ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Science and Sinology at the Colonial Frontier: The Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1847-1859

• In Event: China Observed: Science and the British Encounter with China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

English Abstract

This paper examines the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (1847–1859) as a key yet overlooked institution at the intersection of science, sinology, and empire. Founded in the aftermath of the First Opium War, the society united governors, missionaries, physicians, and merchants in producing and circulating knowledge about China’s language, history, science, and culture. Through its Transactions, the branch positioned Hong Kong as a colonial frontier of epistemic authority, where sinological study advanced imperial diplomacy and commerce. Figures such as John Francis Davis, John Bowring, William Aurelius Harland, and Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff used sinological and scientific inquiry to legitimize Britain’s “civilizing mission” while embedding imperial ideology in the representation of Chinese knowledge. I argue the Transactions of RAS-HKB operated as “instruments of imperial epistemology”—a discursive system that reclassified Chinese practices through Western categories and portrayed China as simultaneously knowable and deficient. By situating the Hong Kong Branch within broader networks of the Royal Asiatic Society and British colonial governance, this study reveals how the pursuit of knowledge served as an instrument of British imperialism in nineteenth-century East Asia.

Author

• Bernard Lightman, York University