“Book Descriptions: For four centuries Westerners have been voyaging to China, and regularly publishing elaborate accounts of that vast and complex country. But much less is known about the first Chinese who traveled to the West. In this intense and startling book, Jonathan Spence reverse the usual practice and tells the extraordinary story of a man called John Hu, who accompanied a French missionary returning from Canton to France in 1722. But the reversal is not simply a geographical one: not only is the voyage the other way around, but many of the conventional images we have --- of piety and sin, of sanity and madness, of reality and vision, of what is European and what is Chinese --- are turned on their heads; there is, indeed, not one "question of Hu," but many.
On one level, the story seems a simple one. After arriving in France, Hu appeared to become deranged and he reacted with wild imagination to everything he encountered --- hopping over cruciform boards on a church floor, demanding to walk across France to see the Pope. After being locked up and beaten, he escaped and began to roam the streets, preaching in Chinese to astonished Parisians as he beat a little drum he had made. In the spring of 1723 he was committed to the lunatic asylum of Charenton, where he remained for more than two years, until he was released and returned to China by order of the French authorities in 1726.
Spence tells this simple but also dangerously ambiguous story with the clarity and depth of understanding that many of his readers have come to expect from all of his historical undertakings. Drawing not only on the published accounts of Hu's adventures, but also on manuscripts stored in French, British, and Vatican archives, Spence has masterfully assembled an unusual and compelling narrative.” DRIVE
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