| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Nicholas Clifford. "A Truthful Impression of the Country": British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880–1949. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2001. Pp. xxi, 231. $39.50.

This beautifully written volume takes its title from an 1899 travelogue by one of its principal subjects, Isabella Bird. While Nicholas Clifford nods in the direction of "scholarship" on travel from the field of literary criticism, he is ultimately less concerned with discourse analyses or with the biographies of travel writers (although these are impossible to ignore) than with the people and places observed. This, then, is a book about China from the last decades of the Qing dynasty through the founding of the People's Republic, not solely about the "Western representations" of same. The seventy years covered here witnessed dramatic transformations on all fronts. 1

In his introduction, Clifford offers some interesting observations on why the genre of travel writing continues to enjoy such popularity. It gives readers an immediacy and a feeling for the subject that journalists and scholars either cannot or do not wish to convey. In a sense, it is the next best thing to actually traveling—and it is much safer. But while Clifford's travelers form a group by their nationalities and, to a certain extent, their predilections, they nonetheless offer a wide panoply of views, for they never marched in lockstep as a single group gazing upon the Chinese. . . .

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