From Jules Aleni to Zhu Ziqing: Travel accounts and the construction of “Romantic France”

Abstract

Many Chinese believe that France is a “romantic” nation though they may offer different answers to the question “why”. A recent source study shows that this image comes from the travel note written by a French priest Julie Aleni when he took a mission in China, from Wonders in the Voyage and Traveling around Europe and America by Zhang Deyi, a Chinese diplomat in France at that time and from Travel Notes by Wang Tao. Therefore, many Chinese modern writers borrowed this image to their works. Hence it has been created as a set image in the intertextual context of cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity. Therefore, this paper is intended to trace the signs of these cultural interactions so as to see how “Romantic France” has come to be a set image in Chinese culture.