China appears less as a directly depicted setting than as a place recounted and argued over: Dr. Hooker says he spent fifteen years there as a missionary, while the conversations surrounding him expose competing claims about language, religion, and imperial power. The country’s importance lies in how these accounts reveal the assumptions behind the supposed civilizing mission.

China in the Travel Narrative

During Bella Baxter and Duncan Wedderburn’s travels, Dr. Hooker explains that he reached China by the direct Pacific route fifteen years earlier. By the time of the conversation, he has retired from missionary work and is taking an intentionally roundabout route home. China therefore enters the travel narrative through the retrospective account of a returning missionary, rather than through a sustained description of its landscapes or daily life.

The route also places China within a wider journey of encounters and debate. Dr. Hooker’s account of his years there emerges at breakfast, amid the travelers’ conversations, and becomes a way to examine not only where he has been but what he believes his presence there meant.

Missionary Work and Language

Dr. Hooker says that a federation of American Bible societies employed him for fifteen years to teach the Bible’s language and faith in Peking, with support from chambers of commerce and the United States government. He claims that the simplest jargon used by the poorest laborers served his purpose better than the complexities of Mandarin. His description makes language a practical instrument of conversion, while also revealing how little value his stated mission placed on learning the language and intellectual traditions of the people he sought to teach.

The exchange sharpens when Harry Astley points out that Spanish colonizers had likewise treated Latin as the language of Christian faith and the Bible. His response challenges the idea that Hooker’s religious position is culturally neutral: the language presented as sacred changes with the power that claims it. Hooker distinguishes his faith from the later imperial trappings of Roman Christianity, but the conversation leaves the larger question of who gets to define religious authority unsettled.

China in Imperial Rhetoric

In another breakfast discussion, Hooker treats China as evidence for his defense of Anglo-Saxon rule. He describes Chinese judicial torture as a roadside spectacle and groups China with other societies he characterizes as childish and in need of outside instruction. He presents British and American domination as a divinely assigned duty, then argues that force must precede reform. These are Hooker’s colonial claims, not neutral descriptions of China; their sweeping certainty exposes the hierarchy that his missionary language helps justify.

Harry Astley contests the confidence of Hooker’s predictions. He observes that Japan appears to be learning quickly and that Germany’s industrial power is nearly catching Britain. His reply shifts the debate from Hooker’s ranking of peoples to the instability of the imperial order itself: the authority Hooker treats as a natural Anglo-Saxon inheritance may be challenged by other nations.

Narrative Significance

China is connected to the book’s larger examination of the language of benevolence and the exercise of power. Hooker presents religious teaching as a service to people he depicts as incapable of governing themselves, then extends the same logic to military conquest. Astley’s interventions expose the cultural assumptions in that reasoning, while Hooker’s own account of working through a state- and commerce-supported missionary federation complicates any separation between evangelism and imperial interests.

The result is a deliberately mediated portrait. China is not given an independent, extended voice in these passages; it is represented through the travelers’ and missionary’s arguments. That imbalance is significant: the country becomes the subject of competing claims about faith, language, and civilization, and the narrative directs attention to the authority and interests of those making them.