The Face of China

The Face of China by Emily Georgiana Kemp

The Face of China recounts Emily Georgiana Kemp's travels through China in the early twentieth century, blending vivid topographical description with cultural, historical, and religious observation. Beginning with her first approach to Hong Kong through the tail of a typhoon, Kemp traces a journey spanning Shanghai, Shantung, Peking, and deep into the western provinces of Szechwan, offering a panoramic account of a nation on the cusp of modernization. In Shanghai, she contrasts the Europeanized Bund and its foreign concessions with the teeming, labyrinthine streets of the old Chinese city, documenting markets, temples, mandarins' gardens, and the ceaseless commercial bustle. She visits St. John's College and reflects on missionary education, then travels by the newly built German railway through Shantung, describing the province's agriculture, poverty, and the Germans' Kiaochow concession. Extended passages cover Weihsien and Tsingchowfu, village girls' mission schools, and a memorable visit to a rural family compound where Confucian maxims paper the doorways. At Tsinan, Kemp explores the university, a progressive museum and lecture institute, medical missionary work, and an audience with the elderly Governor, Lord Wu. A pilgrimage up the sacred mountain Tai Shan follows, rich with descriptions of ancient sacrifice rituals, temple architecture, and the perilous descent by chair. She then visits Küfow, the ancestral home of Confucius, touring the temple complex, the sage's tomb, and reflecting at length on Confucian ethics compared with Buddhism. A side trip to a Buddhist monastery and passage down the Grand Canal to Tientsin round out this leg, alongside earlier memories of an 1893 journey through Shansi, including river travel, camel caravans, and encounters with Christian converts amid wartime disruption. In Peking, Kemp describes the city walls, the Boxer siege as recounted by survivors, the Altar of Heaven and its imperial rituals, Buddhist and Lama temples, elite social calls including a portrait sitting with a Manchu noblewoman, and the old imperial examination system now being supplanted by Western-style schooling. She details the fraught politics of railway concessions before departing by the Peking-Hankow line, crossing the Yellow River bridge, and reaching Hankow and the Yangtze. The narrative's central adventure is the ascent of the Yangtze gorges by house-boat from Ichang toward Szechwan: negotiating a boat and crew, running dangerous rapids with trackers hauling ropes along cliffs, surviving collisions and near-wrecks, and observing the boatmen's superstitious rituals, endurance, and camaraderie. She reflects on Chinese attitudes toward cruelty, slavery, and pain tolerance, drawing comparisons with Western practices. From Wanhsien, Kemp continues overland by sedan chair and on foot with a military escort, interpreter Mr. Ku, and servant Liu, through spectacular mountain and river-valley scenery to Chengtu, the Szechwan capital. She catalogs silk and embroidery production, kingfisher-feather jewelry, bargaining customs, and the region's remarkably progressive character—clean streets, effective policing, abolished beggary, girls attending school in disguise as boys, and a foot-binding ban enforced at athletic events. Visits to a Buddhist monastery, the Tartar general's yamen, and negotiations for a new Christian university mark her stay. Throughout, Kemp threads observations on Chinese material culture (birdcages, hand-warmers, bamboo craftsmanship), social customs (ancestral worship, filial piety, examination culture, currency complexities), the position of women and girls' education, missionary networks sustaining Western travelers, and the tensions between traditional practice and rapid modernization under railways, telegraphs, and new schools. The book closes this section poised to continue toward Mount Omi and beyond, having established Kemp's recurring themes: admiration for Chinese ingenuity and hospitality, critique of European condescension, and fascination with a civilization she finds inexhaustibly beautiful even in its squalor.

By Emily Georgiana Kemp · First published 1909 · Genre: Travel Writing, Non-fiction, Cultural Essay · 24 chapters · 77,215 words

First lines

My first voyage to China was unspeakably distasteful, and as we neared Hong Kong we were suddenly caught up in the tail of a typhoon and carried for forty-eight hours wherever it pleased to take us. Most of that time we were without food, and could not even get a cup of tea; while we found it hard work to cling to a seat. When we emerged from the storm, and steamed into the wonderful bay of Hong Kong, it seemed like Paradise; it looked to my eyes the most beautiful harbour I had ever seen: and I have seen nearly all the most celebrated ones, without feeling tempted to change my opinion. The first introduction to a new country, if it happens to be when the faculties are specially quickened, makes an indelible impression, and from this time China has been to me a land of infinite charm and beauty. The more I have seen of it, the more I have realised its fascination; even its ugliness is interesting.

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travel writing · East Asia · early twentieth century · cultural observation · geography · ethnography · exploration · imperial era · social customs · religion · Buddhism · Taoism

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