213
Yet however misinformed or ignorant of the real China they might have been, the British officers who went there in the course of the Opium War were not prejudiced against her either. Albeit they usually measured Chinese behaviour against Western concepts of ethics and convention, their writers were still generally respectful of China and its people.
Matched by Chinese Ignorance of the West
The half truths and misconceptions common to those Britons who bothered to think at all about China and the Chinese were only matched by the equal, if not greater ignorance, exhibited by Chinese about the West, even by the governing classes. Their mind set, even of the most thoughtful among them, was cast in a different mould.5
The Chinese themselves may be held partly to blame for this state of mutual ignorance. Major George Henry Mason, who produced one of the most valuable early works in English on China and the Chinese, based on his personal experience of the situation at Canton in 1789-90, commented that in his day:
The very circumscribed limits which are marked out for foreigners at Canton, have rendered the natives of China so completely cut off from human kind that only a very superficial acquaintance has been hitherto obtained with the Religion, the Laws, the Manners or the Arts of a people the most ancient in the discovered world.
It was, Mason said, “to be exceedingly regretted, that either habitual caution, ungenerous suspicion, or experienced necessary circumspection, should influence the Chinese, even at a distance of fourteen hundred miles from the capital of their empire, to restrain the observing traveller within his narrow compass.
196
This situation had not changed a whit by 1839. Each party to the War was boxed in by its own limitations.
British Officers' Differing Views on the War
Like the British public at home, some members of the Expeditionary
213
Yet however misinformed or ignorant of the real China they might have been, the British officers who went there in the course of the Opium War were not prejudiced against her either. Albeit they usually measured Chinese behaviour against Western concepts of ethics and convention, their writers were still generally respectful of China and its people.
Matched by Chinese Ignorance of the West
The half truths and misconceptions common to those Britons who bothered to think at all about China and the Chinese were only matched by the equal, if not greater ignorance, exhibited by Chinese about the West, even by the governing classes. Their mind set, even of the most thoughtful among them, was cast in a different mould.5
The Chinese themselves may be held partly to blame for this state of mutual ignorance. Major George Henry Mason, who produced one of the most valuable early works in English on China and the Chinese, based on his personal experience of the situation at Canton in 1789-90, commented that in his day:
The very circumscribed limits which are marked out for foreign- ers at Canton, have rendered the natives of China so completely cut off from human kind that only a very superficial acquaintance has been hitherto obtained with the Religion, the Laws, the Man- ners or the Arts of a people the most ancient in the discovered world.
It was, Mason said, “to be exceedingly regretted, that either ha- bitual caution, ungenerous suspicion, or experienced necessary circumspection, should influence the Chinese, even at a distance of fourteen hundred miles from the capital of their empire, to restrain the observing traveller within his narrow compass.
196
This situation had not changed a whit by 1839. Each party to the War was boxed in by its own limitations.
British Officers' Differing Views on the War
Like the British public at home, some members of the Expeditionary
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