Tales of China’s Yore
July 13th, 2009
Last week I attended a pleasant get-together at the Bookworm bookshop in Suzhou, just off Shiquan Road. Graham Earnshaw, the man behind Sinomedia and Earnshaw Books, and Derek Sandhaus, the Chief Editor of Earnshaw Books, introduced to the audience of sinophiles to their budding series of books based on stories of Westerners who were amongst the first to live, work and venture in China. Sinomedia is the publisher of China Economic Review and Eurobiz Magazine (for which I write a monthly column), as well as the organizer of economic- and business-related conferences about China. So far, Earnshaw Books has published Tales of Old Peking and Tales of Old Shanghai in what will be a series that will one day encompass the gossip, colorful characters and personality struggles of Old Singapore and Old Hong Kong and many other major metropolises around the worl. The boutique publisher has also brought back to life such classics as 400 Million Customers and Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom, among others.
Derek related the account of the British Empire’s first encounter with the Emperor’s Court in 1793. Lord McCartney represented the British Empire at the height of the British Empire’s holdings and influence in the world; while Emperor Qianlong represented the height of the Qing Dynasty, arguably the zenith of wealth, population and territory for the Chinese empire. Derek presented the point that if Lord McCartney had indeed kowtowed to the Emperor, instead of vehemently refusing, would the Opium Wars have happened at all? After all, the British foisted the wars onto the Chinese to prize open a market that was closed to the British. Derek offered that the Dutch, several decades after McCartney, did indeed kowtow to the then Qing Emperor (as well as to the Emperor’s half-eaten cake) in an effort to charm the Chinese court into doing business with the Dutch court, to little affect.
Graham fittingly called that first diplomatic encounter between the British and Chinese, “a clash of arrogances,” in which each court believed its own to be the center of the world. All the books in the Earnshaw Books library of re-published “dead” authors represent what Graham believed to be “the disconnect between two cultures,” with the books providing “threads of continuity between past and present.” The Publisher has also begun publishing lively accounts by living authors of their experiences and learnings in Asia.
I asked Graham why he thought books like 400 Million Customers by Carl Crowe were timeless while the current batch of “Doing Business in China” books were, well, uninteresting. His take was that Crowe at the time – in 1930s America – was writing for a broader audience than today’s crop of business writers who tend to assume that China is not as alien to the average Joe and Joanne as it was between the World Wars.
Sometimes, though, it still feels the Anglo-American and Chinese empires – though digitized now – are worlds apart.
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