Houseboat Days in China doesn’t fare well in first impressions. The first pages of J.O.P. Bland’s 1909 book, newly republished, are an almost insufferably smug introduction to houseboating, the favourite pastime of nineteenth-century Westerners in Shanghai.

Bland, who was well-known at the time for his fictional accounts of Shanghai expat life, as well as his more serious treatments of British-Chinese relations, was a product of his era, both in attitude and writing style. His overwrought description of boats that resemble “such elephantine freaks as Simeon,” on which “the flesh-pots of the white man” wallow in colonial comfort hardly bodes well for what is to come.

But he soon redeems himself. As Bland journeys through the canals and rivers near Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou, past the ruins of an empire in decline and the seething masses of a society in ferment, his prose becomes crisper and his observations more salient. It’s fascinating to read a first-hand perspective of Chinese life in the final throes of the Qing Dynasty, when European powers carved up the country and many peasants were still recovering from the almost unimaginable devastation of the Taiping Rebellion, which killed an estimated 30 million people across southern China.

Along with its portrait of a long-gone China, however, Houseboat Days is interesting for its depiction of well-heeled expatriate life. The purpose of houseboating is not exploration, you see – it’s shooting birds. “I like to make for the wilds of Chêkiang, with one or two congenial souls, to spots where the foreigner is almost unknown, where the heathen is still unsophisticated, and where a man may shoot to his heart’s content without fear for next season’s supply,” Bland writes. His writing is a window into the exploitative, exoticising, and contemptuous attitude of many Westerners towards China. It’s hard for the cynical reader not to see some parallels with certain circles of jet-setting expats in modern Chinese cities. www.talesofoldchina.com.

Christopher DeWolf