Xiaoyu Li, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Chinese University, Hong Kong, Shenzhen
In the nineteenth century, photography was born in Europe as a new visual technique. Soon, Western societies' thirst for exoticism and a frenzy of scientific viewing drove photography to ally with travel and travel in search of fresh images. This trend grew so rapidly that by the mid-1880s, the Royal Geographical Society had provided specialized photography teaching to Travellers and Explorers in Britain so that they could more accurately and objectively document and reveal reality on trips to foreign countries. On the other hand, the rise of travel photography corresponds to the attempt to transform the real, figurative "thing" into abstract, metaphysical "knowledge" during the period of global expansion of Western capitalism, and to play a role in its control of colonies and hunting "virgin lands".
China has had an enduring appeal to the West since Marco Polo, and now this desire to "witness" and "travel" the East has been satisfied and expanded by new visual technologies as never before. After the Second Opium War, the rights of Westerners to free passage and missionary work in Chinese mainland, as well as the international flow of photographic talents, techniques and instruments, truly promoted the advent of the visual era of photographing China. Although photographers in China all aim to present the "real China", it is needless to say that the spatial geography they have experienced has shaped and limited the understanding and perception of China by different individuals, and "China" has also been concretized into the locations they traveled, as well as their own new insights in them. In this sense, the image of China presented by photography is not only shaped by the laws, beliefs, and values of the Nineteenth-Century Western world, but also by the historical role of the photographer and the Chinese travel experience that matches this role. From the three spatial levels of "point", "line" and "surface", we can get a glimpse of how photographs connect travel experience and visual technology and become the convergence of political culture, ideology and objective reality.
Point: Impression of the city
The late Qing government, which was defeated again in the Second Opium War, was forced to add Tianjin, Yantai, Taiwan, Shantou, Hankou, Jiujiang, Nanjing, Zhenjiang and other places as treaty ports on the basis of the opening of Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai, and these cities and their surrounding areas became the most convenient places for Westerners to visit in China. In addition, because Britain, France, Russia and other countries were allowed to set up legations and missions in Beijing, this imperial center also excited Westerners who had the privilege of visiting and stationing. The rise of modern Chinese cities in the late Qing Dynasty has become the foothold and base of Western photographers and photography enthusiasts in China, and has also inspired many photographic creations around urban social life, landscapes and people.
The British photographer John Thomson's 1874 travelogue Illustration of Chinese China and its People included much of his travel experiences at China's large and small treaty ports. The book takes the form of a mixture of travelogues and photographs, so that the reader can understand in more detail how the photographer understands these "places" of the city. Visually, Johnson often takes a bird's-eye view, absorbing the city's vista or representative buildings into the lens to achieve the effect of "overview of the overall situation"; in the text, he focuses on the history, geography, etc. of these cities, focusing on the benefits obtained by the British Empire in these "breakthroughs". In the sections of "Hankou" and "Zhifu", Thomson tirelessly lists the export goods and total trade of these ports, indicating their weight over British trade; in Shantou, he laments that this natural port cannot play a greater role because of "obstruction by locals who ignore the law"; in "Guangzhou", the photographer concludes that China practices a "consistent" policy of exclusivity and the "ugly customs" of treating foreigners as barbarians. Much has since been devoted to the need for the West to take a tough stance on China and Chinese. In these descriptions, we can clearly appreciate Thomson's shrewd and pragmatic business perspective in looking at Chinese cities, as well as Britain's self-interest insistence on trade and war, which profoundly reflects the stubborn "white perspective" and the undisguised Eurocentrism.
Bird's eye view of Zhifu
The imperial capital is completely different, and its graceful and somewhat decadent urban temperament seems to disorient and intoxicate photographers, supporting their wandering long-term visits. Thomas Child is the most famous photographer in Beijing, and during his two decades at the General Administration of Customs and Administration of the Qing Dynasty, he used his camera to give a comprehensive portrait of Beijing and its suburbs. The remnants of western architecture in the Yuanmingyuan under Child's lens are extremely famous, but the photographer prefers classical Chinese architecture, leaving moving images in Qingyi Garden, Yuquan Mountain, ming tombs and other places. This emphasis on individual buildings such as Chinese palaces, temples, pagodas, and arches is not his personal interest and originality, but a cultural convention, the source of which is deeply rooted in the modern Western system of reproducing and imagining China. Taking "Tower" as an example, its important position in the Western system of "Chinese reproduction" was based on the travelogue "Envoys of the Dutch East India Company Meet the Chinese Emperor" published by the Dutch painter Johannes Nieuhof after his mission to Beijing in the seventeenth century. As the most widely disseminated and influential atlas in Europe, the importance of Nehoff to the tower shown in it inspired and even cultivated the creation of later generations, such as William Alexander, the most important contributor to the "Chinese image" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the painter of the Macartney Mission, who not only showed the shape of the tower many times in his own published Chinese albums, but also continued to create landscape paintings based on the drawings of the tower. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this frenzy continued in the emerging visual medium, such as in popular pictorial newspapers and photographs, and the appearance of the Chinese tower remained high.
The original Qingyi Garden Flower Chengge Glass Pagoda
In addition to landscapes and architecture, more photographers will focus on the reproduction of Chinese cities on "figures", producing a Chinese image trend typical of the poor working class. The aforementioned Thomson excavated many of the ways of working that seemed strange and unfamiliar to Westerners, and used the carry-on, equipment, or labor scenes of the working class to reflect the identity of the subject as a series of visual characteristics. This approach was already practiced by Thomson's predecessor, William Saunders, a photographer who traveled to China in the 1860s. In his indoor studio in Shanghai, he used buckets, buckets, shaved heads, shoulder cloth hangings, etc. as props, hired various models, and took photos of mobile barbers, female weavers, shavers, pedicures and other working-class themes in specific gestures and forms. The large number of "coolie" photographs that appeared intensively at the end of the nineteenth century further magnified the negative significance of the urban poor.
Female weavers
The preference and interest of Western photographers in the late Qing Dynasty in the image of Chinese labor figures may stem from the influence of the values and tastes of the Western middle class in the Victorian period in Britain — in fact, from the middle of the eighteenth century, the problem of poverty and the poor gradually became an open issue in Western society, and the concern for this issue quickly became the embodiment of the conscience and sense of responsibility of the middle class society. From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, many photographers focused on the urban poor and their environment, such as Oscar Gustav Rejlander and Frank Meadow Sutcliff's account of "street children" and the life of Yorkshire workers; Tomas Annan also made a keen exposé of Glasgow's slums in the 1860s. Thomson himself has photographed london's lower classes, and his achievements are reflected in his series of photographs after returning to England after his trip to China, Street Life in London. Thus his interest and concern for the underclass in China can probably be seen as an attempt to practice his "social upbringing", and at the same time reflects the profound influence of this consciousness on him.
However, the meaning of the poor in the lens also varies greatly by nationality. In London Street Life, the urban poor are people who suffer from poverty, and their existence is a social problem; in "Images", Thomson implies that the living conditions of the poor in the late Qing Dynasty are closely related to the "stage of development" of society. In particular, when these images are circulated as a typical Chinese, Western audiences can easily abstract from them the "nature" of Chinese labor, labor force, and laborers, and further derive a judgment of the nature of society: the country is very dependent on manpower, and although the handicraft industry is developed but inefficient, it is impossible to carry out large-scale and delicate production – which is evidence of the backwardness and civilization of Chinese society. Thus, the figurative symbol clearly conveys a meaning that transcends the characters themselves, emphasizing that China is still in an ancient social stage that relies on human labor.
Lines: Waterways and war routes
Compared with a single city as a base, some photographers in China also travel long distances. Their travel space experience is thus more complex and diverse. In the section "From Hankou to Wuxia", Thomson recorded his journey of a thousand miles down the Yangtze River by boat from Hankou, Hubei Province, through the Three Gorges to present-day Wushan County, Chongqing. This inland waterway was outlined as a "waterway" and became a very important element in his picture of China.
In this longest and most photographic chapter, Thomson uses humorous brushstrokes to make fascinating depictions of the scenery on both sides of the river, the rapids encountered during the voyage, and even the overnight exchange of fires with "river thieves", but he is by no means a leisurely and desireless traveler. When traveling to Shashi, Hubei Province, he wrote in his travelogue: "The river here is a mile and a half wide, and the waterway seems to be unimpeded. The town is located on the left bank, guarding one of the best stretches of the Yangtze River, where downstream gas boats can find an anchorage deep enough and close to the shore. An ideal concession point without flooding and keeping a distance from the locals could be a hill on the right bank, opposite the town. There are also some lower locations, just below the town, which may have an advantage from a trade point of view. Thomson's sensitivity to China's geography was tied to commercial and colonization requirements, and his focus seemed to be no different from that of a colonial official eager to establish a career.
Thomson is also very conscious of the mineral deposits on both sides of the Yangtze River, especially the reserves, mining and use of coal mines. In the middle of his travelogue, he briefly mentions the contradiction between the rich coal storage in Shashi and Wushan and Badong counties in the upper reaches of Yichang, as well as the abundant coal storage in Hunan Province and China's poor resource needs, and then spends a lot of time detailing the coal mines in Padang, the mining, processing and transportation methods of the local people, and the selling prices of these coal mines and the income of the miners. There are as many as five photographs corresponding to this section, which reflect the humble condition of the mine, the miners, the coal transporters, and their open-pit labor. In it, we can see very intuitively what Thomson calls "very imperfect" mining methods and the inefficiency of man-handling coal mines on steep cliffs. Finally, Thomson quotes the German geographer and geologist Baron Richthofen to say that Hubei, Hunan, and Sichuan all contain a large amount of coal, and the coal mines south of Shashi alone can be used by the whole world for thousands of years, of course, this assertion seems absolutely exaggerated today, but it is immediately followed by the previous comments on the backwardness Chinese of mining methods and the conservative use of coal mines, which subtly conveys Thomson's admiration and regret that the coal mines in this area are so rich but cannot be used. And this mentality reflects his attitude of being superior to others in terms of technology, knowledge and situation.
In addition to the river routes, the route of the British and French Expeditionary Forces invading China during the Second Opium War was also recorded by Western lenses, becoming a breakthrough feat in the history of war photography. The Photographer in China was the Italian Felice Beato, and although there is no historical record that he was hired by the army, the government, or newspapers to provide a visual record of the expedition, Bitto did participate in the entire military operation as a "out-of-staff" commercial photographer with corresponding privileges by virtue of his friendship with General Grant, the commander of the Anglo-French Expeditionary Force.
Bito's photograph followed the order of the Anglo-French march from south to north. Although Bitto and the London photographer and dealer Henry Herring changed the narrative time of the album to promote sales, the British Expeditionary Force assembled in Hong Kong, the architectural and urban impressions of Guangzhou, the battlefield and military operation records of the British Northern Expedition, the impressions of Beijing and the portraits of Chinese and British officials were still fully included. We can get a glimpse of the whole picture today in Of Battle and Beauty: Felice Beato's Photographs of China, compiled by David Harris. Hong Kong was the first stop of the Expeditionary Force, and Bito used a large close-up of five photographs to see the entire Victoria Harbour and the densely packed battleships. This panorama depicts the majesty of Britain, while also vividly showing the majesty of the Empire that never sets.
Panorama of Victoria Harbour
Bitto is very good at making metaphors with lenses. When the expeditionary force was in Guangzhou, he photographed parts of the Liangguang Governor's Palace. The Governor's Palace was the highest-ranking official building in Guangzhou at that time, and from the photos, it was an elegant and solemn Chinese hall-style building. However, the Westerners in casual postures, sitting or standing in the photographs artistically show the occupation and conquest of southern China— in fact, from 1858 to 1861, the Governor's Palace was requisitioned by the expeditionary forces occupying Guangzhou and became a site occupied by foreign commanders.
As the northward front unfolded, the expeditionary force left Guangzhou and arrived in Tianjin. This was the very important series of battles of the Second Opium War. If Bito was basically a peripheral artist and freelancer when he went north with the expeditionary army, then from here, he had approached the core battlefield and campaign. After the Coalition forces captured the Qing army's Beitang Fort, Bito had plenty of time to conceive his own work on this initially organized war scene. He left the audience with a cinematic photograph: a group portrait of the heroes of the soldiers of the coalition headquarters in the Beitang Fort, where the soldiers gathered easily next to the two remaining Qing Dynasty two-wheeled gunboats in a close-up mess; and at the highest point of the fort, the white tents and rice flags erected were both a sign of victory and a sign of the photographer's pride in ownership.
Beitang Fort
Bito's photographs inside tianjin's Dagukou Fort convey a completely different flavor. The photographer broke the cultural convention of low-key handling of corpses in war photography at that time, directly exposing the faces of the dead Qing army in the lens, interpreting the corpses as a symbol of absolute conquest. Through the account of David Lenny, the doctor who accompanied the team at the time, we can see that the photographer was almost crazy in his pursuit of visual effects: "... Bito... Excited, he said the bodies were 'so beautiful' and demanded that they not be moved until he had kept them permanently with his photographic equipment. This "too beautiful" admiration shows Beato's aesthetic radicalism and boldness, in this photo, the reproduction of the battlefield is no longer subordinated to the classical, "picturesque" artistic conventions, but directly emphasizes the shocking effect of "destruction" and highlights the sharpness of violence.
Taku Kou Fort
After entering the city of Beijing, Bitto's fascination with the battlefield temporarily gave way to Westerners' curiosity about traditional China. He photographed China's monuments and typical buildings on a large scale, documenting the last abundance of the Buddha Xiang Pavilion in Qingyi Garden before it was burned down. Although no more war scenes were filmed, the war did not leave Bito's lens, and the series of photographs in Beijing explained the power of the war blow in another way than directly exposing the cruelty of the battlefield. For example, he photographed the burning of the royal garden, where the desolate landscape and the burned forest showed a deep silence and pain. These scenes are a very direct reflection of the profound lessons that the war has taught Chinese.
Noodles: Qing Dynasty frontier areas
In addition to the "points" and "lines", there are also some special Westerners who systematically photograph the frontier areas of the Qing Dynasty to complete the recording of the "surfaces" with the largest spatial span.
Since the Qin and Han Dynasties, China has always taken the great unified dynasty as a typical state form, and under the principle of the heavenly dynasty system and the principle of one country and multiple systems, a multi-level royal power structure centered on the Central Plains was constructed. The central government has formed a multi-level nature from the inside out, from the outside to the outside, and the more distant and distant the "guest countries" with the "inland", "border areas", "vassals", "tribute countries", and "guest countries" by means of direct rule, indirect restraint, "spreading the royal road" and "spreading favors", and practicing different political, cultural, economic, and trade behaviors. This flexible differentiation strategy enabled the Central Plains Dynasty to maintain a world of dignity and inferiority under the monist hierarchical status by tolerating the relative sovereignty of different levels of political entities, and also created a "tianxia" territory with a body, intangible, boundless, clear center and vague edges. However, when the colonialist expansion and the organizational form of the nation-state in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century came to the door, the vast "world" of the Qing court was in a series of crises. In particular, the upgrading of the colonial process of Western imperialist countries in the hinterland of Asia and Southeast Asia since the middle of the nineteenth century has made the "inner domains" and marginal areas adjacent to the above-mentioned locations in the territory of the Qing Dynasty become outpost areas that are infected and coveted by imperialism.
It is in this context that frontier photography has jumped onto the stage of history. Basically, this kind of photography is a by-product of the expeditions and expeditions of Western countries on China's frontiers, aiming to extensively grasp the dynamics and information of the Qing frontier areas and seek colonial and aggressive interests. In the northwest, the region that attracts the most attention from the great powers is Xinjiang. In the nineteenth century, Britain and Russia engaged in a strategic conflict in Central Asia known as the Great Game, vying for control of this vast region. At this time, the threat to the Asian hinterlands of Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang is part of this complex chess game. During the same period, the competition between Britain and France in Southeast Asia made southwest China, especially the Yunnan region, which bordered the British colonies of Burma and French colonies of Vietnam, a prime target for the extension of the Anglo-French power line.
As a visual practice produced in the international competitive environment, border photography not only intuitively shows the social situation and people's life in the border area at that time at the information level, but also confirms the interest and anxiety of imperialist countries in China's border areas. In 1906-1908, Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, a lieutenant colonel of Finnish descent, received a secret order from the Tsar to travel through Xinjiang and the northern provinces under the name "Madhan". Madaghan was a military spy whose identity was engraved in his own photographs and once again manifested in the twentieth-century publication Complete Reports on Madahan's Expedition to Western China: for example, he was very concerned about the geography of Xinjiang, because it involved the military route of the Russians if they "took over" Xinjiang. At the same time, he also quietly investigated the border people's military system and the situation of armed and combat effectiveness. Through an image of Kalmyk soldiers practicing target shooting, we can intuitively understand the backwardness of these groups responsible for border protection in terms of weapons and equipment and daily training. The Mongol soldiers used an old-fashioned and rudimentary carbine with two sturdy long wooden sticks attached to the barrel to facilitate hunting; ammunition was scarce, with only one soldier in the photograph with a row of bullets strapped to his waist. Madhan spoke very highly of the drill, and in his diary he described the soldiers as "without the majesty of a soldier," "poorly maintained guns," and "poor aiming."
Kalmyk soldiers shoot targets
After entering the city, Ma Dahan's Xinjiang video information more and more reflects the tendency of "two worlds". A world is inhabited by the Sertas — the photographs of the casino in front of the Yarkand monastery show professional gamblers with shackles and his wife, who helped him lift the instrument of torture, embodying the social customs and life of the "greatest people" in the area. The other world belonged to a large number of Han officials stationed on the border. According to the selected diary entries quoted in the atlas, we know that when passing through the oasis city, Ma Dahan contacted many local officials because his travel passport needed the approval of the government, and he also took the initiative to communicate with the principals at all levels in Xinjiang in order to assess the central government's ability to control the frontier, recording a lot of the living conditions of this group. A funny "shooting range practice photo" of the whole family of Aksu Zhentai not only shows the rise of Han power in the frontier in the late Qing Dynasty, but also shows the relaxed moments in the career of local officials. In the photograph, the female relatives who shot at the end of the gun did not let their eyebrows be shaved, and Ma Dahan wrote: "They shot twenty or thirty rounds of bullets at a distance of 180 meters, and each one hit the target." This made Zhentai feel very proud. ”
During the same period, Yunnan, as a key location in the southwest frontier region, was often observed and photographed by colonial officials and travelers. E. Morrison) took more than sixty photographs of minority life in the Simao area (now Pu'er). Born in Australia, Morrison was a Western observer active in Chinese politics and literature in the early twentieth century. In 1908, After fourteen years of traveling to southwest China, Morisun returned to Simao and photographed ethnic minorities such as the Yao, Wa, Yi, and Tibetan. A hundred years later, these old photographs were revived through the excavations of Chinese artists and published in "Modern China in the Eyes of Mo Lixun". The southwest frontier under his lens is also less tense than the "crack area", but more reflects a kind of free fun that is difficult to detect in the "Han world".
The female relatives of Aksu Town shoot targets
In the choice of shooting themes, Mo Lixun did not take the display of the characteristics of ethnic minorities in dress and the physical characteristics of ethnic races as the most important photographic pursuit, but deliberately presented their social life fragments on the basis of taking into account their "specificity". In photographs of Simao women watching military performances, the protagonists are a row of unethical women, wearing dark tunics and knee-length shorts, with a long braid tied to ornaments behind their heads, standing with their backs to the photographer on top of the ridge. In the strong sunlight, some of them wore buckets and looked forward intently, while others seemed to have spotted the photographer behind them and looked back at the strange behavior of the foreigner. The girls, either naked or with beautifully stocking-covered bodybuilding calves, should have impressed Morrison so much that he wrote only one exclamation point-embellished word in the photo caption: "Legs!" ”（legs！ ）
Simao women watch military performances
Because the photographer did not treat the ethnic minority subjects as specimens nailed to the cardboard, focusing on showing their state of "life", So Mo Lixun's group of photos is always filled with a relaxed atmosphere; and in the processing of the visual feeling of the photo, the photographer seems to pay more attention to the sense of scene and the appeal brought by improvisation, making many photos reflect this flexible and relaxed look. But there is no doubt that Morrison has superb control over the photographic scene, for example, in "Simao's Girl in Performance", he chooses to press the shutter when the subject is naturally divided into small circles for social interaction, which not only effectively highlights the intimate female companion at the front, but also ensures the dense and elegant composition of the whole photo. This image successfully manages an alternative "alien atmosphere", which is not only related to the materiality of the characters' clothing and headdresses, but also reflects a certain spiritual difference - the life of these ethnic minority groups living in the border is natural, relaxed, happy and humorous.
Simao's maiden is performing
Photography was the central factor that connected China with the Western world of the nineteenth century. In the late Qing Dynasty, a large number of Westerners who went to China to chase exoticism and fresh news began a spectacular era of photography, and their Chinese photography also circulated in Western society in the form of some kind of special product. These circumstances show that on a "productive" level, Chinese images in the late Qing Dynasty actually have a strong non-Chinese character.
In this special historical context, the development of photography in China is inseparable from the colonization and invasion of Western imperialism, how the various discoveries and assertions of colonialism give vitality to photographic symbols and image narratives, and how the various attempts and "stunted" of colonial actions affect the expression and theme selection of photography, which is undoubtedly the essential problem of early Chinese photography. The geographical space that the photographer travels through has become an external framework that the photographer can finally cross and cannot cross, which largely determines the scope and paradigm of viewing.
Editor-in-Charge: Zheng Shiliang
Proofreader: Liu Wei