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This is a delightful book. It is far from the first anthology of writers on China, since Jonathan Spence and Colin Mackerras, for example, have already published excellent collections of this type. But Frances Wood succeeds here in creating something slightly different from all her predecessors that will be immediately appreciated by anyone who is in the least interested in what the West has made of China. Despite the twenty chapters, coverage is relatively restricted, with the emphasis mainly on the twentieth century and writing in English, with occasional forays into French sources, usually in her own translation: the account taken from this language of an early Italian Jesuit missionary and his encounter with a "sea cucumber" or sea slug on p. 42 certainly helps fill out the picture with regard to Western reactions to Chinese food rather well.
The amount of material anthologized is not particularly extensive, either. Instead, relatively brief quotations are embedded in a continuous narrative introducing the various authors and their works that is much more informative than any other comparable volume, especially since...