China Traveler: The Tourism Industry, Print Culture, and Travel Narratives in Republican China

In 1929, a special issue of China Traveler devoted to “foreign-study students” hit the newsstands. Its cover featured a carefully hand-colored photograph of dozens of Chinese young men and women in Western-style attire gathering excitedly on the deck of a transoceanic steamship. The cover showcased an ideal image of Chinese modern travelers—educated, cosmopolitan, and tourism savvy, an image with which China Traveler’s urban readers could identify. Published by the China Travel Service (CTS, the first travel agency run by and for Chinese), China Traveler was the most circulated and longest-lasting travel magazine in the Republican era. Featuring a variety of travel writings and photography of country resorts, natural wonders, and historic sites, China Traveler also introduced new CTS facilities and services as the travel agency extended its network throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Examining three China Traveler special issues—dedicated respectively to overseas journeys, attractions along major railway lines, and journeys into China’s remote southwest—this paper delineates three specific yet connected travel narratives. Positing these narratives in the context of China’s nation building projects at moments of historical crisis, this paper explores the multiple ways in which the tourism business and print culture helped forge a deep affiliation among Chinese urbanites, changing their senses of mobility, the state, and national space. In a country with vast regional differences in an age of political fragmentation, it was through travel and travel writing that the oneness of China’s coastal regions, inland provinces, and western frontiers was experienced, negotiated, and reinforced.