Bruits de Chine

Abstract

In China, one cannot sleep a wink at night. This complaint runs throughout the nineteenth century, through travelers’ stories and settlements’ newspapers, doctors strive to find its anthropological roots in the lesser sensitivity of Chinese people to noise, and it motivates, finally, various projects to ban noise pollution and exclude the Chinese inhabitants of foreign settlements. The reason lies in the fear of Chinese climate effects, the desire to base the inferiority of the Chinese on racial differences, and plans to westernize China.

Keywords

• sensibilities
• China
• anthropology
• modernization
• Shanghai
• sleep