Jonathon Spence, The Chan's Great Continent

This book started really well, I thought his look at the early Western writing on China, starting with the Jesuits and moving on to the embassies was quite interesting. However once the book hit the 19th century it seemed to loose coherence and I wasn't entirely sure why he picked the examples he did, and why he ignored much of what he did.

Spence writes popular history books about China, however you'd need a grasp of what was going on in the history to know the background of events being written about. (For example the opium war got the briefest of 1 sentence mentions). He also seemed to use primarily secondary sources, quoting people quoting the books, which seemed particularly odd as he was using English language sources.

It was disappointing that so much of the latter chapters focused on the fictional accounts of China, and ignored any of the actual meeting between cultures. For me I think the most impressive chapter was the one looking at women missionaries in China, who embraced the culture or rejected it outright. It was moving to read accounts of people that were killed in the Boxer uprising and unlike a lot of the fiction based chapters gave an actual feel for interaction between cultures.

This book was ok, though I think Barnes, and Barrett, did the same thing much better.

(no subject)

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