Abstract The late nineteenth-century age of empire was also an age of anti-superstition. In China, Western missionaries, diplomats and travellers labelled practices that resisted Western technologies and ideas as ‘superstitious’. This article examines how a group of Qing scholar-officials, all members of the diplomatic corps, interpreted and ultimately defended these customs. Conventionally viewed as tragic figures unable to transcend a ‘Sinocentric’ world view, they were deeply embedded in the global circulations of empire. During their time in Europe and the United States, they compared Western culture and the development of capitalism with the changes they saw in China. For these cosmopolitan actors, Chinese popular cultural practices offered potential sources of anti-imperial resistance to Western presence in China. Yet they also had differing, at times conflicting, visions for how the Chinese state should relate to the ‘superstitious’. Some argued that they needed to be kept in place, undisturbed from the onslaught of Western influence; others believed the ‘superstitious’ could be mobilized as an anti-imperial force.