Oscar Wilde's encounter with the Far East

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. 
- Rudyard Kipling's The Ballad of East and West

Replying to an interviewer for the San Francisco Examiner about his view of America, Oscar Wilde replied: "There is very much here to like and admire. The further West one comes, the more there is to like. The western people are much more social than those of the East, and I fancy that I shall be greatly pleased with California." 

Wilde asked many questions about the Chinese. "Speaking of Chinese art," Wilde said, "it possesses no element of beauty, the horrible and the grotesque appearing to be standards of perfection." 

He added that Chinese art and music "are extraordinary developments of national life. I have seen much that is admirable in Japanese art but nothing of excellence in Chinese art. When I was a lad I heard a Chinese fiddle, or so it was called, at the Paris Exposition, but I could discern no music in it."

- Colin Cavendish-Jones, "Oscar Wilde's radically revised view of China," SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 54, no. 4, Autumn 2014, pp. 923-41.