This is an exercise in comparative literature that is informed by recent debates in the theory and philosophy of historiography. The comparative aspect of this study not only refers to its subject matter – the production of utopian discourses in Europe and China at crucial times in history – but also to the methods of the narrative domains at stake – that of literature, and that of history writing. Such a perspective, one that addresses matters of historiographical enquiry from the standpoint of literature, subscribes to Hayden White's understanding of historical narratives as ‘verbal fictions’,Footnote ¹ but interrogates one of their constitutive devices: the chronotype.Footnote ² I thus engage with the notion of chronotype by folding it back onto its literary model (the Bakhtinian chronotope) via the notion of genre. In doing so, my goal is twofold. On the one hand, I intend to foreground chronotypes as ambivalent constructs that, while effectively making up what they address (e.g. ‘The Renaissance’), at the same time allow for its co-productive interplay (e.g. ‘renaissance’ as a historiographical category deployed by different agents). On the other, I intend to highlight how the functional equivalence between the writing of history and the writing of literature allows for the literary text to work as a marker of historical time.

A peculiar idiosyncrasy marked the appearance of the word ‘utopia’ in Chinese. Echoing utopia's playful etymology, the calque wutuobang 烏托邦 entered the Chinese lexicon as an empty signifier: it pointed at something that was not there. Coined by the late Qing scholar and translator Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854–1921) in his translation of Thomas H. Huxley's Evolution and ethics of 1894–5, wutuobang had no direct equivalent in Huxley's source text, in that nowhere in Evolution and ethics is the word ‘utopia’ used. Yan Fu deployed the neologism wutuobang as the title of one of the fifteen prolegomena that Huxley added to the 1894 edition of his original lecture from 1893.Footnote ³ In the sixth of these prolegomena, Huxley restates his argument for humanity's emancipation from the laws of Darwinian evolution by means of a metaphor: similarly to the way a properly managed garden can shield its plants from the struggle for survival in the natural world, so humanity can emancipate itself from the ‘state of nature’ via the establishment of properly administered ‘colonies’. The ideal goal of humanity, Huxley concludes, would therefore be ‘the establishment of an earthly paradise, a true garden of Eden, in which all things should work together towards the well-being of the gardeners’.Footnote ⁴ In his translation titled Tianyan lun 天演論 (The theory of natural evolution), Yan Fu then glossed Huxley's ‘garden of Eden’ by adding that ‘the Chinese call this Huaxu 華胥 [Land of dreamsFootnote ⁵], while the Westerners call it wutuobang’.Footnote ⁶

Yan Fu was among the first late Qing literati to study abroad – ‘Great Britain was to become his ideal model, and English ideas were to dominate his intellectual development’Footnote ⁷ – and therefore his familiarity with the English language and literary tradition should not come as a surprise. Yet because Thomas More's Utopia would not make its appearance in Chinese until much later – with Liu Linsheng's 劉麟生 1935 translation – Yan's choice of words in Tianyan lun remains remarkable.Footnote ⁸ Why did he decide to coin a specific, hitherto unused neologism in order to elucidate an image – the garden as colony/enclave – that was in itself quite self-explanatory? Furthermore, wenyan 文言, that is to say the variety of literary Chinese used by Yan Fu in his translation, already offered a meaningful array of lexical choices that could better approximate Huxley's botanical metaphor: from the biblical leyuan 樂園 (‘garden of delights’ or ‘earthly paradise’) and yidian yuan 伊甸園 (‘garden of Eden’),Footnote ⁹ and the Buddhist jingtu 净土 (the ‘Pure Land’ of Amidism), to the autochthonous letu 樂土 (‘happy land’) and leguo 樂國 (‘happy state’) used as early as in the Shijing 詩經 (Classic of Poetry, eleventh to seventh century bce),Footnote ¹⁰ the Confucian datong 大同 (‘great harmony’) and xiaokang 小康 (‘small tranquillity’), and the Daoist taiping 太平 (‘great peace’),Footnote ¹¹ if not classical China's very own utopian archetype, taohua yuan 桃花源 (‘Peach Blossom Spring’).Footnote ¹² The sudden emergence of wutuobang as utopia from the sea of Chinese lexicon towards the end of the nineteenth century seems rather to suggest that this word fulfilled a particular cultural need at a precise moment in Chinese history.

The recoinage of autochthonous taohua yuan as wutuobang in early modern China, though on the surface an individual translator's quirk, calls for the re-evaluation of utopia in light of its transcultural circulation. On the one hand, the reasons for utopia's transcultural reframing are embedded in the idea itself: whether it be qualified as Platonic Politeia, Confucian datong, Daoist taohua yuan, or Morean Nusquama, utopia demands a leap of imagination beyond the limits of one's own culture and towards the nowhere-else that it posits. On the other, as this article tries to demonstrate, utopianism as a modality of thinking and practice seems to surface with substantially similar features ‘through all the provinces of history’ at certain crucial times.Footnote ¹³ Yet because, as Quentin Skinner warns, setting out the ‘ideal type’ of any given notion would risk hypostatizing it into a ‘fully developed form … always in some sense immanent in history’, and because the idea of utopia already posits in itself an ideal type of sorts – utopia is by self-definition immanent in history – its transcultural recurrence must be contextualized.Footnote ¹⁴

In doing so, I do not intend to draw an alternative genealogy of this idea nor to trace the branching out of ‘utopia’ from its presumed classical loci of coinage to its reverberations in conveniently distant contexts.Footnote ¹⁵ Rather, I want to argue for the emergence of utopian thinking (expressed in writing and practice) as the cultural inflorescence of particular socio-historical conditions coming together in a given time and place: in other words, how the imaginary institution of utopia responds to similar structural stimuli.Footnote ¹⁶ By considering the emergence of utopian thinking as the by-product of (relatively) commensurable historical situations, my goal is to avoid the two main fallacies at stake when drafting the history of an idea: namely, its reduction to the matter of the text in which it first appears (for example, ‘utopia’ as something that is inextricably bound to the blueprint of Thomas More's book); and, conversely, its univocal ascription to the local context from which it emerges (for example, utopia as a unique by-product of the historical context of early Renaissance EnglandFootnote ¹⁷).Footnote ¹⁸ The local production of utopias may tap into autochthonous tropes and motives,Footnote ¹⁹ or adapt blueprints received from abroad,Footnote ²⁰ yet these traits remain accessory. Analogous historical contexts engender similar imaginary practices, so that a certain context may provide the ground for a certain kind of abstraction in very much the same way (to rehash Huxley's metaphor) that a given terrain will sustain the production of certain plants better than others.

In order to demonstrate this point, I will attempt a comparison between two apparently distant cultural contexts in which the idea of utopia gained similarly unprecedented traction: early sixteenth-century England and late nineteenth-century China.Footnote ²¹ Insofar as ‘[g]enres provide a conceptual framework for the mediation (if not the “solution”) of intractable problems, a method of rendering such problems intelligible’, narrative utopias came about in these contexts to mediate specific problems generated by hitherto unprecedented historical circumstances.Footnote ²² What made the actors inhabiting these cultural contexts particularly receptive towards the fashioning of ‘inverted images’ and ‘notions of nowhere’ from which to look back at their own present was a radical shift in their understanding of space and time.Footnote ²³ In the case of early sixteenth-century England, preconceived understandings of space and time were thrown off by the growing awareness of there being a mundus novus expanding beyond existing geographical, political, and cultural cartographies. In the case of late imperial China, foreign intervention threw off the last tenets of a Sinocentric worldview that organized tianxia 天下 (‘all under heaven’) in terms of dependency on the imperial court, along with culturalist dichotomies that framed as ‘barbarian’ (yi 夷) what lay beyond China proper.Footnote ²⁴ These were events of global significance, whose importance was marked in both cases by the appearance of very specific ways of writing about time and space.

The writing of narrative utopias during these crucial junctures performed a buffering function, elaborating through the allegory of the literary text the impact and uncertainty brought forward by the changing of global co-ordinates. Written in Latin in 1516 and first translated in English in 1551, More's Utopia punctuated the long sedentary hiatus between John Cabot's last overseas expedition (in 1497) and Francis Drake's first voyage (in 1577), addressing by extension ‘the apparent slowness of Europe in making the mental adjustments required to incorporate America within its field of vision’.Footnote ²⁵ Similarly, the flourishing of wutuobang narrations in late imperial China, following in particular the Wuxu bianfa 戊戌變法 (‘Hundred Days’ Reform’) debacle of 1898, punctuated late imperial China's slowness in coming to terms with the new (‘Westphalian’) world.Footnote ²⁶ In both cases, the writing of utopias marked a moment of cautionary retrenchment and epistemological re-elaboration: of the Tudor court against Spain and Portugal's dominant position in the Atlantic trade between 1492 and circa 1570;Footnote ²⁷ and of the Manchu court's condition of (semi-)colonial subjugation against the expanding presence of the West in East Asia during the second half of the nineteenth century.

For the sake of this argument, it is useful here to consider utopia, as both an idea and a literary genre, in the guise of a ‘chronotype’. Building upon Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of ‘chronotope’ as ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’ of a literary text, John Bender and David E. Wellbery posited chronotypes ‘as models or patterns through which time assumes practical or conceptual significance’.Footnote ²⁸ Chronotypes are markers of temporality; they provide unifying directives for the inscription of particular historical contingencies into larger explanatory frameworks (such as the ideas of ‘Reformation’, ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Renaissance’, the Italian Risorgimento, or the German Wiedergeburt). Utopia, then, is akin to the notions of chronotype and chronotope in that it provides an ideal image of the ‘intrinsic connectedness’ of time and space through and in the literary text. ‘Utopia was born with modernity’, Krishan Kumar remarks about More's eponymous work;Footnote ²⁹ similarly, late imperial China's compelled modernization starting from the First Opium War gave rise to new strands of utopian-like imaginaries that transposed in figurative terms the country's ‘need for a thorough reappraisal of her position vis-à-vis the outside world in general and the West in particular’.Footnote ³⁰

What qualifies the utopian chronotope as a marker of historical time is the twofold relationship, at the same time analogical and contrapuntal, that links the practice of writing utopia to the writing of history. Building upon Frank R. Ankersmit's thesis that ‘[h]istoriography develops narrative interpretations of sociohistorical reality; literature applies them’, we may argue that utopian literature develops narrative interpretations of socio-historical reality via the latter's radical negation, especially when the said reality is undergoing substantial changes in the way in which it understands itself in time and space.Footnote ³¹ As Kumar further remarks, ‘[u]topia … expels history from its timeless order of perfection’, yet behind this apparent gesture of expulsion is an act of ‘chronotypic’ foregrounding – the recognition of the limits of pre-existing epistemological co-ordinates for making sense of time and space.Footnote ³² New calendars and new maps always accompany the writing of utopias: born out of critical shifts in the understanding of time and space, ‘utopias dramatize historical crisis … [and] show how history is made up – in the double sense of “constituted” and “fictionalized” – in order to show how it can be made over’.Footnote ³³

Yet it is not only by virtue of utopia's contrapuntal relation with history that the writing of utopia is akin to the writing of history. These practices are predicated upon similar rhetorical strategies, in that both the utopian and the historiographical text are the results of constructivist operations of colligation ‘which [bring] a number of empirical “facts” together by “superinducing” upon them a conception that integrates and makes them in this way capable of being expressed by a general law’.Footnote ³⁴ By way of comparison, if the ‘general law’ of the Renaissance as a historiographical construct is broadly defined by the ‘creation of states as merely political structures regardless of moral norms’, ‘the development of the individual’, and the ‘[d]iscovery of world [in relation to] man’,Footnote ³⁵ or the law of the Enlightenment is the prevalence of ‘reason’ over other modalities of thought, then the general law of utopia is its being the best of the possible worlds yet to be realized.

Before delving further into the analysis of utopian representations between China and Europe, a working definition of utopia as a practice of imaginary colligation is in order here. In its broadest sense, utopia is ‘the imaginary projection of a society that is substantially different from the one in which the author lives’.Footnote ³⁶ Throughout history, this imaginary projection has been developed in many forms: as Lyman Tower Sargent remarks, a comprehensive account of this idea would have to include utopian traditions in literature, social experiments informed by utopian ideals, and utopian social theory.Footnote ³⁷ Fatima Vieira further highlights the following most commonly recurring aspects of this construct in literature: (1) the oppositional character of utopia's ‘ideology’ – namely, the presentation of an ideal society predicated upon the rejection of the ideological tenets of the socio-historical reality whence it originates; (2) its literary form – that is, the prevalence of exposition over narration, the philosophical digressions, the spatio-temporal displacement, and so forth; (3) its function – the expected impact of utopia on the reader's mind; and ultimately (4) the ‘principle of hope’ that underlies it – what Ernst Bloch defined as ‘hoping beyond the day which has become’.Footnote ³⁸ For practical reasons, I will rely here on the operational definition given by the science fiction scholar Darko Suvin in Metamorphoses of science fiction: ‘Utopia is the verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author's community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis.’Footnote ³⁹

Within the European literary tradition, the archetype of utopia is to be found in Thomas More's (1478–1535) eponymous work, De optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia (On the best state of a commonwealth and on the island of Utopia), published in 1516 in Leuven.Footnote ⁴⁰ More probably conceived the idea of ‘utopia’ in the summer of 1515, during an embassy to Bruges as a representative of England's royal trade commission. During his stay in Flanders he visited Antwerp, where he met Peter Giles (Pieter Gillis, 1486–1533), a fellow scholar, civil servant, and (like More) intimate of Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536). Utopia, composed of two parts, reflects these experiences: book i begins with a brief account of More's diplomatic mission and of his acquaintance with Giles, whose fictionalized persona, together with the eclectic figure of Raphael Hythloday, takes the centre stage in a fictional conversation with More on the morality and legitimacy of providing counsel to a prince. Book ii, on the other hand, consists of Hythloday's account of the ‘Island of the Utopians’ and the perfect features of its government and society. ‘[Y]ou should have been with me in Utopia and seen with your own eyes their manners and customs …’, Hythloday tells More and Giles at the end of book i; ‘[if] you had seen them, you would frankly confess that you had never seen a well-governed people anywhere but there’.Footnote ⁴¹

More initially conceived Utopia's book ii as a stand-alone fictional travelogue narrated by Hythloday after his alleged return from Amerigo Vespucci's third voyage to the New World.Footnote ⁴² Yet even though the matter of book i, together with Utopia's ancillary correspondence, was composed later, the twofold structure of the work's final edition came to embody the underlying principle at its core. When Thomas More conceived the island of the Utopians in 1516, he most likely had in mind the geography of the British Isles: his description at the beginning of book ii – ‘two hundred miles across in the middle part, where it is widest, and nowhere much narrower than this except towards the two ends … crescent-shaped, like a new moon’Footnote ⁴³ – borrowed from ‘The Descripcyon of Englonde’ included in The St Albans chronicle by Thomas Walsingham (d. c. 1422).Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet it was not Utopia's resemblance to the reality of sixteenth-century England that granted this work recognition, but rather the radical potential of its idea. As the etymology of the word itself suggests, the imagination of utopia requires a gesture of negation and displacement from the contingent reality of the author and the imaginary of radical difference represented by the utopian locusFootnote ⁴⁵ – an engagement, as Antonis Balasopoulos terms it, with ‘spatial disjunction’ and ‘political deterritorialization’.Footnote ⁴⁶

On the level of form, this disjunction is emphasized by the difference between the dialogical and oratory style of book i – a well-recognized format in the humanist tradition of More – and the travelogue presented in book ii.Footnote ⁴⁷ On the figurative level of the text, the positing of the hiatus is conveyed by the image of Utopia's transformation into an island upon King Utopus's decision to have ‘a channel cut fifteen miles wide where the land joined the continent, [which] thus caused the sea to flow around the country’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As Fredric Jameson argues by building on Louis Marin's semiotic analysis of More's book, such a symbolic gesture maintains a double edge, in that it reasserts (rather than severing) the link between utopia and the present, allowing for the former's ‘superimposition’ onto the latter (i.e. utopia replaces the present), but also for the latter's historical ‘emplacement’ (i.e. the present is historicized, it is recognized in and as history).Footnote ⁴⁹ It is upon the utopian text's covert function of historical emplacement of the real via its overt displacement and apparent negation, rather than in the fanciful depictions of imaginary landscapes and exotic populations, that the utopian chronotope effectively translates and functions as a marker of historical time.

A similar gesture of disjunction (but not yet of emplacement) can be found at the core of what is considered the locus classicus of utopian fiction within the canon of classical Chinese literature: Tao Yuanming's 陶淵明 fable Taohua yuan ji 桃花源記 (The story of the Peach Blossom Spring).Footnote ⁵⁰ Written in 421 ce at the beginning of the Nan-Bei chao 南北朝 (‘Northern and southern dynasties’) period, an interval of institutional fragmentation and political chaos that followed the demise of the Jin 晉 empire in 420, Taohua yuan ji tells the story of a fisherman's fortuitous discovery of a reclusive community inside a remote grotto located at the heart of a peach-tree forest:

Yet while it is true that Tao Yuanming's Taohua yuan ji offers one of the earliest fictional formulations of the utopian chronotope, its comparison with More's Utopia is relatively sterile. Taohua yuan ji and Utopia vastly differ at the level of their formal features: Tao Yuanming's utopian fable, even when considered together with the poem ‘Taohua yuan shi’ 桃花源詩 (‘Ode to the Peach Blossom Spring’) with which it is usually paired, does not exceed 500 characters (322 in prose and 160 in verse). Translated in its entirety, it would not surpass the length of the shortest of the letters that introduce the main body of More's Utopia. Though word count is seldom relevant in the evaluation of the quality of a piece of literature, Taohua yuan ji's conciseness, its standard stylistic features, and its canonical references to Daoism do not suggest the intention, on the part of Tao Yuanming, to engage in any kind of radical or oppositional literary project.

In fact, the utopian imaginary delineated by Tao Yuanming was not one of radical difference, but rather of nostalgia; it posited no opposition to the prevailing ideology. Written in a time of political upheaval and instability – that is, the long period of political fragmentation that followed the fall of the Han 漢 (206 bce–220 ce) and lasted until the Sui 隋 reunification in 581 – Taohua yuan ji reads like a nostalgic vision of the past. The Peach Blossom Spring is presented as a pastoral haven that was spared from history's ruinous unfolding:

Even though Tao Yuanming's ‘cutting off’ of the Peach Blossom Spring ‘from the outside world’ may recall More's severing of the island of Utopia from the continent, the ‘nowhere-elses’ that these texts posit remain meaningfully different. In Tao Yuanming's fable, history is not emplaced/transcended but rather forgotten, as if it had never happened.

Tao Yuanming's instance of historical ‘withdrawal’ in Taohua yuan ji was coherent with the aesthetics of its time. As Zongqi Cai suggests, owing to the fragile political context of the time, which highly inhibited intellectual pursuit and the literati's participation in public discourse, the aesthetics of the Six Dynasties (222–589 ce) developed as one of disengagement and retreat from public fora to private enclosures – mingshi 名士 (‘famous scholars’) coteries, private patrons’ gardens, and the salons of aristocratic families.Footnote ⁵³ As the intellectual debate shifted from public to private, its tenor became more abstract and ‘abstruse’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Taohua yuan ji is a by-product of the aesthetic of disengagement that this hostile political climate fostered: the Peach Blossom Spring – a secluded community in harmony with nature, self-governed, blissfully the world forgetting, by the world forgot – came to embody both the literati's nostalgia for a past that did not ostracize them, and the gardens behind whose walls they were forced to retreat.

This is not to deny Taohua yuan ji its relevance as utopian archetype, nor to reassert the priority of More's prototypical Utopia in the transcultural history of this idea. The composition of Taohua yuan ji is clearly informed by tropes of secluded grottos as loci of social/individual bliss and ‘return to nature’ (fan ziran 返自然) narrations that share with the Morean notion of utopia a similar significatory purpose.Footnote ⁵⁵ As Zhang Longxi has shown, it is entirely possible to argue for Tao Yuanming's Peach Blossom Spring as an ante litteram locus of conciliation of utopia as both individual pursuit and collective endeavour, ‘more than a thousand years before Thomas More and more than a thousand and three hundred years before Voltaire['s Eldorado]’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet, while it may be true that the principles that inform Tao Yuanming's work are ‘probably more important for ethical and political philosophy than a sophisticated plan or blue print [sic] for an ideal society with intrusive rules, regulations, and protocols’, I argue here that it is not in Taohua yuan ji that we can find the most constructive point of reference for a comparative understanding of utopia in the Chinese tradition.Footnote ⁵⁷

Writing a history of utopia that relies on the contingent appearance of this idea through all linguistic, cultural, and social provinces according to criteria of mere similarity would eventually dilute it to its broadest recognizable denominator.Footnote ⁵⁸ If it is true that the historical emergence of utopianism as a modality of thinking and writing is predicated upon underlying instances of ‘spatial disjunction’ and ‘political deterritorialization’,Footnote ⁵⁹ then the ground for the reframing of utopia/wutuobang as the composite result of different situated co-productions must be located accordingly. Taohua yuan ji posited no disjunction: the fact that Tao Yuanming located the Peach Blossom Spring inside a grotto hidden within a forest located in what would be considered ‘China proper’ (Zhongguo benbu 中國本部), and that the utopian community thereby introduced was modelled after a famous passage from the canonical Laozi 老子,Footnote ⁶⁰ qualifies Taohua yuan ji as a utopia of re-territorialization that did not posit a radically ‘other’ alternative, but rather called for a rectification of the present according to the past. In the case of More's Utopia (but also of Shakespeare's The Tempest and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis Footnote ⁶¹), the underlying disjunction was represented by Europe's oceanic turn after Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World at the end of the fifteenth century – ‘the most thorough transformation of the planetary outlook in all the known history of the world’ and ‘the first, complete, space revolution on a planetary scale’.Footnote ⁶² Consequently, to retrace utopia as a chronotype-like marker of time manifesting itself from the ‘specific site’ of China's tradition, we should look for a similar instance of transformation and spatial revolution therein.

Given the revolutionary impact of the New World's incursion into the cultural geography of Renaissance Europe, the use of such a unique historical event as ground for cultural comparison is admittedly problematic. At the same time, the peculiarity of this event allows for its relatively straightforward ‘typification’: Europe's discovery of the New World was a watershed moment in that it ultimately changed the shape of the known and knowable world.Footnote ⁶³ Arguably, a similar shift in perceptions – one that embraced a truly global, networked, and multicentred perspective – was occasioned in late imperial China by the Qing's defeat in the First Opium War against Great Britain and the signing of the treaty of Nanjing in 1842.Footnote ⁶⁴ Though a relatively marginal conflict if measured on a global scale (the British deployed fewer than 5,000 troops and twenty vessels, while the Manchu court relegated the management of the war to local militias at the provincial levelFootnote ⁶⁵), this war and its immediate aftermath marked a radical change in the way that late imperial China positioned itself in the world. The subsequent implementation of the so-called Unequal Treaties system sanctioned the subordination of the Qing empire to a semi-colony of the Western powers by granting the latter unprecedented sovereignty rights over the former's territory and by forcing the Manchu court to relinquish substantial authority over the management of its domestic affairs, economic and financial policies, and foreign enclaves.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Manchu-born stateman Qiying's 耆英 (1787–1858) claim that between 1839 and 1842 ‘the barbarian situation has undergone deceptive changes and … has not produced a unified development’, and that as such it required that ‘the methods by which to conciliate the barbarians … change their form’ was, if anything, a colossal, etiquette-hindered understatement, in that his signing of the treaty of Nanjing de facto recognized the inadequacy of the variety of practices (trade agreements, diplomatic negotiations, and localized military interventions) through which the Chinese empire had been regulating its foreign affairs.Footnote ⁶⁷

On a symbolic level, this shift resonated deeply. The displacement of the Manchu court from its hegemonic position implied the redefinition of the epistemological co-ordinates through which it traditionally defined its position in the world. If, during the early stages of this confrontation, the Chinese literati were able to rationalize their country's perceived incapacity to assert itself in the world at large as a purely instrumental question of technical and military prowess, the ti-yong 體用 conceptual safeguard to which this position was anchored gradually grew untenable.Footnote ⁶⁸ As the compound debacle of the Second Opium War, the near-disaster of the Taiping Rebellion, and the wake of insurgencies and rebellions that followed further weakened China's position during the second half of the nineteenth century, the recognition of Western power engendered a compulsive attempt at ‘self-strengthening’ (ziqiang 自強), which conversely exposed the central government's reticence to reform. Finally, as the Chinese again lost face at the hands of the Japanese over the control of the Korean peninsula in 1895, the conservatism of the early reformers gave way to a new wave of radical reformists who saw in the complete Westernization of the country's institutional apparatus the only way out of the colonial impasse.Footnote ⁶⁹

The idea of utopia as a twofold discourse of disjunction (for which the utopian discourse foregrounds a new historical consciousness in the making) and emplacement (for which its contingent reality is historicized) emerged from this background. In fact, one of the most recognizable traits that characterized the early modernity of Chinese literature (jindai wenxue 近代文學) was the coalescence of an overtly utopian imaginary that intertwined the form of the novel with the most visionary instances of late Qing reformism.Footnote ⁷⁰ Many novelists from this period elaborated and resolved the condition of uncertainty of late imperial China's ongoing process of social, political, and cultural readjustment via its utopian negation in the literary text. Such a rhetorical project seems at least to link a variety of novels written at the turn of century – such as, among others, Xin Zhongguo weilai ji 新中國未來記 (Future chronicles of New China, 1902), Huangren shijie 黄人世界 (Yellow man's world, 1903), Shizi hou 獅子吼 (The lion's roar, 1905), Wutuobang youji 烏托邦遊記 (Travel to Utopia, 1906), Xian zhi hun 憲之魂 (The spirit of the constitution, 1907), Xin jiyuan 新紀元 (The new era, 1908), Guangxu wannian 光緒萬年 (The ten thousand years of the Guangxu reign, 1908), Dian shijie 電世界 (Electric world, 1909), and Xin Zhongguo 新中國 (New China, 1910) – in what unfolds as a veritable utopian negative of fin de siècle China in a moment of radical transition.Footnote ⁷¹ Among the variety of utopian texts that punctuated the literary landscape of fin de siècle China, almost as if foregrounding its dissolution via its parodic idealization, one particular novel stands out as epitome of the utopian genre in the local Chinese variety: Wu Jianren's 吳趼人 Xin Shitou ji 新石頭記 (The new story of the stone). Serialized between 1905 and 1906 in the pages of Nanfang bao 南方報 (The Southern Gazette), and published in volume format by Shanghai-based Gailiang xiaoshuo she 改良小說社 in 1908, Xin Shitou ji represents one of the most telling utopian specimens of its time.

Amid Wu Jianren's vast and eclectic literary production, Xin Shitou ji is often overlooked. A prolific journalist and novelist, Wu is most often remembered for novels such as Henhai 恨海 (The sea of regret), Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang 二十年目睹之怪現狀 (Bizarre happenings eye-witnessed over two decades), and Jiuming qiyuan 九命奇冤 (The strange case of nine murders), or his eccentric collection of grievances, Wu Jianren ku 吳趼人哭 (Wu Jianren cries). Yet, whereas these works indulge in the mannerist narration of wails and denouncements that was typical of much of the literary production of jindai, Xin Shitou ji maintains a carnivalesque appeal that sets it apart as a one-of-a-kind work of fiction whose features eschew univocal modalities of interpretation and branch out to other spaces and times.

In Xin Shitou ji, Thomas More's prototypical utopia finds a proper counterpoint. Considered together, these two works of fiction mark the long gestation of a notion of colonial modernity whose ‘general law’ is one of displacement, deterritorialization, and semiotic rupture. Like More's Utopia, Xin Shitou ji's chronotope is twofold, in that the forty chapters that compose this novel are divided into two acts of equal length: the first, a series of vignettes on fin de siècle China; the second, a lengthy account of the so-called ‘civilized country’ (wenming guo 文明國) or ‘civilized world’ (wenming shijie 文明世界). The linkage between the old world of late imperial China and the mundus novus depicted in the text is given by the novel's hero, a reborn Raphael Hythloday in the guise of Hong lou meng's 紅樓夢 protagonist Jia Baoyu 賈寶玉 – a quintessential liminal figure in the canon of traditional Chinese literature.Footnote ⁷²

Wu Jianren's Xin Shitou ji shares a significatory purpose with More's Utopia, in that both texts translate to the figural domain the contingent instances of cultural fragmentation and upheaval that constitute the historical preconditions for utopian thinking to manifest itself. The rupture brought forward by old Europe's maritime displacement is allegorized in More by the separation of the island of Utopia from the known world; the rupture of late imperial China's traditional worldview by means of unequal international treaties is in turn allegorized by the positing of a ‘civilized world’ that unfolds beyond the self/other colonial dichotomy:

By reassessing a ‘centre’ (zhong) beyond the centre of China proper, Wu Jianren purposefully rejects the position of marginality imposed by the European powers upon fin de siècle China. Yet beyond Wu's apparent gesture of revanchist reversal lies something more: the radical potential of the idea of utopia itself. A careful look at the geography of the ‘civilized country’ presented in Xin Shitou ji quickly reveals the wider scope of Wu Jianren's utopian project. If it is really true that Xin Shitou ji's ‘civilized world’ has ‘two million districts’, and that each district has an area of one hundred square li (fifty square kilometres), then its area would extend for a total of 100 million square kilometres – almost as much as the entire inhabitable world.Footnote ⁷⁴ In other words, Wu's utopian vision would encompass the whole of humanity, thus reaffirming the idea and ideal of utopia as a truly transcultural goal, although one that is always informed by the ideological tenets of the part that posits it.

This brings us back to Yan Fu's translation of Huxley's Evolution and ethics, and the invention of wutuobang at the turn of the twentieth century. A fundamental discrepancy marks the rendition of Evolution and ethics into classical Chinese: despite Yan Fu's claims of ‘faithfulness’ (xin 信) to the original text as one of the main principles of his translation, his work on Huxley's text was informed by ‘unfaithful’ motives. While Huxley insisted on the moral nature of man and the importance of ethics to counter-balance the ‘might is right’ claims of social Darwinism in the Spencerian mould, Yan Fu used Huxley's text to mount a defence of Herbert Spencer and his argument in favour of ‘the implications of Darwinian principles for the sphere of human action’.Footnote ⁷⁵ If, for Huxley, what made the ‘garden of Eden’ utopian was its capacity to keep the laws of Darwinian evolution at bay by allowing the intrinsically moral nature of the human race to flourish, for Yan Fu – we must infer – utopia as wutuobang was ultimately something else. In his Neo-Confucian willingness to attribute the sources of morality and reason to heaven and not, like Huxley, to humanity lies perhaps a vision of utopia that stems from and is inscribed in the former and not dependent on the fickleness of the latter. It is, I argue, upon such truly idealistic principles that a genuinely transcultural understanding of the idea of utopia ought to establish its grounds.