Free Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe

actually wanted to cut back on the printing work—but Williams managed to raise $600 from his home church in Utica. Then, like Cushing and Fletcher Webster, he set out to lecture on China in any church or public hall that would invite him. The tour lasted over a year, covering a dozen states. During this time, Williams met, courted, and married his wife Sarah, and decided to turn his lecture notes into a book. He had noticed that many in his audiences thought the Chinese ridiculous—“as if they were apes of Europeans,and their social state, arts, and government, the burlesques of the same things in Christendom.” China hands like himself, he said, were expected to tell tales of
Mandarins with yellow buttons, handing you
     
conserves of snails;
Smart young men about Canton in nankeen tights
     
and peacocks’ tails.
With many rare and dreadful dainties, kitten cutlets,
     
puppy pies;
Birdsnest soup which (so convenient!) every bush
     
around supplies. 16
    This quatrain by Lady Dufferin, a popular British poet, was apparently all the rage at the moment. Williams feared that if all that Americans remembered about China were cartoonish images like these—or stories about dishes that went “Bow, wow, wow”—they wouldn’t take seriously the great task of converting China. By the end of 1847, he had compiled
The Middle Kingdom
, a two-volume, 1,250-page tome that remained the principal American reference work on China into the twentieth century. (Its frontispiece features a perhaps inadvertently insulting portrait of the imperial emissary Qiying that shows him bareheaded and in a costume stripped of all sign of rank.)
     
    Williams wrote
The Middle Kingdom
to show that “the introduction of China into the family of Christian nations, her elevation from her present state of moral, intellectual, and civil debasement, to that standing which she should take, and the free intercourse of her people and rulers with their fellowmen or other climes and tongues, is a great work, and a glorious one.” Furthermore, he says, the holy work of converting the Chinese “is far more important than the form of their government, the extent of their empire, or the existence of their present institutions.” He then contradicts this claim by spending most of the two volumes discussing China’s government, empire, culture, religion, and so on with the utmost scholarly rigor. In fact, there’s a strange dichotomy throughout the book between learned investigation and reductive moralizing. For instance, he begins the first volume with a thoughtful discussion of the name “China” itself, which is used in many foreign languages but not by the Chinese themselves. The word may derive from “Qin,” or “Ch’in,” the name of the dynasty that unified China and ruled it from 221 to 206 BCE . During the first millennium of the Common Era, “China,” whose location was uncertain, was the fabled source of the costly fabric, worn by emperors and kings, that came from the East on camel-back along the Silk Road. In the minds of the Christian West, “China” only became firmly fixed as the great empire at the opposite end of the Eurasian continent with the writings of Marco Polo and the other travelers who followed him into Asia. Williams says that over the centuries, the Chinese themselves have called their land “Beneath the Sky,” “All Within the Four Seas,” and the “Middle Kingdom.” (Today, the nation’s formal name is Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo, “People’s Republic of China,” literally “People’s Republic of the Middle Prosperous State.”) But then the missionary in him comes forward to render judgment on these presumptions: “All these names indicate the vanity and the ignorance of the people respecting their geographical position and their rank among the nations.” 17

     
    Figure 2.2. Rice sellers at a military station, c. 1843. In
The Middle Kingdom,
Williams describes the grain as “emphatically the staff of