2 - China Stinks

Summary

The first stirrings of a Chinese olfactory revolution arose at a time when an influx of Western travellers set foot in China in the nineteenth century. To most of them, China stank. Suffocating odours from manure-buckets, vile fumes of opium, indescribable stenches from filthy streets and stagnant ditches, and the disagreeable reek from perspiring ‘coolies’ suffuse the pages of their writing. Drawing on a large corpus of English-language travel literature, Chapter 2 probes how China was implicated in the global history of olfactory modernity, giving rise to a new olfactory order and sensibility. I inquire into smell’s role in forging the ‘China stinks’ rhetoric, and I argue that this rhetoric was not grounded upon a supposedly pre-defined orientalist structure of feeling, but came into being through sensorial and psychical encounters. The private sensorium and macroscopic sociopolitical changes were entangled. This chapter illuminates these dynamics through an investigation of the specific Chinese odours that offended the foreign travellers’ noses, the particular strategies of producing the impurity rhetoric, and the permeation of the constructed discourse into the Chinese imaginings of modernity.