Undergraduate Course: Chinese Whispers: China in Western Minds since 1300 (HIST10438)
Course Outline
| School | School of History, Classics and Archaeology |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 40 |
ECTS Credits | 20 |
| Summary | China and its people have long been objects of fascination to Western observers. But from admiration to disgust, from 'stately pleasure-domes' to Yellow Peril, the 'China' of Western minds has been invented and reinvented over many centuries of Sino-Western contact. |
| Course description |
This course examines the various ways in which ideas about China, Chinese people, and Chinese culture have been imagined and reimagined by Western observers since around 1300. Weekly seminars are based on the critical analysis of a range of primary sources (including texts, objects, images, architecture, music and films), while the course as a whole asks students to engage with an important body of theoretical scholarship on cross-cultural encounters that has emerged since the late 1970s. By the end of the course, students should be able to place the West's current fascination with China within a historical context of which Marco Polo, Lord Anson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fu Manchu, Franz Kafka and David Bowie are all a part.
Content Warning: In this course we examine and critique anti-Chinese attitudes, stereotypes and language that some students may find upsetting.
|
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
|
Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | A pass in 40 credits of third level historical courses or equivalent.
Students should only be enrolled on this course with approval from the History Honours Programme Administrator |
Course Delivery Information
|
| Academic year 2026/27, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
|
Quota: 0 |
| Course Start |
Full Year |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
400
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 44,
Summative Assessment Hours 3,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 8,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
345 )
|
| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
40 %,
Coursework
40 %,
Practical Exam
20 %
|
| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Exam:
Three-hour exam (40%)
Coursework:
5,000 word essay (25%)
2,000 word exhibition catalogue (15%)
Non-written skills:
Seminar participation and leadership (20%) |
| Feedback |
Students will receive written feedback on their coursework, and will have the opportunity to discuss that feedback further with the Course Organiser during his published office hours or by appointment. |
| Exam Information |
| Exam Diet |
Paper Name |
Minutes |
|
| Main Exam Diet S2 (April/May) | | 180 | |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- demonstrate a command of a body of knowledge relating to the ways in which China has been imagined and reimagined by Western observers since around 1300;
- demonstrate an ability to analyse and reflect critically upon relevant scholarship;
- demonstrate an ability to analyse critically a range of primary source materials, and to contextualise these within a history of China in the Western imagination;
- demonstrate an ability to develop and sustain scholarly arguments by formulating appropriate questions and harnessing relevant evidence, and to present those arguments in a manner befitting the discipline;
- demonstrate independence of mind and initiative, and intellectual integrity and maturity.
|
Reading List
Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
Xuelei Huang, Scents of China: A Modern History of Smell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Sascha Auerbach, Race, Law, and 'The Chinese Puzzle' in Imperial Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Ross G. Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
James L. Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
Lenore Metrick-Chen, Collecting Objects/Excluding People: Chinese Subjects and American Visual Culture, 1830-1900 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012).
Anthony W. Lee, Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Christopher Frayling, The Yellow Peril: Dr Fu Manchu & the Rise of Chinaphobia (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014).
Esther Kim Lee, Made Up Asians: Yellowface during the Exclusion Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022).
Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
|
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
The course will help students to develop the following core graduate attributes:
Skills and abilities in research and enquiry;
Skills and abilities in personal and intellectual autonomy;
Skills and abilities in communication;
Skills and abilities in personal effectiveness. |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Stephen McDowall
Tel: (0131 6)50 3754
Email: stephen.mcdowall@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Lorna Berridge
Tel:
Email: Lorna.Berridge@ed.ac.uk |
|
|
University Homepage