The Lure of China: History and Literature from Marco Polo to J.G.

For over 2,000 years, the West has been fascinated by China. From vague Roman tales of silent silk merchants to eyewitness accounts of war by Martha Gellhorn and Christopher Isherwood, stories of China have attracted readers. Medieval travellers like Marco Polo combined fact and fiction, creating a romantic picture of an exotic land by interspersing brief descriptions of Chinese cities with lurid accounts of islands peopled by monsters. Jesuit observers and European diplomatic missions sought to correct the more fantastic ideas of China with firsthand descriptions.

Explorers like Sven Hedin and Sir Aurel Stein were drawn to the Silk Road and its buried treasures, while French writers like Paul Claudel and André Malraux filtered China through their own preoccupations. Romantic novelists like Ann Bridge and Vicki Baum achieved fame with fiction set in Peking and Shanghai. Somerset Maugham’s more cynical views were reflected in a series of Chinese vignettes, while hardened journalists like Peter Fleming flocked to China, where aesthetes like Harold Acton, Osbert Sitwell and Denton Welch listened to the whistling of flocks of pigeons and collected curios.

So many visitors wrote accounts of what they saw that ‘it was as if China made writers of them all,’ observes Frances Wood, for whose remarkably extensive selections from the vast library of fiction, memoir and travelogue this book can be thoroughly relished. Illustrated with photographs and printed images from collections in Europe, America and China, her book shows how the people, cities, food, language, flora, art, architecture and wars of China have appeared to Western writers and appealed to their imaginations across eight centuries.