This path was created by Nathaniel Isaacson. 

Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

China's First Railroads - The Wusong and Tianjin Railways

During Dianshizhai's print run, the total distance covered by railroads in China amounted to less three hundred miles in a few isolated locations. Thus, members of the Chinese public would have come to terms with trains in print media rather than in the flesh. It is also important to understand that the development of railroads was not a matter of linear acceleration, and that their emergence in media was not simultaneous with their development in real space.

For example, the Wusong Railroad (which we will see some early images of shortly) was only in operation from 1876 - 1877; thus its appearance in Dianshizhai occurred nearly a decade after the demonstration line had been removed. Given the discrepancies between its appearance in the pictorial and the actual appearance of the locomotive used for the railway, it seems unlikely that the illustrators who produced the image had actually seen the Wusong Railway in operation in person, and instead drew from other print depictions of trains. The Tianjin Railway, originally established as a means of shipping coal from a mine to a local canal, did not significantly alter local space in its initial form, and sat many days journey from Shanghai by boat or on foot. The illustrators were thus separated from their subject matter by significant gaps in time and space. We should think of these images less as depictions of the transformations of the local landscape, and more as transformations in the representation of the landscape vis-a-vis its shifting geopolitical context.  

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