Title: The Self-Shaping of England’s Image as a Maritime Nation: Diplomatic Imagination in Queen Elizabeth I’s Royal Letters to the Emperor of China

Abstract: As an early English textual practice that constructed national identity through rhetorical discourse, Elizabeth I’s three royal letters to the Wanli Emperor of the Ming Dynasty employed diplomatic rhetoric to negotiate sovereign equality, while legitimizing appeals for commercial access by invoking reciprocity in trade and narratives of exploration. In so doing, they shaped an image of England as a maritime nation that was “sovereign and independent,” “venturesome in exploration,” and “secular as well as pragmatic.” Although none of the three letters ever reached China, they became a “site of memory” in the history of Sino-British relations, providing a discursive resource that could later be inherited in support of Britain’s aggression against China. It was through this imagined interaction with the Oriental Other that England began to establish its self-positioning as a maritime power—a move that prefigured the discursive legitimacy for the British Empire’s later global expansion.

Keywords: Elizabeth I, early Sino-English relations, royal letters, England’s self-image as a maritime nation, self-shaping

Authors: Wei Li, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China; Wenran Hou, School of Foreign Languages, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.01.004