Seven

CHINA THROUGH
AMERICAN EYES

AFONG MOY, THE “CHINESE LADY.”

THE REVEREND EZRA STILES, THE PRESIDENT OF YALE UNIVERSITY, delivered a sermon on May 8, 1783, in Hartford, Connecticut, in honor of recently elected state officials. The Revolutionary War was over, and the final peace was in sight, so Stiles took the opportunity to expound on what lay ahead for his new country. “This great American Revolution, this recent political phenomenon of a new sovereignty arising among the sovereign powers of the earth,” Stiles declared, “will be attended to and contemplated by all nations. Navigation will carry the American flag around the globe itself, and display the thirteen stripes and new constellation at Bengal and Canton, on the Indus and Ganges, on the Whang-ho [Yellow river] and the Yang-tse-kiang [Yangtze (Chang Jiang)], and with commerce will import the wisdom and literature of the East. . . . [T]here shall be a universal traveling to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”1 With regard to Canton, and China more generally, Stiles was both correct and overoptimistic. The American flag did travel the globe and alight at Canton with impressive regularity over the next fifty or so years, but it was the commerce of China that increased most rapidly. As for the increase in knowledge about China, that was in much shorter supply.

During the early years of the China trade Americans’ perceptions of China came partly from imports—the porcelain, paintings, silks, fans, and decorated furniture, which offered overly idealized depictions of China, including exotically beautiful landscapes with waterfalls, majestic trees, verdant mountains, architecturally spectacular buildings, and people—the poor peasants intentionally excluded—going about their daily activities. Such scenes were the basis for imagining what China was like. It was largely through their “interactions” with such Chinese objects, argues the historian John Rogers Haddad, that “ordinary Americans . . . developed an unrealistic construction of China as a pastoral oriental dreamland: the fantastical kingdom of Cathay.”2 But such objects were not the only available source of information. As an increasing number of Americans visited China, they developed their own more detailed images of life in the Middle Kingdom, which filtered back to the States in the form of books, articles, speeches, and casual conversations.

In constructing these images, however, the Americans faced a severe handicap. Ever since the emperor instituted the Canton system in the mid-eighteenth century, foreign traders were restricted to the thin strip of land where the factories were located, along with select locations in Canton proper, which they could visit briefly a few times per month. This was hardly a propitious vantage point from which to learn about a country as large and diverse as China. Nevertheless Americans reported what they saw and, in so doing, found a very receptive audience back home. An indication of the depth of American curiosity about China can be gleaned from the comments of a merchant who noted in 1830, “Few return [to America] from a visit to the ‘Celestial Empire’ without evincing considerable annoyance at the multitude of questions (many of them inconceivably absurd) with which they are afflicted by their acquaintances.”3

Many of the descriptions of China were quite positive, focusing among other things on its beauty, agricultural productivity, the great inventions of its people, the wisdom of Confucianism, and the skill of its craftsmen. No account was more glowing than Amasa Delano’s rousing conclusion in 1817 that “China is one of the most fertile and beautiful countries on the globe. It affords the fruits and vegetables of almost all climates; abounds with most of the manufactures are useful to mankind; is favored with the greatest conveniences by water transportation of any country; and finally, is the first for greatness, riches, and grandeur, of any country ever known.” One subject on which most observers agreed was the honesty and professionalism of the hong merchants with whom the Americans dealt, who were by and large extolled as responsible businessmen who tried their best to navigate the rocky shoals of Chinese commerce, albeit not always successfully. Howqua was held in the highest regard. His probity and friendship were cherished in Boston, New York, and other ports where the China trade flourished, making him arguably the best-known Chinese person in the United States.4

For all those Americans who viewed China in a positive light, there were many, if not more, whose opinions were far less charitable. “Prejudiced originally in favor of the Chinese,” wrote an American merchant, “and very much influenced by the missionary travels, I was, as may be imagined, infinitely mortified to find on my arrival, that instead of exceeding the expectations which I had indulged, they fell considerably below the standard which I had formed of their moral and physical character.”5 As the historian John Kuo Wei Tchen observed, “The closer Americans got to real Chinese, dispelling their imagined ‘Orient,’ the more their respect for and emulation of Chinese civilization diminished.”6

Since trade was the primary medium of contact, it is not surprising that the trade itself was at times a target of disdain. According to Tchen, “Americans believed that the creed of life, liberty, and happiness justified demands for ‘free’ trade, and having overcome British controls, they decried China’s regulations of its trade and ports as ‘despotism.’ ”7 Some Americans thought that China’s government was corrupt. “Notwithstanding the encomiums which are generally bestowed on the excellence of the Chinese government,” noted Samuel Shaw, “it may, perhaps, be questioned, whether there is a more oppressive one to be found in any civilized nation upon earth.”8

Condemnation of the government was often intensified by a negative view of the Chinese legal system. The Emily affair, in which Francis Terranova was ultimately convicted and strangled, greatly offended Americans’ sense of justice. In their eyes not only was the death accidental, but the trial itself was a sham. As further proof that Chinese justice was unfair, the Americans pointed to the British and their experience with the Lady Hughes. The sentences handed down for violations of the law—including strangulation, decapitation, and scalding with hot oil—were also criticized. “China has been long celebrated for the cruelty of the punishments inflicted by her laws,” wrote one American trader. “The variety and ingenuity of them are certainly little creditable to a people which boasts of so high a degree of civilization, and many of them are unequalled among the most barbarous nations.”9

The military prowess of the Chinese was also lambasted: It was widely believed that against the modern weaponry and armed forces of the West, China wouldn’t stand a chance. A Philadelphian who resided in Canton claimed that the Chinese “are literally a flock of sheep, in comparison with Europeans, and their armies of millions would be as easily routed and slaughtered.”10

Some viewed the Chinese people themselves with contempt. “Of all uncouth figures that strut their little hour upon the stage of life,” wrote an American visitor to Canton in 1832, “a China-man is surely the most grotesque animal. . . . the most unprepossessing figure ever beheld—the most awkward looking biped in the universe.”11 Other Americans called the Chinese “vindictive, lascivious, and roguish,” “vile,” “depraved,” and “cowardly.” The strongest criticism was reserved for the small-time traders or peddlers, who were seen as being “ruffians,” ready to cheat the foreigners at every turn.12 As one American merchant counseled, “The only good rule for the government of a man’s conduct is to believe every Chinese a scoundrel, till you are convinced of his integrity.”13 Chinese cuisine was often ridiculed, especially the consumption of rats, dogs, and cats, as well as other items that would never appear on American menus. The practices of female infanticide and foot binding also came in for biting commentary, provoking claims that China oppressed women (Americans at the time were apparently incapable of understanding how they, too, subjugated women).14

Those who spent time in China frequently mentioned yet another unflattering piece of the culture—poverty (an aspect of life hardly unique to the country). “Multitudes of beggars are seen all about,” Peter Parker observed soon after arriving in Canton.15 Missionaries like Parker were alarmed not only by the widespread poverty but also the difficulty of gaining converts to Christianity, a failure they attributed in part to the alleged pagan nature of the Chinese. The more the missionaries ran into resistance, the greater their frustrations became. They often railed against Chinese idol worship, gambling, prostitution, opium smoking, and the despotic government, which they believed placed roadblocks in the way of their proselytizing.16

To a considerable extent the unflattering impressions of the Chinese that many Americans developed were a function of their limited perspective. Regarding the American community in Canton, Jacques Downs wrote: “Their enforced isolation, their daily association with the lowest classes of Chinese, the sumptuous existence at the factories, and the nearby spectacle of poverty and Chinese justice [that is, public executions] made for a series of cultural contrasts which created a very jaundiced view of the people and culture of China.”17

STATESIDE, AMERICANS HAD virtually no opportunity to meet Chinese people and therefore create their own sense of what they might be like. With the exception of Punqua Wingchong, none of the handful of Chinese who made it to America on merchant ships left an indelible impression, and the residue of his visit was hardly ennobling to the people he represented. The five Chinese boys who came to America between 1818 and 1825 to attend the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, were there less to inform Americans about China than, as one newspaper put it, to receive “a Christian education, hoping that on their return home, they may be useful in Christianizing the Chinese, the most populous heathen nation on the globe.”18 The only other Chinese who came to the States were not ambassadors for their culture but objects of entertainment, or “edifying curiosities” viewed more as freaks than respected members of another society.19

ONE SUCH EXAMPLE has become a mainstay of American lore in the nineteenth century. As the story goes, Abel Coffin, the captain of the Sachem, had quite a surprise for his wife, Susan, upon his return from a trading voyage to the Far East. “I have two Chinese boys 17 years old, grown together,” he wrote her in 1829. “They enjoy extraordinary health. I hope these will prove profitable as a curiosity.”20 The two boys, called Chang and Eng, were conjoined at the abdomen, near the umbilical cord, by a span of flesh about five inches long and eight inches in circumference. They shared a liver and their blood supply, but other than that had everything else in duplicate. They were born and raised in Thailand, near Bangkok; however, their fisherman father was Chinese, their mother was reputed to be three-quarters Chinese, and their peers in Thailand referred to them as the Chinese Twins. Coffin and his partner, Robert Hunter, a British trader, didn’t abduct Chang and Eng but rather persuaded their mother to part with them for two and a half years in exchange for five hundred dollars.

CHANG AND ENG, THE “SIAMESE TWINS,” BY JOHN M. ELLIOT, 1839.

When the boys arrived in Boston, on August 16, 1829, they created a sensation. The Boston Patriot averred, “We have seen and examined this strange freak of nature. It is one of the greatest living curiosities we ever saw.”21 Doctors called in to do their own investigation duly reported that Chang and Eng’s condition was real, thereby putting to rest rumors that the boys were part of a hoax. Soon thereafter Coffin’s hope for profitability proved true. Within two weeks he had rented a tent capable of holding thousands of people, and launched a massive publicity campaign, replete with posters plastered citywide, to entice people to come see “The Siamese Double Boys.” And come they did in droves, each paying fifty cents a head.22 “All the town goes to see the Siamese twins,” reported the Boston Galaxy, “and people are set to wondering, as well they may be, at this fantastical trick which nature has taken into her head to play for the special purpose of confounding the wits of us poor mortals.”23

For nearly three years, under Coffin’s management, the celebrated Siamese Twins toured the United States, England, Scotland, and Ireland, being presented at numerous venues where they often donned Chinese costumes, performed simple acrobatics, and sold autographed lithographs of themselves as souvenirs. In June 1832, however, when they turned twenty-one, they broke from Coffin, believing that they had fulfilled all their obligations to him—they were, they told him, “their own men.” Over the next seven years they managed themselves, touring extensively throughout America, and also appearing in France, Belgium, Holland, and Cuba. One contemporary chronicler called them the “eighth wonder of the world.”24

In 1839 the brothers settled in North Carolina, became naturalized citizens, purchased slaves to manage their estate, married two sisters, and produced twenty-one children between them, surnamed Bunker. Although they wanted to retire from performing, financial concerns forced them back into that life in 1849, and for many years thereafter they continued to tour to pay the bills, at one time performing in P. T. Barnum’s shows. Finally, in January 17, 1874, they died within a few hours of each other, with Chang expiring first. Eng’s last words were “May the Lord have mercy upon my soul.” The conjoined twins were sixty-three years old.25

FIVE YEARS AFTER Chang and Eng came to America, the first known Chinese woman arrived onboard the Washington, which docked in New York City on October 17, 1834. The Carnes brothers, who had already grown rich selling Chinese knockoffs of French designs, owned the Washington, and now hoped to add to the allure of their “product line” by employing this Chinese woman to bring a so-called slice of China to America. Various papers referred to her as “Julia Foochee ching-chang king,” or “Miss Ching-Chang-foo”—beginning a trend of making a farce of Chinese names—and claimed that her father was an important man in Canton, but history has not left a record of who she really was. The Carnes brothers soon had the young lady change her name to Afong Moy, and her career, such as it was, as the exotic “Chinese Lady” was launched.26

Out of an exhibition space at 8 Park Place, the Carnes showed Ms. Moy to all who would pay fifty cents, seemingly the going rate for viewing Chinese “curiosities.” Legions of New Yorkers put down their money, and when they walked through the door they entered a parlor replete with lacquered furniture, Chinese silks, paper lanterns, paintings, and porcelain vases, where Ms. Moy, adorned in Chinese costume, would sip tea, hobble around every now and then on her “golden lilies,” and answer questions from visitors through the intermediary of her Chinese servant and interpreter, a Mr. Atung, who had purportedly accompanied her from China. The New York Gazette reported that Ms. Moy “possesses a pleasing countenance, is 19 years of age, four feet ten inches in height, and her feet, including her shoes, are but four inches in length, having worn iron shoes for the first ten years of her life, according to the custom of the country.”27 Her tiny feet elicited the most attention in the press, and were the subject of the most impassioned reactions, with one reporter decrying her deformity and the culture that promoted it, stating that it was a “cruel process to which she has been subjected,” and that it showed that Chinese women live in “vassalage to the lords of the other sex.”28

Ms. Moy had an extended run in New York, followed by travels throughout the country, always drawing big crowds, much as Chang and Eng had done. “In many ways,” as the historian Krystyn R. Moon notes, “Afong Moy’s act . . . reemphasized what Americans saw as the differences between themselves and the Chinese, and by extension, the latter’s inferiority.” Ms. Moy purportedly left America for home in 1837, but she appeared again in New York and Boston about ten years later, performing native songs, and using her newfound facility for English to lecture audiences on Chinese customs. Soon after, the “Chinese Lady” faded from view, possibly heading to Europe for other engagements.29

CHANG AND ENG, along with Afong Moy, offered but the slightest—and hugely distorted—glimpses of China, little more than gross caricatures. Other reflections came from collections of Chinese objects and artifacts brought to the United States. The first of these belonged to Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest, an American citizen of Dutch descent who worked for the Dutch East India Company in Canton during the 1790s. A heavy-set man with a large, round, inviting face, Houckgeest accompanied the Dutch ambassador on a mission to Peking in honor of the sixtieth year of the emperor Qianlong’s reign. During the long and oft-interrupted trip Houckgeest marveled at his surroundings, sketching many of the fascinating scenes along the way.

The mission arrived in the capital city in January 1795 and spent forty days, during which Houckgeest became not only the first American to visit Peking, but also the first to be presented to the emperor in the imperial court. Houckgeest made quite an impression, performing the kowtow, and in the process having his hat tumble off his head, which caused the emperor to laugh. In that moment and the brief lighthearted exchange that followed, Houckgeest thought he had formed a special bond with the aged emperor. “I afterwards finished my salute of honor,” Houckgeest later wrote, “and when I rose to retire, the Emperor, having his eyes still turned towards me, kept looking at me with a countenance expressive of the greatest kindness. Thus did I receive a mark of the highest predilection, and such as it is even said no envoy ever obtained before.”30

The mission returned to Canton in May 1795, whereupon Houckgeest employed two Chinese artists to take his numerous sketches and render them into finely colored drawings and paintings. This was not the first time he had employed these artists. Before his trip to Peking he had hired the men “to travel at his expense throughout the whole of China, in order that they might collect views of every thing curious and picturesque which that country contains.” The result of their efforts was monumental, nearly eighteen hundred images of the Celestial Empire. Houckgeest’s goal was to create a collection that captured the essence of China. To that end he compiled the images into thirty-eight volumes covering a wide range of topics, including history, mythology, arts and trades, manners and customs, and two entire volumes containing views and monuments of Canton. To these volumes Houckgeest added many maps, charts, and plans, as well as a “number of other curious things,” one of the most spectacular of which was a vase made of “rock crystal, supported by the trunk of a tree, and embellished with a garland of flowers.”

Houckgeest arrived in Philadelphia in April 1796, bought a 430-acre farm near Bristol, Pennsylvania, and began building a grandiose house. During construction he rented a space in Philadelphia to exhibit some of his collection, and there a relatively small number of visitors—mainly the city’s elite—were entertained by their host’s animated tales of China, and by the presence of the five Chinese servants he had brought back from Canton. As one of the visitors remarked, it was “impossible to avoid fancying ourselves in China, while surrounded at once by living Chinese, and by representations of their manners, their usages, their monuments, and their arts.”31

Upon completion of his fifteen-room mansion, Houckgeest called it China’s Retreat, a most appropriate name since the money that paid for it came from the China trade. Atop the building sat a small pagoda bedecked with silver bells, and inside, his collection transformed the house into a Chinese museum, but one that only a select few invited guests ever saw, including George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette on a visit from France. After about a year, however, Houckgeest’s lavish lifestyle ruined him. Overextended, he ended up in debtor’s prison for a short while, then left for London, where his prized collection was sold by Christie’s auction house in 1799. Two years later Houckgeest died in Amsterdam, all but forgotten.32

AT THE SAME TIME that Christie’s was selling the remains of Houckgeest’s treasures, another collection of Chinese art and curiosities was just getting started in Salem, Massachusetts. In fact Salem’s East India Marine Society was established in August 1799 by a select group of sea captains and supercargoes who had the distinction of having sailed beyond either the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. One of the provisions of the society’s charter called for establishing “a cabinet of natural and artificial curiosities,” which had been brought back by members on their travels beyond the capes. The museum that resulted—the ancestor of the modern Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, which is the oldest continuously operating museum in the country—contained an enormous variety of objects from the Pacific Northwest, the islands of the Pacific, and the Far East, those from China being just part of the whole. A girl who visited the museum in the 1830s later recalled the wonderful effect its exhibits had on her inquisitive mind:

It was an experience for an imaginative child to step from the prosaic streets of a New England town into that atmosphere redolent with the perfumes from the east. . . . From the moment I set my foot in that beautiful old hall, and greeted and was greeted by the solemn group of Orientals [including a Chinese mandarin in costume] . . . until the hour of closing came . . . [the time was] full of enchantment, and I think I came as near fairyland as one can in this workaday world.33

It was a failed businessman from Philadelphia named Nathan Dunn, however, who outstripped his contemporaries’ efforts to educate Americans about the Middle Kingdom. He wanted to bring China to the States in a way that left people in awe, thereby serving as a counterbalance to the widespread derogatory portraits of the country. Propelled by his desire to get out from under a pile of debt he had accumulated, Dunn journeyed to Canton in 1818. The particulars of Dunn’s fall are unclear, but he had seen other men make their fortunes in the China trade, and he decided it was his turn to try. He did spectacularly well, returning to Philadelphia in 1832 a wealthy man. Eager to present himself in a new light, he invited all his former creditors to a sumptuous dinner, and under each of their plates placed a check that covered his debts to them plus interest.34 Money, however, was not all he had acquired. During his years in Canton he had assembled an extraordinary collection of Chinese objects, which came back with him as well.

Dunn’s collecting strategy was both traditional and unique. He used his vast financial resources to purchase many items in Canton, but he also relied on strong personal ties with the Chinese to expand his collecting horizons beyond anything he could have achieved himself. His fervent opposition to the opium trade underscored his reputation as a highly respected foreigner, opening up wider avenues for adding to his growing collection of all things Chinese. According to a contemporary account, Dunn received “frequent presents . . . of valuable curiosities, and articles of interest, from the natives,” as tokens of “their thankfulness for the virtue that induced him to abstain from [engaging in the opium trade, and] assisting in the ruin of thousands of their countrymen.”35 Dunn’s actions greatly elevated him in the eyes of local, regional, and national government officials, all the way up to the emperor. With their support Dunn was able to hire Chinese agents to do what he, as a “foreign devil,” couldn’t—scour the empire for items to add to his collection.36

Dunn’s goal was to display his collection in public. His wish was granted in late December 1838, when he opened an exhibit titled “Ten Thousand Chinese Things” on the first floor of the newly opened Philadelphia Museum, which had been largely funded by a major donation from Dunn himself. The hall was a little over 160 feet long, and 70 feet wide, with high ceilings supported by twenty-two ornate wooden columns. Upon entering the space, one was—according to the accompanying catalog—“transported to a new world. It is China in miniature. The view is imposing in the highest degree.”37 One visitor claimed that Dunn had created “a panoramic pageant of Oriental life and art, which places the whole nation within the reach of the remotest inquiring inhabitant of our union.”38

While this was hyperbole, the exhibit was exceptionally comprehensive, if not a bit overwhelming. In fifty-three cases, plus numerous freestanding exhibits, Dunn’s “Chinese Museum” employed fifty life-size clay figures and about twelve hundred objects to tell the story of China, which would have been a daunting task for an exhibit ten times as large. There were marble and copper Buddhas alongside detailed models of pagodas, bridges, houses, and many of the boats encountered on the watery thoroughfares of China. Three “literary gentlemen” in loose-fitting summer costumes could be seen with snuff bottles in hand, standing alongside delicately carved and highly polished wooden bookcases that gave mute testimony to Dunn’s claim that the “Chinese are a reading people” who were producing grand works of literature during the eighth century, “when almost the whole of Europe was sunk in gross ignorance and barbarism.” Skillfully rendered paintings helped visitors visualize the graceful architecture, verdant landscapes, and large cities of China, including Canton and Peking. There were portraits of well-armed warriors, stately mandarins, ladies at play, as well as the emperor and Howqua. The section on natural history presented a stuffed peacock, a Chinese fox, and a silver pheasant, while other areas showcased musical instruments, cooking pots, agricultural tools, and chopsticks in a sandalwood case. And along the edge of the hall, on the moldings surmounting the columns, Chinese maxims were inscribed, sharing the wisdom of the ages: “Those who respect themselves will be honorable,” read one, “but he who thinks lightly of himself, will be held cheap by the world.” Another declared, “Virtue is the surest road to longevity; but vice meets with an early doom.”39

The exhibit was an enormous success, drawing one hundred thousand visitors during its three-year run, and selling fifty thousand copies of the museum catalog. It certainly helped to improve China’s image in America. “Mr. Dunn, in the collection he has made and now offers to public examination,” noted Enoch Wines, a Philadelphia minister, “has done more than any other man to rectify prevalent errors, and disseminate true information, concerning a nation, every way worthy to be studied by the philosopher who delights in the curious, by the economist who searches into the principles of national prosperity and stability, and by the Christian who desires the universal spread of that Gospel.”40

EVEN AS DUNN’S EXHIBIT was presenting China as a society of the first rank, worthy of respect and admiration, it elicited some comments that were anything but laudatory. “Stopped in their progress, as the Chinese were,” proclaimed an editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, “and without any likelihood of a change, . . . a collection like that of Mr. Dunn becomes of permanent value, for it exhibits not only the past and present of such a people, but their future also.” This editor was merely reflecting a widespread belief in America and Europe that China was somehow stuck in the past—that while the Western world had galloped ahead during the late 1600s, 1700s, and early 1800s, making great strides in science, literature, the arts, and governance, China had remained stationary, advancing not at all.41

Western gate of Peking, by Thomas Allom, 1843.

The true picture was anything but that. China had remained very much an illustrious and innovative civilization, even though by the early nineteenth century the ruling Qing (Ch’ing) Dynasty was showing serious signs of decay. What had changed, however, was the West’s position and perspective, incredibly rapid advances enabling its countries finally to approach, and in many instances exceed, China on the various benchmarks by which we measure human progress. This was especially true with regard to scientific and technological achievements. So, to many in the West, it appeared that China was a case of arrested development.

WITH ONLY A FEW opium pipes on display, Dunn’s exhibit barely touched upon opium smoking in China, but the catalog made clear just how central an issue this was. Dunn used the last 9 pages of the 120-page catalog to rail against the growing drug trade in China: “Opium is a poison, destructive alike of the health and morals of those who use it habitually, and, therefore, the traffic in it, under any circumstances, is nothing less than making merchandise of the bodies and souls of men.” 42 Although most of his anger was directed against the British, the main suppliers of the drug, Dunn was also scornful of American merchants who sold opium to the Chinese. As visitors flocked to Dunn’s Chinese Museum, and read his condemnation of the opium trade, events were transpiring in China that would bring the long-festering issue to a violent head.