The Ultimate China Bookshelf #51: Harriet Low’s Lights and Shadows of a Macao Life

Harriet Low herself chose the title Lights and Shadows of a Macao Life, for her journals. They chart her amazement at leaving Salem, Massachusetts, for Macao, a Portuguese colony off the China coast. Perhaps no greater contrast was imaginable in 1829. Harriet lived the constricted lifestyle of the foreign merchants’ wives, forced by the Chinese to live in Macao while their husbands traded tea and opium in Canton; balls, operas and picnics; Chinese customs and Catholic processions; true friendship and false; romance or religion are all reflected in the pages of her journal. 

Up now in full on the Sinica substack….here