How Xu Jiyu Understood George Washington in Yinghuan Zhilüe

A Chinese Inscription Inside the Washington Monument

There is a stone tablet bearing Chinese text inside the Washington Monument. According to the US National Park Service, it was donated by the American Mission in Ningbo, carved there in 1853, and later installed at the monument's 220-foot level.

The inscription quotes Qing official Xu Jiyu's description of George Washington:

Washington was an extraordinary man. He rose in arms more boldly than Chen Sheng or Wu Guang, and carved out his domain more powerfully than Cao Cao or Liu Bei. Yet after taking up his sword and opening a country of vast extent, he did not claim an imperial title or pass power to his descendants. Instead, he created a system of election, approaching the ideal that the world belongs to all and carrying something of the spirit of the Three Dynasties. In governing, he valued restraint and good customs rather than military glory, setting his country apart from the others. I once saw his portrait: his bearing was resolute beyond compare. How could he not be called a hero among men?

The passage comes from Yinghuan Zhilüe, published in 1848. Xu had never visited the United States. Working from maps, translated material, and conversations with Westerners, he tried to describe for Chinese readers a world much larger than the traditional conception of tianxia, “all under heaven.”

What interests me is not only that he admired Washington, but the language he used to understand him.

Translating an Unfamiliar System into Familiar Ideas

Xu did not explain the United States in today's language of republicanism, democracy, or peaceful transfers of power. He reached instead for Chen Sheng, Wu Guang, Cao Cao, and Liu Bei; for “not passing power to his descendants”; for “the world belongs to all” and “the spirit of the Three Dynasties.”

This was not simply an introduction to American institutions, nor was it a modern democratic manifesto. It was an act of translation. Xu used Confucian political ideals and figures from Chinese history to give his readers coordinates for an unfamiliar world.

The most powerful phrase is that Washington “did not claim an imperial title or pass power to his descendants.” In much of Chinese historical experience, commanding an army and winning territory seemed naturally to end in a hereditary dynasty. Washington's departure from power allowed Xu to see another political possibility.

His claim that elections approached the ideal of “the world belongs to all” should not be read too quickly as a reform program for the Qing. A more careful conclusion is that he recognized how political ideals preserved in the Chinese classics might take on a new meaning in a country dismissed as foreign or barbarian.

That alone was unusual enough.

Do Not Turn the Early Observers into a Ranking

Accounts of the late Qing encounter with the wider world often group Lin Zexu, Wei Yuan, and Xu Jiyu together, then reduce them to a neat progression: Lin saw silver, Wei saw warships and cannon, and Xu saw institutions. It makes for a dramatic story, but it compresses all three men beyond recognition.

Wei Yuan's Haiguo Tuzhi certainly advanced the idea of “learning the foreigners' superior techniques in order to control them.” Yet the book was not only about weapons. It also contained extensive material on geography, coastal defense, and foreign political systems. Xu's Yinghuan Zhilüe offered a more systematic country-by-country geography of the world and showed a sustained interest in some political institutions.

The books differed in emphasis and expression, but both used the limited translated material available to redraw the map of the world. Instead of asking who saw “deeper,” it is more useful to ask how war, coastal defense, geography, institutions, and history each shaped their understanding of the West. These were overlapping problems, not a ladder of insight.

Turning intellectual history into a ranking of prophets produces a sharp story at the expense of the differences worth understanding.

Why He Lost the Governorship of Fujian

Xu's political downfall is also often arranged into a tidy causal chain: he wrote a book praising the United States, offended the court, had the book banned, and lost his office.

The surviving evidence does not support so simple a story.

Around 1851, a dispute over foreign missionaries living at the Shenguansi temple in Fuzhou provoked intense local conflict. Xu's handling of the negotiations was attacked by local gentry and court officials as too accommodating toward foreigners. He was demoted, then fully removed from office in 1852 following accusations of negligence and delay in other cases. Foreign-policy disagreements, local conflict, and bureaucratic impeachment all shaped his position.

Yinghuan Zhilüe and Xu's broader attitude toward the West may have influenced how his opponents saw him. But the claim that he was dismissed simply for praising Washington goes beyond what the evidence can establish. I also found no strong basis for the often-repeated stories that the entire book was formally banned or that he ordered his family to destroy its manuscripts before his death.

Nor did Xu disappear from public life forever. He was recalled to service in 1865, later worked with the Tongwen Guan, retired in 1869, and died in 1873. That record does not fit a simple narrative of total erasure.

History does not have to become a conspiracy before it can be cruel. An official caught between foreign negotiations, local opposition, and a conservative political climate already tells us something important about the resistance new knowledge meets when it enters an old order.

The Book's Life in Japan

Yinghuan Zhilüe later reached Japan, where it was reprinted and circulated in the mid-nineteenth century. Alongside Chinese works of world geography such as Haiguo Tuzhi, it became one of many sources through which Japanese readers learned about the world beyond East Asia.

Claims that Japan translated it immediately in 1848, adopted it as a Meiji textbook, or sold hundreds of thousands of copies require stronger evidence than popular retellings usually provide. The circulation of one book cannot explain the institutional choices of the Meiji Restoration either. Japanese readers were drawing simultaneously on Dutch learning, Chinese-language works, overseas missions, and a growing body of European and American political knowledge.

A more accurate view places these books in the middle of an East Asian circulation of knowledge. Written in China, they were selected and interpreted again by Japanese readers. Once knowledge leaves its author and enters a different political setting, it can acquire a life the author never anticipated.

Why I Still Like This Story

Removing the drama of “the prophet who was punished” does not make Xu Jiyu ordinary.

If anything, it makes the difficulty of his work easier to see. He had fragmentary information filtered through translation, yet he tried to place unfamiliar continents, countries, and institutions inside an order Chinese readers could understand. He inevitably misunderstood some things and never escaped his own time. Still, he was willing to admit that beyond the traditional map of the world lay forms of political life worth describing seriously.

The tablet inside the Washington Monument is not simply proof that “another country preserved what China was afraid to say.” It was selected and donated by an American missionary community in China. The stone is itself an act of cross-cultural circulation: Americans found praise for Washington in a Chinese official's book and carved it into their national monument.

I value Xu not because he somehow knew the answers to the next hundred years, but because he offered a quieter example. When the world suddenly becomes larger, begin by treating unfamiliar things as real and complicated enough to understand.

Sometimes the first step in changing thought is not to overthrow an old system. It is to let an old language describe an experience for which it previously had no place.

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