‘Bearing Confucius’ Morals to Britannia's Ears'

This chapter charts the tendency to represent China as a space of inauthenticity, or fictionality, that emerged in the 18th century with the decline in the dominance and credibility of Jesuit missionary reports. However, this new preoccupation with the fragility and ephemerality of ‘China’ paradoxically allowed it to continue to play a robust and elastic role in the British cultural imagination. The analysis of fictional texts about China contributes to the increasing seriousness with which the cult of ‘chinoiserie’ is being treated by economic and cultural historians. The chapter considers four groups of fictional sources, first, oriental tales with a ‘Chinese’ setting by Thomas–Simon Gueullette, ‘Hoamchi-Vam’, Thomas Percy, and Horace Walpole; second, the group of tragic plays about Chinese ‘orphans’ written by figures as diverse as Voltaire and Elkanah Settle; third, the representation of China as an empire of ‘Dulness’ in poetry and fiction relating to Alexander Pope's Dunciad; and fourth, published letters written in the voice of the Chinese informant, of which Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World is the most impressive, if late, example.

Ancient history · Art · China · Cult · Empire · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Seriousness · Tian · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture