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Valery M. Garrett. Heaven is High, the Emperor Far Away, Merchants and Mandarins in Old Canton, Oxford University Press [Oxford University Press (China) Ltd., 2002] xiv, 210,
Mrs. Garrett has put a lot of loving effort into this book, and it shows.
She made many visits to Canton during its years of gestation, and the contents fully endorse her claim (Introduction, xiii) that "instead of discovering that all had been swept away, I found that much had survived.' We are also in her debt for another reason. She has provided wealth of description from older works obtained during her searches in the second-hand and rare book market, many of them never reprinted, and hence scarce and expensive to buy, if you can find them! One such book is by the American, Osmond Tiffany Jr. (Boston, 1849), which has supplied the two little gems given on pages 79 (on the Parsee merchants of Canton) and 90 (on Chinese shopmen).
The result is a lively, informative, and very readable account of a City, once famous across the Four Seas, which has been long neglected and deserves to be again better known. No matter - as the author has felt obliged to add that a visit there is "like an audience with a grand old lady who has had too many face-lifts". She is still worth cultivating, for all that!
The long history of Canton is given in outline, but the focus is on its 18th and 19th centuries "heyday," when the city was the only port on the long Chinese seaboard open to foreign trade: and as promised in the sub-title, here we have 'merchants and mandarins' superabundance, firmly set within the geographical, social, and historical context of their times.
I liked the book's organization. Its three parts, with fourteen chapters and accompanying notes, together with an Introduction, cover the subject very neatly, whilst each chapter is long enough to impart adequate information, but not to the point when it becomes too much to handle.
I also like the illustrations, especially the three sections in colour. All very well reproduced and including some that (I predict) many