Jonathan Spence, our foremost historian of Chinese politics and culture, tells us in his new book how the West has understood China over seven centuries. Ranging from Marco Polo's own depiction of China and the mighty Khan, Kublai, in the 1270s to the China sightings of three twentieth-century writers of acknowledged genius - Kafka, Borges, and Calvino - Spence explores Western thought on China through a remarkable array of expression.
Peopling Spence's account are Iberian adventurers, the great Jesuit missionaries, Enlightenment synthesizers including Voltaire and Montesquieu, spinners of the dreamy cult of Chinoiserie, American observers such as Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ezra Pound, and Eugene O'Neill, and diplomats from Britain's Lord Macartney to Henry Kissinger. Their visions are alternately coarse and subtle, generous and vicious, sober and exotic.
Taken together they tell us as much about the self-image of the West as about China.
Jonathan Dermot Spence is an English-born American historian, sinologist, and writer specialising in Chinese history. He was Sterling Professor of History at Yale University from 1993 to 2008. His most widely read book is The Search for Modern China, a survey of the last several hundred years of Chinese history based on his popular course at Yale. A prolific author, reviewer, and essayist, he has published more than a dozen books on China. He retired from Yale in 2008.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Spence
