Chapter 3. Dining, Shopping, Bombarding, and Touring: Foreigners in the Traditional City

Canton is a sphinx, serenely indulging in calm recollections, and seeming to smile with equal contentment on time and change. We have interrogated it. How shall we be able to record its responses.¹

—Olive Risley Seward, 1873

Guangzhou never became a colony per se. Foreigners only ever controlled the city for a few years after the Arrow War. Thus should nineteenth-century Westerners have chosen to wander outside the narrow confines of their residential enclaves, they would have been confronted with an entirely Chinese, or more specifically Cantonese, city to explore. The records of foreigners touring parts of the city thus take on a rather different cast from similar writings by contemporary Westerners in wholly occupied or controlled cities, whether they were in distant India or nearby Hong Kong. Several overlapping phases of “tourist” experience illustrate consecutive ways of seeing the urban spaces of Guangzhou. During the Shisan Hang era, foreigners’ explorations of the city were limited to venues where they had either been invited for a special occasion or where they had acquired standing invitations. This time period is most marked by visits to places to engage in activities such as walking, eating, and buying, necessary relief from the monotony of long work hours in sometimes cramped quarters. The time span from the Opium Wars to roughly the mid-1870s is characterized by “mapping.”² Here the meaning is from Michel de Certeau’s use of the word, as the mental placement of static sites in contrast to “touring,” a more active engagement with the place. During this period, foreigners, after having forced open its gates through war and negotiation, explored the city and located sites of interest, formulating observations onto a static spatial order in attempts to know “the Chinese.” The ability of tourists to move through the city was mediated by the ability of the Cantonese populace to control foreigners’ movements by surveillance and what can be termed the “press” of the crowd. The last quarter of the nineteenth century is marked by the acceptance of conventional itineraries, codified and reinforced by a budding, Cantonese-run guide service. This fully developed state of tourist practice, possibly both in Western and East Asian terms, is marked by the evolution of sites into “famous” buildings and locations known for their supposed uniqueness. Sites became dissolved in their own representation, in the end becoming items on an itinerary to be checked off rather than experienced.³

Guests and Customers: “Invited” Foreigners in the Early Nineteenth Century

The trading community’s quest for some form of recreation outside of walking around the factory square characterized the early years of foreign presence in Guangzhou. They succeeded in such explorations to a limited extent. Their main trips beyond the factories focused on visits to a couple of specially permitted scenic sites, dinner parties at the residences of their cohong merchant trading partners, and shopping in Old and New China Streets and the artisan and mercantile neighborhoods just to the north of their residences. These explorations were mostly on the semi-rural edge of the city suburbs, with the exception of shopping at the artisan streets, which was within a rather dense building fabric, if still suburban.⁴

From at least 1819, Chinese imperial edicts spelled out that foreigners were allowed on certain days to frequent the Ocean Banner Buddhist monastery near the western tip of Honam Island and the flower gardens at Huadi (in Cantonese, Fati), literally “flower ground,” southwest across the back or Macao reach of the Pearl River from the western suburbs.⁵ These two sites, while later codified into conventionalized tourist sites, not the least because of their association with the early China traders, were recorded and remembered in the early nineteenth century as places of active recreation. Both functioned primarily as destinations for a row on the river and places to walk without having to pace back and forth in the square. The choice of these two sites by Chinese officials and foreigners probably resulted from their status as two of the city’s largest and most clearly bounded sites unrelated to governmental functions.

Visiting a Buddhist Monastery

One of the earliest in-depth descriptions of the Ocean Banner Monastery was inserted in Notices Concerning China and the Port of Canton, published by the Mission Press in Malacca in 1823.⁶ The Mission Press was part of a larger missionary institution, the Anglo-Chinese College, founded in what is now Malaysia, where possibly the first school to teach Westerners the Chinese language was located. As a product of such a place, much of the work relies heavily on Chinese historical documents translated by an unnamed foreign expert. As far as the monastery is concerned, it therefore mainly recounts the legend of the founding of the monastery, as it was described in an historical text. In this work there is also a Chinese diagram of the complex (Fig. 3.1) to which is appended a numbered explanation of the plan in English. This contains both simple translations from the diagram as well as observations on how the spaces of the monastery were used in contemporary practice. The map and explanation indicates both that the authorities and the monks allowed foreigners to explore the temple rather thoroughly and that foreigners closely observed, if not always comprehended, religious and other activities within the temple.

Fig. 3.1

Plan of Ocean Banner Monastery, 1823. This schematic plan is accompanied by Arabic numbers cued to one of the first “tour guides” intended for Westerners. From Notices Concerning China and the Port of Canton, p. 9.

As early to mid-nineteenth-century foreign visitors strolled through the temple grounds, they made observations that can be characterized as marveling, aesthetic, and “pre-ethnographic.” The marveling observations were the result of a perceived uniqueness or exceptionality. The size of the “vast” temple itself was deemed remarkable, as Osmond Tiffany asserted, “This establishment is one of the largest in the empire, second only, perhaps, to the great Potala.”⁷ William C. Hunter was more cautious and probably more accurate in his assessment, calling it only “one of the largest and finest in the southern provinces.”⁸ The Buddhist images were also deemed outstanding, though not always in a positive way. Fitch Taylor, an ordained chaplain generally hostile to the idea of Chinese religion, remarked, “The immense statues at the portals are huge monsters of beings, neither divine nor human, and convey no positive sentiment save that of power and anger, which is the result of their hugeness and paint.”⁹ Also, never escaping the foreigner’s notice in terms of the “marvelous” were the “sacred pigs” resident in a pen in the monastery. These were notable not only in terms of their presence in a sacred space, but also in terms of their accommodation, “a stone pen, roofed in, and as clean as the temples,” and of their size, which “would have thrown a Cincinnati pork packer into ecstasies; they were of so portentous a girth, that they could neither walk, stand, or see.”¹⁰ The perceived extraordinary quality of parts of the monastery always made up an important part of early descriptions. While this aspect of the monastery was generally an object of enjoyment for its own sake in the secular or at least rationalist minds of Tiffany and Hunter, Western clergymen generally interpreted the marvelous aspects as somehow grotesque.

Hunter’s brief description of the Ocean Banner Monastery dwells on the aesthetic in particular:

The series of large beautiful halls, or distinct temples, stand on stone platforms, ascended by broad granite steps, and are surrounded by low stone railings, divided by granite columns which support the overhanging roofs. The varied colors of the buildings, the quantity of gilt scrolls hanging on pillars within and without, present a cheerful, brilliant aspect, to the foreign visitor particularly.¹¹

As a long-term resident, and even a friendly acquaintance of the “chief priest,” Hunter viewed the complex as primarily a treat for the senses. Many accounts share his liking for the variety of the temple architecture, which was sometimes compared to the relative uniformity of Cantonese vernacular. The aesthetic observation of the temple, like the Chinese garden to be discussed later, sometimes has an additional significance, such as when Osmond Tiffany noted windows “decorated with all conceits of Chinese taste.”¹² The seemingly self-evident identification of examples of “Chinese taste” echoes a conception from the chinoiserie architectural and garden literature of eighteenth-century Europe. While the consideration of “Chinese taste” may be an assessment according to criteria from inherited notions, these descriptions do not seem to be a judgement of “authenticity” in a modern sense.¹³ Rather, the assessments seem to be rooted in a point of view deriving from classical Western education, a sort of Aristotelian recognition of something dwelling in its “natural” state.

Finally, the “pre-ethnographic” observations of Cantonese activities were based on what the visitors saw local people doing inside the temple grounds. Overall attitudes towards the Chinese and, more specifically, Buddhism (understood by none but the most sophisticated visitors) predictably influenced the visitors’ comments. Lewis Bentham Bowring, a British official who was part of the broad machinery of empire and who had little good to say of the Chinese or, to some extent, any non-British people, recorded his haughty observations and subsequent conclusions:

The finest temple in Canton is that of Honam on the south side of the river, from which a flagged pathway leads to the building, which, though large, is not pretty, the colossal images in the shrine and the painted statues in the approaches being devoid of beauty. The Chinese are singularly irreverent in their temples, in which they smoke, chatter, and transact their business as did the Jews once in the precincts of a more sacred space. It is hard to say whether the egregious vanity of a Chinaman destroys his reverence, but he appears to be outwardly less religious than other orientals, his idea of material existence being confined to material pleasure.¹⁴

Analogy was a practice in observation that would have a long life in Westerners’ views of Guangzhou, even among more diligent observers. Osmond Tiffany observed the rituals of the Buddhist monks and recorded his thoughts:

The priests were dressed very much like Catholic clergymen, in long cassocks, and some with a surplice of yellow silk. Their heads were all shaved and they stood ranged on each side of the altar. Their voices were united in a sort of chaunt, and they consider it of the utmost importance to repeat words of mystical meaning, and to which they do not themselves attach the slightest interpretation. These sentences they sing over hundreds and thousands of times, and consider them peculiarly acceptable to the Diety [sic]. The devotions of the priests occupied some considerable time, as some of the party ranged on either side of the altars, others prostrated themselves on the stone floor, and bowed their heads to the pavement as many as nine times in succession, three to each idol, “thrice to thine and thrice to mine, and thrice again to make up nine”. This was the first time that I had seen the Kotow performed; it is exacted by the emperor, and so humiliating, that no wonder English embassadors [sic] refused to submit to it. The idols which seemed to be the subjects of adoration stood in highly decorated niches, and while the priests went through their mummery they occasionally struck consecrated gongs. When the services were over, we remarked on several points of resemblance between the Buddhist and Catholic ceremonies. We saw priests burning incense and counting beads, and chaunting like the monks of Europe.¹⁵

From here, Tiffany went on to elaborate extensively on the analogous practices he saw between Buddhist monks and Catholic monks and priests. Watching the Chinese in order to characterize their behaviors was a Western travelers’ practice that is substantially present even into the twentieth century. At this stage of the early to mid-nineteenth century, what is notable is the heavy reliance on analogies and the very personal, opinionated or speculative voices of the authors when they interpret their observations. This vanished at some point in the later nineteenth century when a more “factual” tone came to be used.

Flower Grounds

Such conflicted and complex observations were not made on the other “across the river” location of respite, the flower gardens, in reality a working plant nursery, named Fati (in Mandarin, Huadi). Observations on this site could be as simple as “Mary Ann & myself have been this forenoon in company with Mr. French to visit some flower gardens at the West of the city, they were quite extensive and filled with many kinds of rare & pretty flowers & shrubs.”¹⁶ The not-always-so enthusiastic missionary Dr. B. L. Ball echoes this generally favorable impression:

The grounds are extensive, and regularly laid out. Long rows of plants and flowers stretch across, with rows of crockery vases full of variously trained plants, and shrubs border the paths. In the season of bloom it must be a pretty sight; but it now presents little of interest. The Chinese in attendance were very civil and polite to us.¹⁷

Even when anti-foreign sentiment was high, it seems that the attendants at Fati were always very pleasant to their Western visitors. This could have been variously because of the foreigners’ status as potential customers, since the flowers grown here had been known to bedeck the tables and verandahs of the factories, or because the foreigners shared a mutual interest in botany with the Chinese attendants. Osmond Tiffany recorded:

The gardeners were evidently men who thoroughly understood their vocation, and were stimulated by enthusiasm at the same time. They were polite and anxious to show us their plants, and did not withhold any information we asked for. They were different from the generality of the people, who are very shy in their answers.¹⁸

The Cantonese gardeners’ high degree of hospitality allowed for much flexibility, as Tiffany recorded, “They are open all day, and foreigners are permitted to visit them at any moment.”¹⁹ Furthermore, during the Chinese New Year holiday, Fati would be the site of picnics both for well-to-do Cantonese and for groups of up to thirty foreigners from the factories, in what would seem to be a local Western adoption of a Chinese festivity.²⁰

Tiffany’s account of the gardens, one of the most informative, is extensive and difficult to pare down. He stated that there were actually two gardens divided by a creek, and that at a certain time of year one could witness the blooming of ten thousand japonicas.²¹ He further describes that the entrance was via a gardeners’ lodge, and storehouse for tools and equipment, that there were thousands of flowerpots, glass bells for seedlings, porcelain seats and chairs for furnishing gardens, bonsai, and topiary.²² A rare photograph, circa 1900, shows what must be part of the exterior of the gardeners’ lodge in front of which are displayed flower pots, scholars’ rocks, and a trained bamboo (Fig. 3.2). Tiffany’s admiration of Fati and its Cantonese caretakers glows in the account—the men and the skills on display here impressed him to an extent that stands out even in a generally Sinophilic book. The commercial aspect of the gardens is also evident in this description, as Tiffany mentioned “any of the plants” was available at “reasonable prices.”²³ He discussed his purchase of an orange and a japonica, which made it back to his Baltimore home, where “several Baltimore florists obtained cuttings of them, which grew very well in their green-houses, and on which they bestowed unqualified approbation.”²⁴ This place where dedicated people grew interesting and beautiful plants was mutually culturally intelligible.

Fig. 3.2

Vignette of the Huadi (Fati) Gardens, c. 1900. This photograph illustrates not only the botanical specimens, but scholars’ rocks and flowerpots that still populate what is one of the largest flower markets in China. From Scidmore, China the Long-Lived Empire, p. 449.

Invitation to a Chop-stick Dinner

The cohong merchant’s dwelling, or more particularly his garden villa, offered the next notable setting for the Western merchants to visit and absorb a more elaborate specimen of the Cantonese-built environment. This was initially the result, particularly in the years before the Opium War when the great merchants still maintained government-granted monopolies, of formal invitations to banquets (or as more than one trader dubbed them, “chop-stick” dinners). These banquets were in some ways the most personally gratifying cross-cultural social gatherings that the foreign merchants enjoyed in the earlier days of British and American trade in China. As the turmoil surrounding the Opium and Arrow Wars reached its climax, such invitations dropped off drastically, but, generally speaking, visitors still had ready access to the monopolists’ gardens.²⁵ The practice of viewing Howqua’s and Paunkeiqua’s gardens survived as part of the foreigners’ tour of Guangzhou well into the late nineteenth century, although without the expectation that the hosts themselves would be present. Predictably, therefore, the Western experience of the garden villa in Guangzhou changed noticeably from the first decades of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of the Arrow War.

Among the more detailed of several surviving descriptions by foreigners of “chop-stick” dinners are Bryant Tilden’s visit to Paunkeiqua’s villa, Edward King’s visit, in the company of William C. Hunter, to Tingqua’s country house, and Robert Bennet Forbes’s attendance at a grand banquet at Mingqua’s residence.²⁶ Tilden’s account, actually recording two separate visits, took place in the 1819 trading season and stands out as both the earliest and most personal. Paunkeiqua was, alternately with Howqua, the head of the cohong association, and probably had the highest status on account of his success at the imperial examinations.²⁷ After having carried on substantial business transactions with the merchant, Tilden received an invitation to come alone to Paunkeiqua’s garden villa on Honam, though apparently not to the more famous family garden, the Lixiang Yuan, which was west of the city. This informal visit began with a tour of the house and gardens—which Tilden already keenly compared with a previous visit to Howqua’s villa:

He then showed me some parts of his houses and suites of elegantly furnished halls and rooms which I had never before seen, where every thing is more in true ancient Chinese style than I have seen at Houqua’s establishment, without a mixture of foreign appendages, excepting the fascinating cut glass and large framed picture prints. His numerous larger and small fish ponds are connected & crossed by airy and fairy-like short stone bridges, also ponderous artificially made rocks around which seats of naturally-formed yellow shining, single stones, all of which are shaded by grotesquely made to grow palm, orange, and other fruit trees.²⁸

Tilden, who veered towards the practical, was less an aesthetic connoisseur than some other foreigners, but he made a judgment about the “authenticity” of the house and gardens.

After being introduced to children and grandchildren (males and younger females—mature women at this time period being sequestered from outside guests in upper-class Chinese households), Tilden and Paunkeiqua proceeded to a substantial midday meal of “hashed fowls, birds, and rice, sweetmeats, and choice tea” that though not elaborate enough to qualify as a banquet was satisfying nonetheless.²⁹ The host and guest then proceeded up to the library or study on the second story of one of the villa’s chambers.³⁰ Tilden’s notice of the second story is significant, as multi-level garden buildings are much more typical of gardens of the Lingnan (Guangdong) tradition than Chinese gardens elsewhere. To the supercargo’s credit, he recorded the substance of the interesting Pidgin English conversations he had with the monopolist in much greater detail than his experience of the spaces.

After this apparently mutually enjoyable social occasion, Tilden frequently chatted with Paunkeiqua and made several large purchases of his silk and tea stock, and the monopolist decided to give a banquet in his honor.³¹ Tilden was told to invite seven or nine Americans to come with him to the villa, and the account of the “chop-stick” dinner that followed sets the pattern for later accounts.³² Arriving by boats sent by Paunkeiqua, the Westerners arrived early in the afternoon, and were given the tour of the villa, as Tilden recounted: “We were kept amused in his curious museum and library rooms—and in various other ways, in and out doors, until three o’clock.”³³ At that point, they proceeded to a large, round table in a “cool hall,” and were seated in relation to the host according to status and, to a lesser extent, age—the fifteen-year-old lad in the party being opposite the seats of honor.³⁴ The event began with toasts all around (French and Madeira wines and English glassware were notably prized by the cohong elite) in what Tilden suspected was a cultural practice borrowed from the Western traders themselves.³⁵ Then followed the long parade of courses, starting with soups among which was the always noted bird’s nest soup, estimated at about twenty in number and distributed over three hours.³⁶ Another aspect of the feast noted by Tilden, later by others, was the placement of arranged flowers on the table, and the clearing of the table and subsequent strewing of flowers over it between courses.³⁷ Dinner lasted until around eight o’clock in the evening, and the guests remained at the table chatting until around ten, when they finally left with their host’s blessing.³⁸ This sort of festive event was for both hosts’ and guests’ enjoyment as well as a way to cement business relationships.

The account by Edward King, a resident partner of Russell & Co., of a banquet at Tingqua’s villa in 1835 follows much the same pattern as Tilden’s. The guests arrived in the early to mid-afternoon, and were given the tour:

On our arrival we were conducted through the different apartments of his establishment which is of great extent. The buildings are numerous and of great variety of forms and sizes; the rooms were all well filled with furniture, some of which is quite pretty. The chairs are large and heavy and are mostly stationary. There are no sides to a great many of the rooms and you can walk out from them into the gardens and small squares where flowers are beautifully arranged. The grounds are principally covered by the different buildings but there are some small ponds with small boats for the amusement of the children. . . . In the dining-room were a great many glass lanterns of European manufacture, also clocks some of which must have cost a good deal of money.³⁹

The description, which seems a quick inventory of the constituent parts of a Chinese garden, also notes the display of foreign objects, presumably as symbols of prestige. What follows is a description of the courses of the meal, once again noting the soup first, bird’s nest and shark’s fin, followed by dishes too numerous all to be sampled and of which King comments, “The substances are glutinous and I should think quite healthy.”⁴⁰ The timespan of the dinner was from about half-past five in the evening to around nine, and left the guest a bit exhausted—“the eating of the rich Chinese consumes too much time for us Americans.”⁴¹

Robert Bennet Forbes, another partner of Russell & Co., described a banquet on December 30, 1838 at what was apparently Mingqua’s townhouse.⁴² Slightly different in focus from the previous two descriptions, the only space described by Forbes was the “large hall well lighted” where the event began.⁴³ The event being “a Chinese chop stick dinner preserving the Chinese Etiquette” really formed the focus of Forbes’s account.⁴⁴ Seating and procedure are initial concerns:

seats were arranged for us one half on one side of the hall & the other half on the other the etiquette being for the most distinguished guest to sit in the left hand & the host at the extreme right, a small teapot on the right of each chair—after passing enquiries of health the tea was brought in the small porcelain cups with covers & stands which we sipped a la chinese without sugar or milk, in about five minutes the dinner was announced & we marched into the dining room, our hosts following—on either side of this hall were chinese chairs covered with scarlet cloth richly embroidered in colours—near the centre two tables about 6 feet long and 3 wide with chairs covered with the same surrounding the same—the tables were placed thus—[here a sketch of two rectangular tables placed at acute angles to each other] the hosts seated themselves at the right hand corners & the guests to the left leaving the further ends unoccupied.⁴⁵

This event was definitely traditionally Chinese. Forbes carefully notes the correct manners to use. What follows is a detailed description of the twenty courses of the meal, the correct etiquette for using spoons and chopsticks, and carefully noted recordings of the movements of the hosts and servants.⁴⁶

Forbes describes breaks in the eating to arise, walk around the room, and have pipes or cigars. ⁴⁷ The lack of any account of garden space implies this was a townhouse. Flower arrangements were again noted and, just before the dessert courses, Forbes stated, “a large waiter of beautiful flowers was brought to Mingqua, Jessamines, Roses &c which he took by the handful and promiscuously threw all over us & our tables filling the air with fragrance particularly of the Jessamine & pink or Carnation.”⁴⁸ Dessert was followed by toasts, singing by the foreign guests (ending in “Auld Lang Syne”), and a very formal leave-taking at eleven o’clock, including shaking hands at the door to the dining room, again at the stairs, and yet again at the outer door of the dwelling.⁴⁹ While the previous accounts of banquets at the Hong merchants’ houses were mostly concerned with the spectacles of sight and taste that these adventures entailed, Forbes was consistently studious in his observations of the proper protocol. This on the one hand reveals his keen desire to acquire good manners, which would serve to bolster relations with his trading partners, and on the other perhaps an extra effort put forth, by the Americans at least, to diffuse the rising tensions leading up to the Opium War.

Following the first of the mid-nineteenth-century wars, the cohong merchants lost their monopolies, and subsequently perhaps the means and, to a lesser extent, the incentives to hold such elaborate banquets. The garden villas of Paunkeiqua and Howqua, however, would remain attractions to foreign residents and visitors alike. Paunkeiqua’s garden as discussed here was the Lixiang Yuan, the family’s principal villa and not the one visited by Tilden. From the 1840s to their respective demises, these gardens were part of the standard itinerary. Paunkeiqua’s garden was looted by the French in the Arrow War and became the site of a hospital in the 1870s, but Howqua’s existed into the twentieth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, foreign visitors to these sites would generally be led by a foreign resident adept at dealing with the locals, initially the Sinologue trader William C. Hunter and later missionaries like Dr. Parker, founder of the first missionary hospital. By mid-nineteenth century, visitors to the villas were so common that the servants in charge of attending to them would simply let foreigners in to view the grounds as a matter of course. Osmond Tiffany noted that, upon his mid-1840s visit to Paunkeiqua’s garden, “A little lodge stood on one side of the gate occupied by a servant, who bowed obsequiously as we entered.”⁵⁰

By the late 1840s, Paunkeiqua’s garden was already suffering from some neglect, as the senior trader had died and the principal heir was in jail for debt.⁵¹ The touring missionary, Dr. B. L. Ball, recounted his observations of the garden:

The grounds were large, laid out in good taste. Narrow walks, hedged with vases of flowers, extended in various directions. Artificial hills were covered with plants, shrubbery, and trees, intermingled with rocks; and among these were smaller paths winding and leading to the highest parts. Underneath were subterranean passages, so constructed as to represent grottoes, and wild, rocky places washed by the sea. The house was built upon stone posts, and situated in the center of an artificial fish-pond. Railed walks, raised on piles above the water, led to it from two sides. Arched bridges, as if made for ornament, but probably to allow boats to pass under, connected some of the walks. The house was unoccupied, and from neglect, fast becoming dilapidated. We looked into the windows, and saw some of the unique furniture still remaining around the rooms. Paintings and pictures still hung on the walls, and a few carved ornaments were yet observable. The house was one story, designed and constructed purely in the Chinese style.⁵²

Besides the typically Western inventory of parts, two things are notable in this description. One is the almost voyeuristic quality of the visitors’ behavior, particularly peeking through windows. This, however, seemed to have been accepted as a matter of course; no evidence of protest from the family, or for that matter the Howqua family at their residence, seems to have been recorded. The other notable comment is the assessment of the villa as being “purely in the Chinese style.”

The latter comment, oddly self-evident, is a common one among nineteenth-century foreigners’ accounts. Ball’s comment is echoed by other visitors to Paunkeiqua’s gardens, including Osmond Tiffany—“Everything was queer, different from anything we had ever seen before, and perfectly Chinese”—and missionary A. B. Smith—“It is a house done off in splendid Chinese style.”⁵³ The foreigners’ claim to expertise on what was or was not the “Chinese style” is a problematic one. These statements may be interpreted as praise for the garden as an exemplar of whatever “Chinese” aesthetics was assumed to be. In a somewhat related way, they could be judgments based on an idea of “Chinese” taste deriving from the English landscape garden/chinoiserie criteria produced in the eighteenth century as a particular, historicist trajectory. This assumes a certain level of aesthetic education among the observers, and may be borne out by the fact that some observers seemed to lack such concerns, like Paul S. Forbes of Russell & Co., who had little interest in the gardens per se, but rather found their avian denizens more interesting.⁵⁴ The “Chinese” quality of Paunkeiqua’s villa may also be in some ways in dialogue with Howqua’s garden, which in the mid-nineteenth century was both better maintained and a more hybrid environment, as indicated above in Tilden’s implication that Howqua’s villa had “foreign appendages.”⁵⁵ One anonymous passenger of the ship Eureka, visiting Howqua’s villa in 1854, even went so far as to state that it was “furnished in considerable style though I should hardly think in a true Chinese manner.”⁵⁶

Howqua’s villa had, due to its longer life, more surviving representations to be disseminated in the West. A gouache in the Peabody Essex collection illustrates the garden as it was in the mid-nineteenth century, complete with a gnarled tree in the foreground, flowers in pots in typical Lingnan style, the pond, and bridges and pavilions (Pl. 21). The garden survived into the early twentieth century, and similar views can be found in postcards. Dr. Ball, who had gained entrance by tipping the doorman, described the well-maintained garden quite enthusiastically:

The view which broke on us was the most beautiful of anything which we had seen or could have imagined in this region. Before the unique Chinese buildings spread out an expanse of green shrubbery, broken here and there by glistening mirrors of water, long walks, and hedges intersecting at right angles, and forming squares and oblongs; and long lines of flowers, in green-glazed vases, lined pretty little avenues, through which it was delightful to walk. The artificial arched bridge of wood, the small ponds teeming with fish, and the broad-leafed lotus plants floating, all added to the beauty and variety of the scene.⁵⁷

The use of water in Howqua’s garden emerges in this description as a departure from Western expectations. As previously mentioned, the other quality noticed by foreigners on visits to Howqua’s residences was the presence of objects from many places, particularly the West. Of one of the hong merchants’ houses, which may or may not be the garden villa, upstate New Yorker Augustus Ward Loomis noted in 1849:

The rooms are spacious & elegant, richly & tastefully furnished with the richest & rarest of all native & foreign furniture & ornaments. America has not its equal. It has a piano but so sadly out of tune Mary Anne [his wife] could not get a tune out of it, but there was an organ, a splendid affair, turned by a crank & imitated all the instruments of a full band.⁵⁸

On a visit to Tingqua’s garden residence nine years before, Scots missionary Howard Malcolm admired the gardens but was less pleased with a similar, more carefully enumerated, global mix in the merchant’s rooms:

The style of the rooms pleased me less. They were numerous, but all furnished in the same manner, and most of them small. Besides gorgeous Chinese lanterns, hung Dutch, English, and Chinese chandeliers, of every size and pattern. Italian oil paintings, Chinese hangings, French clocks, Geneva boxes, British plate, &c, &c, adorned the same rooms, strewed with natural curiosities, wax fruits, models, and costly trifles, from every part of the world.⁵⁹

For these Chinese merchants, imported objects displayed status and connections with global trade just as the pictures of the Thirteen Factories, specimens of porcelain, and other decorative arts did in the houses of Boston or London merchants.

The Howqua family’s hospitality was unfailing, so that even in the immediate aftermath of the Arrow War, a British army officer could visit and note that the family was “very gentlemanly and civil” and that “The house was furnished with great taste, and scrupulously clean.”⁶⁰ It helped that the aforementioned officer was in the company of Archdeacon Gray, who became ever more closely a friend of the Howqua family, so that in the late 1870s he and his new wife were often invited to dine at the Howqua residences. Mrs. Gray’s accounts are the last of banquets for foreigners at the villas of the former cohong merchants; in some respects, they differ little from Tilden’s accounts of the beginning of the century.⁶¹ The locally hosted banquet gradually faded from the foreigners’ experience, excepting the state banquets provided on the visit of the former president of the United States, General Ulysses S. Grant, in the late 1870s.⁶² This event, the first visit of a foreign former head of state to China, was a highly unusual one, and the ceremony surrounding Grant’s arrival and the elaborate nature of the banquet were rather outside everyday practice in the city.

The practice of visiting the private garden villas of Guangzhou’s wealthy would outlive the “invitations to a chop stick dinner” by almost forty years. The experience of visitors was fundamentally transformed by the lack of social engagement with the denizens, the increasing rarity of such residences, and, finally, by the foreign way of looking at the sites of Guangzhou. The garden visits were not the only touring practice that started in the early years of foreign residence that managed to outlive the wars of the mid-century. Shopping was just such another.

The Impulse to Buy

Foreign residents and visitors had knowledge of the western suburb of the city because of its proximity to the Thirteen Factories. This area was a bustling artisan and merchant neighborhood where shops lined the streets, selling both raw materials and highly finished art and craft objects, or, as contemporaries called them, “fancy goods.” Even short-term visitors would venture forth into the shops lining Old and New China Streets, the gated passages that provided access to the factories from the city. Those with more experience would venture further into the suburbs in search of better bargains. These streets created an image of the city in the West that would dominate foreign understanding of Guangzhou’s urban fabric. The shops were vernacular building types that evolved to accommodate efficiently the needs of vending to foreign and domestic shoppers. They housed cross-cultural activities that became, and remained, one of the primary foreign points of contact with the traditional city.

The general impression given by these streets of the western suburb was of narrow lanes, bustling with activity and curiosities. Fitch Taylor, on a voyage around the world with an American military squadron in 1840, recounted a general impression that was fairly typical among foreigners:

Toward evening I took a stroll with Dr. Parker, passing up old China-street, one of the widest streets in the city, and composed of respectable shops on either side; and in a short time, we had wandered through a number of streets, presenting at once the variety of this extensive mart of the East. The streets are narrow, serving only for foot-passengers, flagged with quarried granite. The shops are open in front; and as you look down these streets you see a range of perpendicular tablets, designating the different establishments in the picturesque character of the Chinese, and generally in red letters. The scene is unique; and as you look still further on, the narrowing perspective converges until your sight is entirely obstructed by these gorgeous signs on either side.⁶³

Taylor goes on to list the various types of shops he saw, a practice which became a convention among visitors. A seasonal adaptation was noted by Bryant Tilden: “During the summer thin boards are spaced across the streets from the roofs of buildings to intercept the sun’s rays.”⁶⁴ Photographer John Thomson’s well-known view down “Physic Street” best caught this impression in the 1870s; this view was constantly reproduced and imitated by photographers and illustrators into the twentieth century as somehow typical of Guangzhou. While the narrow lanes of the suburb were later exoticized in travelers’ accounts, at this point the accounts are actually notably matter-of-fact in their description. Some foreigners actually praised the streets as “well paved,” particularly those who, like Americans, were accustomed to muddy roads in their home countries.⁶⁵

The individual shops varied somewhat in their layout, and can be found portrayed in a number of different sets of Chinese export watercolors purchased by foreign visitors from approximately the 1820s through mid-century.⁶⁶ As Osmond Tiffany observed, “The shops are all built upon a line, principally of wood, sometimes the lower story is of blue brick, and with the doors raised a single step from the street.”⁶⁷ The two-story buildings contained the main commercial space below, and the second story might contain living space, restaurant space, storage, or workshop space.⁶⁸ The shutters, partitions, and other woodwork dividing the shop space from the street and organizing the interior were commonly painted green or black, or sometimes kept in the color of the wood used.⁶⁹ Tiffany gave a good impression of the interior of one type of shop:

They [the shops] are lighted from the top, and are two stories in height; though the second floor sometimes has latticed windows. The skylight is of glass, with an outer covering formed of the laminae of oyster shells, both coverings being managed by cords within reach of the shopman. The second floor is only partially laid, and has a gallery running around it, which overlooks the shop. In this story the walls are usually panelled with wood, decorated with carvings and painted monsters. In the lower story the goods are displayed on shelves or in glass cases on two sides and behind the shopman, who has his counter opposite to the door. There sits in state the little despot of his trade, and scrutinizes with skillful eye all who approach.⁷⁰

In a close view of one of these shops on Old China Street (Pl. 22), a Parsee customer arrives in a shop that caters to the visiting souvenir hunter.⁷¹ While many shops traded in only one particular type of good, this one, located on the main “tourist” thoroughfare, has shelves stocked with matting, hats, umbrellas, teas, baskets, bamboo furniture, and so on. A feather fan vendor is walking in front of the shop, which hints at the fact that there were always a fair number of street vendors at work in and around the Thirteen Factories.

The shopping experience of foreigners was, to some extent, predicated on the degree to which they penetrated the suburbs. The tawdriest goods were to be found in Hog Lane, which catered to sailors granted a very brief shore leave, and where the business premises were little more than temporary wooden stalls (see Chapter 1). By the mid-nineteenth century, the shops of Old and New China Streets catered almost exclusively to the tourist market, as observed by Dr. Yvan Melchior:

I never saw anything in China so stupidly dull as these two insipid passages and their trade. During three parts of the day there is not a soul to be seen; but as soon as a European heel resounds on the granite, every door exhibits a Chinaman with a naked head and a flat face, lighted up with an assumed smile, which is intended to tempt a customer into his shop. . . . Old China Street and New China Street form really, a part of the European ghetto; never does a Chinaman venture into them, especially if he wants to purchase anything. A native will no more go and be taken in by the traders there, than a Parisian will visit certain shops into which provincials and foreigners plunge.⁷²

The notion of a strip of overpriced tourist shops is still familiar, both in China and the West. Not everyone had such a negative view of the streets bordering the factories. They were inhabited by merchants who generally spoke Pidgin English very competently. Osmond Tiffany, who knew no Chinese, actually recounts acting as an interpreter between a shopkeeper and a Frenchman, who knew no English, resolving a problematic situation—“the Frenchman had thundered forth in his native tongue, as if speaking in the tribune of the National Assembly, and the puzzled Chinaman gave utterence to a ‘Hi Yah’” (the latter word a Cantonese “yes,” often used to indicate attentiveness).⁷³ Shop signs in these streets were written in Chinese and English. Sometimes this was a bit puzzling as well, Tiffany recounting one shop sign that read “Tychong eaney think and steaks,” meaning that Tychong’s shop sold an assortment of goods and especially walking sticks.⁷⁴ At any rate, the attempt at communication in the name of commerce was always made with enthusiasm.

The procedures upon entering the shop were remarkably consistent, if the similarities across different accounts are to be used as evidence. Dr. W. S. W. Ruschenberger provided a concise summary of typical commercial transactions in the mid-1830s:

On entering one of these shops, you are welcomed with ‘Chin, chin,’ and a door which separates the shop from a small vestibule in the front, is closed to shut out intruders, and prevent the gathering of a curious crowd in the street. . . . A counter six feet long and one and a half wide, covered with oil-cloth, stands a little in front of the shelves. Before it is a table, on each side of which are seats for the purchasers, that they may examine the goods at ease.⁷⁵

Osmond Tiffany also noted the closing of the doors, which he additionally attributes to local practice—“there seems also in Canton to be a jealousy between customers, and one does not like to make a bargain while his neighbor knows exactly what he is buying, and what he pays.”⁷⁶ The observant American also noted that the commercial transactions’ component of cross-cultural interaction had qualities that he rather enjoyed:

The intercourse with the shopkeepers I found much more pleasant than I anticipated. I do not remember to have been cheated in any article I bought, but I would have been willing to loose a trifle occasionally in preference to being debarred from the pleasure of converse with the funny dealers. I found so much to laugh at as well as to admire; their queer ways of saying and doing things were a source of constant amusement; and their industry and ingenuity never ceased to excite my wonder.⁷⁷

The relaxed attitude, while it never let go of inherent cultural prejudice, and the general feeling of collaborative good will paralleled other forms of social interaction between foreigners and Cantonese during the pre–Arrow War era.

Venturing beyond Old and New China Streets required a bit more preparation. Some areas, like the relatively close “Carpenter’s Square,” a favorite venue for visiting ship captains to buy boxes and furniture as souvenirs, had consistent enough foreign traffic that commerce was conducted smoothly and regularly.⁷⁸ Beyond Thirteen Factories Street, shopping required some specialized knowledge, since tradesmen in the suburbs were generally grouped by professions or materials, and had little if any knowledge of English.⁷⁹ For traveling further into the suburbs, visitors generally preferred to take with them one of the few “old China hands” who actually spoke a version of Chinese and had familiarity with local cultural practice. William Hunter of Russell & Co. and the missionary surgeon Dr. Parker were particular favorites.

The trips beyond Old and New China Streets by visitors became more frequent in the era around the Opium Wars. Between the Opium and the Arrow Wars, foreign women were not generally resident but could visit Guangzhou. In 1856, Caroline Stoddard, daughter of the captain of the American clipper Kathay, recorded one account of a trip into the suburbs led by Dr. Parker. Selections of her account are as follows:

About ten o’clock this morning Mr. Parker came for us to go shopping. . . . So getting into our chairs we started. We first went to Old China Street, which to speak within bounds, is not over, or much over, ten feet wide. We first went to a jewelers store, to see what they had got. He had some very pretty things, but not anything we wished. So we started again. As they opened the door [apparently from Old China Street into Thirteen Factories Street], I was a little frightened, for the street as far as I could see was crowded with Chinamen, women, and children, staring with their eyes and mouths wide open, as if they had never seen such a sight before. As our chairs went along, they were crowded on each side, and they would even run along ahead of us, then turn round and look straight in our faces. And then the streets smelled so terribly, I had to keep my handkerchief to my face at all times and even then I felt sick when I got home.

As we went along, I saw a boy cleaning or washing canary birds. I was struck with astonishment at the way with which he did it, and stopped the chair to have a look at him. He had several cages full of them around him, and this is the way he was cleaning them: he had a bowl of water, and would dip his hands into it, and then get a good lot of it into his mouth, then spit it out at them. I thought I should have died of glee, he looked so ridiculous, but the poor birds seemed to like it very much, or that is they seemed to like it much better than I should under the circumstances. We afterwards went to Kechong’s, a silver smith, and Wan-Kung’s, a jewelry store, and Po Hing’s, a jewelry store. While we were there, Mr. Parker and I went on the top of the house to look around. As far as we could see there was nothing but Chinese houses, and they weren’t one of them more than three inches apart, so that one could step from house to house and upon all the roofs, there are large earthen jars, which are kept full of water, and in case of fire they throw them onto the roofs and the wet clay prevent [sic] the fire from spreading. We returned home tired and sick enough for the streets smell so badly that it nearly made one sick, and the stores were about as bad; they had some pretty things, Mr. Minton was not very much pleased, rather inclined to find fault with the price.⁸⁰

Once again in this account, descriptions of the urban fabric and the shops’ wares are foci. Additionally noted are aspects of street life and the reaction of the Cantonese to the visiting Westerners. These themes become more and more common in later travel writings. Miss Stoddard’s sensitive nose is also an issue here. Most male commentators of the Thirteen Factories period did not note smells as part of the experience, but in the later nineteenth century the debate over the cleanliness of the city became tied to ideas about race and civilization in accounts that do not have the same, fairly straightforward empirical focus. The wars of the mid-century and the new ideological questions that accompanied them would transform Western experiences of Guangzhou.

The City Question: Entry and Mapping in the Third Quarter of the Nineteenth Century

The Opium and Arrow Wars loosened and then eliminated official controls on Western movement throughout Guangzhou. While before the wars long-resident merchants sometimes disobeyed official restrictions on their movements, penetrating deeper into the suburbs to visit a few temples, their adventures were tolerated as long as they did not try to go within the walls of the city.⁸¹ The demands of the British, and later the French, for concessions both during and after the Opium and Arrow Wars would fundamentally change all that. The imperialist ideologies that supported the foreign military actions would color later views of the Cantonese and their urban environment. In order to conceptualize the city, foreigners came up with new methods of describing it in which maps and guides became increasingly important. The Cantonese, having lost a path of official resistance to foreigners wandering through their city, developed other ways to control their movements.

British resentment at the many ways the Chinese regulated trade with the outside world triggered the Opium War. The landing of troops around the city forcibly introduced foreigners to parts of the city suburbs to which they had previously had little access.⁸² The British encampments above the city, combined with warships in the Pearl River, placed the city under siege. Targeting certain structures of the city, notably the city walls, and threatening the local landmark of the Zhenhai Lou (Fig. 4.18), previously unmentioned in Western accounts, sent a message of military supremacy to the Chinese authorities. They also made clear a desire for access to the walled city.

Dr. Cree, a naval surgeon who painted a watercolor featuring the Zhenhai Lou, noted: “The red five-storeyed temple opposite is much venerated by the Chinese and the authorities have begged us not to injure it. However, a couple of shells had gone through the roof.”⁸³ The Zhenhai Lou, constructed in 1380 by a local “marquis,” was not a temple at all but rather a guard tower for military surveillance, a feng shui talisman against negative influences from the north, and a symbol of local power and independence.⁸⁴ The Chinese arguably viewed warfare in highly symbolic terms. Although the city officials had to pay a high ransom and retreat with the Manchu troops sixty miles distant from the city within a week, they managed at least somewhat to save face by leaving the walls unbreached and the Zhenhai Lou more or less intact. The British troops’ proximity to the tower, while determined by the strategic benefits of its heights, encouraged the city officials to parley.

The Treaty of Nanjing ended the first Opium War on August 29, 1842. The treaty, besides establishing peace, gave the British a series of concessions. These included many millions of dollars in indemnities, the abolition of the cohong monopoly, the release of British prisoners, and amnesty for Chinese who had helped the British.⁸⁵ The terms of Article Two of the treaty implied that foreign residence, including that of females, would be allowed in five “treaty ports,” of which Guangzhou was one. To the British, this implied the ability to enter the walls of the city as well. This “right of entry” to the city would be a key point of foreign-Chinese conflict over the next decade and a half. In the wake of the Treaty of Nanjing, the Americans and the French also negotiated treaties that followed some of the basic structure of British rights of trade and residence against the context of coerced legal protection, equality, or perhaps advantage that contentions now played out.

Progress trying to convince the Chinese authorities to allow greater foreign access to the city was slow. Frustrated by the pace, the British sent an expeditionary force up to the factory sites from Hong Kong in 1847. This intimidated the serving Chinese administrators of the city, who made several concessions.⁸⁶ These included the right to dwell and use warehouses outside of factory grounds, particularly on the island of Honam on the other side of the river. The foreigners were permitted to roam more freely around the city’s environs, though entrance into the walled city was still an issue that remained a point of friction between the British and the Chinese administration, which was, among other things, concerned about the potential reaction of the Cantonese populace to such foreign activity. The conciliatory Chinese governor, Keying, was replaced in 1848 by new and more instinctually anti-foreign officials, Commissioner Xu and Governor Ye. In 1849, Xu officially refused the British assertion of right of entry into the walled city.⁸⁷

What followed was the Arrow War. The right of entry into the city was a key demand of British and French allied forces.⁸⁸ The British resumed bombardment of the city, aimed at highly symbolic targets like Governor Ye’s yamen and a huge bell in the “Temple of the Five Genii” (Wu Xian Guan) that British intelligence indicated a local belief that if it was rung, it would spell catastrophe for the city.⁸⁹ A cannon was leveled towards it and actually succeeded in striking the bell. This indicates an increasing foreign knowledge of the city that was gathered for military purposes through many reconnaissance missions.⁹⁰ The British and French troops then charged and occupied the city walls, demolished the city gates, and planned the occupation of the city.⁹¹ Upon entry, troops appropriated key governmental and symbolic sites within the city walls, including official yamen and the Zhenhai Lou.⁹² Looting by foreign, particularly French, troops whose discipline had broken down damaged several sites, including the garden villa of the Paunkeiqua merchant family and temples where statues were overturned to find the precious metals ritually secreted in some of their cavities.⁹³ Foreign domination of the city was complete, but the occupying powers realized that they lacked the ability to govern such a vast population. With the concessions the foreigners demanded firmly in place, the Chinese gradually resumed control of Guangzhou.⁹⁴

The events of the Opium and Arrow Wars fundamentally changed the relationship of foreigners to the city. The most obvious was unrestricted access to the city in its entirety. Indeed, some of the first foreigners to see sights within the city walls were military men, who published their observations, although they did not really research, frame, or digest these newly exposed places for in-depth Western comprehension.⁹⁵ The soldiers who wrote about the city in their memoirs were frequently concerned with observations having to do with defense and government of the city, from the heights of the walls to the hierarchy of Chinese regional government.

A second product of access to the city and the military presence, was the production of accurate maps of the city. These included the 1840 Bramston map during the Opium War (Fig. 1.1) and campaign maps that showed important sites within the walls (Fig. 3.3) during the Arrow War. It took surprisingly little time for some Cantonese to respond commercially to the opening of the city to the foreigners; painter Lee Mun Une produced an engraved and watercolored map (surviving in the collections of the Peabody Essex Museum) for the foreign tourist trade as early as the year immediately following the end of the Arrow War, when foreign troops were still stationed in the city.⁹⁶ The map, labeled in English, shows diagrams of buildings of interest, and indicates recommended tour routes with dotted lines. This map appears to be the direct ancestor of the inserts in later tourist guides to the city produced by Westerners, including Dr. Kerr’s A Guide to the City and Suburbs of Canton and R. C. Hurley’s The Tourist’s Guide to Canton, the West River, and Macao (Fig. 3.4).⁹⁷

Fig. 3.3

Plan of the attack and bombardment of Canton, 1857–58 (C. Wingrove Cooke). The first highly accurate maps of the city to circulate in the West were the result of military necessity in the eras of the Opium and Arrow Wars. From Cooke, China.

Fig. 3.4

“Canton: Plan of the City and its Suburbs,” c. 1895 (R. C. Hurley). This map offers a simplified, if rather legible, version of the city and its sites, including some recent Western contributions like the cathedral. From Hurley, Tourist’s Guide to Canton the West River and Macao.

New maps were temporally and sometimes physically accompanied by new textual descriptions. Guidebooks that attempt to record and assess the historic significance of sites within the city begin regular production by the 1870s. The process of mapping was not accomplished only in literal terms, but also as an overall way of viewing the city. “Mapping” as the mental articulation of an immobile spatial order, contrasting with the earlier view of selected parts of the city as scenes for activity, was introduced into the standard foreigners’ experience.⁹⁸ This change was a gradual one, and individual experience left room for differing interpretations, but the pattern seems to hold. One account of a visit in 1858–59 shares much with the earlier Western writings in its emphasis on activity:

We went through all the principal streets and basars [sic], made several purchases—visited all the principal buildings, pagodas, temples & c. & c.—ascended one of the pagodas as far as it was considered safe (as it was much out of repair) went upon magazine hill and walked part way round the wall.⁹⁹

Notable in this account is the ascension up a pagoda, a practice, which though common for modern tourists, was not typical in the nineteenth century except immediately after the Arrow War.¹⁰⁰ Going up pagodas, city walls, and other taller buildings to obtain a view seems to have been particularly characteristic of this brief era, when it served to give some way of conceptualizing the city before guidebooks delivered a summary in pre-digested form. The above description in a ship’s log contrasts sharply with later travel accounts, which spend much time describing places in architectural or historical terms.

The first great foreign textual “map” of the city was produced by the Ven. John Henry Gray, then the British consular chaplain in Guangzhou and later the Archdeacon of Hong Kong. His Walks in the City of Canton (1875) contained 695 pages of text and an appendix of seven itineraries for foreign visitors.¹⁰¹ Gray had been resident in Guangzhou from the eve of the Arrow War, and remained until the late 1870s. Baron de Hübner, globe-trotter of the 1870s, discussed Rev. Gray:

The Rev. John Henry Gray was born on the Scotch border. He is, I should think, about fifty, and has exercised his ministry here for nineteen years. The most busy time of his life coincided with the occupation of Canton by the English, when war and sickness, even more than Chinese balls, cut short so many young lives. It was then that the Cantonese became accustomed to see this good man in his cylindrical hat, white cravat, and long black greatcoat, rushing from hospital to hospital, and from port to port, tending the sick, consoling the dying, and burying the dead. It was from that moment that dates the reverend gentleman’s great popularity. A fine and noble face, an intelligent look, whiskers white as the driven snow, a tall figure, square shoulders, vigorous arms—the ensemble thoroughly sympathetic.¹⁰²

Gray had earned Cantonese respect as a humanitarian during the Arrow War and practiced a vocation (as consular chaplain rather than field missionary) that apparently gave him plentiful spare time. This made the local population quite comfortable with him, and enabled him to acquire a good command of Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese as well as an extensive knowledge of the city. This made him a much sought-after tour guide. He was the guide of former US Secretary of State William H. Seward and his party when they toured the city.¹⁰³ Baron de Hübner gave impressions of a tour with Gray:

Every two minutes my guide stops, jumps out of his chair, draws close to mine, and explains in a stentorian voice the objects most worthy of my attention.

Everywhere the archdeacon makes himself at home: he goes in and comes out without paying the slightest attention to the shopkeepers.

They all smile when he comes in, and let him do what he likes.¹⁰⁴

At one point on the tour, Gray even stopped a Buddhist monk, who without any verbal exchange assented to having his head used in explanation of the vows symbolized by the burned spots arranged on it.¹⁰⁵ Apparently, Gray was such an appreciated public figure in both Cantonese and Western communities that his eccentricities were tolerated and even indulged.

Gray’s guide to the city is encyclopedic, pointing out many places and buildings that receive scarce if any mention in later publications. His entries for such buildings, inserted in a sort of spatial order in a running text and then indexed in the itineraries, are very in-depth. The “Chong Choy Tchu Miu Or Temple in honour of the Inventor of Letters and the Inventor of the Art of Printing” is not alone in receiving considerable attention, with the index entry reading:

Brief Historical sketch of Tchong-Kit, the Inventor of Letters. Vide pages 185, 186, 187, 188, 189.

Board on which are recorded sixteen sacred precepts. Vide pages 189, 190, 191, 192.

Pagoda shaped furnaces in which scraps of paper containing Chinese characters are burned. Vide page 192.

Well at the gates of the temple. Vide page 193, 194.¹⁰⁶

The discussion of this lesser known temple (miao) is brief for Rev. Gray, but illustrates his typical compositional method, combining a description of the temple and its contents with a discussion of the Chinese history related to it, interpretations of practices within the temple, and translations of inscriptions in it. The attention to detail is such that, in his description of the temple that foreigners often called the Temple of Five Hundred Genii, which Gray correctly calls the Temple of Five Hundred Lohans (disciples of the Buddha), he actually lists phonetic spellings of the names of all five hundred.¹⁰⁷ Obviously, few Western tourists would have much use for this information. So why did Gray compile such a thorough account of the city?

The archdeacon inserts no preface or other commentary detailing his intentions. The overall factual voice and detailed recording of places is little modified by pronouncements about Guangzhou or “the Chinese.” All that can be presumed is an intense personal desire on the part of Gray to master knowledge of the city. Baron de Hübner asserted of Gray, “His museum is Canton.”¹⁰⁸ Gray’s overall humanity and intense intellectual interest seems to pervade Walks in the City of Canton. The work, however, provided a baseline of information that was used in diverse ways, including prominently published travel accounts reinterpreting the city with specific concerns and biases, and the proliferation of guidebooks and institutionalized tourist practices.

Tourism at the Sunset of Imperial Guangzhou: Institutions, Ideologies, and Power

In the late nineteenth century, Guangzhou became a standard part of globally oriented tourists’ itineraries, in part because it was considered a preeminent example of a Chinese city. According to one source, it was “the typical city of China in its domestic and foreign relations, and in all that makes up the peculiarities of Chinese town-life.”¹⁰⁹ According to another source, it was “the strangest of all strange cities, and perhaps the most representative one in China.” ¹¹⁰ Yet it was not far from the comforts of British Hong Kong. The increasingly large group of Victorian-era globe-trotters supported a flourishing tourist industry, producing tourist guidebooks, a small group of professional Cantonese tour guides and sedan-chair bearers, and some attempts by the city’s inhabitants to keep the tourist traffic controlled. The group produced a literature of their own, which consistently utilized the information generated by foreign inhabitants such as Rev. Gray to bolster their own preexisting notions of how Guangzhou, and indeed China, fit into the world order.

The most popular tourist guide was Dr. J. G. Kerr’s A Guide to the City and Suburbs of Canton, which was continuously reprinted from the 1870s into the first decade of the twentieth century.¹¹¹ Dr. Kerr, a close contemporary of Rev. Gray, arrived in 1854 as a physician for the American Presbyterian Mission, in many ways the successor to Dr. Parker.¹¹² Like Gray, Kerr lived in the city for several decades, was appreciated by the Cantonese for his humanitarian efforts, and was, after the Archdeacon, a favorite tour guide for visitors into the 1870s.¹¹³

Kerr’s guide, though not nearly as detailed as Gray’s, was at less than a hundred pages in length “tourist friendly,” with general information about accommodations, communications, and conveniences. Additionally, it contained a foldout map of the city with place names in both English and Chinese. The text is divided into geographic regions: Shamian, Western Suburbs, New City, Old City, Northern Suburbs, Eastern Suburbs, Honam, and Fati (Huadi). To this, Kerr also added seven potential “excursions” into the surrounding countryside. Each site within each geographical division is relegated to one paragraph explaining its significance. For even more rapid reference, lists are appended at the end of the guide. One is “Chief Places to be Seen,” arranged in terms of potential tours, the first part being the best things to see on “one day’s tour,” and the second part outlining six potential tours for the week-long visitor.¹¹⁴ The second appended list is actually dubbed “objects of more or less interest to strangers,” which fall under the broad categories of amusements, arms, food, industries, medicines, religion and geomancy, and sundry curios.¹¹⁵ All place and object names were once again most usefully written in both English and Chinese. The visitor thus went into the city with his or her list of places and articles for consumption.

Kerr’s guide, while the most successful, was not the only tour book for Guangzhou in the late nineteenth century. J. W. Carrall, of the Guangzhou office of the Imperial Maritime Customs, published in 1877 a truly brief twenty-page pamphlet entitled “The Tourist’s Guide for the City of Canton Compiled from Various Sources.”¹¹⁶ This work consisted of five pages of listed sites with Chinese character equivalents, followed by brief descriptions of four Buddhist temples, the mosque, two other temples, the Gongyuan or civil service examination hall, and the Zhenhai Lou (a.k.a. five-storied pagoda), with about seven pages of city history and statistics.¹¹⁷

A later entry into the guidebook market was R. C. Hurley’s The Tourist’s Guide to Canton, the West River, and Macao, published in 1895 by the proprietor of the hotel on Shamian.¹¹⁸ The motive behind Hurley’s endeavor is made quite clear to the reader by Hurley’s “Special advice to Tourists” facing the title page:

Do not be persuaded to remain on board the river steamers after arrival in port for, by remaining on board, you waste both time, money and opportunity. Go straight ahead to the Shameen Hotel, where the Manager [i.e., Hurley himself] will receive you, and arrange programmes specially suited to your taste, and to the time you may have at your disposal. He will also, if you wish, accompany you on the walking trip to the curio shops, afford much interesting information, and give you many valuable and necessary hints for your general guidance.¹¹⁹

Thus began the package tour in Guangzhou. Hurley’s text departs little from the basic outline of Kerr’s, but does add a small Cantonese glossary and such “helpful” advice as, “The native guides for the City meet the steamers on arrival; but it is safer and better to engage them, and to arrange your day’s programme, from the Hotel.”¹²⁰ To his list of objects that visitors might purchase, or as he dubbed it, “list of inexpensive articles suggested as curios,” Hurley added prices deemed acceptable for each of the object types.¹²¹ He even included a special map of “the walking trip to the curio shops.” True to his book title, Hurley pointed out sites of interest along the river, going to and within Macao. Hurley’s map insert for the whole city (Fig. 3.4) was less detailed than Kerr’s, though more of a souvenir, given its somewhat artistic renderings of notable buildings in elevation, but a secondary foldout accompanied this showing sites in the southern and western suburbs in detail.

Kerr, Carrall, and Hurley all give the visitor a check list of “must sees” and even “must buys.” The city thus becomes no longer a place to be explored by the visitor in an individual and experiential way, but rather a collection of notable spots that have already been framed by the travel book or, as will be investigated below, by the Cantonese tour guide. The consistency of travel narratives and guidebooks reveal that, in the Western mind, sites had been transformed in the late nineteenth century into “signifiers of themselves.”¹²² Rarely did tourists visit a site that was not included in Kerr or Hurley’s guide. Furthermore, visitors’ descriptions are rarely based on their own observations, but rather reiterate the information gleaned from guidebooks or tour guides. In the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century, the visitor’s experience was wholly mediated by a firmly entrenched tourist industry. Given the normative segregation of foreign residents from the Cantonese populace during this era, and a certain level of racial phobia of “the natives,” the industry was geared towards profit from, and at least perceived protection of, the lucrative foreign traveler.

The previously prevalent practice of resident merchants and missionaries giving tours of the city to foreign visitors began to fade in the 1870s. In their place, a commercial tour guide service run by native Cantonese arose to handle the increased tourist traffic. Preeminent among these was a guide, or eventually family of guides, that went under the moniker “A Cum.” The original A Cum seems to have made his appearance as early as the late 1850s. In perhaps 1874, British “adventure” tourist and world traveler Thomas Woodbine Hinchliff (M.A., F.R.G.S., President of the Alpine Club) noted at the beginning of his tour of the city:

To enable us to see some of the lions of Canton, our hosts sent for a first-rate Chinese guide, who gave us his card in English fashion, with the name A Cum upon it. He spoke English intelligibly, and in every way behaved so extremely well that I have great pleasure in recommending him to anyone who may follow our steps to China.¹²³

A Cum had prepared carefully for his profession, down to having cards printed in English. In 1878, Constance Gordon-Cumming hired him and learned of his background:

This morning we secured the services of a guide who has long been a servant of Archdeacon Gray, who is the great authority on all matters of local interest, having himself an extraordinary knowledge of Chinese manners and customs, rites and ceremonies. . . . I had been greatly counting on the privilege of making his acquaintance, on the strength of an introduction from Sir Harry Parkes, but to my great regret, find that he has returned to England. So we had to console ourselves with the second-hand erudition of Ah Kum, whom the Archdeacon carefully instructed in all points most certain to interest travelers, all of whom are therefore deeply indebted to him for this living guide, as well as for the written records of all his own wanderings in the city.¹²⁴

Here, it seems, all roads to the tourist experience in late nineteenth-century Guangzhou led back to Rev. Gray. Some skepticism should be leveled at Gordon-Cumming’s assertion that A Cum’s knowledge was solely the doing of Gray. Her own apparently preconceived thoughts on where authority lay were formed from her own background as a well-to-do female citizen of the British Empire, then nearing its height. Though it may well be true that Gray helped A Cum to understand what sites were most likely to interest foreign travelers, his command of his own language and tradition was undoubtedly better than Gray’s. This raises a question of collaboration in Gray’s Walks in Canton that cannot satisfactorily be resolved with the present level of documentation.

What is certain is that A Cum continued to do a thriving trade. In the 1880s, Englishman W. Henry Barneby conducted his world tour and stopped off in Guangzhou, noting:

We decided on taking a couple of guides to show us the town, and having engaged an old man, by name “Ah Cum,” and his son, we sallied forth, each in a palanquin (a kind of sedan chair), carried by three or four bearers, our guides being accommodated in the same manner.¹²⁵

During the 1890s, American globe-trotter Ms. Delight Sweetser noted, “Ah Cum, Sr., and Ah Cum, Jr., were our guides and piloted us skillfully through the maze of streets in the city.”¹²⁶ The A Cum family seems to have been fully aware of the dominance they had on the tourist traffic in the city, and even to some extent of their global reputation. The rather caustic and often somewhat racist traveler and lecturer John L. Stoddard recorded his surprise on arrival in Guangzhou:

It seemed impossible to disembark in such a mob.

But suddenly I felt a pressure on my arm. I turned and saw apparently three laundrymen from the United States. A glance assured me they were father and sons. “Good morning, sir,” said one of them in excellent English, “do you know Carter Harrison, of Chicago?”

This question, coming in such a place and at such a time, rendered me speechless with astonishment. “He mentioned us in his book, ‘A Race with the Sun,’” continued the young Chinaman. “This is my father, the famous guide, Ah Cum. This is my brother, and I am Ah Cum, Jr. The others are engaged for to-morrow, but I can serve you. Will you take me?”

“So you are Ah Cum?” I rejoined; “I have heard much of you. Your reference book must be a valuable autograph album of distinguished travelers. Yes we will take you.”¹²⁷

This quote more than any other indicates the total institutionalization of Cantonese tour guides as the primary interpreters of the city’s tourist sites to foreign visitors. An advertisement from the early twentieth century even shows that visitors could arrange a tour with one of the three generations of the family via the Thos. Cook & Son agency in Hong Kong.¹²⁸ Though A Cum and family were the preeminent Cantonese guides of the late nineteenth century, by the turn of the century they had regular competition.

In 1899, American clergyman Edward Abbott stopped in Guangzhou on his way to Australia. His only slightly decipherable travel journal recorded his visit in sentence fragments and a simple list of sites he visited with no elaboration. He noted:

Perfect swarm of boats and humanity. An introduction to teeming China. Struggle [?] to get aboard our deck and conduct [?] business. Competition of guides. Kingap [?] the first one who puts in an appearance who speaks English quite well and has a good book of recommendations from English and American travelers.¹²⁹

This, however fragmented, likely gives a good impression of what a short-term Western visitor at the turn of the century would experience on his arrival in Guangzhou. Several guides now competed for the tourists, boarding the steamers as they arrived, and carrying books with the recommendations of previous clients. Abbott must have ended up with the one whose card he attached to his journal, “Wong A Yew, Guide, Canton.”¹³⁰ As noted above, R. C. Hurley also made clear in his book that he had relationships with guides who could be taken from the Shamian Hotel, guaranteeing a consistency of quality that could not be counted upon if one obtained a guide from the steamer landing.

The tourists, once they had acquired their guide, surrendered control as they were whisked from site to site. The reasons for this were a combination of their own obvious lack of knowledge of the city, expedience, and security from real or perceived threats. Typically, the mode of transportation was the sedan chair, usually suspended between two poles and borne front and back by working-class local men. This distinguished them from the earlier sightseers, particularly those from the era before the Arrow War, who mostly moved about on foot. The chair bearers, as well as the guides, were to some degree responsible for the tourist. As Bishop Marvin noted in his travel memoir, “A man does not take a chair here for the same purpose as in America—that is, not always; for sometimes he takes a sedan-chair, in which case the chair takes him, rather.”¹³¹

Sedan bearers laid claim to their own expertise, and were sometimes resistant when given orders they did not feel appropriate. Even Rev. Gray and his wife could not count on control when they ventured forth on chairs, as recorded by Mrs. Gray’s recollections of one of their tours in the adjacent countryside:

We should have missed the finest part of the scenery if Henry had not known the route, as the chair coolies wished to take us direct over a high hill after we left the farmhouse, which would have shortened the journey some six or seven miles. They refused to take us where Henry intended to go, round the base of the hill. I got out of my chair and we walked on, the men stoutly declining to give in, and they became threatening in their attitude. When we walked a mile . . . the chair coolies, seeing they could not intimidate us, brought up the chairs, and we continued our long journey. . . .

I was in front, and not hearing the voices of Henry’s coolies, I became uneasy and called out to him. No answer came, and I called again. I had been warned by Henry not to show distrust to the Chinese, so, with as cheerful voice as I could command, I continued to call, but in vain—no answer came. I felt anxious. . . . The men too had been so very insubordinate, and one had looked so evil in the discussion of the choice of routes, that I feared something must have happened to Henry. I could neither speak nor understand a word of Chinese, and, therefore, could not tell the coolies to stop, so on we went. . . . You can imagine what my joy was when the steps of the other chair coolies became audible. . . . The coolies carrying his chair had become very much fatigued, and it was time for the other four to take their turn, but when inquired for, they were nowhere to be found.¹³²

Clearly, even experienced foreign residents surrendered some control when they took a sedan. Note that though Mrs. Gray became extremely worried, everything turned out fine in the end. The role of the chair bearers was more often an enabling rather than a confrontational one. These sturdy Cantonese accomplished foreigners’ progress through the city streets with aplomb, as Henry Barneby indicated:

We were soon in the city; such curious narrow streets, only six to eight feet wide, where the passers-by often had to stand on one side to let our chairs through. They were everywhere crowded with people, but we went on at a quick trot, our bearers hallooing and shouting the whole time so as to warn people to clear a way.¹³³

Experiencing the city on a sedan chair may not necessarily have been the most free or relaxed way, but definitely provided some advantages to the foreigners. Cutting through the Cantonese crowds was a primary function.

The Press of the Crowd

The progress of foreigners through the city in the tow of guides and sedan bearers was not simply ignored by the Cantonese. The citizens of the narrow streets of Guangzhou’s suburbs in the nineteenth century responded to the presence of Westerners, typically by gathering and observing them. Sometimes, this could be quite benign, as an American traveler of the 1870s noted:

But if we were amused with the Chinese, I dare say they were as much amused by us. The people of Canton ought by this time to be familiar with white faces. But, strange to say, wherever we went we attracted a degree of attention which had never been accorded us before in any foreign city. Boys ran after us, shouting as they ran. If the chairs were set down in the street, as we stopped to see a sight, a crowd gathered in a moment. There was no rudeness, but mere curiosity. If we went into a temple, a throng collected about the doors and looked in at the windows, and opened a passage for us as we came out, and followed us until we got in our chairs and disappeared down the street. The ladies of our party especially seemed to be objects of wonder. They did not hobble on the points of their toes, but stood erect and walked with a firm step. Their free and independent air evidently inspired respect. The children seemed to hesitate between awe and terror. One little fellow, I remember, who dared to approach too near, and whom my niece cast her eye upon, thought that he was done for, and fled howling. I have no doubt all reported, when they went home, that they had seen some strange specimens of “foreign devils.”¹³⁴

The press of the interested Cantonese crowd was a common experience for foreign travelers in Guangzhou and elsewhere in South China during the second half of the nineteenth century.¹³⁵

The crowd could also be employed to intimidate foreign tourists, possibly in hopes of moving them out of the neighborhood. The busy streets of Guangzhou could equally present a peaceful, even pleasant, crowd or a resistant or threatening one, as noted by some visitors. Rev. J. MacGowan stated:

There is one feature about this place that is very striking, and at the same time exceedingly disagreeable, and that is the contempt which people in the street show the foreigner. This is not confined simply to looks, but often takes the more offensive shape of insulting epithets and rough jostling, which at the least provocation would lead to something more serious.¹³⁶

From foreign accounts, there is little to hint at what made the experience of some tourists so different from that of others. What is clear is the role that the guides or chair bearers could play in acting as a buffer. John Stoddard’s recollections attest to this:

Some of the ladies feared being insulted by the Canton populace, and told exciting stories of an English lady who had been recently spat upon, and of American ladies who had been followed by a hooting crowd. Ah Cum, however, smiled complacently. “There is no danger,” he assured us; “my father will take care of you ladies, as I will of these gentlemen. Everyone here knows us. Our people are always safe.”¹³⁷

Occasionally we met a sedan-chair coming in the opposite direction. Both sets of bearers then began to yell like maniacs, and we would finally pass each other with the utmost difficulty, our coolies having frequently to back the chair-poles into one shop, and then run them forward into a doorway on the opposite corner, thereby blocking the noisy, surly crowd until the passage could be cleared.

The faces packed around us, while not positively hostile, were as a rule unfriendly. An insolent stare was characteristic of most of them. Some disagreeable criticisms were pronounced, but Ah Cum’s expression never changed, and we, of course, could not understand them. Once a banana-skin, thrown probably by some mischievous boy, flew by my head; and I was told that China’s favorite exclamation, “foreign devils,” was often heard. But I dare say that if a Chinese mandarin, in full regalia, were to walk through some of our streets, he would not fare as well as we did in Canton; and that if he ever went to the Bowery, “he’d never go there anymore.”¹³⁸

Cantonese playing a number of different roles, therefore, controlled the Western experience of travel through the city. The crowds could permit and even find interest in the foreign presence. They could alternatively employ their collective action to discourage foreign access. Guides and chair bearers took as their job the negotiation of the foreigners through the streets. Cantonese guides presented chosen sites from an itinerary constructed collaboratively between themselves and certain foreigners, notably Rev. Gray. It was up to the visitor to then produce his or her own interpretation.

The “Regulation” Sites

Foreign views and interpretations of the tourist sites of Guangzhou is a complex subject, perhaps worthy of an individual study unto itself. Authors like Bernard Cohn, working in other nineteenth-century colonial environments, have found that the West’s accumulation, ordering, and systematization of knowledge of other cultures were a directly hegemonic move.¹³⁹ The Western investigative modality, Cohn states, “includes the definition of a body of information that is needed, the procedures by which appropriate knowledge is gathered, its ordering and classification, and then how it is transformed into usable forms.”¹⁴⁰ Unlike other colonial environments, China confronted Western observers and scholars with an intact historical record and with citizens prepared to exert some control over their own history.

As already outlined, some topographical knowledge was produced as part of British efforts to dominate the city during the Opium and Arrow Wars. These efforts had little long-term impact beyond the production of accurate maps, however. Rev. Gray, the individual primarily responsible for initial gathering of information on the city with an eye toward comprehensiveness, did not do his work in a vacuum. He formulated his primarily geographically ordered survey of the city by gathering information not only from his own experiences and research, but also from local informants. Gray’s collaboration and friendship with knowledgeable Chinese, in particular Buddhist monks and other temple attendants, is amply documented, to the extent that the monks of the Ocean Banner Monastery had even given him a pavilion in the temple for use as a study and retreat.¹⁴¹ Gray’s, and hence all later, summaries of the history and meaning of various sites in Guangzhou therefore relied heavily on the presentations of information by Cantonese people in charge of the sites.

On the other hand, Gray’s choice of sites for inclusion was influenced by ideas of interest imported from the West. Chinese-language tourist publications of the same era often indicated distinctly different sites of interest, following a Chinese conception of landscape, scenery, and meaning.¹⁴² Sites included in Gray’s and later travel guides for Westerners were generally architecturally monumental, “ethnographically” interesting, or historically significant. The last category of sites was generally agreed upon across cultures. The sites viewed by Westerners as “ethnographically” interesting, that is, to Western eyes unusual or odd, did not overlap with Chinese ideas of things worth seeing. By looking at a few of the many sites that were part of most tours of the city, it is possible to examine how Guangzhou was framed or represented by Western travelers, and to what ends.

First, temples always commanded the attention of Westerners. This is true in Guangzhou, even though, by and large due to their urban nature, they were generally not as monumental as elsewhere in China. Though discussed in detail and deemed worthy of interest by Dr. Gray, it did not take long for travel writers to disparage Guangzhou’s temples generally. British engineer Daniel Pidgeon, for instance, stated, “There are any number of temples and pagodas in Canton, notable for nothing but their filthy ruinous condition, and entire want of architectural interest.”¹⁴³ Wesleyan missionary John Turner concurred:

The city of Canton, being much given to idolatry has many temples, more than a hundred and twenty of which are said to be Buddhist. They are mostly dingy in appearance, the chosen abodes of bats, and of spiders whose webs are black with the smoke of ever-rising incense. In the courtyards outside congregate fortune-tellers, hucksters, and beggars in sackcloth full of sores.¹⁴⁴

Not surprisingly, most Westerners and particularly those of strongly religious backgrounds had little understanding of the operation and role of temples in Cantonese life. Obviously, statues were interpreted as “idols,” while incense and its effects on the buildings were viewed negatively, particularly by Protestants. The fact that the temple generally served a secondary function as a neighborhood social center in Chinese tradition was frequently viewed as evidence of a lack of reverence.

The temple perhaps most frequently visited by foreign tourists of the later nineteenth century was the Temple of Five Hundred Lohans (also known as the Hualinsi). It is also perhaps the most perpetually misinterpreted. Never depicted from the exterior, the conventional view of the building represented in Western books and postcards was of the 500 statues in the interior of a main hall (Pl. 23). Some of the most attentive travelers came close to understanding the contents of the temple:

Among the many temples we visited today, one was dedicated to the Five Hundred Disciples of the Buddha, whose five hundred life-sized gilded images are ranged all round the temple, so as to form a double square, while others ranged in cruciform lines, meeting at a bronze dagoba which doubtless contains a relic of some great saint. Each of these statues is different (although all alike are hideous), and are supposed to be life-like. Some are sad, some merry, some in tattered garments and barefoot, while some are well dressed and well shod. An extra statue represents the Emperor Kienlung, who was greatly revered, and three Buddhas watch over all.¹⁴⁵

Mrs. Gordon-Cumming, with her attention to detail and, apparently, to the notes of Rev. Gray, besides getting the name more or less right, understood a fair amount about the symbolism of the temple’s contents. She of course made a negative aesthetic judgment on the statues, which was common practice though not a rule, as another visitor observed, “The features are good and there is every variety of expression.”¹⁴⁶ Another account was put forth after a cordial visit by Olive Risley Seward, the niece of American statesman William Seward, who accompanied him on his tour:

Its pantheon contains images not only of gods of whom the Greeks or Romans never dreamed, but of more gods than they ever worshipped. Think of five hundred colossal wooden figures, of all complexions, black, white, and red, with distorted features and limbs, dressed in purple, crimson, and gold, sitting in close order around the walls of a saloon, equal to the largest in the British Museum. These are the guardian genii of China. Each is a deified apostle or saint of the religion. These figures were presented to the monastery by one of the emperors, and perhaps were all carved by one artist. If he failed to impart a natural human expression to any among them, it must be admitted in his favor that, in their hideous distortions, no two are alike. We were kindly received by the monks. . . . The brethren showed by their conversation a vague knowledge of foreign countries. They feared that the disasters which have befallen France may encourage Russian aggression against China. They understood something of the great civil war in the United States, and rejoice in its results.¹⁴⁷

Olive Seward, having the benefit of being in a tour group of dignitaries led by Rev. Gray, had an interesting experience allowing her to perceive the inhabitants of the temple as contemporaries with knowledge of the modern world. However, she places the site as something of the past, comparing the statues with the gods of Greece or Rome and comparing the building to an exhibition hall in the British Museum. Even with an expert tour guide, her concerns are aesthetically conventional. Here, it should be noted that Lohans in the Buddhist tradition are generally elderly and not particularly friendly figures, not generally thought of as “beautiful.” She also somehow conceives of the statues as being some sort of “guardian genii.”

The misunderstanding of the statues, in search of a common past, becomes more and more strained in the accounts of less well-informed travelers. Thomas Woodbine Hinchliff supplies his own story, heedless of documentation, for one statue: “Many of the figures are extremely curious; and in one case a Buddhist version of the history of Elijah is represented in the person of a saint, who in his banishment is being nourished by wild monkeys!”¹⁴⁸ Perhaps the most frequent Western misinterpretation focused on one particular statue. Revealing some sort of imperialist fantasy, it was described as “a European in sailor’s costume, said to be meant for Marco Polo, but, whoever it may be, evidently considered an object at least of veneration, if not of worship.”¹⁴⁹ As appealing to the Westerner as this theory might have been, this myth, perpetuated by R. C. Hurley’s guide, was certainly wide of the truth. The figure was described elsewhere as “with a black face,” probably representing a South Asian.¹⁵⁰ It is difficult now to assign the exact identity of the statue, though it was undoubtedly a fairly conventionally acknowledged Lohan. Its identification as Marco Polo likely has a complex history that, in addition to Western fantasies, probably owes to the fact that the statue had facial hair and non-Chinese features, combined with the presence in some local temples of an Indian figure, though probably not this one, that was thought to have brought the pineapple (locally dubbed polo) to China.

These discussions of the Temple of Five Hundred Lohans reveal themes consistent in Western views of Guangzhou’s sites overall. One is the supposed “backwardness” of the largely misunderstood Chinese religion, which was sometimes used to justify missionary intervention. Another is a continual aesthetic assessment. This of course slid into a view of the city as a sort of museum, often scoured for clues to a shared past, or a searching between Chinese civilization and Western history. In all of these, there seems to have been a perpetual equivocation. On the one hand, some visitors simply admired the city’s features, and on the other, some viewed them as proofs of Western superiority and justification for intervention.

These ideas can also be observed in accounts of other tourist sites of the city. One attraction that was variously interpreted as a marvel or an indication of backwardness, this time in terms of technology, was the city’s water clock. Located in the central part of the walled city, in a part of a ceremonial double gate, it was in almost every tourist’s itinerary. A typical description might be as matter-of-fact as the following:

Over one of the principal gateways is a curious Water-clock, which consists of three barrels placed step-like one above the other, and is very ancient. The water drips at a given rate from the higher to the lower, thus indicating the time.¹⁵¹

Constance Gordon-Cumming praised it as “a most ingenious contrivance which seems to have been in use among various ancient nations.”¹⁵² Maturin Ballou, however, asserted, “Much has been said about the wonderful Water-clock of Canton, but it is actually a very simple and crude method of measuring time, which any smart Yankee school-boy would improve upon.”¹⁵³ Another visitor noted, “It is a device unworthy even of a barbarous country.”¹⁵⁴ This attraction received a progressively worse reputation as the twentieth century dawned, one lady visitor being so oblivious to its significance that she actually sat on part of it and was consequently chastised by her local guide. The water clock, incidentally, can still be seen in its new location, the Zhenhai Lou, now the museum of the city.¹⁵⁵

The attraction that perhaps most epitomized the use of the site as a static place of discourse—observe that, as in any of these examples, there is little account of foreign visitors actually doing anything—about the nature of China and the Chinese was the Gongyuan or “Examination Hall.” This was a great attraction, much represented in postcards, both because of its large scale and because of its apparent illustration of Chinese systems of governance (Pl. 24). Dr. Kerr’s guide offered its concise and precise description:

The triennial examination of candidates for the Ku-yan or second literary degree is held here. All the Siu-tsai or graduates of the first degree in the whole Province are required to compete at this examination. The enclosure is divided into two sections: that for the candidates and that for the officials. On each side of the great avenue are ranges of cells, in which the scholars write their essays. These cells are 5½ feet long by 3 2/3 feet wide and are 11,616 in number. The apartments for the officials, copyists, police, and servants are in the rear, and there is room for about 3,000. The examination begins on the 8th of the 8th moon, and occupies three sessions of three days each. The same texts are given to all at daylight, and the essay must be handed in the following morning, after which candidates leave the Hall, to re-enter the following day for the next trial. About 130 are passed after the final trial, and these are booked to promotion in civil offices. They are also required to go to Peking to compete for the third degree. The Hall is about 1,380 feet long by 650 feet wide. The plan gives an ideal arrangement of an institution peculiarly Chinese.¹⁵⁶

Accompanying this entry is a plan, copied from a Chinese woodblock, into which the author inserted arabic numerals keyed to points of interest such as “Watch tower. God of Literature in second story” and “Hall of Perfect Rectitude, where essays are handed in.”¹⁵⁷ Thus precisely measured and mapped, the examination hall solidified into one of Guangzhou’s must-see attractions. Explanations of the examinations offered to visitors were reinterpreted by them as assessments of the nature of Chinese civilization. The greatest enthusiasts for the site, also often those who had a favorable impression of the city, echoed praises of China by the Enlightenment philosophers. Henry M. Field, D. D., an American world traveler of a pragmatic turn of mind, assessed the site in the 1880s:

We found a very curious study in the Examination Hall, illustrating as it does, the Chinese manner of elevating men into office. We hear much in our country of “civil service reform,” which some innocently suppose to be a new study in political economy—an American invention. But the Chinese have had it for thousands of years. Here appointments to office are made as the result of a competitive examination; and although there may be secretive favoritism and bribery, yet the theory is one of perfect equality. In this respect China is the most absolute democracy in the world. There is no hereditary rank or order of nobility; the lowest menial, if he have native talent, may raise himself by study and perseverance to be Prime Minister of the Empire.¹⁵⁸

To Field, China contained lessons for his own government in the United States. He later went on to consider, “May we not get a hint from this for our instruction in America where some of our best men are making earnest efforts for civil service reform?” and “if they [American officials] were required to pass an examination, and to furnish written essays, showing at least some degree of knowledge of political affairs, we might have a more intelligent class of officials to fill consular posts in different parts of the world.”¹⁵⁹

Other visitors to the site posed backhanded compliments, such as “if the country remains stationary under a system from which we expect advance, it is because the test of merit is mere scholasticism.”¹⁶⁰ John Stoddard was a bit taken aback by the physical conditions of the exams; in describing the cubicles, he stated:

One of the horse-sheds in the rear of a New England meeting house would be a far more comfortable house in which to sleep and eat. Perhaps they are meant, however, to emphasize the triumph of mind over matter. Their only furniture consists of two small planks, one for a seat, the other for a table. Rest is, of course, impossible in such cages, and candidates have sometimes died here from physical and mental strain.¹⁶¹

The morbid, perhaps spurious, claim that examination candidates died in the cells seems to have had a fascination for Western travelers, who often repeated this line. Those who were predisposed to condescend to the Chinese as a backward race, of course, found fault with the system. Biologist Edward S. Morse, for whom everything Japanese seemed vastly superior to everything Chinese, assessed the activities of the site as follows:

An ignoramus on everything but Chinese classics may beat other numskulls in writing the best composition on the text given, and attain some office dealing with matters pertaining to the nineteenth century. As an illustration, a competitor has secured a position in the army by passing a literary examination on the art of war, not as understood today, but with the art as set forth by authorities three thousand years ago. . . . No wonder in the recent war with Japan, Chinese generals were found with bird cages, and a retinue of concubines, while every soldier carried a fan, and every third one a banner. How inferior to the Japanese in these matters!¹⁶²

The matter of literary examination for public office has been repeatedly dwelt upon, yet no one can realize the powering absurdity of it until he comes to examine the conditions minutely. China is supposed to have an army and a navy, arsenals and departments of telegraph, customs, etc. Now let one open a page of Confucious [sic] . . . and find if he can a single line which would enable him to perform any of the duties involved in the above departments.¹⁶³

These moral admonitions of Confucius are evidently taken in the usual Chinese reverse sense; for, outside of the municipal affairs of New York and Philadelphia, no greater corruption or dishonesty exists than can be found in China.¹⁶⁴

If a visitor like Morse toured China expecting inferiority and backwardness, he would find it. Morse’s tone was one of great authority, to which he had no more claim than most of his fellow tourists. His work was one of intended “objective” analysis, but he consistently failed to approach his ideal. He was prone to profound cultural misunderstandings, as when he visited the Howqua family villa and wondered why the residents were brusque with him when he wanted to draw their kitchen rather than admire the gardens.¹⁶⁵ Those Westerners who toured Guangzhou in the later nineteenth century, no matter their cultural sensitivity or disposition, uniformly saw the buildings and sites on their tour as examples of Chinese culture and places with which to represent it. Most of the tourist sites were physically described in terms that repeated Gray or Kerr’s guides almost verbatim, and then were used to express personal feelings or opinions, usually to appraise the “Chinese” as a civilization or race.

Urban Fabric and Western Perceptions

The setting where this was, finally, most apparent was in the streets of Guangzhou themselves. Delight Sweetser in the 1890s asserted that “The regulation sights of Canton are less interesting than the streets.”¹⁶⁶ Constance F. Gordon-Cumming expressed the sentiment in a more elaborate way:

What really fascinates the eye and bewilders the mind is simply the common street-life, which, from morning till night, as you move through the streets, presents a succession of pictures, each of intense interest and novelty. In all this there is life—a great busy people, and one feels that it is really an effort to turn aside from these to see any recognized “sight.”¹⁶⁷

By the streets, it was generally understood that the narrow thoroughfares of the Xiguan, or western suburbs, were somehow representative, although in reality these were fairly uniquely urbanized conditions in terms of China overall.

Though few Western visitors in the later nineteenth century actually seem to have felt “at home,” several had generally favorable impressions. Bishop E. M. Marvin reflected:

Canton is in many respects and by far the finest, as it is the largest, Chinese city we have seen. Soochow and Hangchow were, perhaps, as large before the insurrection, but they were terribly depopulated by the [Arrow?] war, and have not yet recovered their former greatness; nor were they ever anything so well built as Canton. Some of the best brick work I ever saw is here. The most perfect of pressed brick is laid in mortar, spread so thin that it looks like a thread of white running from one end of the wall to the other. The face of the wall is very beautiful. . . . There are the same very narrow streets here as elsewhere, but they are cleaner; and though the odors are bad enough, yet they do not come up to those of other cities we have visited. The shops are larger, and the stocks of goods better than we have seen elsewhere.¹⁶⁸

This from a world traveler, who despite antagonism to what he termed the “idolatry” of the Chinese, was quite impressed with their civilization as represented by Guangzhou. H. M. Field lumped his descriptions of the sites of Guangzhou all together, then expanded on his view of the Chinese from his brief visit, at one point dubbing them “the most industrious people on the face of the earth.”¹⁶⁹ Guangzhou was his main experience of China, and favorably impressed him, as he ended the chapter on the city:

No one can visit China without becoming interested in the country and its people. There is much that is good in the Chinese, in their patient industry, and in their strong domestic feeling. Who can but respect a people that honor their fathers and mothers in a way to furnish an example to the whole Christian world? . . . The mass of the people are miserably poor, but they do not murmur their lot. They take it patiently, and even cheerfully; for they see in it a mixture of light and bright. In their own beautiful and poetical saying, “The moon shines bright amid the firs.” May it not only shine through the gloom of deep forests, but rise higher and higher till it casts a flood of light over the whole Eastern sky!¹⁷⁰

The people who seem to have had the most favorable impressions of Guangzhou are the ones who appear to have taken the initiative to have personal interactions with the Cantonese. John Russell Young, part of the retinue of General Grant on his visit to the city, is one such example, recounting, “The spirit of the people is as a general thing courteous. Now and then some member of the party at one of our pauses would exchange a remark or a salute with the crowd in front of his chair, or pat a child on the head, or give it a coin, and there would be a sudden whiff of laughter or merriment.”¹⁷¹

Most travelers were equivocal in their assessment of the city streets and their inhabitants. The typical foreign tourist in Guangzhou saw it as a paradigm of China, and made judgements, often underpinned with ideas about Western superiority and historical progress, that took into account both good and bad. Many, when they saw conditions they disliked, instinctively paused to reflect on the reasons for them. Rev. J. MacGowan noted:

Canton, like other Chinese cities, presents a curious mixture of squalidness and opulence. Narrow, dirty streets, with tumble-down houses and untidy interiors (which in the shops at least are always open to the inspection of passers-by), give one the impression that poverty must be an important factor in the lives of the large majority of these vigorous, sturdy people.¹⁷²

Other travelers expressed a typical sentiment, put succinctly by Thomas Hinchliff, that “The Chinese are wonderfully clever and interesting race of people, capable of great things if they ever free themselves from the thraldom of a grasping Government.”¹⁷³ Guangzhou’s inhabitants were aware of Western critiques of their city, and some agreed with them. As it turns out, the bustling Cantonese were about to rid themselves of the imperial government and of many of their narrow streets. The reader must follow this part of the story, however, into the twentieth century.

1. Seward, William H. Seward’s Travels Around the World, p. 236.

2. The term “mapping” is here used in generally the same sense utilized by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

3. John Frow, “Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia,” October 57 (Summer 1991): 128–30.

4. It is important to note that the southern and western suburbs of Guangzhou before the twentieth century were actually more built up than the city center within the walls. The reason for this is that they contained the active commercial functions of the city, while inside the walls, and particularly inside the “old town” or northern walled city, were located only official functions largely dedicated to the Qing (Manchu) occupation of the city—palaces or yamen, and barracks.

5. Hunter, The ‘Fan Kwae’ at Canton, pp. 28–29.

6. Notices Concerning China and the Port of Canton (Malacca: The Mission Press, 1823), pp. 6–11.

7. Tiffany, The Canton Chinese, p. 184.

8. Hunter, Bits of Old China, p. 176.

9. Taylor, A Voyage around the World, p. 159.

10. Tiffany, The Canton Chinese, p. 190.

11. Hunter, Bits of Old China, p. 176.

12. Tiffany, The Canton Chinese, p. 190.

13. See Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Shocken Books, 1976), Chapter 5, passim and p. 122.

14. Lewis Bentham Bowring, “A Memoir of Service in India” (c. early 1850s), MSS Eur. G91, British Library, p. 71.

15. Tiffany, The Canton Chinese, pp. 187–88.

16. Augustus Ward Loomis Papers, Cornell University Archives (2474). Letter of October 23, 1849. Loomis was a missionary from Cazenovia, New York.

17. B. L. Ball, Rambles in Eastern Asia (Boston: James French and Co., 1855), p. 105.

18. Tiffany, The Canton Chinese, p. 163.

19. Ibid., p. 159.

20. Hunter, Bits of Old China, p. 7.

21. Tiffany, The Canton Chinese, p. 159.

22. Ibid., 160–62.

23. Ibid., p. 160.

24. Ibid., pp. 162–63.

25. During the late nineteenth century, the great monopolist families were to some extent in decline. The Howqua family held on to its villa for some time after the death of the patriarch Wu Chongyao in 1863. Archdeacon and Mrs. Gray, always popular among an interesting cross-section of Chinese society, were attendees at a banquet at the Howqua family villa as late as May 1877. See Gray, Fourteen Months in Canton, pp. 121–29.

26. See Col. Lawrence Waters Jenkins (ed.), Bryant Parrott Tilden of Salem at a Chinese Dinner Party, Canton: 1819 (Princeton: Princeton University Press for The Newcomen Society, 1944); Ethel King Russell (ed.), Journal and Letters of Edward King, 1835–1844 (New York: 1934), pp. 99–100; and Kerr, Letters from China, pp. 79–83.

27. Jenkins, Bryant Parrott Tilden of Salem at a Chinese Dinner Party, Canton: 1819, pp. 11–12. This is in contrast to Howqua, who, while usually considered the wealthiest, was a lower level degree holder who had failed the jinshi examination four times (see Johnson and Peterson, Historical Dictionary of Guanghzou (Canton) and Guangdong, p. 51). There were three hong merchants referred to as Paunkeiqua, a father, son, and nephew of the surname Pan—and this is probably the second of the line. An interesting bit of trivia is that this merchant was made a member of the Massachusetts Agricultural Society in the same year as Tilden’s visit. See Jenkins above, p. 10.

28. Jenkins, Bryant Parrott Tilden of Salem at a Chinese Dinner Party, Canton: 1819, p. 12.

29. Ibid., pp. 12–13.

30. Ibid., p. 13.

31. Ibid., p. 17.

32. Ibid., pp. 17–18.

33. Ibid., pp. 18–19.

34. Ibid., p. 20.

35. Ibid., pp. 20, 22.

36. Ibid., pp. 20–21.

37. Ibid., p. 21.

38. Ibid., pp. 22–23.

39. Russell, Journal and Letters of Edward King, 1835–1844, p. 99. Another description of a visit to Tingqua’s villa, albeit without a banquet, can be found in Taylor, A Voyage Around the World, pp. 143–46.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., p. 100.

42. Kerr, Letters from China, pp. 79–83.

43. Ibid., p. 79.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., pp. 79–80.

46. Ibid., pp. 80–82.

47. Ibid., p. 82.

48. Ibid., p. 83.

49. Ibid.

50. Tiffany, The Canton Chinese, p. 166.

51. Ball, Rambles in Eastern Asia, p. 122.

52. Ibid., p. 123.

53. Tiffany, The Canton Chinese, p. 167, and A. B. Smith, Diary. American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions records. Harvard University Archives. ABC 18.5.5, vol. 2, entry for January 13, 1846.

54. Paul S. Forbes Diary, Forbes Collection, Box 6, Folder 65. Baker Library, Harvard University. Entry for May 15, 1843.

55. Jenkins, Bryant Parrott Tilden of Salem at a Chinese Dinner Party, Canton: 1819, p. 12.

56. Passenger Journal. Eureka, Ship. Peabody Essex Museum. LOG 1854 E3 (B19), entry for April 11.

57. Ball, Rambles in Eastern Asia, pp. 123–24.

58. Augustus Ward Loomis Papers, Cornell Archives. #2474. Letter of October 23, 1849.

59. Howard Malcolm, Travels in South-Eastern Asia: Embracing Hindustan, Malaya, Siam, and China (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1853), p. 341.

60. Major-General G. Allgood, China War 1860: Letters and Journal (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901), p. 24.

61. See Gray, Fourteen Months in Canton, Letters 10, 15, 18, 25, and 37. Notable in Mrs. Gray’s discussions were the attempts by the men of the Howqua family to emulate Western manners.

62. John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant, Vol. II, Part 2 (New York: 1879), pp. 322–45, passim.

63. Taylor, A Voyage Around the World, p. 140.

64. Tilden Journal. PEM. Voyage 1, Vol. 1, p. 80.

65. See, for example, Samuel R. Corwen (sailing master), Log of Ship, Golden West, 1858/1859. PEM.

66. Two collections of interest are in the Peabody Essex Museum, accession numbers E 80607.23 and E82.546-549. The album in the former is featured in H. A. Crosby Forbes, Shopping in China: The Artisan Community at Canton, 1825–30 (Baltimore: Garamond/Pridemark Press, 1979). The author of this catalogue has carefully analyzed the contents and activities represented in these shop pictures.

67. Tiffany, The Canton Chinese, p. 59.

68. See Crossman, The China Trade, pp. 105–7.

69. Besides the paintings, descriptions of the shops tend to agree on this point. See W. S. W. Ruschenberger, A Voyage Around the World (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1838), p. 398.

70. Tiffany, The Canton Chinese, p. 61.

71. See Forbes, Shopping in China: The Artisan Community at Canton, 1825–30, no. 40.

72. Yvan, Inside Canton, pp. 51–52.

73. Tiffany, The Canton Chinese, pp. 63–64.

74. Ibid., p. 61.

75. Ruschenberger, A Voyage Around the World, pp. 398–99. Ruschenberger, a US Navy surgeon and member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, was an excellent observer of the more technical aspects of Chinese industry and exchange.

76. Tiffany, The Canton Chinese, p. 65.

77. Ibid., pp. 64–65.

78. Hunter, Bits of Old China, p. 72.

79. Downing, The Fan-qui, or Foreigner in China, pp. 291–92. He particularly notes the trailing off of English-language proficiency further away from the “China” streets.

80. Caroline A. Stoddard, Journal for 1856, LOG 1856 K (clipper ship Kathay) B41 F4. PEM. Entry for August 11, 1856.

81. See Hunter, Bits of Old China, pp. 63–68, 107, 194, 199–200. For general lax attitudes towards the resident traders, see also pp. 1–3.

82. See Edward H. Cree, Naval Surgeon: The Voyages of Dr. Edward H. Cree, Royal Navy, as Related in His Private Journals, 1837–1856, edited by Michael Levien (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982), and Duncan McPherson, The War in China: Narrative of the Chinese Expedition from its Formation in April 1840 to the Treaty of Peace in August, 1842 (London: Saunders and Otley, 1843), Chapters 14 and 15, and Hall and Bernard, The Nemesis in China, passim.

83. Cree, Naval Surgeon: The Voyages of Dr. Edward H. Cree, p. 86.

84. Wu Qingzhou, Guangzhou jianzhu (Guangzhou: Guangdong sheng ditu chubanshe, 2000), pp. 64–66.

85. Discussions of the Treaty of Nanjing are too numerous to list here. A succinct account can be found in Spence, The Search for Modern China, p. 164.

86. British Foreign Office Correspondence (PRO 17/127). Despatches no. 104, 107, et al.

87. Jules Davids (ed.), American Diplomatic and Public Papers: The United States and China, Series 1, Vol. 3 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1973), p. xx.

88. For other reasons behind the Arrow War, see Spence, The Search for Modern China, pp. 179–80.

89. Garrett, Heaven is High, the Emperor Far Away, pp. 104–5.

90. Cooke, China, Chapter 25. This gives several examples of such expeditions.

91. Laurence Oliphant, Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan (Reprint, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), pp. 95–99, and Cooke, China, Chapters 25 and 26.

92. Cooke, China, Chapter 26.

93. Oliphant, Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan, pp. 120–22; Lt. Col. C. B. Fisher, Personal Narrative of Three Years’ Service in China (London: Richard Bentley, 1863), pp. 9–10; and Garrett, Heaven is High, the Emperor Far Away, p. 107.

94. Oliphant, Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan, pp. 121–22. This passage recounts the realization that governing the city by themselves was beyond the means of the allied foreigners.

95. See Cooke, China, and Fisher, Personal Narrative of Five Years’ Service in China.

96. PEM Accession No. E78602. The date assigned in museum files is 1858.

97. J. G. Kerr, A Guide to the City and Suburbs of Canton (Hong Kong: Kelly & Walsh, original edition 1870s, multiple reprints—I have access to the 1904 edition), and R. C. Hurley, The Tourist’s Guide to Canton, the West River, and Macau (Hong Kong: Noronha & Co., 1895).

98. De Certeau, The Practice of Everday Life, Chapter 9, “Spatial Stories.”

99. Samuel R. Corwen, Log of Ship Golden West, 1858/59. PEM.

100. Another notable account of going up a pagoda for a view is in Hannah Legge Diary, Legge Family Papers. SOAS. Entry for June 25, 1860.

101. John Henry Gray, Walks in the City of Canton (Hong Kong: De Souza & Co., 1875).

102. Baron de Hübner (Joseph Alexander), A Ramble Round the World, 1871 (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1874), p. 584.

103. Seward, William H. Seward’s Travels Around the World, Chapters 15, 16, passim.

104. De Hübner, A Ramble Round the World, 1871, pp. 585, 586.

105. Ibid., p. 586.

106. Gray, Walks in the City of Canton, p. xv.

107. Ibid., pp. 208–17.

108. De Hübner, A Ramble Round the World, 1871, p. 586.

109. Samuel Mossman, China: A Brief Account of the Country, Its Inhabitants, and Their Institutions (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1867), p. 151.

110. Maturin M. Ballou, Due West or Round the World in Ten Months (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1884), p. 93.

111. Kerr, A Guide to the City and Suburbs of Canton. I have had access mostly to the 1904 edition.

112. See Noyes, History of the South China Mission, particularly Chapter 6.

113. For an account of a tour given by Dr. Kerr, see Mrs. H. Dwight Williams, A Year in China (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1864), pp. 183–97. This book notably contains a preface by William Cullen Bryant.

114. Kerr, A Guide to the City and Suburbs of Canton, pp. 84–88.

115. Ibid., pp. 89–93.

116. J. W. Carrall, The Tourist’s Guide for the City of Canton Compiled from Various Sources (Macao: J. M. da Silva, 1877).

117. Ibid.

118. Hurley, The Tourist’s Guide to Canton, the West River, and Macao.

119. Ibid., p. xxix. The passage is listed under the advertisement section, but of course in a prime place in the text.

120. Ibid., p. 21.

121. Ibid., pp. 32–33.

122. This concept is borrowed from Frow, “Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia,” pp. 128–30.

123. Thomas Woodbine Hinchliff, Over the Sea and Far Away, being a Narrative of Wanderings Round the World (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1876), p. 395.

124. Gordon-Cumming, Wanderings in China, pp. 46–47.

125. W. Henry Barneby, The New Far West and the Old Far East (London: Edward Stanford, 1889), p. 248.

126. Delight Sweetser, One Way Round the World (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1898), p. 127. Also note that one of the Ah Cum consortium was Rudyard Kipling’s tour guide when he visited the city in 1889. See Rudyard Kipling, “The Canton Trip” in Chris Elder (ed.), China’s Treaty Ports: Half Love and Half Hate (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 214.

127. Stoddard, John L. Stoddard’s Lectures, Vol. 3: Japan and China, pp. 268–69.

128. See Thomas Cooke & Son, Information for Travelers Landing at Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Thomas Cook & Son, 1919), p. xi.

129. Edward Abbott Papers, Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library (LCCN 78000657), p. 65.

130. Ibid.

131. Bishop E. M. Marvin, To the East by Way of the West (St Louis: Bryan, Brand & Co., Publishers, 1878), p. 145.

132. Gray, Fourteen Months in Canton, pp. 29–32, passim.

133. Barneby, The New Far West and the Old Far East, p. 248.

134. Henry M. Field, From Egypt to Japan (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886), p. 372.

135. Another account of the crowd, rendered as inconvenient but non-threatening, can be found in Williams, A Year in China, p. 191.

136. Rev. J. MacGowan, Pictures of Southern China (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1897), p. 394.

137. Stoddard, John L. Stoddard’s Lectures, Vol. 3, p. 276.

138. Ibid., pp. 280–81. A similar account can be found in Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, China: The Long-Lived Empire (New York: The Century Co., 1902), p. 433.

139. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

140. Ibid., p. 5.

141. Gray, Fourteen Months in Canton, p. 13.

142. Er An, Zhucheng Jiji (1901; in Chinese), Zhongshan Library Archives (Wende Lu), Guangzhou (K.1.17244). This book has descriptions and engravings of the traditional Chinese sights of the city.

143. Daniel Pidgeon, An Engineer’s Holiday, or Notes of a Round Trip from Long. 0° to 0° (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1883), p. 328.

144. John A. Turner, Kwang Tung, or Five Years in South China (London: S. W. Partridge & Co., 1894), p. 27.

145. Gordon-Cumming, Wanderings in China, p. 47.

146. Marvin, To the East by Way of the West, p. 147.

147. Seward, William H. Seward’s Travels Around the World, pp. 241–42.

148. Hinchliff, Over the Sea and Far Away, p. 397.

149. Brassey, Around the World in the Yacht ‘Sunbeam’, p. 355.

150. Turner, Kwang Tung or Five Years in South China, p. 27.

151. Ibid., p. 35.

152. Gordon-Cumming, Wanderings in China, p. 49.

153. Ballou, Due West or Round the World in Ten Months, p. 100.

154. Pidgeon, An Engineer’s Holiday, p. 328.

155. Scidmore, China the Long-Lived Empire, p. 438.

156. Kerr, A Guide to the City and Suburbs of Canton, pp. 29–30.

157. Ibid., pp. 30–31.

158. Field, From Egypt to Japan, pp. 374–75.

159. Ibid., pp. 376–77.

160. Pidgeon, An Engineers Holiday, p. 328.

161. Stoddard, John L. Stoddard’s Lectures, Vol. 3, pp. 328–29.

162. Edward S. Morse, Glimpses of China and Chinese Homes (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1902), p. 174.

163. Ibid., p. 175.

164. Ibid., p. 176.

165. Ibid., Chapter 9.

166. Sweetser, One Way Round the World, p. 131.

167. Gordon-Cumming, Wanderings in China, p. 36.

168. Marvin, To the East by Way of the West, p. 151.

169. Field, From Egypt to Japan, p. 387.

170. Ibid., p. 396.

171. Young, Around the World with General Grant, p. 320.

172. MacGowan, Pictures of Southern China, p. 308.

173. Hinchliff, Over the Sea and Far Away, p. 401.