Dangerous encounters: British women travellers and unwanted proximity in late nineteenth-century China

By the end of the nineteenth century, China was no longer regarded in the West as a picturesque, fascinating, and culturally refined country, but as an empire on the brink of collapse, whose unpredictable fate threatened to jeopardise the delicate balance of power in the Far East. Travelogues of this period registered the climate of fear and uncertainty: while still exploiting stereotypes that characterised the Chinese as sober, docile, and hard-working, they also described the growing animosity against foreigners, which often resulted in actual aggression. This essay looks at two texts published in 1899, Isabella Bird’s The Yangtze Valley and Beyond and Alicia Little’s Intimate China, investigating how they depicted anti-foreign violence: in particular, it explores the key role played by the attacks suffered by the authors on the part of Chinese mobs. I suggest that these episodes were used by both authors to fulfil two different, but interdependent aims: they served to question traditional assumptions about gender, but also to stress the seriousness of the political situation in China, and thus the relevance and urgency of the authors’ textual interventions. For both Bird and Little, the encounter with China became a site for the assertion of their own public identity and for a stronger participation in the political discourse through a remarkably authoritative voice, legitimised by their first-hand knowledge of the country and their understanding of the bigger political picture, especially valuable at a time when China was undergoing tremendous political changes and antiforeign sentiment was rampant.