No Foreign Bones in China: Memoirs of Imperialism and Its Ending

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

This sweeping story by veteran Canadian journalist Peter Stursberg
covers his family’s life in China from the 1830s to the early 1960s.
Beginning with his grandfather’s exploits as a trader and customs
official along the South China Coast, Stursberg details the rhythms of
British treaty port life amid the turmoil of late Imperial and early
Republican China.

Early on in his account, Stursberg makes clear, perhaps unknowingly,
just how superficial the impact of imperialism was in China before 1949.
Both his grandfather and his father were career officials in the
British-run customs and postal systems, which were staffed with American
and European technocrats. Unlike Western missionaries, who often
operated in remote areas in close connection with the surrounding
Chinese community, these officials worked in or near major cities and
ports open to foreign trade and usually lived confined to the local
foreign enclaves. What contact there was with the larger Chinese world
beyond their walled homes came through servants, occasional travel, and
the Western-language press. This segregation extended beyond life:
foreign graveyards were conspicuous for their monuments and after 1949
became targets of anti-Western animus expressed by destruction,
exhumation, or simple paving over. Foreign remains deserved no resting
place in Chinese soil.

Stursberg’s research was complicated by a dearth of family documents,
memoirs, and official records. Although his father had made efforts to
preserve letters written during the 1920s and had begun an autobiography
several years before his death at 94 in 1979, much about his grandfather
and his Japanese grandmother remained sketchy. Indeed, the central
mystery of Stursberg’s story remains his grandmother, who at 22
married his 58-year-old grandfather in Fuzhou, where they lived until
his death in 1908. She was given the name of Ellen O’Sea on marriage,
when she lost her Japanese name. Her children never knew how, or under
what circumstances, she came to marry, or what events drove her to China
from Japan in the late 1870s.

This shortage of documentation forces Stursberg to shift awkwardly from
family history to overly general summaries of Chinese recent history.
The result is a narrative that too often tells us too little about
treaty port life, with little specificity concerning China’s
tumultuous prerevolutionary history.