Captured Glimpses of Modernity and War in Late Qing China

From Firenze University Press Book: East and West Entangled (17th-21st Centuries)

Aglaia De Angeli, Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom

The history of photography in China started as a glimpse into the East for the West. The First Opium War (1839–1842) offered a chance to bring back photographic testimony of China. Although most of the photographs taken during the war are long lost, during the span between the First and Second Opium Wars, ephemeral and lasting photographic studios, and known and unknown photographers flourished in China. At the same time, the conflict initiated by Britain against China in order to open the Middle Kingdom to foreign trade, which had been confined to the port of Canton and its factory system, led to the irreversible decline of the last ruling dynasty. The Qing paid a high toll, because this clash between China and the West started a long series of conflicts, which opened China not only to foreign trade, but also to a permanent foreign presence driving an inexorable modernisation process which inevitably proceeded on foreign terms. This modernisation process included and was documented by the technology of photography. In the late Qing period, the Qing court was struggling with internal insurrections, such as the Taiping Rebellion, while external threats were eroding the tributary system on which they had established their dominant position in East and Southeast Asia. During the last 70 years of the Qing Empire, the Chinese fought against the British and French armies in the Second Opium War (1856–1860), against France for the dominion of Tonkin and Annam in 1885, against Japan during the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), and against a range of Western nations during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900–1901. Their reduced power was ultimately signified by the fact that, during the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904–1905, they were mere spectators to a war fought by other states over their former territories in Manchuria and Korea. These conflicts were all products of Western forms of modernity and the technology of photography was part of the modernising process. T his chapter aims to analyse how photography was used to document the modernising process in China and the conflicts that accompanied it. To do so, it examines photographs belonging to the Sir Robert Hart Collection and specifically, a selection of snapshots taken by Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs officer, Richard H. Strangman, as well as a number of glass slides and photographs taken by other amateur photographers. All these photos are black and white and, despite involving different media — paper and glass — all bear witness to the period immediately preceding and during the Russo-Japanese War. These photographs offer a simple visual framing of the establishment of new trading networks in the concrete form of railways, warehouses and port facilities. They also reveal the conspicuous military presence both Russians and Japanese put in place around this infrastructure. The images taken by amateur photographers captured in material form a series of transitory moments, which reveal how wartime reality differed from that of peacetime. T he camera is a visual tool and, while photographs provide visual information, they are humanly produced artefacts that require interpretation through being contextualised and scrutinised in their medium, design, structure and composition. We should ask, then, what these photographs, in all of their dimensions, reveal about the modernising process in China and the accompanying conflict, including the role of photography in these processes. The chapter will answer these questions, first by discussing the state of the art of photography in China and the modernising process in the China of the late Qing period; then it will examine photographs as a witness of modernity and war, to finally pinpoint how photography in China can be considered a cross-cultural sight between China and the rest of the world.

DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0242–8.11

Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/chapter/captured-glimpses-of-modernity-and-war-in-late-qing-china/14119