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Kathlene Baldanza: Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia. (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asia Institute, Columbia University.) xii, 235 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. ISBN 978 1 107 12424 0.

important sources of information for Victorians at home. Information transmitted through travel writing served the public discussion and more scholarly research, contributing to the formation of “public opinions” and the institutionalization of various disciplines at home. On the other hand, like the previous century, Victorian travellers went to China with different agendas – political, religious, and commercial – trying to describe the “Middle Kingdom” in, as they believed, a unique way. After all, China meant different things for different Britons. The heterogeneity of British travel writers and their writings provided a more complicated picture of China and the Chinese. Therefore, perhaps the ways of knowing China in the nineteenth century had not changed that much from that of the eighteenth century, neither had the heterogeneity of the big picture. Last but not least, Millar’s nuanced picture of Enlightenment debates about China’s political economy and the more complicated picture of Britain’s perceptions of China throughout the second half of the nineteenth century invites us to a more critical reading of the contemporary broad theory of Saidian Orientalism. Millar’s perspective reminds us that while it is not necessary to undermine the imperial narratives, it is crucial to provide a more nuanced, contradictory version, subject to changing historical and political circumstances, of the representation of China and the Chinese in the West.