World-weaving in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: the case of Hong Kong's earliest Chinese newspaper, gems from near and afar

Tsang, Michael (2022) World-weaving in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: the case of Hong Kong's earliest Chinese newspaper, gems from near and afar. In: Bhattacharya, A. and Hibbitt, R. and Scuriatti, L. (eds.) Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century: Spaces beyond the Centres. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 61-86. ISBN 9783031130595.

Abstract

Book synopsis: This chapter attempts to examine the processes involved in implicating a colony into a colonial world system by studying the case of Hong Kong and its first Chinese newspaper, a monthly periodical called Gems from Near and Afar, published between 1853 and 1856. Drawing on the concept of ‘world-weaving’, a variation of Pheng Cheah’s concept of ‘world-making’, and analysing the periodical in both its form and its content, the chapter argues that Gems from Near and Afar fulfilled a function of ‘world-weaving’: it weaved Hong Kong, a newly founded British colony at the time, into a world of circulation of capitals, serving not only the people of Hong Kong, but more broadly those in China and East Asia. Two senses of world-weaving are discussed: first, to weave its Chinese readers into the world by providing knowledge about the world as cultural capital necessary for imagining a life beyond the Chinese context they lived in; and second, to weave Hong Kong into the world by showing that the ‘world-weaving imagination’ in the first sense was enabled by an understanding of the colony as a curiously different place from the rest of China.

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