Rediscovering Travel Writing – RAS China Event Video

A video from the Royal Asiatic Society China of my talk on the launch of the China Revisited Series (from Blacksmith Books and avalable here) and a discussion with historian Jeremiah Jenne on rediscovering “lost” travel writing on China…click here to watch

China Revisited – Recovering Lost Travel Writing

China Revisited is a new series of rediscovered travel writing on China from the Victorian, Edwardian, and Interwar periods from local independent publisher Blacksmith Books. Each book is abridged, introduced and annotated by historian and author Paul French. The series aims to “recover” largely forgotten and invariably dismissed works that often perpetuate the cliches and stereotypes of their authors and times. Yet often the writing reveals moments in China’s history, providing snapshots of a country now forever changed. And problematic as these texts can be they do show us the terms of engagement and preoccupations of both westerners and Chinese in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. This presentation looks at the first three books in the series and asks how we can best appreciate and understand these historic works through the lens of the second decade of the twenty-first century.