Abstract

In 1845, the French writer Émile Daurand Forgues, writing as “Old Nick,” published a fictional travelogue describing a Westerner's banquet with a Canton hong merchant, served with bird's nest, shark’s fin, and assorted game. No such banquet occurred, yet this “textual banquet” captures how nineteenth-century Westerners imagined a “Chinese banquet.” This article asks where that imagination came from and how Chinese actors themselves organized, responded to, and reshaped the ways China was observed. Drawing on Western travel writing, diplomatic diaries, official memorials, and local Chinese sources, it examines elite foreign-facing banquets in nineteenth-century Guangzhou, tracing how food, utensils, serving order, and bodily conduct became media for cultural negotiation in the contact zone. Before the Opium War, Canton merchants used marine delicacies, game, rice, and Sino-Western utensils to display local taste and their reach across the seas, testing cultural boundaries through boundary foods and table manners. During the treaty negotiations, banquets became part of Qiying's strategy of “shifting stance” (yibu huanxing). After the war, as treaty-port life turned routine, food coding was again observed, imitated, consumed, and reinterpreted—in restaurants, foreign-hosted banquets, merchant households, and travel writing. Specific meals were repeatedly named and recounted until they detached from their original settings, becoming citable knowledge of “China.”

Keywords: Guangzhou, foreign-facing banquets, food coding, contact zone