Exhausting the Ears: Aural Discomfort as Epistemological Disruption in British Travel Writing on China, c. 1860–c. 1911

British travellers to late Qing China regularly complained about the discomforting noises they heard across the country. However, despite the prominence of sonic language in travelogues from the period, the impact of sound upon British travellers has remained understudied. While historians have long emphasised vision as the primary sensory modality through which Western travellers projected imperial authority over colonised spaces of empire, this article reinterprets this global encounter between Britain and China as a fully embodied experience rather than an exercise of the eye. It contends that prevailing historiographical assumptions of British imperial knowledge making, in China and elsewhere, become fundamentally disrupted if we attend to the many reports of sound-induced discomfort within the archive of nineteenth-century British travel. In particular, the article argues that the emotive reactions of British travellers to China’s soundscape prohibited them from ever existing as unaffected observers of empire, and also undermined their attempts to represent the country as a passive idyll reminiscent of domestic chinoiserie. Overall, the British experience of aural discomfort in China suggests the ambivalence of these travellers about the possibility of projecting total imperial order over this semi-colonial space.