China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome: Classics, Sinology, and Romanticism, 1793-1938 (Classical Presences)

Fascinated and often baffled by China, Anglophone writers turned to classics for answers. In poetry, essays, and travel narratives, ancient Greece and Rome lent interpretative paradigms and narrative shape to Britain's information on the Middle Kingdom. While memoirists of the diplomatic missions in 1793 and 1816 used classical ideas to introduce Chinese concepts, Roman history held ominous precedents for Sino-British relations according to Edward Gibbon and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. John Keats illuminated how peculiar such contemporary processes of Orientalist knowledge-formation were. In Britain, popular opinion on Chinese culture wavered during the nineteenth century, as Charles Lamb and Joanna Baillie demonstrated in ekphrastic responses to chinoiserie. A former reverence for China yielded gradually to hostility, and the classical inheritance informed a national identity-crisis over whether Britain's treatment of China was civilized or barbaric. 0Amidst this uncertainty, the melancholy conclusion to Virgil's 'Aeneid' became the master-text for discussion of British conduct at the Summer Palace in 1860. Yet if Rome was to be the model for the British Empire, Tennyson, Sara Coleridge, and Thomas de Quincey found closer analogues for the Opium Wars in Greek tragedy and Homeric epic. Meanwhile, Sinology advanced considerably during the Victorian age. Britain broadened its horizons by interrogating the cultural past anew as it turned to Asia; Anglophone readers were cosmopolitans in time as well as space, aggregating knowledge of Periclean Athens, imperial Rome, and many other polities in their encounters with Qing Dynasty China Cover 1 Series page 3 China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome: Classics, Sinology, and Romanticism, 1793–1938 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Acknowledgements 8 Contents 10 List of Figures 12 Chapter 1: A Classical Cathay and a Real China 14 Knowing China in English 25 Theorizing a Classicized China (or Not) 35 Chapter 2: ‘Ancestral Voices Prophesying War’: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edward Gibbon, and the Warnings of History 42 Coleridge, Gibbon, and Asia 51 The Vision in a Dream, the Plenipotentiary, and the Sober Historian 60 Chapter 3: The White Snake, Apollonius of Tyana, and John Keats’s Lamia 76 Orientalist Keats: Visions of Asia in Lamia 85 Apollonius’ Lamia Tale as Folklore and Myth 97 Transmissions of Apollonius 104 Chapter 4: Charles Lamb, Roast Pork, and Willow Crockery 112 The Deputy Grecian at East India House 113 ‘Roast Pig’ Recipes from Greece to China 120 Elia’s Tea Set and Keats’s Urn 126 ‘Talked of in China’: Willow Narratives and Later Servings of Lamb 135 Chapter 5: ‘Better Fifty Years of Europe than a Cycle of Cathay’: British Progress, the Opium Trade, and Tennyson’s Retrospection 146 Classics and Tennyson’s Politics 152 Time Stands Still: Asian Stagnation in a Classical Universe 156 Tennyson and Coleridgean Visions of China 168 Chinese Lessons for Britain in ‘Locksley Hall’, ‘Sixty Years After’, and ‘The Ancient Sage’ 174 Chapter 6: A Greek Tragedy in China: Thomas de Quincey’s Opium Wars Journalism 182 Classics, Confessions, and de Quincey’s Orient 189 The Opium Wars and de Quincey’s ‘Theory of Greek Tragedy’ 196 De Quincey’s Daimon Amok in China 203 Chapter 7: ‘From Those Flames No Light’: The Summer Palace in 1860 and Beyond 208 ‘You’re Getting Sacked in the Morning’: Trojan Victory and Virgilian Melancholy in China 212 Elgin & Son: the Parthenon Sculptures, the Summer Palace Treasures, and Repatriation Debates 227 Chapter 8: Coda: ‘All Things Fall and Are Built Again’: Yeats’s Daoist Optimism and the Fall of the Qing Dynasty 234 Sages on Mountains 246 Appendix: Sara Coleridge, ‘Tennyson’s “Lotos-Eaters” With a New Conclusion’ (1842/43) 254 References 256 Index 270 Fascinated and often baffled by China, Anglophone writers have turned to classics to provide interpretative paradigms and narrative shape to inform their understanding. This volume reveals key insights into British cosmopolitanism, which sought its bearings in the ancient past in encounters with Qing Dynasty China.