The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds

I very much liked this book, since I enjoy reading about other cultures. The book provided a very good description of the culture and practices. I do recommend it for anyone who likes to learn about other countries and people.

I started reading Jonathan Spence and now I have to read everything he wrote. He had so much knowledge to share

Imaginative. Careative!

As described. Timely delivery

Great stuff...

I read this book in anticipation of our recent trip to China but didn't manage to learn much to help me appreciate what we'd see. This is a highly scholarly book with esoteric references for academic insiders. In fairness to the author, a China expert who evidently is highly regarded, I probably just chose the wrong book to help me prepare for a touristy visit to the Great Wall, the Terra Cotta Warriors and the pandas.

~This is an odd book, one of those curious fish that escape the nets of genre. Is is history? Sort of. Literary Criticism? Perhaps. Cultural anthropology? In a way.It's well worth reading, but it's not an entirely successful book. In a way Spence's great virtue is his downfall here. He's too generous and open a reader, too ready to take the Western traders, soldiers, missionaries, and men of letters on their own terms. He'll follow them anywhere -- and the result is a rather unfocused phantasmagoria, a bewildering palimpsest of Chinas. One of Spence's main points is that the Chinas in Western minds have no necessary connection to each other, or to the "real" China -- and it's a point well-taken -- but the result is a diffuse and slightly out-of-focus book. It's history in the strict sense, when it intriguingly evaluates Marco Polo's credibility. It's history in the 19th Century vein (that's praise, in my book) when it presents the tragedy of an isolated missionary's wife betrayed to an unmerited violent death in the Boxer rebellion. It's cultural anthropology when it evaluates Mark Twain's simultaneous racism and anti-racism. It's pure literary criticism as it meditates on Kafka, Malraux, and Borges. It's very good in each mode. But the different modes don't really inform and enrich each other. The book remains a collection of disparate pieces, each very good of its own kind, but it never reaches the higher unity that we look for (maybe unfairly, maybe unwisely) in a cross-disciplinary book.Still it is a great read, and its sheer variety (and the display of Spence's remarkable virtuosity) is entrancing. It may be disorienting, but it's never boring. Anyone whose fate makes them one of that other species of curious fish -- those who swim in between the East and West, being wholly of neither the one nor the other -- will want to read it.

The subtitle of this book is clear. THE CHAN'S GREAT CONTINENT: CHINA IN WESTERN MINDS is not a history of China. It is a history of Western thinking, using "China" as a mirror. Sometimes, the image distorts the subject, but its not China we are looking at. As an expatriate living in Korea, who is daily confronted with the distortions and limitations of my own western thinking, the concept of an "Asia" or "China" is more dangerous and loaded than all the jingoistic slogans ad agencies produce.Each chapter is a look at some (or many) pieces of literature or criticism, making the whole book more literary criticism than history (the nod to Harold Bloom should be a big clue to this). So many major and minor works are examined, that it is clear, that "China" could never be so much to so many, even over time. What is documented here, is the Western need for dualism and aggrandiazement at the expense of an "other".The book is actually better-written than it should be, like William James. It should be dry and abtuse, like some bad literary criticism. Spence's skill as a popular writer makes the exposition too slick. This is a specialist work masquerading as popular history.If read correctly, this book should shock and humble. After all, why do Westerners find so much that is different in "China"? Why are there conclusions so off-mark? This book is not a history of China, but a history of Western errors.