Vertical travel and cosmopolitanism in Florence Ayscough’s A Chinese Mirror (1925)

ABSTRACT

Focussing on Florence Ayscough’s A Chinese Mirror (1925), this article examines the potential for vertical travel to have political and ethical implications. Born in China, Asycough was a Shanghai-based sinologist who garnered an international reputation for translating Chinese literature and culture. Well-qualified for this task through her extensive knowledge of local history, language, literature and culture, Ayscough revises the horizontal axes of travel and writing that were dominant in the 1920s, turning her life in Shanghai and her journey along the Yangtze River into vertical travels involving new modes of microspection. The article argues that Ayscough’s writing demonstrates how vertical travel could be deployed to resist and critique imperial aspirations and their reliance on violence, domination and existing hierarchies of culture and nature, self and other. It reveals the significance of verticality in her critique of British imperialism and her self-representation as a cosmopolitan with cultivated distance from Eurocentrism.

KEYWORDS:

• Vertical travel
• West–East encounters
• anti-imperialism
• cosmopolitanism
• Florence Ayscough
• China

Acknowledgments

The research for this article is supported by the Macgeorge Bequest, University of Melbourne, and the National Social Science Fund of China on the Project “Cultural Community in American Ethnic Literatures” (No. 21&ZD281).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Among a host of Western travellers, Isabella Bird took the river journey in 1895. See her The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899).

2 Well-received when published, A Chinese Mirror has been long forgotten, but in recent years it has drawn increasing critical attention. For example, in Transpacific Displacement (2002), Yunte Huang reads it as a “large-scale ethnographic project”, praising Ayscough’s capacity to describe “the intimate details of China” (51–53).

3 Christopher Frayling has done excellent work on the importance of Fu Manchu within Yellow Peril discourse; see his The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia (2014).