A southern Chinese city through the eyes of a British missionary: Preliminary analysis of the text of a historical travelogue

Title

A southern Chinese city through the eyes of a British missionary: Preliminary analysis of the text of a historical travelogue

Description

Walks in the City of Canton is a book written by John Henry Gray of Christ's College, Cambridge who came to China and stayed as a missionary for many years, and it was published in 1875. This project did a preliminary analysis of the text of this book digitized by Google from the Library of Harvard University and uploaded to the Internet Archive. The Voyant generated top 500 words are tagged selectively aiming to find the more popular nouns, adjectives and verbs, and their related topics, sentiments or actions. This analysis is combined with the observations obtained in the translation of some chapters of this book by the presenter. Through the textual analysis of this historical travelogue, the audience will be exposed to the most interesting, vivid and sometimes astonishing narratives and topics, such as monasteries, emperors and officials, execution ceremony, raising silk worms and manufacturing white wax, along with an extensive variety of topics from streets, shops, examination halls, to festivals, gardens and tombs. It also adds a fuller picture to the beginning of modern Chinese history, including Qing dynasty’s closed-door policy and the western allies' entering by force, and it shows its appreciation of various humanistic sensibilities to different groups of people, including the blind, the aged, the foundlings and the born to be drowned baby girls, and some related facilities and philanthropic efforts. Presented at the 2016 Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA) Southeast Chapter Meeting, Rollins College, Orlando, FL. September 23, 2016.

Creator

Deng, Sai

Publisher

Chinese American Librarians Association

Date

2016-09-23

Rights

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Language

English

Type

text; presentation files

Coverage

Canton (China); China

Date Issued

2016-09-23

Spatial Coverage

Canton (China); China

Temporal Coverage

19th century

Position: 64 (409 views)

Files

southernCnCitythrEyesofBrMissionary_Deng.pdf
southernCnCitythrEyesofBrMissionary_Deng.pptx

Citation

Deng, Sai, “A southern Chinese city through the eyes of a British missionary: Preliminary analysis of the text of a historical travelogue,” CALASYS - CALA Academic Resources & Repository System, accessed February 16, 2025, https://ir.cala-web.org/items/show/72.