Abstract This article places the nearly forgotten local tour guides at the forefront of the studies of Victorian travel and travel writing on semicolonial China, showing how mediating agents shaped and disrupted cross-cultural writing and history with their relational identities. It contextualizes British and American travel writing on the Five Hundred Genii Temple (in Chinese, the Hualin Temple) from 1849 to 1912 within the intertwined relations between travel writers and guides, in the local socio-spatial condition of Guangzhou (then Canton) and under the travel-to-tourism transition in China. The role played by earlier foreign expatriate guides shifted from introducers to coordinators, leading to travelers’ nuanced local understandings that challenged the temple’s presumed otherness. Later authoritative Cantonese guides manipulated local interactions, reviving stereotypical images among the tourists. The guides appropriated metropolitan baggage of the guided in different ways, cowriting the travel writing and the cross-cultural history it implied. Being mediating agents in the travel as a process of encounter with otherness, the guides significantly altered the encounter while sometimes becoming themselves the focal Other in the writing.
Tingcong Lin (Wed,) studied this question.