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Distant Neighbours and Familiar Strangers. The Intercultural Narrative of A Lady’s Visit to Manilla and Japan

Anna D’Almeida’s A Lady’s Visit to Manilla and Japan (1863) is much more than an indolent tourist’s shallow account of the conventional enjoyment or predictable moral outrage she experiences in the course of her fashionable “grand tour,” part of the emerging field of late 19th century tourism. This essay examines Western female writing in the context of cultural encounters or, more precisely, it investigates the images that a 19th century Western woman traveler creates from her transient exposure to several Asian spaces and practices. In order to attain the statute of ‘civilized,’ colonized countries should unreservedly adopt the benefits of industry, abjure the equally uncivilized idols of paganism and Catholicism and pay unwavering deference to tourists, who also function as temporary ambassadors of political and cultural imperialism. A Lady’s Visit to Manilla and Japan is a vivid, well informed and surprisingly comprehensive first-person narrative of a journey across the global colonial home that was the British Empire.