Benjamin Lincoln Ball and American Tourism in Early Treaty Port China, 1842-1860

Drawing from multi-disciplinary scholarship on tourism and Sino-American relations, this paper explores how the first modern American tourists to China interpreted their travels within and relied upon imperial infrastructure in early treaty port China, from its formation in 1842 to its expansion in 1860. Western tourism during this period has been described as “mapping.” Rather than actively engaging with a place, foreigners explored by identifying sites of interest in an attempt to know “the Chinese.” American physician Benjamin Lincoln Ball’s Rambles in Eastern Asia (1855) provides the central case study of this paper. It is a rich account of two years spent in China’s treaty ports and Hong Kong, Macao, and Manilla. Ball travelled to China for pleasure and often engaged in the “mapping” of sites of interest. Because the treaty ports had so recently been opened to tourists, his book often comments on and foregrounds the diplomatic and commercial structures that made his travel possible and draws attention to the ways local Chinese resisted these structures and semi-imperialism on the coast of China.