Writing in her 1899 travelogue The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, inveterate globetrotter Isabella L. Bird proclaimed to her readers, "Our ideas as to Chinese food are, on the whole, considerably astray."1 Echoing the sentiments of the periodical Temple Bar - which, in 1891, had declared, "It seems, however, impossible to disabuse people of the idea that dogs, rats, and snails frequently appear on the bill of fare" in Chinese establishments - Bird addressed head-on prevalent misconceptions about the exotic nature of the Chinese diet.2 These misconceptions were often advanced through travel writers' and journalists' experience primarily with aristocratic banquet foods and their lack of familiarity with everyday and regional fare. By contrast, Bird provided her readers with a much more visceral account of the manners and customs of the "Celestials" by describing her adventures in eating in such diverse settings as mandarin's palaces, rural inns, wayside restaurants, and markets. "It is true," she notes, "that the rich spend much in pampering their appetites, that the foolish extravagance of providing meats, fruits and vegetables, out of season at 'dinner parties' prevails among them as among us, and that such delicacies as canine cutlets and hams, cat fricassees, bird's-nest soup - A luxury so costly that it makes its appearance on foreign tables - stewed holothuria, and fricassee of snails, worms, or snakes are to be seen at ceremonious feasts" (300). But, she continues, not only is the Chinese food she saw and sampled during her visit largely wholesome and healthy in nature, it is also incredibly diverse, even amongst the poorer households: "The variety of food eaten by all classes in China is amazing. It would require four or five pages to put down what I have myself seen in the eating-houses and food shops on this journey" (298). With its fin-de-siècle publication date, Bird's book appeared towards the end of a long period of fascination on the part of the British public with Chinese food. For decades, the exotic and sensuous fare of the Flowery Land had been elaborated for readers back home and from a distance by a multitude of writers and travelers who had tested the cuisine on their behalf - usually in China, but sometimes in North America, among the expatriate Chinese communities of New York and the West Coast. These Britons recorded their experiences primarily in the periodical press, but also in standalone travelogues, where a scene of ritual disgust à table was almost de rigueur - As it also was for the expatriate British community resident in China, whose antipathy towards local food Jay Denby immortalized in his hilarious Letters of a Shanghai Griffin to His Father and Other Exaggerations (1910).3 Like her Victorian predecessors, Bird's descriptions of Celestial foodways use them as an exemplar of a more general fascination with the radically different world of China that the travelogue, as narrative form, necessarily seeks to elaborate for its audience at home. She relies on her audience's unfamiliarity with the culinary ground she covers to make her descriptions exciting, even titillating. Yet her more accurate and more laudatory discussion of these foodways and her inclusion of edibles for eaters across the class spectrum - ranging from the preserved eggs she observes being made in a village in Sichuan to the bean curd of the more prosperous regions she visits, to the "itinerant piemen" of the towns who hawk "vegetable patties" at markets and "places where men congregate" (298) - bucks the trend for much of the Victorian era of overemphasizing Chinese cuisine as strange and antithetical to the British diet. Instead of stressing the difference between the British and Chinese diet and eating habits, as was commonly the case (especially in the work of male travel writers and journalists), Bird focuses on variety, ingenuity, healthfulness, and even the triumph over adversity as the hallmarks of Chinese cuisine. ("Cleanly cooking and wholesome and excellent meals," she avers, "are often produced in dark and unsavoury surroundings, and those foreigners who travel much in the interior learn to find Chinese food palatable" [300].)4 Whether wittingly or unwittingly, this vision of Chinese food turns its producers into reflections of model Britons. The Chinese, through their cooking, excel at the Darwinian traits of adaptation to local conditions, and they embrace the principle of diversity as the means of safeguarding the survival of the social whole. Moreover, and contrary to readerly expectations, Bird's travels demonstrate that proper standards of hygiene prevail against the odds, and nutritional benefit accrues even if the foodstuffs themselves lie beyond the pale of the British palate and thus would normally be assumed to be unhealthy - which in part explains the emphasis in many travel narratives on the consumption of rats, dogs, snakes, insects, and other "low" animals that "civilized" eaters would have excluded from their purview. By embodying a dialectic of fascination with the exotic and a simultaneous rejection of it, Bird's book encapsulates some of the contradictions that govern the narration of Chinese eating habits and dishes during this period. Regularly appearing in the columns of the nation's press from the 1840s onward - A starting point linked to the conclusion of the First Opium War and to British expansion in India and in Asia more generally following the 1857 Mutiny - descriptions of Chinese dinners and diners became a staple of travel narratives, miscellanies, magazines, and fiction produced by British writers in China, as well as those who wrote about the Celestial Empire from bases in Albion. Such descriptions formed a crucial part of the way in which the British public conceptualized China as foreign and inaccessible, while also offering cultural explanations of manners and customs aimed at making the inscrutable scrutable through common bonds of etiquette, eating, and after-dinner entertainment. At the same time, discussions of Chinese food paralleled the interest in the cultivation and preparation of that article of Chineseness which Britons ingested on a regular basis - Tea. Over the course of the nineteenth century, tea was gradually transmuted from the strange into the familiar, from the foreign into the domestic - As new methods of preparation saw black tea eclipse the consumption of green tea and as new colonial plantations in South Asia shifted production away from China and into the imperial fold (thus removing the economic danger of tea consumption implicit in Britain's dependence on China for this commodity at the same time as opium exports redressed the overall trade "imbalance" between the two countries). Yet Chinese food continued to enthral and repulse with its alterity, exotic obsessions, and unfamiliar modes of preparation and consumption. Even the implements used to convey this "chow" from table to tongue were a source of wonder to many observers who visited China: chopsticks constituted objects that unified the sublime and the ridiculous and inhabited the basic contradiction of an ancient culture that staunchly resisted incorporation into Western systems of behaviour and Western patterns of material culture. Thus Chinese food - raising, as did interpretations of all other foreign cuisines, questions about the boundary of the national, the natural, and the adaptable - became emblematic of Britain's relationship to China: it was alternately used to contain Cathay through a process of exoticization and to bolster Her Majesty's imperial designs by making that exoticization central to Britain's own efforts to incorporate Cathay within its vision of global supremacy. The travel writer's dual subjectivity as ingestor and raconteur both confirmed cultural boundaries and traduced them, turning culinary descriptions into a process of reaffirming cultural integrity while simultaneously promoting patterns of identification across cultural lines. The heavy reliance on analogies in these descriptions - comparing thousand-year-old eggs to ripe cheese, for instance, or regularly relating the elaborate table etiquette and the variety of courses served to French traditions - highlights the search for recognizable terms of reference in Chinese menus that would make both the food and the customs surrounding it comprehensible to readers who had never experienced it. At the same time, these writers put into operation a counter-process for familiarizing Chinese cuisine by making European food itself strange; for, when viewed in a critical light, Western delicacies were themselves as exotic and potentially unpalatable as snakes, birds' nests, and the like. A January 1887 article on bird's nests in The Cornhill Magazine, for example, quotes Charles Darwin's derisory comment that "[t]he Chinese make soup of dried saliva" but contextualizes it as follows: "This sounds horrid enough, to be sure; but when we ourselves give up colouring jellies with defunct cochineal insects, it will be time for us to cast the first stone at the Oriental cuisine. © 2007 by Hong Kong University Press, HKU. All rights reserved.