Fellow-Traveling: Reading Su Manshu and Byron Across Lands and Seas

Abstract The Japanese-born Chinese writer Su Manshu (1884–1918), who introduced Chinese readers to Lord Byron through the 1909 publication of Selected Poems of Byron, also showed kinship with Byron as a man on the move, a writer who traveled widely and wrote about his travels. While Byron wrote in the early nineteenth century about traveling from Britain across Europe to the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean, Su wrote in the early twentieth century about traveling between China and Japan and, southward of the East Asian cultural sphere, throughout Southeast Asia to Dutch-held Java. He assumed in these writings the role of an eccentric and charismatic guide who told Chinese readers of Asian lands and peoples at a time of anti-imperial, anticolonialist, and revolutionary ferment throughout the region. This essay examines how Su styles himself as a travel writer sympathetic to revolutionary and anticolonialist movements in large part by claiming fellowship with Byron and, significantly, by bringing him into constellation with premodern Chinese Buddhist travel writing.