‘From Those Flames No Light’

The Second Opium War concluded in 1860 with Anglo-French forces looting and sacking the Summer Palace at Yuanmingyuan. Commentators such as Victor Hugo delighted that these incidents occurred under the leadership of Lord Elgin, whose father instigated the Parthenon Sculptures controversy. Memoirists and journalists show that the Summer Palace incident was divisive: looting posed a threat to military discipline, and the wanton destruction occasioned a debate over whether Britain was civilized or barbaric. To some, the melancholy victory evoked the Aeneid. Inevitably debates over repatriation of Summer Palace treasures have invoked discussion of the Parthenon Sculptures. Yet commentators like artist Ai WeiWei show that sculptures that the Chinese Communist Party made emblematic of National Humiliation are not really Chinese and were probably not removed by Europeans. Chinese efforts to retrieve the sculptures demonstrate that modern China, like Victorian Britain, reaches to the cultural past for stability amidst bewildering change.

‘Better Fifty Years of Europe than a Cycle of Cathay’

The classical universe allows Tennyson perspective on China. While ‘Locksley Hall’ appears to endorse British progress and deride China, the metre distances the poet from modernity: Tennyson’s line has probably Persian or ancient Greek origins. Tennyson’s patriotism celebrates ancient values but is suspicious of Victorian progress. ‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’ considers the paradox that Britain deems Asia both accomplished and stagnant. Britain was culpable for hindering China as the East India Company became increasingly reliant on the illegal opium-trade. In the ‘Lotos-Eaters’ Tennyson responds to the opium crisis in China as well as addiction in his family. Sara Coleridge wrote her own version of the ‘Lotos-Eaters’, intensifying the Chinese analogues by reference to her father’s ‘Kubla Khan’. In ‘The Ancient Sage’ Tennyson finds an alternative to Victorian progress in Laozi’s Dao De Jing, as translated by John Chalmers, although Tennyson interprets the philosopher in Augustinian terms.

‘Ancestral Voices Prophesying War’

Edward Gibbon and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were uneasy about the prospect of a British Empire, fearing overreach and collapse. Historical precedents such as the Roman Empire and Kublai Khan’s China made imperial expansion appear unwise. To Coleridge these predecessors served as warnings to Britain, but to Macartney they offered evidence that the Qing Dynasty was doomed. The Macartney Embassy attempted to recreate aspects of Marco Polo’s reception at Kublai Khan’s court: Macartney, like Gibbon and Coleridge, felt that histories could be replicated. In light of Britain’s fruitless embassies to China in 1793 and 1816, Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ draws on Gibbon’s account of the Khans for prophetic effect. Like Macartney’s journal, Coleridge’s poem articulates a perception that war between Britain and China was likely some decades before the First Opium War occurred.

Coda: ‘All Things Fall and Are Built Again’

Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’ responds to a Chinese stone etched with a poem attributed to the Qianlong Emperor. Yeats describes the stone in Keatsian ekphrasis. He demonstrates the influence of Daoism, particularly Zhuangzi, as he interprets the stone philosophically. To Yeats the lapis offers consolation amidst upheaval. The object appears prophetic of the fall of the Qing Dynasty, and Yeats finds its optimism pertinent as the Second World War approaches. The stone’s portrayal of sages on mountains prompts Yeats to invoke Daoism to correct the pessimism of Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna. The lapis expresses a universal wisdom that Yeats finds alike in Lucretius and in his Nietzschean reading of tragedy. As in his enthusiasm for ‘half-Asiatic Greece’—exemplified by the sculptor Callimachus—Yeats urges a fusion of classical and Asian values.

A Greek Tragedy in China

Thomas de Quincey endorsed the Opium Wars in his journalism. Yet his China essays invoke ideas from Greek tragedy, and his ‘Theory of Greek Tragedy’ expresses British jingoism. Such a connection was topical: the Canton Register stirred controversy over Qing officials’ description of Europeans as yi (夷‎) with reference to classical conceptions of barbarism. Classical literature is crucial to de Quincey’s identity; he wields this as a master-knowledge against such Sinologists as Thomas Taylor Meadows when debating the Arrow crisis. Classical allusions reveal that his hatred of China is ultimately self-loathing: figures such as the classical daimon show that de Quincey identifies with those who have ceded agency to an outside force, and in his opium addiction he resembles China as much as he does the Malay in Confessions of an English Opium Eater. By reference to tragedy he proposes violence that is symbolic rather than real.

The White Snake, Apollonius of Tyana, and John Keats’s Lamia

The many details shared by John Keats’s Lamia and Feng Menglong’s treatment of the White Snake legend are evidence of a series of exchanges between Europe and Asia over the course of centuries. Ultimately these originated in Indian folklore which was transmitted to China, where it became Buddhist myth, and to the Hellenistic world in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Keats amplified these commonalities by using Philostratus’ serpent tale as a vehicle for considerations of Orientalism. In Apollonius he chose a figure that generated considerable controversy among Anglican theologians, both for the parallels in Philostratus’ hagiography to the life of Christ, and by his associations with Asian philosophy. Feng Menglong’s treatment of the White Snake legend was prominent in eighteenth-century China, and is likely to have been known to European visitors.

Charles Lamb, Roast Pork, and Willow Crockery

Charles Lamb’s work communicates both his frustrated wish to study classics and the Orientalist atmosphere of his employment at East India House. ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’ envisions the discovery of cooking in China but—although it has correspondences with Thomas Manning’s travels—the source is Porphyry’s treatise on vegetarianism. ‘Old China’ is an ekphrastic treatment of an imaginary crockery set in the chinoiserie aesthetic, but the primary influence is Keats’s ‘Grecian Urn’. Lamb’s and Joanna Baillie’s responses to chinoiserie chart fluctuations in British opinion on China, and interrogate whether crockery was a gendered interest. Via Mark Lemon, Lamb’s writing on China has had lasting influence on narratives that arose about the Willow pattern popularized by Wedgwood and Spode. The Willow pattern imitated Chinese aesthetics, but the Willow narrative is Ovidian rather than Chinese.

A Classical Cathay and a Real China

Classical imagery and allusion in narratives of the 1793 Macartney Embassy to China demonstrate the importance of classical reception in Anglophone engagements with Chinese culture. Concepts from ancient Greece and Rome helped to interpret what was foreign or, as critics of the Macartney Embassy noted, denoted utter incomprehension. Classics offered a lens through which Westerners viewed China, although definitions of what was classical or Chinese were in perpetual flux. Anglophone readers derived their ideas of China primarily from translations of Jesuit scholarship mixed with the Orientalist generalizations of Arabian Nights. This chapter considers the state of British Sinology in the late eighteenth century (which relied primarily on Jean-Baptiste du Halde’s General History of China), the disastrous outcome of the Macartney Embassy, the inadequacy of conceptualizing China according to European models, and recent attempts to theorize Sino-British cultural exchange in light of Edward W. Said’s work.