Professor Wang Guanglin, School of English, Shanghai Chinese University
Writer Jiang Yi frequently mentioned a British comic magazine Punch (also translated as Clumsy, Punch, Punqui, etc.) in the "London Picture Book", which is a satirical weekly magazine that embodies British humor, founded in 1841 by journalist-turned playwright Henry Mayhew and woodcarver Ebenezer Landells. It pins down current events, denies characters, and boldly blends jokes, puns, parodies, comics, and socio-political commentary. From its inception in 1841 until its last issue was published in 2002, Stupid Fun was one of the most successful magazines in English-speaking countries. Famous writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Robert Browning, Henry James, C. S. Lewis, Roskin, Thomas Carlisle, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are readers of the magazine. The famous writer Thackeray was not only a loyal reader of the journal, but also wrote regularly to the journal in 1843 and 1854, and his The Snobs of England was first published in the journal. Because comics can tease public figures and influence public opinion, British politicians such as Benjamin Disraeli have managed to curry favor with John Leech, a columnist for "Dumb", and his political enemy, William Gladstone, is ecstatic to be a guest on the Punch Table. The magazine not only sold well in the UK, but also spread abroad. In 1883, Henry James wrote: "Many Americans learned almost entirely about British life from Stupid Fun. But the magazine is not unimpeded overseas either. In France and Germany, the magazine has been censored intermittently to varying degrees. The magazine was even destroyed in Russia due to the publication of cartoons satirizing the Tsar.
When the magazine was first published in 1841, it had 20,000 copies and had 100,000 readers, and in November 1905 it had 61,000 copies and 305,000 readers. Perhaps of interest to Chinese readers, this comic magazine is also closely related to China. Between 1841 and 1901, Stupid Fun published forty-four chinese-related cartoons. Recently, Dr. Amy Matthewson of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, Cartooning China: Punch, Power, & Politics in the Victorian Era, Routledge, 2022, has helped us gain a deep understanding of the Chinese elements of the comic magazine. With the help of the concept of power proposed in Said's Orientalism, the author raises the question of who has the power to represent and who is represented, and in conjunction with Homi Baba's ambivalence about colonial stereotypes, discusses a series of textual and visual stereotypes of China and Chinese in "Stupid Fun". Reading this book and looking back at British comics and their history more than a hundred years ago, it is not difficult to see the cultural bias and paranoia in it.
Matthewson, Comics China: "Stupid Fun," Power, and Victorian Politics
One
According to Mr. Fan Cunzhong in "Chinese Culture in England in the Age of Enlightenment", the first person to go to England was a Nanjing man named Shen Fuzong, who eventually came to England in 1687 with the Jesuit Philippe Couplet. Later, with the increase in the number of Chinese employees in the East India Company, especially the Treaties of Nanking and Beijing in 1842 and 1860, Chinese appeared in Britain, but in general, the British still knew little about China. After entering the Victorian era, Britain's view of China changed, and this change was naturally reflected in "Stupid Fun". This publication has a relatively large influence on the British middle class, but given that the British do not know much about China, these cartoons are also contradictory, reflecting the complex and contradictory mentality of British society towards China and Chinese culture.
Reading Matthewson's Comic China, we can see that "Stupid Fun" closely followed the pace of the times at that time, dominated by British ideology, and reproduced the Sino-British tea trade and its conflict, the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War and its British and European colonial interests in the Far East. In the 1840s, Stupid Fun's focus on China focused on tea and Britain's mission of civilization. The focus on tea is because tea has become an indispensable product in British daily life, and the concern for civilization is that with Britain's victory in the Opium War, the British people's sense of cultural superiority exploded. The history of tea drinking in England dates back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when tea was a luxury and a symbol of wealth and status that only the nobility could afford to consume. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, British tea imports increased from less than a million pounds to more than ten million pounds. By the nineteenth century, tea had become a necessity. Samuel Phillips Day, in Tea, Its Mystery and History, explains that tea is "the only real luxury that the rich and the poor share," and that by the 1840s, even the poorest had tea and white bread as their staple food. Tea has become a popular drink for the British, but to Britain's embarrassment, its symbol of British national identity depends on tea imports from China. Due to the excessive dependence on Chinese tea, the Sino-British trade balance is tilted in favor of China. In this regard, "Stupid Fun" not only pays timely attention, but also uses the form of comics to propose a possible solution, that is, to force China to accept the needs of the British. This also became the cause of the Opium War and the Arrow War (the Second Opium War), which also gave Dumb Fun a very good opportunity to unite the British around patriotism.
At that time, there were two diametrically opposed concepts in British politics. Richard Cobden wants to strengthen communication with China, but Henry John Temple Palmerston wants to take a tough stance on China, Palmerton's imperialist spirit is more popular with the media, and Cobden is ridiculed. Not only did Dumb Fun publish a poem mocking Cobden, but it also published a cartoon by John Ritchie in support of Palmerston's chauvinism. In this cartoon, Ritchie draws Cobden and Sir Derby as Chinese warriors, forming two camps with Palmerston, who rolls up his sleeves and prepares for battle. The battle slogan was "Boh! Hea!” and "Pee! Koe!” At that time, Wuyi and Pekoe were the two most popular Chinese teas in Britain.
Another of Ritchie's cartoons, "A Lesson to the Chinese Guy John," depicts Palmers-Zun holding up a nine-tailed whip and preparing to whip a Chinese man with the charge of "Destroyer of Women and Children" around his neck, representing a barbaric and backward culture. In Parliament, Palmerston slammed Kobden for his "anti-British sentiment" and argued that condemning his motion would mean "abandoning a large swath of British subjects at the end of the globe to a bunch of barbarians—a bunch of kidnapped, murdered, poisoned barbarians." His tactics proved successful; Palmerston won by a majority, while Mr. Cobden and others who supported peace with China lost their seats on "non-British" accusations.
Under the Palmerston government, Britain went to war with China. During this period, "Stupid Fun" continued to strengthen its defamation of China. This distortion and slander reinforced the image of barbaric China in the minds of the British. Many well-known thinkers were deeply influenced. John Stuart Mill, for example, argues that Chinese "has no history" and has been "static" for thousands of years, "if they want to improve, they must rely on foreigners."
In 1858, Lord Elgin arrived in China, and after a series of skirmishes in the navy, British and French troops occupied Canton, captured the hapless Ye Mingchen, and began to head north to ensure that the Treaty of Tianjin met all the demands of foreign powers. Stupid Fun thought it was memorable, so he asked John Tenniel (the famous artist who illustrated Alice in Wonderland) to paint a painting called "A Little Tea Party," in which English and French people drink Chinese pearl tea. They sat somewhere in China with the familiar willow tree motif on the table and the meaningless "Chinese characters" on the tablecloth. The walls are dotted with holes that mark the recent war. The lady representing Britain stood up, holding a small teapot, and asked the burly Chinese official if he would have another cup of pearl tea, and the Chinese official on the screen was immediately frightened. His long, pointed beard stood ridiculously upright, revealing his fear. "Another cup of pearl tea?" Mr. China? The British lady asked. The English word for pearl tea is gunpowder tea (gunpowder tea), and this question is a pun, and the intimidation means obvious. "Uh no, thank you madame." Mr. China replied.
In June 1859, Elgin's younger brother, Frederick Bruce, headed north, but the Qing government refused him access to the capital. Bruce then opened fire, and to the surprise of the British and French troops, the Chinese actually fought back, killing five hundred and nineteen British sailors and wounding four hundred and fifty-six British soldiers. Events escalated quickly, and eventually the Anglo-French forces won the battle and then marched to Beijing. John Tenniel's comic strip What We Should Do in China expresses the anger of the British. In the comic, an English samurai on horseback, with a ball and chain in his hand, aims at a Chinese dragon, which cowers and flees. In their paintings, Chinese loses its humanity and becomes a monster, reminiscent of Mueller's view that for China to become civilized, it needs foreign intervention. The violent intervention advocated by "Stupid Fun" has finally come true; In October 1860, Lord Elgin led people to loot and destroy the beautiful Yuanmingyuan. The Great French Writer Victor Hugo was shocked by this, and he wrote: We Europeans are civilized people, Chinese are barbarians in our eyes. This is what civilization does with barbarism. The two robbers who will be sanctioned by history, one is called France and the other is called English.
Two
As early as the eighteenth century, the european connection between productivity and progress and the rapid development brought about by the Industrial Revolution reinforced the sense of superiority of the British. The remarks of "Stupid Fun" coincide with the British imagination and various currents of thought at this time, believing that China is a stagnant symbolic country. In March 1848, the Visit of the Chinese Sailing Ship "Qi Ying" not only made the British curious, but also made them feel the backwardness of Chinese technology and the advancement of Britain. Comic China details Britain's racial and cultural superiority through the comics of the time.
On 1 May 1851, Queen Victoria hosted the first World's Fair at crystal palace in Hyde Park. Two months after its launch, John Tenniel wrote the comic book Happy Family in Hyde Park, which celebrated the British. The cartoon describes the exhibition as a harmonious internationalism that unites the people of the world. Percival Leigh also wrote an article to emphasize the friendly exchanges between the "British lion" and various countries, giving people a feeling of kinghood. In the form of pictures, Tanil recreates the happy participation of countries around the world. The exhibition's royal patron, Prince Albert, stands outside the Crystal Palace, watching the spectacle of exotics dancing within the glass walls. However, upon closer inspection, a more discordant component is revealed behind the harmonious picture.
In the comics, Prince Albert stands with other European celebrities, turning their attention to the exotic land at the show. Jeffrey A. Auerbach explains that the reason for separating them with the "glass window of the Crystal Palace" was to present the aliens in the museum inside the window, making people feel that it was "a circus cage, showing a strange and primitive dance". Inside the Crystal Palace, classes and races mingled and became a place for people to peek into. Here, when someone looks, someone is watched. Europeans are imagined as a whole, peering from a distance into what they see as uncivilized peoples. As early as the eighteenth century, Montesquieu's Persian Letters and Oliver Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World used fictional observers of the East to highlight a country's political and social weaknesses. Foreigners reflect the ideology and stereotypes of the British.
The exhibition, titled 'The Great Exhibition', was a huge success, with more than fifteen thousand exhibited works stretching for more than ten miles and viewed by more than six million spectators, almost one-fifth of the entire Uk's population. This grand exhibition showcases not only the technical achievements, but also the visitors. Some viewers were happy to build international understanding and cooperation, but others were dismissive and skeptical. For example, John Ritchie's 1851 Daedemune Competition not only shows the competitive situation of representatives of the world and how they use the exhibition to express themselves, but also takes the opportunity to despise What he sees as China.
In this contest comic, the winner is Britain: the representative John Bull rushes ahead, the designer of the Crystal Palace, Joseph Paxton, follows like lightning, and Mr. Dumbo. Punch rides his dog, Toby. Others are behind, riding a variety of animals such as giraffes, elephants, ostriches and camels. The only difference was that China, which sent a fat man who turned a blind eye to industrial progress, ran in the opposite direction across a pig. Watching this strange match were the British, who stood in a whole line on the sidelines. One man in the crowd pointed to China, and another looked up and laughed, and in the face of technology, China seemed to have become a laughing stock. In fact, China did not participate in the exhibition, and the so-called Chinese exhibits were also temporarily cobbled together by the organizers. China's refusal to exhibit seems reminiscent of the scene in 1793 when Macartney met the Qianlong Emperor and Qianlong refused to cooperate. The exhibition aims to highlight the educational and technological progress of the West, as well as the principles of free trade, which they see as fundamental elements of political freedom and international peace. They were shocked by the apparent disregard for these ideas in Qing China.
The Expo allowed the world to see Britain's industrial prowess and earned britain the respect of the world, while the British are familiar with only two Chinese symbols: tea and braids. After the Opium Wars, British sailors realized that cutting their braids would bring shame Chinese. The paintings and text on "Stupid Fun" also associate braids with tails, a visual symbol that highlights the nobility of the British and the inferiority of the Qing Dynasty. During this time, "Stupid Fun" also created two contradictory Chinese figures, one was the Qing Dynasty official He-Sing, who suddenly stood up stupidly and walked over to Queen Victoria and bowed to her repeatedly while singing in hallelujah at the Crystal Palace. Even William Thackeray recorded the incident through comments, "There was a Chinese, his face was like a pantomime mask ... He stepped forward and kissed the Duke of Wellington, to his surprise." The other is Pwan ye Koo, a female artist less than two and a half inches away from Jin Lian, whose performances in the UK earned her the A Lady of Quality reputation.
China lost the Opium War to Britain, and China lost to Japan in the Sino-Japanese War. The loss of the big powers to the small powers shocked the Western powers, who saw it as the result of a lot of corruption in the Qing court and stubborn resistance to Western technology and backwardness at the national level. In contrast, Japan began to attract the attention of Britain, which was unanimously recognized as representing a new imperialist force whose rise marked a shift in power. John Tenniel's comic book Moving Appeal depicts a Chinese who loses a fight to a much younger Japanese than he is, because Chinese speak crappy pidgin English, while Japanese speak standard English. In the eyes of Europeans and Americans, pidgin English is ridiculous, representing non-Caucasian people with low social status. The Proficiency of the Japanese in English marked their entry into the "civilized world," and the reason for the backwardness of the Qing Dynasty was its inability to integrate into the modern world.
Britain not only felt the decline of China, but also felt that the Western powers were in the process of competing for the Chinese market, and they were all fighting with each other. With Britain's growing geopolitical awareness, Stupid Fun uses comics as a tool to justify Britain's presence in China. They even defended the massacres carried out during the Japanese occupation of Lushunkou and constantly ridiculed China. Other media outlets have also begun to pay attention to and ponder the reasons for China's weakness. For example, the Zilinxi Bao believes that China's backwardness is due to the imperial examination, because it only pays attention to the dead things of thousands of years ago and ignores the vitality of the modern state. But they are also concerned about the potential threat posed by Japan's rise. In the comic strip JapaneseMan in a Chinese Shop, Sambourne depicts a little Japanese man grabbing a Chinese official's braid, posing as Japan's aggressive new overlord.
Britain, Japan, Russia, France, Germany and others are all coveting China's resources. Tenniel's cartoon ,A Treasure Trove of Treasures Too Much to Choose from depicts a Chinese man at the "Hotel de L'Europe" who seems undecided about which table to eat at, because the meals on both sides are the same: large loans especially for China.
In 1899, Samborn painted a Russian bear and saw a Japanese man courting a Chinese woman. The manga represents the competition between Russia and Japan in China, but his representation is more unique. He discarded the metaphor of the dragon and the fat and useless official, feminizing China, leaving two male competitors to exert their influence and control and cultivate their emotions. Feminizing China is not a new concept, and in order to highlight China's weakness and irrationality, the image of Chinese femininity has repeatedly appeared in British discourse.
On July 4, 1900, Thornborn created a Chinese version of Temple based on the well-known British Humpty Dumpty (an egg-shaped short fat man in the English nursery rhyme, which later appeared in Carroll's "Strange Edge in the Mirror" and other literary works, and successively created a Chinese version of Temple. Painting seems simple, but if you look closely, you will find something worth playing. The whole painting is full of exaggeration, which makes the British feel an alternative foreign image. The painting depicts a strange costume and slender braids, obviously a modern world, but holding an ancient sword in his hand, a crumbling look. The painting corresponds to the conflict between China and Britain, and China is also facing the Boxer Rebellion, so what it transmits to Britain is a patriotic and imperialist ideology, which seems to ridicule The collision between China and modern Britain. If the comic is placed in a broader historical and epistemological context, the Chinese version of Templey also provides the reader with an understandable cultural code: the viewer sees a scene from the Chinese version of Templey that is about to fall, referring to the scene in the nursery rhyme (Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall/Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the King's men/Couldn't put Humpty together again. Short and fat, sitting on the wall, planted a big heel fight, the king, Qi soldiers and horses, broken mirror is difficult to round no way). As the nursery rhyme suggests, when Templey fell from the Great Wall, all of the Emperor's men and horses could no longer erect him.
“Untitled”, Punch, Vol. 119 (4 July 1900), p. 1.
Three
As the author Matthewson puts it, as a British satire magazine, Stupid Fun clearly represents a British cultural stance. Since its inception in 1841, the magazine has used publications as a tool and China as a place to use to share and share the concerns and concerns of British society. In the Chinese version of Temple's image, people see comics, cartoons and visual imaginations perfectly combined, conveying all aspects of China to the British. Sayyid has analyzed people's sense of superiority and hostility in expressing other cultures, which are very helpful for understanding and understanding the Chinese image in "Stupid Fun". As an art that impacts people's vision, the metaphorical function of comics cannot be underestimated, on the one hand, it will simplify complex problems, on the other hand, the authenticity of comics will also be questioned. For example, "Stupid Fun" simply draws China as John Chinaman, a Chinese guy, to belittle and vilify. Comics have an ability to feel both familiar and uncanny, and it's easy to infect people by spreading stereotypical ideas through people's thoughts and actions.
In Matthewson's view, these comic works are full of political metaphors and racial prejudices, reflecting and shaping the British people's concepts and attitudes towards China during the turbulent period of Chinese and British history, and becoming a powerful tool for the reproduction of British culture. She placed these cartoons in The Social, Cultural and Political Discourse of The United Kingdom, making a critical inquiry into British popular culture and its relationship to race, geopolitical propaganda, and public consciousness, and is therefore particularly interesting to read.
Editor-in-Charge: Ding Xiongfei
Proofreader: Yan Zhang