In the 1840s, Emperor Daoguang tasked Xu Jiyu, the governor of Fujian province, just north of Guangdong, with writing a history of the Western barbarians. Published in 1849, Xu’s A Short Account of the Oceans Around Us lavished praise on America, and especially on its first president, inaugurating a Chinese cult of George Washington that would endure through the era of Mao Zedong.
