Volume 45, Number 19 · December 3, 1998
China is Near
By Richard Jenkyns
The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds
by Jonathan D. Spence
Norton, 279 pp., $27.50
Jonathan D. Spence's title is the imagining of an imagining. 'The Chan's Great Continent' is a phrase drawn from Hart Crane's 'The Bridge'—a phrase, moreover, which describes not China itself but Christopher Columbus's fancy of the land which he expected to find. And that fancy is presented in the poem as hazy and distorted, for the great Chan or Khan ruled China in Marco Polo's day, two centuries before the Santa Maria sailed. Thus Spence adapts Crane who invents a Columbus who imagines a China colored by Marco Polo; China shifts its tone and hue as it passes from pen to pen, or mouth to mouth, in a game of Chinese whispers.
Review, 4333 words
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