An Irishman in China
An Irishman in China

Author: Zhao Changtian

Publisher: Shanghai Press

Published: 2013-10-22

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781602202382

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It was a long journey—in more ways than mere geography—from a childhood in Northern Ireland to becoming the most influential foreigner in 19th-century China. This historical novel follows the life of Robert Hart, whose career in China spanned more than half a century during the turbulent last decades of the Qing dynasty. As the Qing government's Inspector General of the Maritime Customs Service, Hart was involved in many major events of late Imperial China. While negotiating his way through civil dissent and foreign conflicts, he played an instrumental role in the country's modernization. A rare foreigner who learned the language and developed a deep interest in and sensitivity to the culture, Hart had a passion for his adopted country but continually struggled in his dual role as British subject and employee of the Chinese government. Hart's personal life was not without its own challenges as he grappled with his relationship with his Chinese lover and the children he had with her, as well as his British wife and their family together. Long periods of conflict, loneliness and doubt lurked behind the professional triumphs for which he became world-renowned. Based on exhaustive historical research, the story is enlivened by dialogue and plot elements suggested by the author's deep knowledge of Hart and the country and times in which he lived. The reader will be rewarded with insight into this pivotal period in Chinese history through the lens of the life of one fascinating individual.

The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters
The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters

Author: Simone O’Malley-Sutton

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-11-07

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 9819952697

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This book examines how the early twentieth-century Irish Renaissance (Irish Literary Revival) inspired the Chinese Renaissance (the May Fourth generation) of writers to make agentic choices and translingual exchanges. It sheds a new light on “May Fourth” and on the Irish Renaissance by establishing that the Irish Literary Revival (1900-1922) provided an alternative decolonizing model of resistance for the Chinese Renaissance to that provided by the western imperial center. The book also argues that Chinese May Fourth intellectuals translated Irish Revivalist plays by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Seán O’Casey and Synge and that Chinese peasants performed these plays throughout China during the 1920s and 1930s as a form of anti-imperial resistance. Yet this literary exchange was not simply going one way, since Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge and O’Casey were also influenced by Chinese developments in literature and politics. Therefore this was a reciprocal encounter based on the circulation of Anti-colonial ideals and mutual transformation.

Kowtow
Kowtow

Author: Eoin McDonnell

Publisher: Fonthill Media

Published: 2021-03-13

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13:

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In 1793, George Macartney introduced two of the leading empires of his age, and set off one of the greatest power shifts in history. Kowtow: Georgian Britain, Imperial China and the Irishman who Introduced Them tells the story of Macartney, Britain's first Ambassador to China, and his career that spanned the globe, from the Caribbean to India, from Brazil to Indonesia, and then finally through China to Peking. Kowtow explains why Macartney s embassy was needed, and examines the nature and personalities of the Ambassador and his imperial host, the Emperor Qianlong. The reader will journey with Macartney across the world into Peking s Summer Palace, before crossing over the Great Wall to Qianlong s summer hunting grounds in Rehe. The story of the Macartney mission provides significant lessons for modern diplomatic engagements and trade relations, and still causes great reverberations today. As a result, his mission represents one of the major missed opportunities in history and the challenges faced by Macartney still finds echoes in relations between China and the West.

Entering China's Service
Entering China's Service

Author: Katherine F. Bruner

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1684172624

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Robert Hart was one of those empire builders of the Victorian age who had a long and nearly uninterrupted experience in China, from 1854, when as a young Irishman from Belfast he landed in Ningpo, until 1908, when as a man in his seventies he finally retired to England. His years as the Ch'ing government's Inspector General of the Maritime Customs Service have been copiously recorded in letters to his London agent, beginning in 1868, published as a 2-volume collection, The IG. in Peking (Harvard, Belknap Press, 1975). In 1970, a second lode of Hart materials came to light, the 77 volumes of his journals, begun on the day of his arrival in China in 1854 and ending at his departure in 1908, with two short but significant gaps in the first decade where he himself destroyed entries of too personal a nature. Entering China's Service presents a complete and annotated transcript of the surviving journals through 1863, alternating with chapters devoted to Hart's North Ireland background, the China he encountered, the Ch'ing officials who trusted him, and the unfolding of his career. His reactions to the Chinese as well as to his fellow Westerners cast an invaluable light on nineteenth-century China.

Mark Twain in China
Mark Twain in China

Author: Selina Lai-Henderson

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2015-05-13

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 0804794758

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Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) has had an intriguing relationship with China that is not as widely known as it should be. Although he never visited the country, he played a significant role in speaking for the Chinese people both at home and abroad. After his death, his Chinese adventures did not come to an end, for his body of works continued to travel through China in translation throughout the twentieth century. Were Twain alive today, he would be elated to know that he is widely studied and admired there, and that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn alone has gone through no less than ninety different Chinese translations, traversing China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Looking at Twain in various Chinese contexts—his response to events involving the American Chinese community and to the Chinese across the Pacific, his posthumous journey through translation, and China's reception of the author and his work, Mark Twain in China points to the repercussions of Twain in a global theater. It highlights the cultural specificity of concepts such as "race," "nation," and "empire," and helps us rethink their alternative legacies in countries with dramatically different racial and cultural dynamics from the United States.

The Vision of China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
The Vision of China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Author: Adrian Hsia

Publisher: Chinese University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9789622016088

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The Vision of China is the first book on China as it came to be reflected in English literature. As such, it also offers the first comprehensive study of the image of China in Western literature. Featuring essays by prominent Chinese scholars such as Qian Zongshu, Fan Cunzhong, and Chen Shouyi, it complements such works as Pierre Martino's L'Orient dans la litterature francaise au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siecle (1906), Ursula Aurich's China im Spiegel der deutschen Literature des 18. Jahrhunderts (1935), and E. Horst Tscharner's China in der deutschen Dichtung bis zur Klassik (1939).Together with William W. Appleton's A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the 17th and 18th Centuries (1951) and Raymond Dawson's The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (1967), the book studies the last phase of the Chinese mode in England. Some of the articles collected here actually inspired Appleton's study, at least in part.As a contemporary volume on the construct of China, The Vision of China can readily be considered the companion study to Edward Said's envisioned Orient in Orientalism (1979), to Tzvetan Todorov's Africa in Nous et les autres: la reflection francaise sur la diversite humaine (1989), and Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989).

Lin Yutang and China’s Search for Modern Rebirth
Lin Yutang and China’s Search for Modern Rebirth

Author: Suoqiao Qian

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-10-20

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 9811046573

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This book provides a comprehensive examination of the socio-cultural and political context of modern China in terms of its interaction with America and the West, focusing on the influence of the well-known Chinese writer and intellectual Lin Yutang (1895-1976). Offering a unique study of the life and works of Lin Yutang, it highlights his intellectual legacy in modern China and considers how his cross-cultural life and ideas embodied the modern Chinese cultural experience. It notably focuses on Lin’s reputation as an outspoken critic of the infringement of human rights during the rise of the Communist regime in China, but also on his rediscovery of Chinese cultural resources. At a time when China’s cultural contributions are increasingly relevant worldwide, this book contributes to ongoing critical reflections of Chinese modernity, particularly in terms of its intellectual legacies, but also to a renewed understanding of the cross-cultural interactions between China and America and a re-opening the dialogue and search for a new cultural understanding.