Half Of The Eyes Of Westerners In The Nineteenth Century, Guangzhou Image

The 19th century is the Silver Age of Chinese open trade and the cultural communication between China and the West. Guangzhou was the only entrance for Western having business with China before 1842. It was also a symbol city and window for Western to know China. The western visitors and residents wrote lots of journals about their experience in Guangzhou at that time. This thesis pays a key point for culturally analyzing the three literature, La Chine et les Chinois, The Fankwae at Canton, Inside Canton, which give out a description for the Guangzhou image of the first half of the 19th century, reveals the image of Guangzhou in the western perspective and explains how the city image had become in the Opium War.Whatever Guangzhou was the romantic orient ancient city, the Chinese-Western trade and cultural communication center or the humdrum and decadent city of old age, the western society knew and shaped the image of Guangzhou by gradually according to the changing of times and evolvement. The kind of knowledge was based on the subjective ideology of the author, it was affected by the author's social culture background and western society imagination, so it hid the western culture strong force and discourse hegemony inevitably.