Death and Emotions in Anglo-China

Negotiating Grief Across Cultures in the Nineteenth Century

Bobby Tam (Author)

Death and Emotions in Anglo-China

Negotiating Grief Across Cultures in the Nineteenth Century

Bobby Tam (Author)

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Description

This book uncovers the history of emotions surrounding death in colonial and semi-colonial Anglo-China during the 19th century. Engaging with both English and Chinese sources, including obituaries, memoirs, personal correspondence, missionary publications, mourning poetry and travel accounts, Death and Emotions in Anglo-China explores how this common human experience was understood, expressed, and felt across different cultures, where it became not merely a personal matter but a hotly contested issue.

Illustrating how emotions of death solidified communities, buttressed regimes and galvanised political movements, the book pays attention to the dilemma between personal grief and communal commemoration, arguing that the chaotic process of grieving was often pushed aside by collective narratives, which stressed the emotional norm of solemnity. Such collective emotions provided the Western powers, namely the British, a sentimental rhetoric of sacrifice for their imperial cause, and for the Chinese, a powerful impetus to rising Chinese nationalism by the turn of the century.

Focusing on a culturally dynamic context previously overlooked in the field of emotional history, this book contributes to the global dimension of growing interests in historicizing the universal human conditions of emotions and death.

Introduction
1. Regime and Community
2. Authenticity of Grief
3. Personal, Private and Domestic
4. Shared Emotions?
5. Waning of the Old
6. Turn of the Century
Conclusion
Epilogue: The commemoration of Sun Yat-Sen

Product details

Published	09 Jul 2026
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Extent	256
ISBN	9781350588783
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Series	History of Emotions
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Bobby Tam

This is a bold but well-grounded inquiry into the impact of cross-cultural contact on Western and particularly Chinese experiences of grief and commemoration in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Clearly written and exceptionally well researched, its findings are significant in their own right and as a model for other work in the field.

Peter Stearns, George Mason University, USA
Death and Emotions in Anglo-China illuminates an area of historical research otherwise shrouded in the obscurity reserved for the Underworld. In scrutinising the mutual learning process concerning death and funerary ritual of the Western and Chinese communities inhabiting Treaty Port China, we gain valuable insight not only into the collective emotional responses to the passing of human life but also into the interaction between China's urban society and the arrival of people from the West with new customs and beliefs surrounding death.

Lars Peter Laaman, SOAS University of London, UK