The Question Of Hu, By Jonathan Spence

To give you my complete and honest review about this book, I’d have to say that for me it was really boring, at times it was hard to follow, and the way that it’s written was just weird. The book was written by Jonathan Spence, who is a British-born American historian who focuses on Chinese History. He was a professor at Yale University for 15 years (1993-2008). To me because he studied Chinese History and taught it at a widely know Ivy League University makes him a creditable resource for this topic. His identity as a History connoisseur helps portray his book well to those who finds the History of China and History in general interesting.
The Question of Hu is a story of a forty-year old Chinese man who is brought by a Jesuit priest, Jean-Francois, …show more content…
Believe that the question he is trying to raise to us and to get us to think about is that why we know so much about Hu? Is it because of the fifty plus Chinese who went westward during the eighteenth century, three of them were jailed in Canton under vague charges and stayed there for eleven years. Or is it strictly about his travels from China to the western world of a Jesuit missionary. Though Hu’s travelers are no more historically important than the three who were in jail for eleven …show more content…
It is not very interesting and can be hard to follow if you do not find this topic interesting. At times I felt overwhelmed with facts, one example is when Spence is trying to describe Canton to us “Canton is a big city – it takes almost an hour to reach the center by carrying-chair if your house is on the outskirts. The Europeans living there guess the city’s population to be around one million, and those who know both cities think Canton is about the same size as Paris, though the buildings are all single-storied, which makes it hard to judge. Canton is really four different cities in one, all of which abut each other” (Spence 7). I felt that this paragraph was jam packed with facts, so the readers could picture how big this city was. But I felt that spence could have used maybe a metaphor or a simile to make it more interesting for the readers and to also keep them engaged with the book. Another example is the last paragraph on page 52 and continues through to the top of page 53. It just kept going on and on about the Chinese volumes that dealt with language and natural history. Though I did not care for the book I felt that Spence did a great job at making it historically accurate and attempted to make it somewhat interesting even though it wasn’t for