Mirror of the “Other”: Western Views on China in The Canton Miscellany

Abstract

Published in 1831, The Canton Miscellany is a special textual carrier intertwined with Sino-Western cultural collisions and colonial expansion before the Opium War. This study takes the existing five issues of The Canton Miscellany as the research object, and based on the “Other” theory and the perspective of Orientalism, reveals its dual characteristics as a cultural mirror of the Western community in China through textual content analysis and historical context restoration. It presents exotic descriptions of China during the Qing Dynasty, and implicitly contains the early penetration of colonial discourse. The Canton Miscellany constructed China as an “Other” opposed to Western modernity through a binary oppositional discourse system of progress vs. stagnation and civilization vs. barbarism. It not only reflects the cultural superiority of British colonizers in the 19th century, but also implies the deep intention of serving commercial expansion and colonial legitimation, thus providing media evidence for understanding the evolution of Western views on China in the first half of the 19th century.