Vertical travel and cosmopolitanism in Florence Ayscough’s A Chinese Mirror (1925)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Focussing on Florence Ayscough’s A Chinese Mirror (1925), this article examines the potential for vertical travel to have political and ethical implications. Born in China, Asycough was a Shanghai-based sinologist who garnered an international reputation for translating Chinese literature and culture. Well-qualified for this task through her extensive knowledge of local history, language, literature and culture, Ayscough revises the horizontal axes of travel and writing that were dominant in the 1920s, turning her life in Shanghai and her journey along the Yangtze River into vertical travels involving new modes of microspection. The article argues that Ayscough’s writing demonstrates how vertical travel could be deployed to resist and critique imperial aspirations and their reliance on violence, domination and existing hierarchies of culture and nature, self and other. It reveals the significance of verticality in her critique of British imperialism and her self-representation as a cosmopolitan with cultivated distance from Eurocentrism.