Belgium’s military might to back up his desire for a treaty, but his poem left no doubt that this military demonstration was a proper gesture of respect.

While his reception by the “lesser rulers” such as the king of Belgium and the Swedish royal family was expressed in a joyous and unproblematic manner, Binchun’s encounter with the British monarch presented a bigger challenge for representation. The biji contained three long entries on his visits with the British royalty lasting three full days. The reader was told that on the first day, the group took a train to Windsor Castle and toured its gardens and major collections of antiques and art. On the morning of the second day, a court official delivered an invitation from the Prince of Wales to his state ball in the afternoon, and immediately the British assistants and translators “rushed to make their uniform and ceremonial swords ready” and the Chinese members put on their official gowns. In the afternoon, they were taken to the palace by a pair of royal carriages.

Windsor Castle, in Binchun’s depiction, was guarded by heavily armed “generals” and “unreachable by common people.” After being led through a bewildering number of hallways and stairs, the party arrived at a “dance palace” of the most amazing splendor (he estimated the number of lights to be “eight thousand and five or six hundred”). Four hundred royalty and ministers were present, together with more than eight hundred “palace ladies.” Binchun did not dance that evening, but he observed everything with good humor. The dance seemed like a semi-formal ceremony in which all participants adhered to a dress code and rules of conduct. As he expected to see on ceremonial occasions, the prince and his consort sat in the center of the hall, facing south. Officials sat or stood on three levels of stages flanking the royal family. Men and women danced about ten times to the rhythm of the sonorous music played by musicians sitting on the very top level of the hall. Military ministers wore red uniforms, whereas civil ministers wore black ones, and both had their clothes embellished with gold. After the dance, all stood up and waited on the two sides as the prince and his consort walked to another room.

A more casual meeting then took place between members of the mission and the prince. In response to the prince’s question of how London compared to China, Binchun tactfully avoided any direct comparison. “China has never before sent any envoy to foreign countries,” he said, “and it was only with this imperial commission that [we] first learned that there are such beautiful places overseas.” The reply was the product of a great deal of deliberation, and Binchun would continue to use the same line in other countries.Footnote ⁴² The prince was apparently overjoyed to hear this reply, but still modestly declined his praise. In a poem dedicated to the occasion, Binchun painted him as a brilliant young leader steeped in a Confucian deference and humility. Praising his fame as “well known throughout the countries of the ocean,” the poem went on, “in this faraway place he found ways to show respect to the Chinese envoy. His humble words and modest air only accentuated his excellence.”Footnote ⁴³

Comparisons between China and Britain came up again the next day, when the mission was received informally by Queen Victoria. Unlike the Prince of Wales, the queen insisted on hearing exactly what Binchun thought of England and inquired flatly what he made of the differences between Britain and China. Binchun replied that the English “buildings and equipment exceeded the Chinese in the intricacy of their manufacture, and its governance also has merits.” Thanks to the Queen’s generous accommodation, he gushed, the mission had seen the country’s most fabulous sights. Visibly delighted, the Queen expressed the hope that Binchun would report observations back to China “to bring the two countries even closer.”Footnote ⁴⁴

By his own account, Binchun’s reply satisfied his British royal hosts, but an astute reader of this account might notice a bit of sleight of hand in how he represented the exchange. His compliments gave more weight to the appearance and utility of what he saw in England – the beauty of the scenery, the grandeur of buildings, and the dexterity of machines – but he reduced matters pertaining to governance and culture to dropping a hint. The real emphasis of his portrayal of the exchange seems to be the gloating satisfaction of Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales upon hearing his compliments: they were anxious to receive such praise from a Chinese envoy.

Despite Binchun’s literary circumspection, he did not shoehorn his description of the audiences into a fixed tributary style, but conveyed a startlingly new message about the life of the British monarchy. Mid-nineteenth-century Chinese accounts of the West generally skirted the institutional and ideological components of Western governments by insinuating that these countries did not have an understanding of ritual. Lin Zexu, the opium suppressor whose destruction of the drug provoked the first Opium War, learned from his British informants that the royal families of Europe “lived in houses not at all different from those of the commoners,” with only a couple of guards.Footnote ⁴⁵ Qishan, the Manchu official who negotiated a ceasefire with the British Navy in 1841, reported that England was “a country of barbarians … They do not yet know about ritual, righteousness, benevolence, and humility, and how could they know anything about the differences between the monarch and the ministers, and between the high and the low?”Footnote ⁴⁶ Even in geologist Xu Jiyu’s far more accurate Yinghuan zhilüe, court etiquette in England was painted as a confusing scene where “the base and the noble are mixed in their seating, and no difference was observed between those below and those above, and those on the left and on the right.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Binchun’s depiction of his visits to European palaces contrasted sharply with those binary and detached portrayals of China and England. An awareness of social distinctions, as expressed in the relative positioning of the high and the low, suggested that the British court in fact shared certain concerns for ritual with the Qing. Even the state ball was seen as a co-ordinated dance with an elaborate dress code and sophisticated musical accompaniment to punctate every movement of the dancers. The ruling house commanded enormous wealth, power and prestige, and lived in a guarded palace forbidden to commoners. At the top of the hierarchy was the virtuous prince who greeted the Qing visitors with civility. In its ritual parlance, Binchun’s account suppressed cultural differences, but it also relegated European courts to a place of respectful subordination to a China-centered world.

The Power of Steam

For all Chinese members of the 1866 mission, the first train ride in Cairo was a momentous experience, delicious and disorienting, and one which stretched the possibilities of imagination about time and space. But Binchun’s representation of his first train ride betrayed careful design, with his journal and poems each capturing a distinct mode of perception. Readers of his biji would encounter an exhaustive enumeration of all practical conveniences he thought relevant: the thick and soft cotton-padded cushions, the spacious storage cabinets, the large glass windows protecting passengers from wind and sun. He loved the freedom of movement it afforded: one could choose to sit or lie down, eat or drink, to stand up and look around. The train started after a bell rang three times to notify the passengers. At first it moved slowly, but after a few paces “ran like an unbridled horse.” As to his personal experience, he simply wrote that at the train’s full speed, objects outside the window flew by so quickly that it was impossible to see them clearly.

In contrast to what reads like a dry consumer report after a test drive, Binchun’s poetic imagination captured a childlike ecstasy:

The festive language here expressed warm and unreserved praise for the train. The poet’s imagination mediated between the classical–mythical world of ancient China and his experience of European technology in a foreign city. The train gave concrete visualization to the fabled travels of the Daoist Liezi, who was known to have the ability to ride the wind for thousands of miles. This classical reference established a counterpart to the steam locomotive within the Chinese tradition. Similarly, by drawing on the mythical travels around the world by King Mu, the fabled fifth monarch of the Zhou dynasty, he bridged traditional lore with his own experience and channeled his fascination with a foreign technology into the glorification of Chinese traditions. It enabled him to make a stunning claim: had King Mu known of the train’s existence, His Majesty would surely have built tracks all over the world. The poem ended on a victorious note by anthropomorphizing the scenery along the way, transforming inanimate objects into sentient beings celebrating his mission.

In 1867, soon after the mission returned, the Zongli Yamen initiated a secret correspondence with seventeen officials on a number of topics regarding modernization and further opening to the West. One of the six questionnaires it sent out applied to the construction of telegraphs and railway lines in China by foreigners. With the exception of a few self-strengthening officials, the replies expressed “unanimous opposition to allowing foreigners to build railway and telegraph lines in China.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Binchun’s poems on the train, when placed into their historical context, may be understood to be an oblique rejoinder to the ongoing discussions about the railroad. Rather than subscribing to a set of fixed demarcations between China and the West, he imagined and internalized the foreign by enlarging the conceptual scope associated with China.

The physical and mental disorientation demonstrated in Binchun’s writing exemplified a common feature in representations of early Chinese encounters with the West, but it was not a phenomenon particular to Chinese travelers.Footnote ⁴⁹ Quite independent of Binchun, the Scottish poet James Thomson (1834–1882), an atheist and advocate for social reform, described his train ride in the following terms:

The similarities between Thomson’s and Binchun’s poems are striking: both invoked anthropomorphized imagery of moving earth, stars, and heavens, and both expressed a sense of ecstasy and empowerment. While Thomson’s object of empowerment was man himself (in particular, those of the poor and the working class) who “see[s] so much divine beauty in the common everyday world,” Binchun channeled his experience into his persona as an imperial envoy, interpreting the moving objects as a cosmic response to his visit.Footnote ⁵⁰ He utilized the disorientation induced by the train ride to create a new rhetorical space for writing about the train: it was comfortable, convenient, consistent with traditional practices, and harmonious with Chinese cosmology.

Elsewhere, Binchun’s depictions of steam-powered machines in land reclamation had the effect of legitimizing the technology by associating them with China’s agrarian economy. The low-lying Netherlands and its extensive drainage works piqued the interest of the ex-magistrate who had spent many years in Jiangxi, where hydraulic maintenance had always been indispensable for agriculture.Footnote ⁵¹ Crossing the border from Belgium, he observed how the landscape changed: “the waterways became numerous, all straight and long; bridges are as dense as a forest, and the natives are all simple and rustic.” After a few days examining the systems of polders, drainage ditches, and pumping stations, he wrote, “their residents maintain the rivers and erect stones in the water on which they built wooden platforms and build houses of six or seven stories. They gather soil on the banks and plant trees, leaving roads two or three zhang wide so that carriages can drive by.” The swamps were made suitable for agriculture by using steam-powered polder mills to remove excess water, an application that Binchun thought “reversed the nature of water” and was rarely seen in Chinese agriculture. “Peasants living on the hills of the lower Yangzi used bamboo ditches to channel water from ravines,” he recalled having seen as a magistrate, “but they were merely yielding to the nature of water.”Footnote ⁵² His poem on the system, glowing with praise, was soon translated and published in an Amsterdam newspaper.Footnote ⁵³

Although Binchun selectively emphasized Western inventions which he considered useful, he showed little interest in the principles behind them. The term fa (“method”) was used ubiquitously to capture the “ways” of the devices: huolunfa (the “method of fire wheels”) was his general term for the application of steam engines; dianji jixinfa (the “method of using electric machines to send letters”) was the secret behind telegraphy; shuifa (the “method of water”) was what enabled the dancing fountains; zhaoxiangfa (the “method of illuminating physiognomy”) was how photography worked. That each of these devices had its own fa meant that Binchun interpreted each device as following a different mechanism. By coupling fa with the names of the devices, he attributed the natural principles behind them to the devices themselves, not to abstract bodies of knowledge (xue).

Fa occupied a vague and unstable space in Binchun’s linguistic repertoire. Take his writing on the steam engine. A Buddhist term signifying illusion (literally a fire whirled in a circle), huolun had been borrowed by European translators as a general term for steamships and trains.Footnote ⁵⁴ By the late Qing, huolun became a rough equivalent of “steam engine.” Binchun consistently used it for the power source of many Western machines. The elevator was a vertically mobile room driven by the huolun method. Cotton textiles were woven by a huolun. Carpenters used a huolun to carve wood. A water pump was powered by the method of huolun. The object of the fire-wheel was taken as a solution to all problems, and was used interchangeably with the principle behind it, as in his suggestion: “China is using huolun to fill her ships; if we use this fa in peasants’ fields, the country will never worry about flood or drought.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Like most well-educated Europeans prior to the early nineteenth century, Binchun probably felt that investigating machines was below his status. Having discerned that the universal principle behind these self-driven machines was the application of the various fa, he saw no need to dwell on the details of their working. Did the steam engine always produce benefits? Binchun left no doubt that it did, but the younger members of his group drew different conclusions. Kuijiu, the youngest member of the mission, wondered openly about the connection between the industrial wealth in France and their countrymen’s dubious ventures in China. When he was told that France was among the wealthiest countries in the world, he blurted out, “Then why do they come to China to gain money?”Footnote ⁵⁶ Zhang Deyi, another student interpreter, reflexively reached for his purse when a poor child begged for money.Footnote ⁵⁷ The plight of children and youth eking out a life in factories and on streets struck a sympathetic chord in these younger members of the mission. The following excerpt about Fengyi, a Tongwenguan student, is from a Birmingham Daily Post report on the mission’s visit to an edge-tool works at Aston:

Since Binchun stayed with the students for the entire visit, we know that he, too, was exposed to the social problems the youngsters identified. It was by choice, rather than coincidence or negligence, that he left out the underside of the Industrial Revolution: the poor, the homeless, the exploited, and the politically subversive. The Europe he described was populated exclusively by men and women of high society, of respectable character and refined taste. The reader was told that “streets and markets are bustling and prosperous. All buildings are six or seven stories, with carved and painted gables, reaching to the clouds.” Gas lamps lit up night streets, and passengers did not need to bring candles. The vibrant street activities in the evening also received his favorable notice: “Streets and alleys are all connected, and market lamps are as numerous as stars. [On a normal day] they outnumber the lights on New Year’s Eve elsewhere.” Besides the wealth, cleanliness and convenience of the city, he marveled at the discipline of the police and the law-abidingness of the citizens in both Paris and London. The police monitoring the streets, he wrote, “shuttled back and forth without a moment’s rest, and their clothes and hats are bright-colored and all brand new.” Even during the day the only sound audible was from the wheels of the carts. “Passengers are as quiet as ants, and no one makes any noise.” He gave open praise to European journalists, and before long an English newspaper was able to report that “the cleanliness and maintenance of order in the streets of Paris have placed Baron Haussmann very high in [Binchun’s] estimation.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Women

A common trope in mid-nineteenth-century Qing sources about European societies was an inversion of the patriarchal order upheld in the Confucian tradition. The facts can be found in Xu Jiyu’s Yinghuan zhilüe, laid out in a pithy, easily comprehensible statement: “men constantly obey women – it is true throughout the entire country.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Wang Tao, a translator and journalist who visited Britain himself in the 1860s, even went so far as to construct Western states in his fiction as the legendary “Kingdoms of Women.”Footnote ⁶¹ These impressions were immediately confirmed by members of 1866 mission to Europe. Binchun wrote sympathetically that European husbands served their wives “like a maid or a concubine” on a daily basis.Footnote ⁶² Zhang Deyi related what he was told by a Westerner on a steamship: “Foreigners constantly debased men while exalting women. Husbands were subservient to their wives, not daring to leave them an inch. In child rearing too, men tended to everything like a wet nurse.”Footnote ⁶³

It eluded the Qing travelers in 1866 that the appearance of women in elite society was relatively recent in Europe, and it by no means meant the subversion of male dominance in politics or the family. Even when we make room for a certain compulsion to “inverse” or “other” the foreign society, it is still surprising the degree to which Binchun tilted his representation of European society to emphasize his socialization with women. Of the forty-nine sets of poems he composed in Europe, seventeen were for women or womanly things. Some of these were dedicated to women of royal houses and wives of high officials and local notables; others were written for dancers, singers, and actresses whom he saw in theaters. The effect was a thoroughly effeminized Western society.

Binchun’s preference for women as subjects of his poetics can be partially explained by practical convenience. Interaction with women gave Binchun a freer hand in steering and representing the mission in the ways he desired. Entertaining ladies was a good way to avoid being dragged into conversations with foreign diplomats, officials, and other interested parties. It was also a quiet form of protest against the agenda imposed by Robert Hart’s associates. When an official reception of his mission took place in Paris, he quietly slipped away to visit the Théâtre de l’ambigu, leaving only the students and his European assistants to attend the event.Footnote ⁶⁴ He reported not a word on the reception, but of the dazzling scenes in the play and the beautiful actresses he was effusive.Footnote ⁶⁵ On a meeting with French ministers the next day, he wrote only of “sitting down with their mistresses who asked him about Chinese customs.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This shift of focus enabled him to represent himself as the propagator of Confucian values to European ladies, and to report that they spoke highly of Confucianism (once they understood it). Binchun also preferred to rest among ladies when he was tired, a choice of company which took his hosts by surprise sometimes. While the mission was in England, a newspaper reported that after having gone through a number of rooms in a button manufactory, Binchun left the group, “betook himself to a small room where only a few young women were at work,” and remained there to rest. His intrusion evidently took by surprise the women workers enjoying their teatime. One of them, “a blushing damsel,” “offered him a cup of tea, which he drank with evident relish.”Footnote ⁶⁷

In her study of women in late imperial China, Susan Mann has described two familiar tropes in Qing literary constructions of women: the secluded, pure-minded guixiu and the cultivated and sensuous courtesan.Footnote ⁶⁸ Binchun’s writing about upper-class European women combined the two categories, alternating between their learning, cultivation, playful vivacity, and stunning beauty. As party hostesses, European women often resembled upper-class Confucian ladies in thoughtfulness and wisdom.Footnote ⁶⁹ A princess, for example, was praised for “belaboring herself exchanging greetings” with him.Footnote ⁷⁰ The queen of Prussia had a “gentle and honorable manner,” with a radiating modesty and a genial voice.Footnote ⁷¹ These honorable women were physically attractive, featuring pleasing fragrance, elegant figures and stunning faces. In a group of three poems devoted to European customs, he portrayed himself like a chivalrous gentleman guarding the ladies from smokers: “Women are untouched by worldly smog. So please! Do not let your tobacco near them.” The poem was followed by a note explaining that, given the high respect society paid to women, men should avoid women’s presence whenever they smoked.Footnote ⁷²

On other occasions – especially with younger guests – his depictions of women resembled courtesans more closely. He befriended them unapologetically, playing games with them, and in one instance receiving from two young ladies a photograph of themselves.Footnote ⁷³ His poems on such occasions were full of verve and naughty, casual joy. Appropriating a term which Tang Xuanzong, a famous eighth-century emperor, had used for his favorite consort, Binchun told us that Bowra’s sister, Anna, was a multilingual “talking flower” (jieyuhua).Footnote ⁷⁴ Bright and clever, she “loved Chinese the best of all languages.” Another female guest at the same party was “a rare beauty.” She made flowers into a hairpin for herself, and followed Binchun everywhere like a fluttering butterfly. Still a third female guest had “a smile echoing springtime.” Delighted to be in Binchun’s company, she volunteered to take off her wedding ring to show it to him. He had been told that Europeans considered taking off their wedding rings as inauspicious, so he praised her for the intelligence she demonstrated in refusing to accept such superstitious ideas.Footnote ⁷⁵

Binchun’s literary treatment of European women adopted a strategic framing similar to his writing on Western courts, machines, and cities. He emphasized their aesthetically pleasing aspects in a language of assimilation, leaving out any content which might appear troubling or difficult to explain. For a comparison, Zhang Deyi filled his account with strange observations such as the custom whereby young men and women “pecked the back of their own hands to pass kisses in the air,” the common practice at Windsor Castle where one “held and smelled” the Queen’s extended hand to show respect, and the rumors about pretty shop attendants who lured rich customers into becoming their liaisons.Footnote ⁷⁶ Although Binchun likely encountered many of the same stories, he made no mention of them. Instead, he explained that foreigners’ customs, strange though they might appear at first, were all perfectly sensible to a Chinese gentleman like him. As he wrote in a set of poems about European women: “only after a handshake could one be said to have fulfilled the ritual.” Asking his readers not to blame him for transgressing the Confucian tradition of gender segregation in a public space, he wrote, “I am afraid that you, my reader, might blame me for my careless conduct, but it wasn’t that I loved their soft hands.” In a note below, he added that handshaking was a sign of respect performed regardless of sex.Footnote ⁷⁷

No fundamental divide separated China and the West in culture, ritual, or gender practice. He used the metaphor of liang qi (“two branches”) in a poem about cultural differences: one branch was the Chinese way of doing things, and the other European. There was a measure of good sense in these foreign customs, which he was willing to acknowledge: “Upon entering the door I inquired after their customs, and I am amazed at how they do things differently from China! Taking off one’s hat is an observance of ritual protocol – surely, if one has a sincere and honest heart, what is the point of setting up fences?” He did occasionally drop a hint of bewilderment and regret. “They do not hesitate to stain their texts,” he wrote, “Men and women do not avoid each other and they will not be suspected of impropriety. It is most regrettable how they let their beautiful skirts trail along the ground to sweep the floor.”Footnote ⁷⁸ But the juxtaposition of gender transgression with his regret about their skirts getting dusty significantly reduces the weight of the moral concern.

The Journey Home

For a man who had spent most of his life on examinations and in bureaucratic service, traveling to the Far West was a fulfillment of the wilder side of his youthful dreams – being a knight-errant (youxia) like those in the vernacular novels he had idolized as a child. Towards the end of his trip, Binchun wrote a long poem to his brothers and cousins as a personal conclusion to the mission. It began, “I have always longed to drift on the ocean … Every time visitors came from overseas, I envied endlessly their rambling talks.” He took enormous pride in the attention they received in Europe: “They started spreading the word of our arrival two months ago, and when we arrived, many came to see us and to take photographs of us.” Like the Song dynasty celebrity poet Lu You, whose sensuous figure was a favorite image decorating literati’s fans, his photographs became increasingly expensive due to popular demand.Footnote ⁷⁹

This state of buoyancy took a turn at the time of his return. In contrast to Haiguo shengyou cao (Poems from a Triumphant Oceanic Voyage), his poetry collection written before the mission’s return, Tianwai guifan cao (Poems on Returning to the Mortal Realm) captured the poet’s emotional fluctuations and metaphysical speculations during his long journey home. The first entry of Tianwai adopted a melancholy tone: “I have already seen much, and so we made plans for our return. Foreigners came to see me off, and they, too, were sorrowful at our parting.”Footnote ⁸⁰ When they reached Denmark, it was announced that an epidemic had spread from continental Europe, and the country was closed to any visitors from those countries. Binchun took the quarantine as a personal affront. He chastised Denmark in a poem: “An epidemic is a disaster sent from Heaven; how could it be brought in by visitors? Closing the country solves nothing; they wantonly suspect passing visitors.”Footnote ⁸¹ From here on, he frequently complained in his poems about the physical hardship, loneliness, and uncertainty he endured in the trip.

The return trip was long, lonely, and uneventful. But it was also the kind of quiet that he needed to settle his thoughts and prepare himself for his friends and colleagues back home. It gave him the time he needed to edit his journal for its presentation to the Zongli Yamen. While he had used poems to express a wide range of personal sentiments in the first half of the journey, now he used them as a vehicle for getting his thoughts in order. Was the kind of prosperity and strength of Europe to be desired and emulated by China? What was the meaning of his journey in the grand scheme of things? He did not ask these questions explicitly, but he searched for the shape of a broader answer in his poems.

A glimpse of the answer was revealed to him in the middle of a night on the Indian Ocean, when a beam of white light shone through the dark and illuminated the night. While the other passengers chattered about its beauty and strangeness, he alone understood the meaning of the sign. As he stood out on the deck, the message conveyed in the Śūranṅngama Sūtra (lengyanjing), a Tantric Buddhist text that he had studied for many years, emerged in full clarity. Truly, this was Heaven’s way of telling him that all attachments to materiality were derived from delusions and moral corruption.Footnote ⁸² During the next few days, he composed a set of eight twelve-line poems in which he meditated on many historical figures, from kings who lost their thrones due to immoral conduct to ministers who suffered from their own clever schemes. “The sages only taught virtue,” he wrote in a verse, and “true gentlemen abide by a life of poverty.”Footnote ⁸³ Wealth and fame were not worth pursuing.

By the time the ship reached Hong Kong, his recasting of the mission had taken yet another turn. In highly dramatized language, he described the exotic elements and “magnificent beauty” (zhuangmei) of the fifteen countries: the huge and horrendous lions, the snowy white pheasants, the enormous whales, the fountains that shoot water up ten zhang, the fireworks that spread the whole sky with glittering beads. He also recapitulated his audiences with European monarchs, casting them in a strictly orthodox light:

The rulers whom Binchun had portrayed as Confucian-style monarchs in his poems during his travel – the charismatic, virtuous, and humble kings – were now described in the hierarchical language to emphasize their moral inferiority and subordination to the imperial center. The lavish accommodation he received in foreign countries was attributed exclusively to the power and influence of the Qing empire: “They valued me not for other things, but because I am from the Central Kingdom.”Footnote ⁸⁵ With this final encapsulation, Binchun affirmed the significance of his mission in accordance with the tributary system.

Yet this fixing of the mission’s meaning was unstable, and elsewhere Binchun gave clues to his troubled thoughts. In one of his short poems towards the end of the collection, he hinted that things were different from the past, and that the foreigners he visited were quite unlike the imaginary tributary rulers. He wrote it while his ship sailed north along the coast of Tianjin, where the sight of the Dagu forts evoked in him memories of the Anglo-French expedition seven years before. Ruminating on the thick ice covering the road, he wrote,

Anyone who knew of the battles at Dagu in 1858 and 1860 would get Binchun’s message easily: the challenge from Europe was no less than a heavenly change, but one could prepare for it by carefully analyzing all the available signs and studying history. Did Binchun see his mission as one of these portents? Did he construct his writing to embed an important message? We do not know for sure, but some of his readers indeed read between the lines and discovered hidden messages.

How His Readers Responded

Only a few weeks after his return, Binchun delivered his journal and a collection of maps to the Zongli Yamen and the governor general of Zhili, Li Hongzhang, and circulated his poems among his friends and relatives. Prince Gong was candid when he reported to the throne that Binchun offered “only a general shape” of European countries and did not “get to the bottom of things.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Li Hongzhang read his account immediately, and in a letter to Fang Junshi, a secretary in the Zongli Yamen, complained that it failed to meet his expectations: “I find it written with clarity and entirely too perfect. It has absolutely nothing specific to say of the political affairs and key manufacture methods of each country. It is only a record of his travel!”Footnote ⁸⁸ Fang also thought that Binchun’s account “only covers the distance of each country and the strangeness and craftiness of their clothes and carts. It does not go beyond what the Yinghuan Zhilüe covered.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Yet others in the Zongli Yamen saw profound implications in Binchun’s depiction of Europe. In a memorial drafted on behalf of the ministers soon after Binchun’s return, secretary Zhou Jiamei summarized the Zongli Yamen’s view as follows:

Zhou then recommended dispatching permanent legations. The reasons he gave were these: first, these envoys could report on the governance of European countries and open up channels of communication with their domestic authorities. Second, envoys could ensure the speedy delivery of trustworthy information on military technology. Third, as Binchun’s discovery made clear, Europeans were receptive to the teachings of Confucianism and respected Chinese ritual, and numerous Chinese in Hong Kong and Singapore welcomed the sight of Chinese officials. If the government could dispatch envoys to those regions, the Zongli Yamen was confident that it could recruit overseas Chinese or foreigners who could devote themselves to the Qing’s service.Footnote ⁹¹

In this memorial, Zhou cited Binchun’s journal to show that no beggars were observed on the streets of Europe. As we have already seen, the mission did in fact encounter the poor and the homeless in European cities, but Binchun avoided mentioning them because they did not fit into his carefully constructed account weighing the interests of all his readers. Zhou’s memorial took Binchun’s literary construct as a matter-of-fact depiction of the social and political conditions of Europe. If we do not think that Zhou (or his astute patron Wenxiang, who most likely dictated the memorial) was quite so naive as to accept Binchun’s sanitized account as a truthful representation, we are left to conclude that the content of this memorial was fixed, at least partly, before Binchun turned in his journal. Zhou’s memorial also cited Binchun’s journal for its depiction of European political structures, land and maritime defense, and arms manufacturing, but Binchun’s work scarcely mentioned those things. All of this points to the fact that high ministers in the Zongli Yamen had already formed their opinions about how to use Binchun’s report independent of what he actually wrote.

A very different sort of reception awaited Binchun’s writing outside the court and high official circles. Domestic demand for the book was astonishing. As Xu Jiyu recounted in his preface to Binchun’s biji, “So many came to request the journal that he decided to publish it for all admirers to read.”Footnote ⁹² To prepare the manuscript for publication, Binchun invited friends and relatives to write prefaces, including officials at the Zongli Yamen and Tongwenguan. Yamen secretary Fang Junshi proofread it to ensure its correctness.Footnote ⁹³ Authors of these prefaces were unanimous in celebrating his travel as a civilizing mission of the Qing empire. Xu Jiyu started his preface with just such a flourish: “Since the virtue of our Celestial Dynasty is spread afar, Western countries have all been waiting anxiously to communicate with the Heavenly Home.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Li Shanlan, a Tongwenguan teacher of mathematics and astronomy, used this occasion to praise the accuracy of geography in Buddhist texts. In this wordy introduction, densely packed with Buddhist terms, Li emphasized that the theory of the earth’s movement around the sun did not, as European missionaries insisted, originate in the West, but was first expounded in the Shakyamuni Buddha’s teaching.Footnote ⁹⁵ Binchun’s travel was depicted as a continuation of the Chinese empire’s long tradition of cherishing distant lands.

Literati readers scrutinized Binchun’s writing for its novelty, balance, and elegance. Lin Changyi, an acclaimed Fuzhou scholar fond of reviewing poems with exotic, foreign flavors, praised Binchun’s verses for their literary achievement and fresh content.Footnote ⁹⁶ As literary scholar Sing-chen Lydia Chiang has observed, although the term biji referred to unregulated prose broadly, the elasticity and heterogeneity of the genre made it a popular medium for recording “anomalies, personalities, and wonders.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Although it is not clear whether Binchun intended his title as a double entendre, we should not be surprised that some readers interpreted the Cheng cha biji as a notebook on the exotic. For example, Mao Xianglin, an expectant salt commissioner in Zhejiang, devoted a long entry on Binchun’s biji in his 1870 Mo yu lu, an encyclopedia on strange tales and uncommon phenomena. “It is full of strange and curious things,” he remarked, “a modern Classic of Mountains and Seas.” As to its literary quality and substance, Mao thought that Binchun’s account was “too long and uncontrolled,” and it suffered from a lack of insight into the “vital and vulnerable parts of foreign countries and the ways of their institutions,” but still “sufficiently interesting to provide material for idle chats over tea.” In his own transcription of Cheng cha biji, Mao expunged most of Binchun’s social accounts, preserving only his meetings with monarchs and officials. Mao also cut Binchun’s descriptions of city scenes and passages relating to customs and everyday life, but reproduced the exact descriptions of the zoo (including a long description of plants inside), the prime minister’s house, the Crystal Palace, Windsor Castle, and a factory. Notwithstanding Mao’s complaint that Binchun focused on trivialities to attract his reader, his own condensed version further reduced Europe to a list of exotic objects devoid of context and meaning. The term huolunfa, which Binchun had used to denote steam engines, appeared as falun (dharma wheel), zhuanlun (spinning wheel), or simply lun, a magic, self-propelled wheel.Footnote ⁹⁸

When Mao died a few years later, his work was compiled and edited by his friend Zhu Zuolin, who furnished each essay in Mo yu lu with a commentary. Zhu wrote about his own experience upon reading Mao’s adaptation of Cheng cha biji.

In contrast to the mixed reviews from his Chinese readers, to Western observers in China Binchun’s account was wonderfully refreshing and politically progressive. Young John Allen serialized it in his Zhongguo jiaohui xinbao in 1871. Wandering in rural Zhili in the 1870s, missionary Joseph Edkins struck up a conversation with a few local notables and asked whether they had read Binchun’s travel account. They had not, so he wrote, “A work like this, elegantly written in prose and poetry, fails to reach far in Chinese society. The Chinese conductors of the book trade do nothing to push the circulation of new works.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Binchun’s positive image of the West went so far beyond his expectation that W.A.P. Martin, president of the Tongwenguan, conjured up reasons to explain why it was so flattering. Martin guessed, groundlessly, that “for every word of praise he no doubt had ten of censure … but the censure was confidential and did not appear in print.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

In a few years, the Cheng cha biji found its way to the Japanese book market for its vivid depictions of European life. Shigeno Yasutsugu, a historian and sinologist who first brought the book home and published it, presented the book as evidence that China was learning its lessons and transforming itself into a strong country:

Shigeno’s interpretation of the book was partially confirmed by Ishihata Yoshihira, a member of an 1870 mission to China for a treaty negotiation. Ishihata reported that the Qing’s internal affairs had been in decay for decades, but recently a group of officials led by Prince Gong were steering its foreign affairs on the right track. He was especially impressed by Li Hongzhang, whose attitude towards foreigners exhibited a clear grasp of international affairs. In 1872, Shigeno and his friends published an abridged and annotated edition of Cheng cha biji (Jōsa hikki) in order to spur the Japanese government to follow suit. They furnished the book with woodblock illustrations to help readers visualize the grandeur and wealth of European cities. Drawn by an artist who most likely had never traveled to Europe, many of the illustrations were mechanical interpretations of Binchun’s descriptions (see Figure 1.3), with no appearance of Chinese visitors. Reframed in this manner, the Jōsa hikki became a statement of early Meiji aspirations.Footnote ¹⁰²

Figure 1.3 The Jōsa hikki’s illustration of a dance and banquet at Windsor Castle

Binchun’s journal and poems, after they were edited, embellished, and reframed, were integrated into the consumption of what Stanley Fish has called “interpretive communities” in a variety of different ways. Similar to the way that Ming-era booksellers adapted envoy accounts of foreign countries into eye-catching best sellers, the content of Binchun’s writing was used as raw material for imaginary and literary exercises by his readers.Footnote ¹⁰³ The various responses to Binchun’s writing by Zongli Yamen officials, Meiji intellectuals, Westerners in China, and Qing literati suggest that contemporaries imbued it with meaning according to their own interests and perspectives. The Zongli Yamen used it to demonstrate the need for further reform in foreign affairs. Meiji intellectuals used it to argue that the Qing was modernizing and to spur their own government into action. Depending on their positions, Western missionaries interpreted it as evidence either of China’s progress or of the abject lack thereof. Finally, his literati readers saw his writing as proof of the Qing’s imperial reach, and – while they might not have been completely convinced by its claims – enjoyed it for its elegance and novelty.

The creative energy in interpreting Binchun’s accounts far outlasted the Qing dynasty itself. Since Cheng cha biji was the first nineteenth-century Chinese account of Europe based on the personal experience of a ranking official, historians have often found it useful as a measure of Qing attitudes about the West. Twentieth-century Western and Chinese historians characterized Binchun as a conservative-minded official who was unable to see anything of real interest to China, and his mission as a failure in acquiring real knowledge about the West.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ A more charitable reading was offered by Knight Biggerstaff, historian of Qing modernization, who attributed Binchun’s lack of deeper insight to the fact that “insufficient time was spent in Europe for the members of the mission to obtain information which would be of very great value to the Foreign Office.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ While Binchun’s critics faulted him for what he did not notice, scholars of the modernization school, looking at what he did record, argued for a progressive, proto-modernist consciousness.

The divergent interpretations of Binchun’s accounts can be attributed to the differences in how readers understood the purpose of his writing. The Zongli Yamen, true to its original intention, understood the mission as strategic investigation, but the literati who purchased Binchun’s works recognized them as travel literature to be consumed for pleasure, fun, and general knowledge about the world. Western and Japanese readers searched in Binchun’s works for evidence of “progress” of the Qing government’s attitude towards the West, and were liable to shift their evaluations based on their existing frames of reference. Each interpretive community, with their shared strategies and core assumptions, rendered the meaning of Binchun’s text subordinate to their own perspectives.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ One suspects that if Binchun had known the ways in which his works would be interpreted, he would not have been entirely surprised by the multiplicity of interpretations. The ambiguity was, after all, built into how he constructed his account.

Conclusion

As Mao’s and Zhu’s notes suggest, Binchun’s journal bolstered the literati’s confidence in the superiority of Chinese culture by providing evidence that “the teaching and music” of China had spread to foreign countries. He did not give any indication that there was an alternative vision of civilization apart from that of China. Despite differences in customs and culture, Europe was essentially Chinese in its most fundamental aspects. The Europeans were peaceful, industrious, and civilized people. Their manufacturing, communication, and transportation methods were all intended to improve people’s livelihood. The Western monarchs were, at their best, Confucian-style rulers, and at their worst, extravagant and materialistic princes who nevertheless knew enough to admire Chinese emperors. In this purified version of Western society, everything was aesthetically pleasing or tantalizingly exotic, and all the virtues of the West were virtues of the Chinese.

Nevertheless, the diffusion of Binchun’s writing among the poetry circles did help break new ground in creating a way of depicting the West. He equated Western customs with Chinese ritual and showed Europeans to be admirers of Chinese arts and the Confucian tradition. In light of the larger context of his time and the tradition of envoy writing he inherited, there seems to be more to Binchun’s project than the sum of all the images he constructed for himself – a Confucian gentleman, an imperial envoy, a poet on a grand journey, or a knight-errant. This is because he was not blind to the realpolitik in Sino-Western relations, and plainly saw that further conflict between China and Europe could lead to unprecedented calamity. He dealt with the daunting task assigned to him by painting the West with a Confucian brush, and, by doing so, proved to others that a Qing official could travel to Europe, publish a well-received journal about his experience, and earn the appropriate recognition from the imperial government. The Zongli Yamen engaged him to work as a director in the Tongwenguan in 1870 (he died the next year).Footnote ¹⁰⁷

By committing to a literary course of action, however, Binchun’s practical value to Robert Hart and self-strengthening officials such as Li Hongzhang diminished. Hart seemed to have forgotten him entirely in early 1868, when preparation for the Burlingame mission was under way. The rapid expansion of information about the West after the 1870s made Binchun’s writing quickly obsolete and seemingly “conservative.” Li Hongzhang’s complaint that Binchun’s account was “entirely too perfect” gives away his expectation that, to gather information useful for the government, a certain breach of convention was unavoidable. Binchun’s failure, from Li’s perspective, lay in his giving in too much to the traditional patterns of literary consumption while ignoring the real purpose of his mission: to collect information and intelligence useful for the state. It also reveals Li’s expectation that the actual conditions of foreign countries could not be fully conveyed without compromising a China-centered worldview. For historians, then, Binchun’s story raises more questions than it settles: how did envoys to the West after him construct their accounts? In particular, how did they reconcile their roles as imperial envoys with the changing demands of the empire?