Would you prefer Chinese or American Tourists?

Nelson H. H. Graburn, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, said one of his graduate students recently asked tour guides in China to rate the tourists from various Western countries.

“They told her that Israeli, French and American tourists could be the most difficult,” Professor Graburn said, “but that what distinguished Americans was that they could be loud and demanding, and then would invariably apologize and give them big tips.”

To be an ugly tourist is to miss the fundamental truth in Mr. Martin’s statement. “It is to have an overall lack of understanding that there is such a thing as cultural difference,” wrote Prof. Inga Treitler, the secretary for the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology, in an e-mail message.

Valene Smith, an anthropology professor at California State University at Chico who pioneered the academic study of tourism and travel in the 1970s, said that the tourists most likely to be deplored by their hosts these days are not the euro-rich Europeans or the British or the standard ugly Americans but the Chinese.

“They have only been traveling widely in the last five years or so, but they are touring in numbers no one has seen before — by the thousands,” she said. “They behave as they would at home — there is a lot of pushing and shoving. Very few speak languages other than Chinese.”

Last summer, in an incident widely discussed among travel experts, she said, 40,000 Chinese tourists descended on the small German city of Trier to visit the birthplace of Karl Marx.

“It was quite a mess,” Professor Smith said. “No one was prepared ahead of time. The Germans were quite upset.”

-They Came, They Toured, They Offended