Book Review

Asia

'Some revised views" might be better than "a revised view," since Jane E. Elliott is less interested here in a new interpretation of the war as a whole than in certain of its aspects that she believes have been wrongly assessed. She begins by looking at foreign press coverage, finding the Times of London (whose China stringer, J. O. P. Bland, never bothered to leave Shanghai to observe the fighting) sadly deficient when compared to Harold Harmsworth's Daily Mail or Joseph Pulitzer's World. Yet the Times has conventionally been accepted as an authoritative Western view. Elliott moves on to one of the book's most interesting and original features: examining pictures of the war from both sides. These include Chinese woodblock prints, indebted to folk and literary tradition yet accurately depicting foreign soldiery and military affairs; American photography, valuable for the lessons it learned from the experience of the Civil War; the drawings of bemused artists in papers such as the Illustrated London News, often incapable of envisioning the fighting in China; and the work of foreign cartoonists. In the last two chapters, she shifts her focus away from images to questions of China's military modernization and particularly to the performance of the imperial troops as they met both the Boxers and the Allied troops that, after initial setbacks, fought their way to Beijing.

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