Travels in China

In this chapter, the author focuses on a large number of essays on travel and exploration for the Quarterly Review . He is one of the great figures of nineteenth-century travel writing, both in his capacity as a traveller and writer himself, and as an instigator of numerous nineteenth-century expeditions to explore parts of Africa and the Arctic. The author was a young man of twenty-eight when he set out for China with the embassy and perhaps his writings on China show certain complacency. After the time spent in China, he returned to Britain, residing with Staunton and helping him with his library and the composition of the official account of the embassy. His picture of China would receive support from the reports and accounts of Protestant missionaries and became the orthodox British view of China, leading directly to the Opium Wars of the later nineteenth century and Lord Elgin's sacking of the Summer Palace in 1860.