Nineteenth-century Sino-French connections are back in vogue these days. The summer of 2025 saw a major exhibition at the Louvre Museum—“Une passion chinoise: la collection de monsieur Thiers”—which displayed, for the first time to a global audience, Chinese artworks and prints from among the over 600 items collected by Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877), journalist, historian, and controversial first president of the Third Republic.Footnote ¹ On the heels of this exhibition appears Pauline Yu’s Chinese Songs in a French Key, “the most comprehensive study in any language of The Book of Jade, the first literary introduction of Chinese poetry to Europe” (14). Beyond sharing the context of French fascination with China in the 1860–70s, the exhibition and Yu’s study both also shed light on the individual figures and the Sinological networks that helped produce richly curated and personalized collections of Chinese visual and literary culture. Yet while Thiers’s artworks were donated to and cataloged by the Louvre upon his death, Judith Gautier’s (1845–1917) Le Livre de Jade was widely disseminated in two distinct editions and multiple translations into other European languages across the second half of the nineteenth century, exerting a wider and more profound influence on Western understandings and representations of Chinese poetry.

Pauline Yu’s book, a product of many decades of engagement with its subject, offers a deeply researched and erudite combination of biography and literary history that centers the study, adaptation, and translation of Chinese poetry in the life and career of one of nineteenth-century France’s most celebrated and prolific authors. The precocious daughter of the famous writer Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), Judith Gautier studied Chinese with an enigmatic tutor named Ding Dunling 丁敦齡 (1831–1886). She applied her aesthetic judgement and literary skills to create an anthology of poetry inspired by classical Chinese works that “captivated and intrigued the French reading public, and especially its literary luminaries” (5). At once steeped in sources such as contemporaneous French periodicals, reviews, and memoirs, and anchored by the author’s own expertise in classical Chinese literature, Yu’s twinned study of Gautier and Le Livre de Jade presents its own captivating close readings of poetry and translation as well as a persuasive argument that Gautier’s work greatly contributed to the popularity of Chinese poetry in the modern West. Yu also wrestles with the broader question of what such a work of literary analysis can “tell us about nineteenth-century French conceptions of China” (14). Along the way, this book brings attention to some intriguing connections between late Qing diplomats and French writers.

While Yu’s exhaustive research and Sinological focus update previous studies of Gautier, this book refreshingly refrains from following a strictly linear biographical structure. Instead, chapters exploring cultural context and artistic connections alternate with chapters examining the literary merits and aesthetic influences of Gautier’s oeuvre. Following a brief opening chapter that demonstrates the French fascination with and response to the appearance of Gautier’s book in 1867, Chapters 2–4 explore the making of Le Livre de Jade by examining the development of nineteenth-century French Sinology, the French public enthusiasm for China in the 1860s, and the two individuals—father and tutor—who most influenced Gautier’s engagement with China. In a brisk review of the work and entangled relationships of such well-known French Sinologists as Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, Stanislas Julien, and the Marquis d’Hervey- Saint-Denys, Yu reminds us that these men all practiced “armchair sinology”: they neither travelled to China nor had the ability to speak the language. With the notable exception of d’Hervey-Saint-Denys, they mostly stayed away from substantial work on Chinese poetry. On the other hand, the boundary between academic Sinology and the literary world in nineteenth-century France was porous. Giants of French literature such as Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers referred to Chinese studies in their fiction and journals, while the accomplished Théophile Gautier was so fascinated with China that he collected Jesuit missionary and Sinologists’ works on China, drew upon them for his own fiction, travelled to see Chinese objects and persons on display in London, and even tried to join the Franco-British expedition to Beijing in 1860. Gautier’s obsession resulted in his hiring of Ding Dunling, an exiled self-proclaimed juren with links to the Taiping rebellion, as a tutor for his daughters.

Ding Dunling had been brought to France by the Catholic bishop and diplomat Joseph-Gaëtan-Pierre-Marie Callery to work on a Chinese–French dictionary. But as Yu demonstrates, he exhibited an entrepreneurial spirit: he participated in ethnographic projects, assisted other French sinologists, wrote a novel, landed in jail for bigamy, and became well-known among the French public for appearing on stage and giving poetry readings, quite possibly the first Chinese person to do so in Paris. Indeed, by impressively marshalling a wise selection of French newspapers to trace Ding’s presence and reputation in Paris, Chapter 3 stands out on its own as the most comprehensive study (in any language) of this mercurial and fascinating transcultural figure. Yu’s exciting biography-within-biography also proves to be an informative window into the intense mentor-cum-collaborator relationship between Ding and Judith Gautier. Each had something to gain from the other. While Ding Dunling provided Gautier with enough background to begin parsing Chinese texts, she routinely endorsed his writing, enhancing his reputation. One exciting episode of this literary partnership, retold in Chapter 4, involves the pair at work requesting and copying from the few anthologies of Tang-dynasty poetry available in the Bibliothèque Nationale (82–85). Le Livre de Jade would be a work of literary imagination, but it began in textual labor.

The heart of this study lies in the analysis of the 1867 and 1902 editions of Gautier’s anthology, in Chapters 5 and 7. Here Yu brings together her command of classical Chinese poetry and her skills as a comparativist to present a patient and masterful unpacking of Le Livre de Jade through trilingual and intertextual analysis. She considers the intricate structure of Gautier’s 1867 collection of seventy-one poems “after” Chinese poets in reference to the Selections of Refined Literature (Wen xuan 文選) that were available in the French national library, and discusses sample poems from each of Gautier’s thematic sections on “Lovers,” “The Moon,” “Autumn,” “Travelers,” “Wine,” “War,” and “Poets,” in comparison to both the original works by such poets as Li Bo and Du Fu and selections in d’Hervey-Saint-Denys’s 1862 volume, Les Poésies de l’époque des Thang. Throughout her analysis, Yu makes a compelling argument for Gautier’s fidelity to the sources—through such practices as retaining the “emotional economy of Li Bo’s poems” (121)—even while the Frenchwoman lost some allusions and ventured into her own free adaptations. The first edition of Le Livre de Jade was partly inspired by the French fascination with China in the aftermath of the looting of Yuanmingyuan and coincided with the Chinese pavilion (curated by d’Hervey-Saint-Denys) at the 1867 Universal Exposition in Paris; Gautier’s decision to release a revised and expanded edition in 1902 followed the Boxer Uprising and War and the 1900 Paris Exposition. Yu’s analysis highlights two major additions in this fin-de-siècle version. First, to the works of male poets, Gautier added translations of and substantial commentary on several poems by Li Qingzhao (1085–1155), thereby introducing the important female poet (with whom Gautier identified) to a Western audience for the first time. Second, the 1902 version featured an intriguing dedication to Ham Nghi, the former emperor of Annam who had been exiled following the French takeover of Vietnam in 1885, as well as an admiring epigraph by Qing ambassador Yu Geng 裕庚 “on letterhead from the imperial Chinese legation” (187–191).

Indeed, besides arguing that Gautier greatly influenced European understandings of Chinese poetry, Yu’s other major point of emphasis is that Gautier’s literary success and prolific output—she wrote over twenty-five works of poetry, fiction, memoirs, and children’s books, many dealing with China, Japan, and Asia—were inseparable from her close associations with major European cultural figures, diplomats, and statesmen. Accordingly, Chapters 6 and 8 focus on these social connections. We learn of Gautier’s marriage to the Parnassian poet Catulle Mendès and her close relationship with such luminaries as Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner. In mapping the legacy of Le Livre de Jade across space and time, Yu includes an intriguing section documenting various adaptations of the anthology in English, German, and Portuguese and, with generous reference to other literary critics and musicologists who have written on the subject, highlights the influence of Le Livre de Jade on Gustave Mahler’s symphony The Songs of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde) and Ezra Pound’s Cathay. In the end, Yu makes a convincing case for the utmost literary and artistic significance of Gautier’s work to Western knowledge and imaginaries of China and Chinese poetry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Chinese Songs in a French Key also succeeds in acknowledging the singular contributions of Gautier as a woman writer and translator, and her Chinese tutor Ding Dunling, to a literary world dominated by Frenchmen. In doing so it serves as an important corrective to surveys of French Sinology, including an authoritative piece published in this journal not long ago, that privilege the likes of Julien and neglect to mention Gautier or Ding.Footnote ² Its combination of insightful literary analysis and engaging narrative has much to offer students and scholars of Chinese, French, and comparative literature, global nineteenth-century studies, and Sino-Western encounters.

What can readers of this journal—that is, historians of China—and historians of the late Qing in particular—take away from this study? For one thing, the enthusiasm with which not only the Gautiers, père et fille, but many around them studied and wrote about China suggests that an alternative and mostly positive image of China as a cultured realm—a “poetic paradise,” in Gautier’s words—existed among the mid-to-late nineteenth-century French public, perhaps especially the secular, educated elite. Insofar as Western images of China are concerned, this recognition is an important counterpoint to studies of French interactions with the Qing—by such historians as Michelle King, Ernest Young, and Selda Altan—that focus on the negative depictions by Catholic missionaries, the forceful religious and diplomatic presence of the French consuls, and the colonial action and labor exploitation by railroad syndicates.Footnote ³ And in highlighting the life and career of Ding Dunling, Yu has provided another example of a transnational Chinese figure—like Henretta Harrison’s interpreter Li Zibiao—whose haphazard cross-cultural mobility allowed him to play an outsized role in Sino-Western exchanges, in spite of minimal connections to Qing officialdom or elite cultural circles in China.Footnote ⁴ The reconstruction of individual lives—and the social and cultural networks they were enmeshed in—continues to shed light on the dynamism and nuanced variations in China’s nineteenth-century encounter with the West.

On the other hand, Yu’s empathetic account of Gautier also elides certain questions. For a study that aims at uncovering “nineteenth-century French conceptions of China,” the book privileges literature and Sinology over other material encounters or visual culture. The book includes a cartoon of Judith Gautier as a Japanese woman by the French artist Félix Régamey (1844–1907) (159), but—in contrast to the several pages on John Singer Sargent and his portraits of Gautier—says nothing about Régamey’s role as a collaborator and travel companion of the notable French collector Émile Guimet (1836–1918). And by not considering the art collections of Guimet and Henri Cernuschi (1821–1896), both of whom travelled to China and Japan and set up famous private museums of Asian art in Paris in the same decades Gautier was active as a writer, this study misses an opportunity to compare Gautier’s poetic construction of China with other forms of representation available to the French public.Footnote ⁵

Moreover, the book avoids a critical examination of orientalism and politics in Gautier’s representations of China. In fact, Yu brushes off supposed issues of “cultural appropriation and the sins of orientalism” by insisting on Gautier’s generosity of spirit and the observation that “Chinese poetry suffered no real damage in her hands” (252). But to bring up orientalism is not the same thing as insisting on “violence” on the part of the author. Rather, assessing issues of positionality, power, and gender may aid engagement with the scholarship on nineteenth-century French celebrity and self-fashioning that both Gautier and Ding Dunling engaged in as they made claims about authenticity—with Gautier announcing herself to be “a Chinese woman.”Footnote ⁶ Moreover, to center Livre de Jade, with its insistence on an ahistoric, poetic, and “charming” China, while relegating to only brief descriptions Gautier’s other more politically engaged works—such as Le Dragon impérial (1869) or La Fille du Ciel (1911)—is to leave out considerations of Gautier’s representations of key moments in Qing history as the Taiping civil war and the Hundred Days Reform.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, in a story in which the French looting of Yuanmingyuan and participation in the Allied expedition in the Boxer War are central to the making of her masterwork, one does not even learn of Gautier’s own stance on these events. While Yu attends to Gautier’s obsession with the erstwhile Vietnam emperor Ham Nghi due to their discussion about the Chinese language, it is disappointing not to learn what Gautier made of the Sino-French War.

Finally, for students of late Qing diplomacy, Yu’s study offers many tantalizing but underexplored leads. Beyond Ding Dunling, Gautier met with many other Qing diplomats who travelled to or were posted in Paris between 1867 and the 1900s. She seemed to be on especially good terms with ambassador Yu Geng 裕庚 (1843–1905), who contributed an epigraph to the 1902 edition of Le Livre de Jade (187–91). Unfortunately, in a work that deals so carefully with classical Chinese texts, the few citations from late Qing diplomats’ diaries are quoted from secondary works or English translations. A more exhaustive examination of Qing diplomats’ meetings with Gautier or other European writers as recorded in their widely available journals may help further contextualize the reception of Gautier and her work among her Chinese interlocutors and suggest patterns of late Qing cultural diplomacy.

While the late Qing historian might wish for more, Chinese Songs in A French Key has raised the bar for multilingual and comparative research on China and West. It should become the go-to book on Judith Gautier and the reception of Tang poetry in Europe and beyond, as well as an indispensable volume for any serious study of nineteenth-century Sino-French connections.