Whose Strange Stories? P'u Sung-ling (1640 - East Asian History

4
/though it ultimately proved to be, this
institution was seen by some to symbolize a
new era in intellectual relations between
China and the West. Giles' first seven years
were spent under the so-called "restoration"
of the T'ung-chih IPJ m reign, and for the
remainder of his time in China, the country
was dominated by the Dowager Empress,
Tz'u-hsi rg;t!. He left six years before the
100-days Reforms, and eight years before the
Boxers. His experience of China was thus
one of relative calm, and he spent it profitably,
immersing himself in the ethos of traditional
Chinese culture (he was to his dying day
conservative, if not reactionary, in his view of
Chinese politics) and devoting himself to the
mastery of the language, which "a close observer
has not hesitated to declare ... requires
the age of a Methuselah to overtake ... . " He
arrived back in Britain in early 1893. If his
twenty-five years as an expatriate consular
official in China had been a period of calm,
he was to find himself back in Europe at a
time of eventful transition in every sphere of
life. Gilbert & Sullivan's The Gondoliers had
received its first performance in 1889,
Debussy's "L'Apres-midi d'un Faune" and
Mahler's Second Symphony were to receive
theirs in 1894. In 1892 Lord Tennyson had
died, and in April 1894 appeared the first
issue of The Yellow Book. In April 1895 Oscar
Wilde brought his ill-fated libel suit against
the Eighth Marquess of Queensberry. The
next twenty years were to witness the prolific
creations of those great Edwardians, Elgar,
Galsworthy, and Kipling. They also saw the
arrival of Pound and Eliot, "The Waste Land"
and Modernism. Giles lived through it all. In
fact it was his rhyming versions of Chinese
poelly that provided the material for Pound's
first Chinese pieces, several years before
Cathay.
Figure 7
Giles family group in the garden
of their Camhridge home, 1900
JOHN MINFORD AND TONG MAN
Figure 6
A rare (by his own
admission) formal portrait
of H. A. Giles, who disliked
photographic sittings
(source: Aegidiana,
between pp.106 and 107,
courtesy Giles Pick;ford)