Travel round the imperial China

TRAVEL ROUND THE IMPERIAL CHINA. Edition of Jordi Groh. Editions Abraxas. 2000

I must admit that in the beginning I looked with a certain skepticism at the present book. A compilation of travelers' histories that throughout the centuries have visited China was not looking like to me a big work to which to dedicate my time and my words. And neither also, between them, seemed to me to find the one that for me would have been an ideal selection.

As soon as I began reading the book, my impression changed completely. From the first fragments of the first selection, of the work of the missionary Juan de Piano, who visited China in the year 1245 sent by the Pope, the book began being interested in me. Every fragment knew me so fresh as a newly prepared sweet. On having finished it only, I could wonder why most of these works are not yet accessible to the reader in Spanish. Since we could have lived all these years, without knowing, at least, it departs from these magnificent trip memoirs.

The description of the life and customs of the Mongols for Juan de Piano, the story of his adventures for the sumptuous city of Hangzhou for Odorico de Pordenone, the detailed enumeration of the differences between the Chinese woman and the Tibetan one, for Marco Polo, or the least detailed explanation of the foundation of the design and the construction of the Chinese gardens for William Chambers, who visited Canton in the XVIIIth century, are pieces of anthology, sufficient as to justify the edition and reading of this book.

The guessed right combination of the included fragments constructs in fact, a history of China. And a history simultaneously of the relations between China and Occident. It throws light on many aspects often neglected in the big histories, which can serve to help reader to understand so immense country, and it is presenting of intuitive form different aspects of his society, customs, history and decline.

Decline is the key word in this work. Since, really, from the arrival of the first Europeans to China in the XIIIth century, to a China that has reached his biggest splendor in last years, with this dynasty Song whose capital Hangzhou still impresses Marco Polo and Odorico de Pordenone, this country initiates a process of decline that scarcely is mitigated during the reign of some emperors especially illuminated. Meanwhile, Occident is going out of the darkness of the Middle Age, to the awakening of the Renaissance, the light of the Enlightenment and the lightning of the Industrial Revolution. The vision of China for the western ones changes with the centuries as they transform both China and the western ones. And official lives through this change in this book better that in many books of the history we would say.

The book is vertiginous, as it is the sensation that feels on having gone on on a few pages, at a few hours, of the imperial nobility that fascinates the first travelers, to the decline at which the merchants laugh to taste in the Canton of the XVIIIth and XIXth century. Very interesting for all the interested parties for China, we hope that it should turn in the beginning, of a task scarcely begun, that it manages to present to the reader the valuable memoirs of those who knew the China of the past.

Pedro Ceinos

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