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Published at the height of the Second World War, Dorothea Hosie’s 1944 novel The Pool of Ch’ien Lung: A Tale of Modern Peking effectively encapsulates China’s socio-political upheavals before the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese war, drawing, as it were, on the author’s missionary diplomatic background and her 1936 experiences in Peking. In her discourse on modern China, Hosie foregrounds ‘The School of Accuracy and Good Manners’, a progressive girls’ school, as a hybrid space where conventional Confucian orthodoxy co-exists with Western science, disciplines and modernism, a trait in-keeping with the syncretism often perceivable in the country’s drive towards Westernization during the 20th century. In this context, the current paper aims to examine the manner in which Hosie’s engagement with the notion of "New China" becomes synonymous with her dialogue on modern Chinese womanhood, cultural continuity, resilience, Japanese militarism, hybridity and a synthesis of tradition and modernism within a highly symbolic and suggestive framework.
Dr. Debabarnine Bhattacharya. “On the Tracks of Modern China: Nation-Building, Womanhood, and Resilience in Dorothea Hosie’s The Pool of Ch’ien Lung: A Tale of Modern Peking.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 235–256. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.15.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
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