Visualising China, 1845-1965 China Studies Published for the Institute for Chinese Studies University of Oxford Editors Glen Dudbridge Frank Pieke VOLUME 23 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/chs Visualising China, 1845-1965 Moving and Still images in Historical Narratives Edited by Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 Cover illustration: The shops’ outflow onto the streets of Shanghai, source unknown, Virtual Shanghai. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Visualising China, 1845-1965 : moving and still images in historical narratives / edited by Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh.   p. cm. — (China studies, ISSN 1570-1344 ; v. 23)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-22820-7 (hbk. : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-23375-1 (e-book)  1. China—History—1861-1912—Historiography. 2. China—History—Republic, 1912-1949— Historiography. 3. China—History—1949-1976—Historiography. 4. Visual communication— China—History—19th century. 5. Visual communication—China—History—20th century. 6. Historiography and photography—China—History. 7. Motion pictures—China—History. I. Henriot, Christian. II. Yeh, Wen-Hsin.  DS761.2.V57 2012  951’.03—dc23 2012024341 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1570-1344 ISBN 978-90-04-22820-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-23375-1 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Introduction. China Visualised: What Stories do Pictures Tell? Christian Henriot and Wen-Hsin Yeh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  vii List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxvii PART I THE CHINA PHOTOGRAPHS: THREE READINGS The Lives and Deaths of Photographs in Early Treaty Port China Robert Bickers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3 Obscene Vignettes of Truth. Construing Photographs of Chinese Executions as Historical Documents Jérôme Bourgon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  39 Street Culture, Visual Fragments and Everyday Life: Narrating Peddlers in Shanghai Modern Christian Henriot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  93 PART II THE VISIBILITY OF CHINESE WOMEN AND HOME Portraits of Republican Ladies: Materiality and Representation in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Photographs Joan Judge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Images of Houses, Houses of Images: Some Preliminary Thoughts on a Socio-Cultural History of Urban Dwellings in Pre-1940s Canton Virgil K.Y. Ho . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 vi contents PART III ADVERTISING AND PROPAGANDA: THE VISUAL IN PUBLIC COMMUNICATIONS From Viewing to Reading: The Evolution of Visual Advertising in Late Imperial China Jen-Shu Wu and Ling-Ling Lien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Imagined Communities Divided: Reading Visual Regimes in Shanghai’s Newspaper Advertising (1860s–1910s) Barbara Mittler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Contextualising (Propaganda) Posters Stefan Landsberger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379 The Dialectics of Mao’s Images: Monumentalism, Circulation and Power Effects Pang Laikwan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407 PART IV MOVING PICTURES Single Women and the Men in their Lives: Zhang Ailing and Post-War Visual Images of the Big Metropolis Paul Pickowicz and Yap Soo Ei . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  439 An Ordinary Shanghai Woman in an Extraordinary Time: A View from Post-War Popular Cinema Fu Poshek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  481 Plate section INTRODUCTION CHINA VISUALISED: WHAT STORIES DO PICTURES TELL? Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh ‘Images [are] made meaningful and understood within the very relations of their production and sited within a wider ideological complex, which must, in turn, be related to the practical and social problems which sustain and shape it’1 How does China project its image in the world? Why and how has the world come to form certain impressions of the Chinese and their way of life? These are issues that preoccupy Chinese citizens in the globalising twenty- first century as they travel overseas, riding on the crest of the country’s newly acquired economic power. This history of image making, implicated simultaneously in Western and Chinese practices, bears much relevance to Chinese images in today’s world. When the first Westerners arrived in China, camera in tow, in the mid-nineteenth century, they had become, we might argue, the first actors in the modern production of Chinese images in the world. The visualisation of China, however, was not just the work of Westerners. Even more impor- tantly, with the help of newly acquired visualising technologies, the Chinese became active participants in their own visualisation. Modern Chinese visual practices began with the use of the camera, but various practices of photography took place within the context of a vibrant visual culture with its established norms and conventions. In this way, the camera not only produced new images but also initiated new practices of Chinese visualisa- tion. A comprehensive history of the modern visualising of China inevitably impinges upon a full range of issues stemming from the global circulation of capital, power and technology since the nineteenth century. Such a his- tory is an ambitious intellectual enterprise. To date, scholars have accom- plished much by way of deep empirical studies on discreet aspects pertaining to it. In this volume, the authors join forces to launch a broader inquiry aimed at a synergistic understanding of that larger story. This is 1 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 188–9. viii underscored by a fundamental question: how can historians use visual documents as sources for research and analysis? The essays here cluster around several nodal points (including photographs, advertisements, posters and movies), spanning from the 1840s to the 1960s. This volume aims to present the in-depth findings of expert studies and to identify emerging questions for further research. On the eve of the British assault on Zhenjiang in July 1842, two Englishmen set up a daguerreotype camera on the banks of the Yangzi. This moment, recorded by a 14 year old, inaugurated a century of the camera in China (Bickers, chap. 1). Two things were notable about this moment. First, the two were in possession of the rather expensive and new invention within the first years of its availability in Paris and London. Second, it was as the secretary and the surgeon of the mission to conclude the Treaty of Nanjing that they brought their new toys to China. After the daguerrotype, other Europeans would bring the calotype, the collodion wet and dry plate pro- cesses, the Kodak revolution, the autochromes, the Kodachrome slides and so on—all within the first years of their appearance in the West. With these cameras, Western travellers made their China photographs: pictures that were taken of China or of Chinese subjects. It is widely recognised that these pictures had a significant part to play in Western representations of China. Yet, representation began before the introduction of the camera. The place of the visual in Chinese society in the late Qing was far from insig- nificant. Objects, images and written texts circulated or were displayed quite extensively to convey official and commercial messages (posters, signs, billboards), to support religious practices (flyers, booklets), or to commemorate events (banners, statues). Modernity, in the forms that came on the heels of Western intrusion in the mid-nineteenth century, set the path toward reshuffling past practices and injecting new patterns of vi- sual politics.2 Technology played a crucial role, especially printing tech- nologies that introduced new forms of communication (newspapers, magazines) and multiplied the physical supports that reached ever- expanding groups in the population.3 Changes in commercial customs— modern advertising was a major ingredient—also fuelled the nascent 2 The line of analysis in this section owes much to the work of Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 63–8. 3 For a solid introduction, see Rudolf Wagner ed., Joining the global public: word, image, and city in early Chinese newspapers, 1870–1910 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). ix ‘pictorial turn’ that would bloom a few decades later with the help of an- other crucial technology: photography. Cities were the major foci of this transformation, both as sites of produc- tion of visual forms and sites of consumption. Up to the 1850–60s, com- mercial streets were lined with colourful shop signs and banners which represented the main commercial visual language, although characters also figured prominently.4 With the advent of the mechanical press, austere missionary journals and pamphlets opened the way to the rise of a wide range of periodicals and newspapers which, for their economic survival, actively sought income from advertising. This became a standard feature of the Chinese and foreign press, with entire pages devoted to commercial publicity. The capacity of the mechanical press for quick and cheap repro- duction opened new markets, e.g. the printing of cartes de visite, with a portrait of the owner or postcards featuring photographs of landscapes, celebrities, monuments, and so on.5 The combination of printing tech- nologies, commercial innovations and urbanisation created a new nexus of visual artefacts that drove the demand and supply of images in the public space. Yet it was not just the press that made an impact. Improved technology also brought colour, which found its way into a variety of products such as elegantly printed boxes for cigarettes, matches, soap, drugs, etc. What photography could not yet achieve in print—a truthful and legible im- age—was within the reach of the artists’ drawings and paintings at all levels. For advertising purposes, drawings and colour paintings would long occupy the forefront, in eye-catching almanacs, calendar posters and, of course, advertising posters for all kinds of products: cigarettes, soap, sta- tionery, flour, drugs and cosmetics.6 Yet photography slowly started to make its way into printed matter, from photographs pasted on a page to actual printing.7 Despite the low quality of early photographic images, 4 Yi Feng, “Shop signs and visual culture in Republican Peking”, European Journal of East Asian Studies, 6, 1 (2007), 103–28. 5 Régine Thiriez, “Photography and Portraiture in Nineteenth-Century China”, East Asian History, 17–18 (1999), 77–102. 6 Ellen Johnston Laing, Selling Happiness: calendar posters and visual culture in early twentieth-century Shanghai (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004). 7 On early photography in China, see Oliver Moore, “Zou Boqi on vision and photography in nineteenth-century China”, The human tradition in modern China, eds. Kenneth Hammond and Kristin Stapleton (Lanham: Rowman & Littefield Publishers, 2008), 33–54. Terry Bennet, History of photography in China: Western photographers, 1861–1879 (London: Quaritch, 2010). Brush & shutter: early photography in China, eds. Jeffrey Cody and France Terpak (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011). x journals succeeded in creating new expectations among readers by the sheer novelty of photography, but also for the window it offered on the world outside. By the turn of the century, photographs had become a com- mon feature in most journals (though not yet newspapers). Over the latter half of the nineteenth century, the visual vocabulary and grammar that permeated Chinese society in the cities underwent a radical transforma- tion. A new phase of Chinese visual culture emerged in the 1920s, again thanks to a combination of factors: improved technology that allowed the wide- spread use of photography, a higher degree of commercialisation and consumption, and political events that heightened the mobilisation of visual resources in support of various political and military agendas. Apart from the more generalised use of pictures in the press, both general and professional, a major change was the rise of illustrated journals—e.g. Liangyou huabao, Beiyang huabao—that reflected new sensibilities in an urban society that craved signs and symbols of modernity.8 Illustrated journals covered everything from everyday life to dignitaries and celebri- ties, from mechanical devices to natural aberrations. The 1920s also saw the establishment of several Chinese movie-making companies, which initiated a long battle for a singular place under the powerful onslaught of foreign films by Western majors.9 Beyond entertainment, however, visual politics also played out on the political stage. Chinese protest movements, as well as government attempts to rally the population around its goals, fed unbridled creativity—even if a large part of these material traces are lost for good.10 The War of Resistance against Japan represented yet an- other powerful moment when all individuals and state organisations used visual tools and documents to heighten national pride and resistance.11 The harnessing of artists and visual technologies during wartime was not some- thing specific to China, although it had an exceptionally deep and enduring impact. If cinema came to be embroiled in politics, filmmakers and movie 8 Leo Oufan Lee, “The cultural construction of modernity in urban Shanghai”, Becoming Chinese. Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 31-58 9 Zhen Zhang, An amorous history of the silver screen: Shanghai cinema, 1896-1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 10 The best introduction to the production and use of posters for political purposes in China, including the Republican period, is Stefan Landsberger’s online collection Chinese Posters. Propaganda, politics, history, art [http://chineseposters.net]. 11 Chang-tai Hung produced the first monograph that highlighted these issues. Chang- tai Hung, Chinese popular culture during the Sino-Japanese war, 1937–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Pres, 1994).