Foray into the west : reading Guo Songtao's overseas mission to Europe

Abstract

Guo Songtao 郭嵩燾 (1818–1891) was caught in a whirlwind of controversy among his contemporaries for heading an apology mission to Britain in 1876. In contrast to his past critics, later reformers and current scholars have rehabilitated Guo as a forerunner of modernization. In a different vein, I consider Guo as a cultural agent who traveled across vast lands and made difficult choices to balance his roles as a late Qing ambassador and a civilian traveler.In this study, I read beyond previous dichotomous historical evaluations of Guo and investigate the complexities of his thought and writings vis-à-vis his journey to the West. In particular, I analyze his personal diary and other records. Chapter 1 provides a review of literature and introduces multiple interdisciplinary concepts guiding this study. In Chapter 2, I chart the evolution of Guo’s sociopolitical views and situate their shifts in their corresponding contexts. In Chapter 3, employing the metaphor of travel as translation and the concept of agency, I figure Guo Songtao as a translator of foreign experience and examine his rhetorical strategies in depicting various occasions and aspects of his journey. In Chapter 4, guided by the notion of autobiographical writing as subjective, I analyze the two versions of Guo’s travelogue and examine his editorial processes in revising his personal diary into a manuscript intended for Chinese readership. I also look at the figure of Bin Chun 斌椿 (1804–1871), who resorted to two different genres in writing about an earlier journey, to suggest that a commonality among late Qing envoys, despite their varying historical evaluations, is their efforts to balance their roles and deliver appropriate messages.