China

China enters the novel not through a direct scene there but through Pierre Piscot’s recollection of the expedition in which he served. His account presents the country as the setting for military plunder and violence, while revealing how his claim to worldly experience coexists with prejudice, regret, and a lasting sense of exclusion.

China in Piscot’s Account

Piscot invokes his service in China to distinguish himself from the villagers he regards as narrow and untravelled. He presents the expedition as proof that he has seen more of the world than they have, but his description of China is itself limited by mockery and stereotype. He dwells on unfamiliar buildings, clothing, hairstyles, and appearance, and singles out the abundance of water as a striking feature. The account therefore establishes less about China as an independently observed place than about the assumptions Piscot brings to it: his boast of experience does not make his perspective perceptive or impartial.

The Expedition and Its Violence

When the narrator asks about Piscot’s impressions, Piscot goes on to describe a campaign organized around pillage. In his telling, soldiers and officers looted alongside generals and priests; houses, shops, gardens, and religious buildings were all targets. He remembers one armed bishop urging the men to work while blessing them, a detail that makes religious authority part of the scene of plunder rather than a restraint upon it. Piscot characterizes the campaign as closer to a wholesale removal of property than to a conventional war.

His recollection also includes direct violence against Chinese people. He describes soldiers using bayonets against people who, in his account, did not resist, and recounts playing at drowning them by rivers. He then tries to reconcile this memory with his insistence that he is not a cruel man, while denying the victims full humanity on the basis of their appearance. The contradiction exposes the limits of his self-exculpation: his claim to ordinary decency sits beside an account of brutality that he can narrate as amusement.

Loot, Exclusion, and Aftermath

Piscot says he declined to take large bronze and painted wooden figures, dismissing them as worthless objects while other men looted. A captain later sold items taken by the company to buyers following the expedition, and the proceeds were divided among the men. Piscot says that the distribution brought some of them thirty, forty, or fifty francs, but that he received nothing because his comrades identified him as someone who had refused to pillage. The captain struck him from the list.

The episode remains a grievance in Piscot’s later account. He regrets not having recognized the possible value of the objects and treats his lost share as evidence of his habitual bad luck. He also says that the other men who had been there received a medal, whereas he did not; after making inquiries with the gendarmes at Montbiron, he remained convinced that the omission was connected to his refusal to loot. China thus remains present in the story through the consequences Piscot attaches to the expedition: not as a place he comes to understand, but as the setting of violence, missed profit, and an enduring grievance.