Chinese dreams in Romantic England

Zusatztext

<p>A brilliant polymath and part of the 'first wave' of British Romanticism, Thomas Manning was one of the first Englishmen to study Chinese language and culture. Like famous friends including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb, Manning was inspired by the French Revolution and had ambitious plans for making a better world.<br><br>While his contemporaries turned to the poetic imagination and the English countryside, Manning looked further afield to China, one of the worlds most ancient and sophisticated civilizations. In 1790s Britain, China was<i>terra incognita.</i> Manning undertook a quest to learn the secrets of its language and culture. His travels included the<i>salons</i>of Napoleonic Paris, a period as a prisoner of war, a dramatic shipwreck and, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim, a trek through the Himalayas to Tibet, where he met the Dalai Lama. But when he returned to England, his ideas confronted an increasingly Sinophobic climate and he failed to publish the grand work his peers had expected for so long. After his death, his outward-looking vision was eclipsed by the English-rural poetic vision of Romanticism, and he was forgotten.<br><br>Mannings extraordinary story, here told in full for the first time using recently discovered archival sources, sheds a new light on English Romanticism and the course of cultural exchange between Britain and Asia at the dawn of the nineteenth century.</p>

Autorenportrait

<p>Edward Weech is Librarian at the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. He is a historian and heritage professional with special interest in how and why British people in the past learned about other cultures, especially those of East Asia. His essays and reviews on history, culture, and society have appeared in a variety of publications including the<i>Times Literary Supplement</i>, the<i>Coleridge Bulletin</i>, and the<i>Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society</i>. This is his first book.</p>

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