Europeans recognized the Orient through literary references rather than direct perception

Evidence

Robert Graves remarks wryly on this effect in Goodbye to All That, when he disembarks at Port Said in the 1920s to take up a job at the Egyptian University and is met by an English friend: ‘I still felt seasick’, he writes, ‘but knew that I was in the East because he began talking about Kipling.’ — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 123

Categorization

• CANDY: The Graves/Kipling quip is a small, self-contained, tweetable anecdote about arriving in the East.