ABSTRACT
The twin interests of the career of Robert Swinhoe (1836-77) were already evident in his earliest days as a student interpreter, when he chose a Chinese natural history treatise rather than a standard textbook as a guide for his foreign language study. Born in Calcutta, Swinhoe received his education in England before travelling to Hong Kong in 1854 with the British foreign service. He served as staff interpreter for General Napier during the final North China campaign of the Second Opium War and published a memoir of the activities he witnessed during that war — a text that remains his most accessible and popular work. The slippages between the forms is even more evident in the very slightly revised version of the governmental Reports that Swinhoe presented to the Royal Geographical Society and later published in its Proceedings.
