Studies of China in the Western imagination have come a long way since Arnold Reichwein and Harold Isaacs, as Nicholas Clifford points out in his carefully composed introduction to this latest venture into the field. It will no longer do just to gather together sources from hither and yon to compose some unitary grand picture; we need to pay much closer attention not only, in view of all the ink subsequently spilt over ‘Orientalism,’ to how these writings were composed, but also to who was writing them and why.