‘That mighty Wall, not fabulous/ China’s stupendous mound!’ Romantic Period Accounts of China’s ‘Great Wall’

Abstract

The case of the Great Wall of China viewed within the larger context of early British understandings of Qing China significantly complicates in interesting ways our understanding of Enlightenment and Romantic period travel writing. This essay discusses the first British encounter with the Great Wall in the accounts of the Macartney embassy of 1792–94. Applying a combination of historical contextualization with aesthetic-materialist understanding of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British travel writing about ‘antique’ monuments, it seeks to articulate the ways in which the Wall became a catalyst in the revelation of the embassy’s assumptions about class, race and other categories. The key point is that Macartney’s embassy allowed Britons physically to view and describe the celebrated Great Wall for the first time in their history and to comment on the significance of the monument in several of the accounts that derived from this event. Julia Lovell, in her recent history of the Great Wall, has claimed that ‘Macartney’s visit marks a crucial episode in the modern history of both China and the Great Wall, his experiences and reactions helping to construct the view of the wall that is still widely, if erroneously, held today.’ For Lovell, Macartney identified two walls, the physical landmark and the mental barrier that the Chinese state constructed to keep out foreign influence.