‘Tagore and China’ Reconsidered

This chapter re-examines the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore and China, which was previously understood through the poet’s 1924 controversial trip to China and thus subject to rather fixed interpretation. It argues that while it is important to explore how Tagore’s contemporary Chinese thinkers responded, usually emotionally, to his proposal of the ‘revival of Eastern culture’ according to their respective stances, more depth and dimensions can be restored to the event to sustain a fuller understanding of how cultural debate was conducted in the early twentieth-century world. To this end, starting from a thought-provoking conversation between Tagore and Feng Youlan, a to-be prominent philosopher who was a PhD researcher at Columbia University in 1920, this chapter seeks to demonstrate a philosophical reading of ‘Tagore and China’ and goes further to expand the intellectual web, covering both Chinese and Western thinkers of distinction, to reveal the world historical significance of Tagore’s uneasy interaction with China.