Italian Women in Chinese Eyes: An Analysis of Some Late 19th- and Early 20th-century Chinese Travel Accounts and Their Perception of Italian Women.

This article aims to analyze the way the first Chinese travelers’ accounts on Italy1 described and perceived Italian society and culture, especially in terms of gender roles. Far for being exhaustive, this short essay is merely intended as a first approach to the question that, for its very nature, can be neither definitive nor comprehensive. This research comes from a simple observation. In the West, in its broadest sense, there is a vast bibliography written from the end of the 19th century not only by Western men, mostly missionaries, but also by women, on the condition of the Chinese woman, which affected the image of Chinese women in the West.