Kipling in China: Empires of Noise

Abstract

This paper sets out to answer the question: by what mode of transport did Rudyard Kipling visit China in 1889? That year, Kipling journeyed from India to Europe by way of Japan and the United States and in early April he arrived in the British crown colony of Hong Kong. He reported on his journey in a series of articles for the Pioneer and Pioneer Mail in Allahabad, later published as From Sea to Sea (1899). Impressed above all by the evidence of Chinese industry and craftsmanship in Hong Kong, he joked with his Anglo-Indian readers that Britain had conquered the wrong Asian country. “Let us annex China!” When he undertook an excursion across the border to visit Guangzhou (Canton) in imperial China, he would be setting foot for the first time (apart from a schoolboy trip to Paris) outside British possessions. His account of the visit is vivid, hallucinatory. Now the Chinese filled him with fear and loathing, and he says he could not wait to get back across the border. Kipling is a reporter of genius, and he evokes these Chinese cities for his readers with a brilliant visuality. His reportorial eye warrants a rapid assumption of expertise which enables him to take possession of a subject on which, for once, he was not knowledgeable. But the Chinese soundscape he experienced simply as noise. From this he ventriloquises a Chinese discourse he cannot hear, to produce a well-behaved industriousness (in the colony) and a bloodthirsty racial hostility (in Canton) which tells us less about the Chinese than about how he understood and expected the world, and other people, to be. This conjured discourse provides an answer to the question.