Touring China: A History of Travel Culture, 1912-1949

by Yajun Mo, Eric G. E. Zuelow (Foreword by)

Overview

In Touring China, Yajun Mo explores how early twentieth century Chinese sightseers described the destinations that they visited, and how their travel accounts gave Chinese readers a means to imagine their vast country.

The roots of China's tourism market stretch back over a hundred years, when railroad and steamship networks expanded into the coastal regions. Tourism-related businesses and publications flourished in urban centers while scientific exploration, investigative journalism, and wartime travel propelled many Chinese from the eastern seaboard to its peripheries. Mo considers not only accounts of overseas travel and voyages across borderlands, but also trips within China. On the one hand, via travel and travel writing, the unity of China's coastal regions, inland provinces, and western frontiers was experienced and reinforced. On the other, travel literature revealed a persistent tension between the aspiration for national unity and the anxiety that China might fall apart. Touring China tells a fascinating story about the physical and intellectual routes people took on various journeys, against the backdrop of the transition from Chinese empire to nation-state.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501760624
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2021
Series:	Histories and Cultures of Tourism
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.12(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Yajun Mo is Assistant Professor of History at Boston College.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Tourism, Travel Culture, and the Making of the Chinese National Space
1. Travel as a Business: The Making of Modern Chinese Tourism
2. Travel as Narratives: Producing Quanguo through Travel Print Media
3. "Head to the Northwest": Modern China's Movement Westward
4. Facilitating the Exodus: Wartime Travel and the Southwest
5. Between Empire and Nation-State:: Tourism and Travel in Manchuria and Taiwan, 1912–1949
Conclusion: Legacies of Republican-Era Tourism and Travel Culture

What People are Saying About This

James Carter

Yajun Mo impressively combines entertaining stories with clear arguments. Her topic is rich and Touring China does not disappoint. Indeed, it exposes a fundamental feature of modernity: to be a modern nation is to be a nation of tourists.

John M. Carroll

Touring China persuasively de-Westernizes the history of tourism in China. A fascinating and important book, it draws on an extensive range of sources with great skill.

Editorial Reviews

Touring China persuasively shows how travel writing in the Republican era brought remote parts of China, previously seen as something of a barbarian wilderness, into national history and geography in ways that show remarkable continuities with the PRC's post-1989 tourism canon. In this sense, the book has unearthed a "missing link" between imperial and post-socialist travel.

The China Quarterly

Touring China persuasively shows how travel writing in the Republican era brought remote parts of China, previously seen as something of a barbarian wilderness, into national history and geography in ways that show remarkable continuities with the PRC's post-1989 tourism canon. In this sense, the book has unearthed a "missing link" between imperial and post-socialist travel.

-- "The China Quarterly"

From the Publisher