The Chinese Railroad View Transportation Themes in Popular Print, 1873–1915

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THE CHINESE RAILROAD VIEW TRANSPORTATION THEMES IN POPULAR PRINT, 1873–1915

James A. Flath

Historians have long been intrigued by the effects that imperialism and industrial technology had on traditional societies such as China. The classical approach to this question, however, has been to judge the “Third World” as technologically incompetent, and depen- dent on a Eurocentric path of international capitalism.1 Under the inXuence of postcolonialism, historians have widely addressed these distortions through methodologies such as the “China-centered” approach.2 This latter development has immeasurably improved the writing of Chinese social and cultural history, but it has also produced a tendency to neglect international inXuences upon China and especially the role of introduced technology in China’s historical development. In proposing a renewed emphasis on this problem, however, the critical question emerges—can historically colonial and semicolonial states such as China be viewed as being under the in- Xuence of imperialism and international capitalism without reinvok- ing Eurocentrism? To suggest that they cannot is to insist that the only way to think about imperialism and international capitalism is through the ideals of rational-humanism that initially produced them. Although it is true that the former could never have existed without the latter, it may also be said that the comprehension of this particular ideological conWguration was not a prerequisite for perceiving and participating in the manifestations of imperialism and capitalism. In fact, international capitalism extended its physical productions well beyond the reach of the speciWc cognitive orders that accompanied their inven- tion and exposed its machinery to the differing cognitive orders on which it intruded. At the same time, the local media carried the

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knowledge of industrial technology such as the railway beyond its physical limits, so that the concept of a steam engine could circulate even where the machine did not. The consequence was neither a wholesale embrace nor a rejection of the introduced technology, but rather a new discourse over its meaning that may best be called colonial-modernism. Although there is no doubt that international capitalism was driven by politics and economics, it was (and is) also a thoroughly cultural phenomenon, and it is through cultural interpretation that the products of capitalism may be evaluated as some- thing other than the insidious agents of Western imperialism. The media form that I will use to illustrate this problem is the Chinese woodblock print form known as nianhua (New Year pictures). This genre had, throughout the nineteenth century, employed the simple but effective technique of polychrome xylography to sup- ply the Chinese market with a wide range of festive, decorative, and votive pictures. Despite the increasing availability of mechanized printing technology, this “low tech” production continued unabated into the twentieth century, when artists began to reproduce the imagery of industrial technology, even while making no appreciable changes to the state of their own technology. These images, emerging in response to a parochial experience of technology but still indepen- dent of universal standards of technical realism, demonstrate how conspicuous representations of international capitalism could be locally appropriated, reproduced, and redeWned as popular texts. Although rural printing centers did not become a driving force behind social and cultural change in the early twentieth century, their production shows that rural China was not a blank slate to be inscribed by more highly organized cultural agents. To the contrary, rural China used its own cultural resources to produce an interpretation of modernity that hinged on the tensions presented by imperialism and industrial technology.

PRINT PRODUCTION IN RURAL CHINA

The prints that I consider in this essay can be attributed to two North China printing centers. The Wrst, Yangliuqing, controlled the largest share of the North China market in popular print and consistently 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 170

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produced the Wnest representations. At the turn of the century Yan- gliuqing was a town of seven thousand households located in the vicinity of Tianjin, North China’s leading treaty port and commercial center. Yangliuqing itself was also the center of a more extensive printing operation that supported a cottage printing industry spread out over local villages such as Chaomidian, where there were thirty printing workshops in 1900 and double that number by 1904 (A 1954, 27).3 Because of its proximity to the port city of Tianjin, Yangliuqing had transportation and distribution advantages that gave local printers access to markets throughout northern China. A second printing center was located in the county of Weixian, in eastern Shandong province. Like Yangliuqing, this industry was distributed throughout local towns and villages, as well as more distant locations around Shandong and even Manchuria, where entrepreneurs were inevitably forced to either compete or to cooperate with Yangliuqing (Yangjiabu cunzhi 1993, 25). While precise statistics do not exist, each of these industries is believed to have produced annual print runs number- ing in the tens of millions, which were then shipped and marketed through wholesalers and retailers throughout northern China in the last quarter of the lunar year.4 By the end of the nineteenth century the popular print industry thus operated as a network of competing and cooperative interests that were open and responsive to changes in fashion and capable of extending those changes throughout expansive marketing regions. The commercial popular-print network also allowed local artisans to get beyond the locality in both a physical and intellectual sense and to extend their knowledge networks to incorporate an ever-widening Weld of reference. The content of the prints thus became extremely varied and, at its height, the industry was able to provide a broad selection of household icons, auspicious and decorative pictures, and illustrations of myths, customs, and popular historical narratives. One form of knowledge that popular printers rarely incorporated into their trade before the end of the nineteenth century was the journalistic subject of current events. The appearance of train and steamship imagery in the early twentieth century, therefore, presents a signiWcant contrast to the standards of the late nineteenth century. Popular print was becoming a medium not only for spreading knowledge of ritual, status, and narrative, but also for spreading the 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 171

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knowledge of events and places. The emergent visual culture, however, did not eliminate the older visual culture, as both modern and traditional subjects would continue to circulate side by side for decades to come. The traditional media and its distribution networks thus carried the knowledge of technological change to the remotest corners of North China and, in its own peculiar way, made the knowledge of technology available well in advance of the actual technological experience.

THE IRON ROOSTER MEETS THE WOODBLOCK PRINT

Technology tends to be reproduced as text through media that reXect its own state of progress. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the British example of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, whose management commissioned a set of prints from the lithographic pub- lisher Rudolph Ackerman in 1831 and timed their issue to coincide with the opening of this early railway (Freeman 1999, 215–16). The marriage of these two new forms of technology thereby produced the lithographic poster series Railroad Views, complete with the novel linear and panoramic perspectives that the new technologies enabled. As Michael Freeman demonstrates in Railways and the Victorian Imag- ination, the railway continued as a favored subject of representation throughout the nineteenth century, as graphic reproduction tech- niques graduated through lithography, to halftone print, and Wnally photography. By 1895, the Lumière brothers were causing audiences to literally jump out of their seats with their Wlm Arrival of the Train at la Ciolet Station. By graphically placing the railway within a spatial context, the media had progressively deWned the relationship between people and this most patent representation of industrial technology. In China there was no such neat correlation between the development of transportation and graphics technology. Visual culture arguably experienced a lag of up to twenty years between the arrival of the Wrst railways and the development of print technology and distribution networks able to carry the lithograph and photograph into rural markets. Owing to the eagerness of commercial interests to extract resources, the Chinese railway boom was well under way by 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 172

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the Wrst decade of the twentieth century. But at the same time, there were few periodical and lithographic publishers operating or marketing merchandise outside the conWnes of large urban centers such as Shanghai and Tianjin. The industrialized graphic printing sector had not developed in step with the industrial transportation sector, as it had in the West. The producers of woodblock prints, however, were well placed to chronicle the arrival of the railway, through the traditional media of xylography and to disseminate the knowledge of technology throughout their traditional distribution networks. As a result, the knowledge of the new transportation was extended into remote localities years before the arrival of the actual railways and their modern forms of printed representation. Between the extension of transportation technology into regions still reliant on woodblock print and the extension of woodblock printed representations of technology into regions still reliant on native forms of transportation, there was considerable scope for disjunction between the two. To establish how the cultural understanding of movement and transportation changed in respect to new technology, it will be necessary

Liverpool and Manchester Railway Traversing Chat Moss, T. T. Bury, Ackerman & Co., 1831, after Free- man, 1999. 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 173

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to consider how such impressions appeared before the age of steam. For this purpose, one print from Yangliuqing’s Dailianzeng print shop serves particularly well. Tianjin’s Northern Floating Bridge can be assigned a production date of ca. 1873—making it one of the few prints for which a date earlier than the 1890s can be Wxed. As such, the print includes a recessional perspective suggestive of outside inXuence (most likely Japan),5 yet its early date isolates it from the full brunt of foreign inXuence that arrived during the “scramble for concessions” sparked by the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 and the Boxer Uprising of 1900. The bridge, as it is portrayed, crosses Tian- jin’s Ziya River and there forms the cross-roads of a busy commercial district of teahouses and shops that exhibit native Chinese wares and notably exclude the Western clocks and kerosene lamps that would appear in later representations. The bridge itself serves as a commercial space for peddlers and supports pedestrian trafWc as well as two forms of transportation frequently associated with North China, one being the “Beijing Cart” on the left-hand side of the bridge, the other being the sedan chair approaching from the right. In direct contrast, and apparently designed as a sequel to Tianjin’s Northern Floating Bridge, is a print titled Tianjin, Hebei: New Floating Bridge. Where the earlier version had contained exclusively Chinese modes of transportation, the new “Xoating bridge” (although clearly constructed on pilings) is the focal point of innovation with its steel

Tianjin’s Northern Floating Bridge, Yangliuqing, ca. 1873. Reproduced by permission of the British Museum. 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 174

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construction and gas lighting. The bridge trafWc is now composed entirely of imported forms of transportation; the traditional cart and sedan chair are replaced by a carriage and rickshaw, and pedestrian trafWc is partially crowded out by the bicycle. SigniWcantly, the only forms of native transportation in view are the boats that pass beneath the bridge, unnoticed by commuters now preoccupied by the new technology. Although women do not yet appear on foot or bicycle, the new forms of transportation bring women into the open—most obviously in the rickshaw, which appeared in China only in the 1890s, but quickly became the transportation of choice for men and women alike in the urban environment.6 Technology may thus appear as the centerpiece of change, but in its subtext, the image is also concerned with the changing social structures that are, quite literally, supported by the new infrastructure. The most popular technological representation in this print genre, however, is not the bridge, but the railway. The emergence of the railway as a source for graphic design may be traced back to Dianshizhai Pictorial (Dianshizhai huabao), a pictorial newspaper founded in 1884 by a Shanghai-based British entrepreneur. As was the case with the British pictorial press, the Dianshizhai Pictorial seized on the spectacle of steam in its early issues, although the overall absence of railways in China at the time meant that steamships commanded a larger presence in print. Nonetheless, the pictorial did include a noteworthy reference to the abortive Wusong Railway, opened in 1876, but torn out

Tianjin, Hebei: New Floating Bridge, Yangliuqing, ca. 1928, after Wang and Riftin, 1989. 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 175

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by conservative Chinese ofWcials after less than a year of operation. Although this representation bears no likeness to either of the en- gines used on the line, it is nonetheless a technically accurate depic- tion of a locomotive of ca. 1860.7 More important is the conscious treatment of the rising disparities between new forms of transportation and the old, apparent in the conspicuous placement of coolie laborers, carrying baskets and pushing wheelbarrows, alongside the speeding train, with its Chinese passengers and foreign engineers. Also not to be overlooked are the novel recessional perspectives provided by the disappearing rails, and the graphic contrasts evident in the hard lines of the railway set against the impressionistic rural scenery drawn from traditional Chinese landscape painting. Change is pictured as a literal contradiction in modes of transport and also in the Wgurative contrast between linear and Xuid graphic structures. With its sensational content, the Dianshizhai Pictorial seems a likely source of inspiration for the popular print industry, and indeed a number of polychromatic prints originating in Shanghai do exhibit such appropriations. Although such appropriation was less common

Wusong Railway, 1884. Dianshizhai huabao, no. 12, 1884. 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 176

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in northern printing centers, several surviving examples demonstrate that some Yangliuqing printers observed what was happening in Shanghai and reproduced some Dianshizhai Pictorial subjects—including, not surprisingly, the Wusong Railway.8 Not withstanding the fact that the subject of this print, titled simply Railway and Train, was already more than forty years out of date when it was found on the market in 1907–1908, the print is still interesting for the way the artist incorporated the “modern” technological scene into the world of popular print. The artist accurately reproduced the linear and technical elements of the machinery but disregarded much of the perspective of the former representation, including the receding tracks and the implication of distance provided in the Dianshizhai version. Whereas the original form is “journalistic” in its black and white format, the Yangliuqing artist took pains to adapt the image to the popular print market by giving it the attributes that made it relevant as art. These include ornamental shrubbery, decorative cloud formations, and novel architecture, not to mention a rich palette of color.9 In North China, railways met with continuing opposition from the state throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century but Wnally began to undergo rapid development toward the end of the century. The Wrst northern railway, and therefore the Wrst actual model on which Yangliuqing printers could base their impressions,

Railway and Train, Yangliuqing, ca. 1907. After Wang and Riftin, 1989. 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 177

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began as a seven-mile tramway appended to the Kaiping coal mines at Tangshan, to the northeast of Tianjin. This became a full-Xedged railway when a contraption christened Rocket of China began to ser- vice the line in 1881, and in 1888, the line was extended through the port of Tongku, and then on to Tianjin (Huenemann, 44).10 The after- math of the disastrous Sino-Japanese war of 1894–1895 saw the im- mediate expansion of foreign-controlled railways throughout China, linking Tianjin to the south via the Tianjin-Pukow line, and to Beijing and Manchuria through the Peking-Mukden line in 1897.11 China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese war also began to erode ofWcial intransi- gence by bringing home the realization that railways could perform important military functions. By the end of 1900, the cash-strapped Chinese government had negotiated several international railway loans and building contracts in exchange for controlling shares in the enterprises. The subsequent transfer of these shares, and the loom- ing threat of a Belgian railway monopoly, sparked the popular railway Rights-recovery Movement, during which Chinese investors attempted to gain controlling shares in new and existing railways (Esherick 1976, 82–83). Railways thus remained intensely political throughout the remainder of the dynasty, and even though popular printers did not necessarily engage in politics, these were the basic conditions under which print was produced, circulated, and read in the early twentieth century. The inXuence of actual railways in North China produced a less dated graphic treatment of the railway, in which social relations once again played forward. One such print, simply titled Tianjin Street (malu—literally “horse road”), follows Tianjin’s Northern Floating Bridge in its portrayal of an urban street scene, although the three decades that have passed between the two publications are strikingly evident. The formerly native subject matter now includes overt manifestations of foreign occupation, seen not only in the presence of foreigners racing horses through the streets of the city, but also bicycles, Western architecture, telegraph poles, and most conspicuously, a train with a clock embedded in its nose. Although there does not appear to be anything implicitly negative about the treatment of new technology in this print, there is a more critical treatment of the social relations that Xourish in its midst. The train itself is divided into Wrst-class carriages and an open third-class boxcar, although this 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 178

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new concept of class and any potential commentary are relegated to the background. The theme, after all, is the street, and it is there that the social contradictions of race and gender are performed. Although the abrasiveness of the foreigners is evident, the scorn of the Chinese gentlemen and police ofWcer on the right is reserved not for them, but for a Chinese woman who breaks social convention by appearing unescorted, except by her young son, on the streets of the city. The train and other foreign representations do not command the full attention of the viewer and appear, instead, as the backdrop against which social change occurs. This affords an understanding of how space, gender, class, and technology were involved as elements in the construction of modernity, the key issue being that this process involved more than just simple contrasts presented by exotic technology. Modernity was Wrst and foremost understood as the complex of new social relationships brought into being by international capitalism and industrialization. As the folklorist V. M. Alekseev argued, Chinese popular print had always been primarily concerned with the drama of human relationships and often played them out in the context of theater (Alekseev 1966, 130). The difference in Tianjin Street is that the theater is the transformed street and the play is the new set of relationships that develop there. The artist may not actually have been thinking of the

Tianjin Street, Yangliuqing, ca. 1907. After Wang and Riftin, 1989. From the collection of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences. 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 179

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late–Qing dynasty self-strengthening formula of tiyong (adopt West- ern “practicality” to preserve the Chinese “essence”) when compos- ing this image, but there is no mistaking that the artist perceived the relationship between Chinese people and foreign technology as de- veloping in much those same terms. Yet the artist also appears fully cognizant of the weakness of self-strengthening in recognizing that the Chinese social essence was being transformed by the intrusion of Western practicality. More cartographical than other prints, down to the inclusion of a directional key, Complete Picture of the Train from Tianjin to Beijing adopts a far wider perspective on the effect of the railway on the Chi- nese countryside and begins to represent the panorama (although not the perspective) of the countryside witnessed in the British Rail- road Views of the 1830s. In this respect, it is also one of a minority of prints that situate the railway outside of the city, suggesting that the railway was predominantly understood in the context of the destination, rather than as a bridge between them. In setting the rails against the countryside in this manner, the print also suggests one of the cru- cial questions facing railways. Early accounts of the popular response to the Chinese railway system often dwelled on the extent to which the rails offended Chinese sensibilities, by forcing carters and carriers out of work and driving straight through all obstacles, including

Complete Picture of the Train from Tianjin to Beijing, Yangliuqing, ca. 1907. From the collection of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences. 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 180

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burial grounds, to reach their destination.12 This, of course, was ex- actly how railways functioned, and there can be no doubt that the railway was often violently offensive to many people. In Train from Tianjin to Beijing, the rail line does cut across the more natural rivers and roadways, and by contrasting the train with simpler modes of transportation, the print also seems to draw attention to the potential social consequences of displacing coolie labor. On the other hand, the railway may also be seen as complementing the roads, canals, and rivers that traversed the countryside before the arrival of the railway and continued to function alongside the new technology long after its arrival. The train transforms the countryside, but it does so within a landscape that is deWned by traditional concepts of balance in nature. Technology retains the Wrst Xush of exoticism, but it is also removed from a context and perspective that made it foreign and is translated into an object of Chinese visual culture. The graphic form establishes a spatial context for technology, and in establishing a context, it cre- ates a mundane awareness of space in which people and technology can coexist in a relatively benign environment. The landscape thus absorbs and transforms the contradictions of industrialization by including developmental disparities in a common framework. Perhaps the most evocative interpretation of the railway found among Chinese popular prints is one that seeks to explain the German-built Jiao-Ji line, which linked the port of Qingdao to the Shandong provincial capital of Jinan. Following the occupation of coastal Jiaozhou in 1897 and the establishment of Qingdao as a for- mal colony the following year, the German government awarded the contract for the construction of the railway to a German syndicate, which then formed the Shandong Railway Company (SEG) in 1899. Although supervision of the project was generally reserved for German nationals, most of the construction was carried out by Chi- nese contractors and as many as twenty-Wve thousand local workers. In order to avoid the high wages demanded by foreigners, the SEG also opened schools to train Chinese for most of the trades and pro- fessional positions within the company (Schrecker 1971, 105–6). Ten- sions over the building of the railway soon arose when the line reached the county of Gaomi, where local residents, fearing loss of land and disruption of gravesites, began to harass surveyors and construction crews. This was temporarily resolved through the promise 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 181

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of Wnancial reimbursement and a show of force. The peace was short- lived, however, as the money failed to materialize and hostilities grew into an organized revolt led by a peasant named Sun Wen. Citing concerns that the railway would block the drainage needed to maintain reclaimed lowlands, the force of several thousand spent the early part of 1900 attacking railway installments, until Governor Yuan Shikai moved in provincial troops to suppress the movement and execute its leader, thereby fulWlling the prophecy of Sun Wen’s rallying cry—“either the railway goes or I do” (Li 1992, 186). Follow- ing further disruptions during the Boxer Uprising of later that year, the SEG was Wnally able to complete construction, reaching Weixian in 1902, and Jinan in 1904. There are only a handful of technology representations from the printing centers of Weixian, but one artist from the Meidangtang workshop did address the arrival of the train in his home county by rendering it into print. New Version of the Shandong Railway, Weix- ian Train Station shares similarities with several of the Yangliuqing prints in its portrayal of a train station, the juxtaposition of different modes of transportation, and the coexistence of Chinese and foreigners. The landscape that familiarizes the train in other renditions is missing from the scene, but the architecture makes up for the absence in being noticeably Chinese. The railway station, with its multi-story

New Version of the Shandong Railway, Weixian Train Station, 1905. Reproduced by permission of the British Library (OR 15376). 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 182

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construction and sweeping eaves, bears little resemblance to the simple buildings that actually served as railway stations, and even the railcars appear as traditional Chinese structures mounted on wheels. Judging from the artist’s capacity to produce a basically accurate locomotive, it should not be assumed that the failure to give realistic representation to the railcars was owing to ignorance of form. Rather, faced with the shapeless boxcar normally employed on this route, the artist probably felt the need to enhance the form, making it appealing to a clientele that had no real demand for technical accuracy. And where Yangliuqing artists had at least begun to incorporate the lin- earity of the railway into their images, this artist treated the subject as a complex of planes, angles, and curves that defy the linear principles on which the actual railway was based. The written text is only semiliterate; nonetheless, a rough interpretation does make it evident that the author wished to explain the functions of the railway, noting various aspects of its construction, fare structure, and scheduling. Addressing more fundamental concerns, reminiscent of those voiced by Sun Wen’s movement, the text also guarantees the safety of the train, and Wnally, glossing over the history of tension between the Chinese and German governments, the text praises peaceful coexistence and the mutual beneWtofthe railway to the Qing dynasty and to foreigners alike.

New Version of the Shandong Railway, Weixian Train Station

The railway is so convenient, crossing ditch and river, Since the railway was built there is no need to walk, near or far you won’t be late, Transporting goods as if by magic, live in the city or live in the countryside, Stations pass in the blink of an eye, mountains and rivers are no obstacle, People of the world show their admiration, the winds and the rains will not be disrupted, No need to fear travel by road, no need of a mule, no need of your feet, Send mail and tell everything of interest, north or south it arrives on time, Government inspectors travel quickly, to discuss pressing affairs, And higher ofWcials needn’t worry about local matters, Soldiers needn’t stay on alert, people needn’t work like slaves... 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 183

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Workers and merchants are not hard-pressed, take a break from the cold and heat, Every day you may enter warehouses Wlled with gold and jade, Tea is prepared, food is prepared, see it run from sunrise to sunset, The telegraph wire stretches without end, The Qing are satisWed, foreigners are satisWed, May they forever maintain peace, as deep as a mountain gorge, Men may travel, women are at ease, There are Wrst- and second-class fares, the bridge planking is all cast iron, The elderly and the young come to no harm, look at the mountains and be happy, Meidangtang, 1905 Train arrival: 12:00. Departure 1:00. (Author’s translation)

While most prints are ambiguous about the nature of the railway, New Version of the Shandong Railway provides explicit commentary about how the railway was locally construed as an international enterprise. The inXuence of the conveyance is felt most directly in collapsing time and distance, facilitating trade, producing wealth, and promoting security by creating conditions for a more efWcient government and military. But there is also a global subtext, indicated in particular by the phrase “people of the world show their admiration.” Weixian Station and the Shandong Railway are presented not merely as technological curiosities intruding upon the locality, but as subjects of global interest. The railway allows local people to look outward, where city and country, north and south all come within reach, and mountains and rivers form no obstacle, and at the same time an admiring world is thought to be looking in on Weixian Station. The contradictions that emerge when viewing the explicitly pos- itive image of Weixian Station in the context of the problematic history of Sun Wen should make it apparent, however, that there is no simple trajectory of historical development in this environment. Sun Wen’s self-sacriWcing opposition to the railway did not preclude his neighbor’s shameless support for the conveyance, demonstrating that, as a dynamic society, rural China produced both resistance to, and engagement with, change. The rural artist could not ignore the complexity of global relations introduced by the railway, but these 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 184

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complexities could be resolved by opposing them in terms of old and new, slow and fast, Chinese and foreign. The popular-culture text could, in other words, exploit the contradictions of modernity by including them in a common frame in order to control and resolve the intrinsic conXict. While transportation technology was clearly the subject of some intense scrutiny during the early twentieth century, it has not, to this point, been suggested that interest in technology was developed to the point of being a fetish. A Wnal image, however, does indicate that interest in technology could be taken to that extreme. Unlike the rural or sub-urban production of most of the above images, Ten Beau- ties Parading Lanterns was produced in the city of Tianjin, and at a slightly later time that corresponds to the increasing urbanization and mechanization of the popular printing industry after ca. 1910.13 The theme of “ten beauties” is common in Chinese popular art, often with women depicted as engaged in such genteel activities as play- ing music, doing crafts, or parading traditional festive lanterns. In this updated lantern festival image the traditional Wsh, lotus, and cabbage lanterns are supplemented by innovative transportation themes, including steamship, locomotive, hot-air balloon, rickshaw, steam-power carriage, and automobile. The tenth is a book lantern, complete with Western binding and approximated foreign text. As in

Ten Beauties Parading Lanterns, Tianjin, ca. 1915. Reproduced by permission of the Royal Ontario Museum. 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 185

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the earlier prints involving Tianjin’s “Xoating bridges,” there is an unmistakable contrast between the Chinese and the foreign, yet these contrasts are detailed through native media forms—in this case com- pounded as both lantern and popular print. The technological objects are removed from the physical context in which they were extensions of international capitalism, and rendered instead as props in an exotic fantasy. Technology is easily controlled, in the explicit sense by the fragile “beauties,” and in the implicit sense by its transformation into an object of popular culture. As in the example of Tianjin Street, the image of beauties with lanterns highlights the social dislocations raised by introduced technology, but focuses tension on the female body rather than back toward the colonial power. The female body, in this way, performs a function similar to the landscape in other images in that both body and landscape serve to absorb the impact of the technological object and so diffuse the potential clash with imperialism.

CONCLUSION

In his inXuential discussions of modernization in China, Joseph Lev- enson once framed cultural change in linguistic terms, stating that, “as long as one society is not being conclusively shaken up by another, foreign ideas may be exploited, as additional vocabulary, in a domestic intellectual situation. But when foreign-impelled social subversion is fairly under way, then foreign ideas begin to displace domestic” (Levenson 1958, 158–59). The problematic dualism inherent in this type of theoretical position was articulated by Marshall Sahlins, who argued in 1988 that the “world is not a physics of proportionate relationships between economic ‘impacts’ and cultural ‘reactions.’ Rather, the speciWc effects of the global-material forces depend on the various ways they are mediated in local cultural schemes” (Sahlins 1988, 4–5). In his discussion of Indian vernacular literature, Sheldon Pollock takes Sahlins’ argument one step further, pointing out that, while global phenomena are indeed mediated by local cultural schemes, local cultural schemes must also be understood as being in a constant state of Xux. As such, the concept of a “local/global dualism” simply cannot exist and needs to be “histori- cized out of existence” (Pollock 1998, 34). 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 186

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From one perspective, Pollock seems Wnally to have reached a logical conclusion in eliminating a false opposition. One of the prob- lems that this discussion has tried to address, however, is that, in terms of culture, these local/global dualisms are still highly relevant. Leo Lee approaches this phenomenon as “modernity” in the context of early twentieth century Shanghai, where, he argues, there was a paradigmatic shift toward an understanding of time as being a linear and evolutionary arrangement in which a nativistic “past” was sepa- rated from a present and future heavily inXuenced by the forces of “Western civilization” (Lee 1999, 43–44). In Lee’s view, modernity was a function of engagement with Western inXuences that were undeniably present in centers like Shanghai. While the question of Chinese urban modernity has received growing interest in recent years, little credence has been given to the possibility that modernity, as Lee describes it, could have developed outside of major cities. In light of the evidence from popular print, it must be asked whether print makers in rural and sub-urban China were already engaging this world view at the turn of the century through their treatment of transportation technology. It may be argued that print artists were simply producing naive imitations of what they saw crossing their towns and Welds, and con- textualizing transportation technologies within the cities that produced them. This, however, would only serve the outmoded concept of China as being a society where culture was made by the literati and urban intelligentsia and obediently consumed by the masses. If the cultural and commercial production of rural China is to be taken seriously, as it most emphatically should, then we need also recog- nize that, when it came to the railway, local people were engaged not only in its physical production, but also in the production of a sense of linear time and space (such as it was) that brought out the disjunc- tions between form and content inherent in printed representations. This production, and the correlation between time, space, technology and representation, cannot be compared to Britain, where the Railroad Views were polished to perfection. But in the semicolonial conditions under which China began its experiments with technology, Chinese print artists also achieved an appropriate perspective on modernity and other empirical ideals enabled by the local representational production of an international enterprise. In other words, Chinese print 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 187

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technology and cultural sensibilities, coupled with imported transportation technology, created a distinctively Chinese railroad view. Railway and Train, for example, clearly states the distinction between coolie transportation and the train which, if it were not directly appropriated from a Shanghai print, would suggest that the artist held a subtle knowledge of the situation. Although this lacks originality, other examples give more noteworthy treatment to the emerging distinctions between mechanized and manual transport and the changing social relations that accompanied the arrival of the railway. The people who composed the prints, and those who viewed them, clearly understood the nature of change and were capable of creating the vocabularies and visual perspectives that could make sense of them within their cultural framework. It was not, however, simply a matter of making room for such objects in the cultural landscape. No matter how extensively the railways were Wnanced and controlled by foreigners, they were still physically built by Chinese labor, experienced by Chinese passengers, and imagined by Chinese artists in a hermeneutic framework that included “local/global” dichotomies. The worldwide phenomenon of the railway (and its local antithe- ses) was both produced by local labor and imagined by local artists. We cannot pretend that this was in any way an equitable exchange or that Chinese peasants were equal partners in the expansion of global capitalism that included rural North China. Nonetheless, from the pongee silk produced for the fashion markets of the West to the tobacco grown for the Shanghai cigarette market and the railways constructed for their delivery, North China was, for better or worse, involved in international commodity production. But if commodities alone are factored into equations of relative involvement, then China will inevitably appear as a simple dependant within a Eurocentric project of global capitalism. Only in considering how the manifestations of capitalism were culturally reproduced can we begin to appre- ciate how change could be conceived of not as the domination of one form of production by another, but as a discourse between the newly articulated concepts of domestic and foreign and their containment within a locally conceived cultural Weld. Print helped to deWne technology as a social issue, and the social resolution of that issue per- mitted the locality to mediate the economic and political inequities 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 188

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of the time and to imagine itself as a functioning participant in an evolving modernity.

Notes

1. In respect to China, this “modernization thesis” was argued extensively during the 1950s–1960s, most notably by Joseph Levenson in Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (1958) and Mary Wright in The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The Tung-ch’ih Restoration, 1862–1874 (1957). These may be seen in the larger framework of the “impact-response” school of thought most clearly articulated in J. K. Fairbank and Teng Ssu-yü in China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Sur- vey, 1839–1923 (1954). 2. See especially the discussion of Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (1984). 3. Jin Ye notes that this number was reached by 1910 (Jin 1950, 63). 4. A comprehensive account of the printing industry is available in my book The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art and History in Rural North China (2004). 5. This particular image bears a strong resemblance to the “Yokohama” style of print that was Xourishing in Japan in the 1860s, which could easily have been marketed in Tianjin through Japanese import shops. Compare especially “Picture of the Newly Opened Port of Yokohama in Kanagawa” (Yonemura 1990, 85). 6. The rickshaw seen here is an early two-manpower model of ca. 1900 that preceded the lighter rubber-tired version that emerged around 1905 and became ubiquitous by 1915. Bicycles, although frequently appearing in popular print, remained a novelty until later times. On the development of the rickshaw, see Strand (1989). 7. The Wrst train in China was pulled by a small four-wheeled engine known as the Pioneer. This was replaced by the larger Celestial Empire, a nine-ton coupled engine with six twenty-seven-inch wheels—but without the large central Xywheel seen here. This suggests that the Dianshizhai Pictorial representation was based on an earlier published source, such as London Illustrated News. 8. For other examples, see Laing (2000). 9. This is one of two known interpretations of the Wusong Railway, both found in the Alekseev collection in St. Petersburg. The second (not pictured) uses roughly the same train and foreground but alters the background to give it a dis- tinct appearance. The existence of competing images thus lends weight to the assumption that the railway subject enjoyed wide popularity. 10. A rival syndicate had set up an experimental line of several miles in length in 1887, which was reportedly used only for amusement. The line was later presented to the empress dowager, who transferred it to the winter palace for her own entertainment (Kent 1908, 30–31). 11. The railways had extended to just 195 miles by 1894, but increased to 2,708 miles by 1903, and 6,052 miles by 1914 (Chang 1975). 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 189

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12. See, for example, Chang (1975, 25) or “Li Wenzhong gong quanshu” in Mi (1963, 149). 13. In dating the print, it may be noted that the steamship Xies the Xag of the provisional government of post-1912, while the “automobile lantern” suggests a vehicle, and therefore a production date of ca. 1915–1920.

Works Cited

A Ying. Zhongguo nianhua fazhan shilue [A Brief History of the Development of Chinese Nianhua]. Beijing: Chaohua meishu chubanshe, 1954. Alekseev, V. M. Kitaiskaia narodnaia kartina [Chinese Popular Pictures]. Moscow: Nauka, 1966. Chang Kia-Ngau. China’s Struggle for Railway Development. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975. Cohen, Paul. Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Dianshizhai huabao (Dianshizhai Pictorial). Shanghai: Dianshizhai, 1884–1898. Esherick, Joseph. Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. Fairbank, John, and Teng Ssu-yü, eds. China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954. Flath, James. The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. Freeman, Michael. Railways and the Victorian Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Huenemann, Ralph. The Dragon and the Iron Horse: The Economics of Railroads in China, 1876–1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Jin Ye. “Yangliuqing he Tianjin de nianhua diaocha” [Investigation of Yangliuqing and Tianjin Nianhua]. Renmin meishu 2 (1950): 62–65. Kent, P. H. Railway Enterprise in China. London: Edward Arnold, 1908. Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Reform, Revolutionary, Political, and Resistance Themes in Chinese Popular Prints, 1900–1940.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 123–175. Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Levenson, Joseph. Confucian China and Its Modern Fate. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958. Li Mingzhong. Weifang gujin renwu [Ancient and Modern Personages of Weifang]. Hong Kong: Zhengzhi chubanshe, 1992. Mi Rucheng, ed. Zhongguo jindai tielu shi ziliao, 1863–1911 [Sources of Modern Chinese Railway History]. Vol. 1. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1963. Pollock, Sheldon. “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (1998): 6–37. 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 190

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Sahlins, Marshal. “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-PaciWc Sector of the World System.” Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988): 1–51. Schrecker, John. Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism: Imperialism in Shandong. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Strand, David. Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Wang Shucun and Boris Riftin. Sulien cang Zhongguo minjian nianhua [Chinese Folkloric Nianhua Stored in the Soviet Union]. Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1989. Wright, Mary. The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T’ung-Chih Restoration, 1862–1874. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957. Yangjiabu cunzhi [Yangjiabu Village Annals]. Jinan, Shandong: Qilu shushe, 1993. Yonemura, Ann. Yokohama: Prints from Nineteenth-Century Japan. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution/Sackler Gallery, 1990.