Decadent And Mysterious Empire

Pierre Loti and Victor Segalen are famous French writers. They both have very deep roots contacted with China. Loti brings China into his exotic and search for beauty in the decay Qing dynasty. Segalen was famous for a lot of works about China and he was regarded as France's Chinese poet.This paper selected Loti's representative work"Les derniers jours de Pékin"and Victor Segalen's novel"Renéleys". Through analyzing and researching these two works, I want to search about how China is represented. First, I abstract the representative works of significance in the typical Chinese city image and the Chinese people image, and then compare the two works to find out the differences and changes between the image of Chinese people and Chinese cities. Lastly and most importantly, is through the image of the Chinese cities and Chinese people ,I want to find out the cultural connection. By comparison we found that Loti's"Les derniers jours de Pékin"written the end of the Qing Dynasty towards decayed, Loti not only concerned the declining reality of the Chinese, but also recalled the past success and achievement of the Qing dynasty. As a newcomer Segalen tried to know more about China. So in"Renéleys"Segalen tried to go into the core city of China——The Forbidden City, to understand the core and essence of Chinese culture.