{"id":814,"date":"2020-02-05T09:48:57","date_gmt":"2020-02-05T09:48:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/?p=814"},"modified":"2020-02-05T09:48:57","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T09:48:57","slug":"representations-of-china-in-historical-childrens-texts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/representations-of-china-in-historical-childrens-texts\/","title":{"rendered":"Representations of China in Historical Children\u2019s Texts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Share<\/a><\/p>\n

Written by Shih-Wen Sue Chen<\/span><\/p>\n

Children\u2019s writers mediated a complex textual discourse on\u00a0China\u00a0for young readers in the Victorian and Edwardian period, trying to make \u2018knowledge\u2019 of \u2018the Celestial Kingdom\u2019 accessible to the British public after China was \u2018opened up\u2019 to the West after losing the Opium Wars. A plurality of viewpoints on China is evident in the numerous books for children that were produced in the years between the Opium Wars and the First World War. Here, I provide a glimpse into the rich\u00a0texture\u00a0and scope of British representations of \u2018China and the Chinese\u2019 in children\u2019s texts published in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.<\/span><\/p>\n

The British children\u2019s book market changed as literacy rates rose after the passing of Forster\u2019s Education Act in 1870. The Act allowed for the establishment of board schools and authorized school boards to make attendance compulsory. By 1880, there were over one million new places in schools set up. Observing this phenomenon, publishers took the opportunity to market various forms of literature to the children of the British Empire.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sunday School Texts<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The editor and author\u00a0J. A. Hammerton (1871-1949) remembered\u00a0being excited about\u00a0\u2018a beautiful colour-book on Chinese life<\/a>\u2019\u00a0given to him by his great-aunt for Christmas. For those children whose families could not afford books like the ones Hammerton received, Sunday\u00a0schools provided a repository of discourses on\u00a0China. Children may have pulled books such as\u00a0Peeps into China<\/em>,\u00a0The Children of China<\/em>,\u00a0The Chinese Boy and Girl<\/em>, and\u00a0The Land of the Pigtail<\/em>\u00a0off the shelves of Sunday school libraries, or received them as rewards.\u00a0Some Chinese Waifs<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The\u00a0Boy with a Borrowed Name\u00a0<\/em>were among the various Sunday\u00a0school\u00a0leaflets published by religious organizations such as the\u00a0Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the\u00a0Religious Tract Society. These Sunday school texts were often used to encourage children to raise money for missions. While many of these missionary texts reinforced the image of the Chinese as \u2018Other\u2019, some authors emphasized the similarities between British and Chinese children to point out the universal need for Christianity, as I have explored<\/a>. By taking part in religious plays and cantatas such as\u00a0Queen Lexa\u2019s Chinese Meeting: A Missionary Recitation for Eight Girls and Three Boys<\/em>, Busy Bees: A Missionary Dialogue in Three Scenes<\/em>, and Missionary Cantata:\u00a0Every-day Life in\u00a0China<\/em>, children were exposed to representations of Chinese children, particularly girls, as pitiful, helpless innocents suffering at the hands of adults who forced their daughters to be foot-bound and gave their children \u2018very strange\u2019 names, as I have examined<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Image from Isaac Taylor Headland\u2019s The Chinese Boy and Girl\u00a0(1901). Source: Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Children\u2019s Periodicals <\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Children interested in China could satisfy their curiosity by reading the wide range of magazines that flourished in the late nineteenth century.\u00a0For example, the CMS Juvenile Instructor<\/em> and Juvenile Missionary Magazine<\/em> frequently carried articles on China, with titles ranging from\u00a0\u2018Chinese Children\u2019\u00a0to\u00a0\u2018A Chinese Funeral\u2019. Young readers could also gain information from the Religious Tract Society\u2019s numerous periodicals, such as\u00a0the\u00a0Child\u2019s Companion and Juvenile Instructor<\/em>,\u00a0Child\u2019s Paper, The Girl\u2019s Own Paper<\/em>,\u00a0and The<\/em> Boy\u2019s Own Paper<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stereotypical images of \u2018the Chinese\u2019 circulated in The<\/em> Boy\u2019s Own Paper <\/em>(1879-1967), one of the most popular children\u2019s magazines in the Victorian era. Chinese people were considered distinctly different physically, with their ubiquitous queue, slanted eyes, and buck-teeth; psychologically, they were believed to be devious, cruel, and evil. One telling visual example of this stereotype can be found in vol. 28 of\u00a0The Boy\u2019s Own Paper<\/em>. On page 312, there is an engraving by Leo Cheney inserted into the space between the end of one story and the beginning of another. The words \u2018The End\u2019 appear above the illustration. These words could either be used to signify the closure of the previous story, or be interpreted as the image caption. The engraving features the profile of a skinny Chinese man with an elongated neck and a big head standing in front of a table preparing to kill an innocent-looking puppy. With one hand, he lifts up the puppy by its neck, in the other, he holds a large scythe-like knife. Underneath his cap, a very long pigtail, adorned at the end with a ribbon, flows down his back, reaching past his knees. His narrow, slanted eyes appear even smaller in contrast to his big smile, which might suggest that he has been starving for so long that he, the stereotypical dog-and-cat-eating Chinese, is very eager to devour the dog. The adorable fat puppy stares pitifully at the readers, reminding them of their own pets and making them shudder at what will inevitably take place. While racial caricatures were present in numerous children\u2019s texts published in Britain when it was at its height of imperial power, my research<\/a> has shown that diverse images of China and the Chinese appeared in children\u2019s travelogue storybooks, historical novels, adventures stories, and periodicals published in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.<\/span><\/p>\n

Adventure Stories, Historical Novels, and Detective Fiction <\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Edwin Harcourt Burrage\u2019s Ching-Ching series provides a counterpoint to the image of the dog-killer described above. Ching-Ching first appeared in a story serialized in The Boy\u2019s Standard<\/em> (1875-92), and later featured in his own magazine called Ching Ching\u2019s Own <\/em>(1888-93). On the surface, Ching-Ching seems to be a stereotypical Chinese comic relief character who speaks Pidgin English and sports pigtails. However, child readers loved his character so much that the author decided to transform Ching-Ching from a minor side-kick into a detective hero who solves cases in England. In the early twentieth century, another \u2018great Chinese detective<\/a>\u2019 entertained child readers: Charles Gilson\u2019s Mr. Wang.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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Cover of Among Hostile Hordes<\/em>. Source: author.<\/td>\nCover of With the Allies to Pekin<\/em>. Source: Internet Archive<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Mr. Wang is a key character in at least nine stories, including The Lost Column<\/em> (1909), which is set during the Boxer Uprising (1899-1901). Adventure novels such as The Lost Column<\/em>, Bessie Marchant\u2019s Among Hostile Hordes<\/em>: A Story of the Tai-ping Rebellion<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>(1901) and G.A. Henty\u2019s With the Allies to Pekin<\/em> (1903) underscore the historically complex relationships between Britain and China. Boxer narratives for children published between 1900 and 1909 provided different interpretations of the same event. As I have argued<\/a>, the Boxer Uprising was a pivotal conflict from which negative images of the Chinese and fears of the Yellow Peril emanated. It is therefore important to consider the state of Sino-British relations during the text\u2019s production because they influenced how \u2018China and the Chinese\u2019 were represented in children\u2019s literature.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dr Shih-Wen Sue Chen<\/strong> is Senior Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She received her PhD in Literature, Screen and Theatre Studies from the Australian National University. Her research focuses on British and Chinese children\u2019s literature and culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of <\/em>Children\u2019s Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China: Education, Religion, and Childhood<\/a> (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and <\/em>Representations of China in British Children\u2019s Fiction, 1851-1911<\/a> (Routledge, 2013).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Written by Shih-Wen Sue Chen Children\u2019s writers mediated a complex textual discourse on\u00a0China\u00a0for young readers in the Victorian and Edwardian period, trying to make \u2018knowledge\u2019 of \u2018the Celestial Kingdom\u2019 accessible to the British public after China was \u2018opened up\u2019 to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":248,"featured_media":816,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[35,46,111],"class_list":["post-814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-four","tag-britain","tag-children","tag-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/248"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}