Soundscapes in the Contact Zone
Soundscapes in the Contact Zone
Listening in Canton, 1770–1839
This chapter travels to the port city of Canton, the main source of direct European knowledge about Chinese sounds around 1800. From about 1700 until the conclusion of the First Opium War in 1842—a period Western historians call the era of “the Canton System” or “Old Canton”—China’s maritime interaction with the world outside its borders took place mostly here. This chapter investigates Western listening in the context of such conflict and compromise, against the background of a long term collapse of Sino-Western relations. The vast majority of its earwitnesses were British (and later American) professional men: traders, naval officers, naturalists, diplomats, missionaries, and doctors. All were products of the upper classes or used their travel to China to gain a higher station back home. Some took a sympathetic interest in what they heard in Canton, especially Chinese music. Many celebrated the vastness of the Canton soundscape, in which millions of people made noise together at once; they were awestruck by the sheer difference of Canton’s sound worlds. Most, however, found Chinese sounds off-putting, even threatening. They wrote about them with absolute confidence in Western superiority, hearing the world with imperial ears.
Keywords: Canton, Chinese sounds, Western listening, First Opium War, Sino-Western relations, earwitnesses, sound worlds, Western superiority, imperial ears, labor
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