2010•Studies in Travel WritingRequires access

Botanising in a Sinocentric world: Robert Fortune's travels in China

Jeffrey Mather

Abstract

This article will discuss the writings of Robert Fortune (1812–80), a Scottish plant collector who travelled in China during the 1840s and 1850s. After the First Opium War (1839–42), trade with China flourished and as European travellers, merchants, and missionaries moved inland, long-held views about China were both confirmed and contested. Fortune's travel books provide important insights into changing British attitudes towards China during this formative period, and often express highly conflicted and ambivalent views towards imperialism. This article will suggest that Fortune's writing can best be interpreted within the dynamic context of ‘informal imperalism’ and ultimately within a larger macroeconomic model of a Sinocentric economy. As one of the best known Victorians to travel to the Far East, his writing sheds light on the ways in which mid-nineteenth-century Britons imagined the very limits of empire.

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Key concepts: China, Opium, Ambivalence, Travel writing, Empire, Context (archaeology), History, Period (music)