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Letter to the editor

East meets West

For centuries books were a major transport on the now busy route between.

By Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Special to the Times
Published January 13, 2008

It was a bumper year in 2007 for newspaper reports about the flow of people and objects between China and America. We read about tainted toothpaste coming here, Hollywood film crews going there to film the latest Survivor and Yao Ming crisscrossing the Pacific to marry in Shanghai and shoot baskets in Houston.

With the 2008 Olympics set to take place in Beijing in August, international tourism to China is likely to reach an all-time high.

That road runs both ways. On a recent Sunday, the Los Angeles Times ran two stories about new developments in East-West tourism. One predicted that changed visa rules would bring record numbers of Chinese travelers to the L.A. area to visit Disneyland, shop for brand-name luxury goods and stay at hotels where Mandarin is spoken. The Travel section's lead story was "Revved Up for the Silk Road," an account of a motorcycle tour through terrain Marco Polo first made globally famous.

Such increasing East-West connections have inspired scores of breathless commentaries about the future. But as 2008 begins, it's worth trying to catch our breath and use some recently published books to look over our shoulders and ask: What can we learn from past moments when East-West exchanges proliferated?

A good starting place is Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, in which Timothy Brook treats the objects appearing in the Dutch artist's paintings - tobacco and beaver pelts from North America, silver from South America, fine porcelain from China - as doors that open to reveal the surprisingly global dimensions of the 1600s.

Just published, this elegantly crafted book sheds light on everything from art to colonialism, but its biggest payoff has to do with fakes.

In Vermeer's time, Brook notes, European-made faux Chinese porcelain pieces were more common than Chinese imitations of Western goods.

Let's turn next to China on Paper: Chinese and European Works from the Late Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century, which highlights another theme with contemporary relevance: China's lure for armchair travelers.

Westerners who have taken imaginary trips to China have always far outnumbered those who physically made it there. And this trend will continue, if only because 15-million Americans have tuned in to take the virtual tour of the nation offered by Survivor: China.

The lavishly illustrated China on Paper, which accompanies an exhibit running at L.A.'s Getty Research Institute, notes that popular Western books on Chinese themes of a few centuries ago often presented themselves as guides for those bound for mysterious Cathay. But they primarily served as "books of wonder collected for - and sometimes by - armchair travelers."

They offered European readers of an earlier day the same invitation that the newspaper travel story about the motorcycle tour gives contemporary readers - to follow in Marco Polo's footsteps by reading and looking at pictures.

Last, but I hope not least, there's a third new book to consider: my own China's Brave New World - And Other Tales for Global Times. It contains many chapters about East-West flows, including "Around the World with Grant and Li."

This chapter takes a playful look at the global circuits made by a famous American (Gen. Ulysses S. Grant) and a relatively obscure Chinese traveler (Li Gui), who met briefly at the Philadelphia World's Fair. But in addition to discussing their actual trips, it revisits the topic of armchair travel, taking it beyond the realm of the kinds of texts discussed in China on Paper.

Books have always remained important vehicles for imaginary trips, but by 1876 people had additional options when it came to vicariously venturing abroad. Americans intrigued by the East, for example, could visit the Asian displays at World's Fairs. According to an illustrated history of the 1876 fair, upon entering its Chinese Pavilion visitors would "for a moment imagine (that they had) put the sea" between themselves and the Exhibition. They'd feel they'd "suddenly landed in some large Chinese bazaar."

Chinese of the time wanting a comparable sense of the exotic West could take in the permanent display of foreign lifestyles and architecture that was Shanghai's International Settlement, the part of China from which Mr. Li started his global circuit.

Of course, the same places often mean different things to different people. The International Settlement's appeal for Grant, for example, was surely not its exotic feel. When he stayed at its famous Astor Hotel, with its English-speaking staff and Western cuisine, the payoff was a comforting sense of being among familiar sounds and tastes while in an alien environment.

In the 21st century, globetrotters still often find this appealing, whether they are Americans ordering burgers at the Hard Rock Cafe's Beijing branch after touring the Forbidden City, or Chinese travelers heading from Disneyland to San Gabriel Valley restaurants and hotels where Mandarin is the lingua franca.

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at UC Irvine, a participant in the 2007 St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading and the author, most recently, of China's Brave New World - And Other Tales for Global Times.

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Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World

By Timothy Brook

Bloomsbury, 288 pages, $27.95

China on Paper: Chinese and European Works from the Late Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century

Edited by Marcia Reed and Paola Dematte

Getty Trust, 280 pages, $45

China's Brave New World - And Other Tales for Global Times

By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Indiana University Press, 210 pages, $21.95

[Last modified January 10, 2008, 13:16:27]