Kipling in China: Empires of Noise

Abstract

This essay 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. Later, he left for an excursion upriver to visit Guangzhou (Canton) in imperial China. 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). 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.