A Classical Cathay and a Real China

Classical imagery and allusion in narratives of the 1793 Macartney Embassy to China demonstrate the importance of classical reception in Anglophone engagements with Chinese culture. Concepts from ancient Greece and Rome helped to interpret what was foreign or, as critics of the Macartney Embassy noted, denoted utter incomprehension. Classics offered a lens through which Westerners viewed China, although definitions of what was classical or Chinese were in perpetual flux. Anglophone readers derived their ideas of China primarily from translations of Jesuit scholarship mixed with the Orientalist generalizations of Arabian Nights. This chapter considers the state of British Sinology in the late eighteenth century (which relied primarily on Jean-Baptiste du Halde’s General History of China), the disastrous outcome of the Macartney Embassy, the inadequacy of conceptualizing China according to European models, and recent attempts to theorize Sino-British cultural exchange in light of Edward W. Said’s work.