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• 1 2019-11-18T15:49:55-05:00 Trains in Dianshizhai 27 Introducing Steam Technology in Pictorial Culture plain 2020-09-18T10:06:23-04:00 Nathaniel Isaacson
  
  In its fourteen-year print run, Dianshizhai huabao featured more than 4,500 images of all aspects of life, foreign and domestic. The main requirement for inclusion was that these events were spectacular - that they were worthy of an audience. They did not have to be real. A small, but conspicuous portion of the lithographic images in Dianshizhai huabao turned their attention to contemporary technological advances like hot-air balloons, airplanes, and steamships, through which they speculated on the position of technology in society, and the differences between China and the West. Less than a dozen images in the pictorial featured trains, but this represent an early glimpse of the reception of a technology that has become one of the key markers of China's contemporary development. 
  
  The Dianshizhai press, and the larger Shenbao press that it was part of were owned by the British entrepreneurs Ernest and Frederick Major. It differed from other gazeteers in that it was a mass-produced publication meant for a popular audience. The foreign-owned, native-Chinese staffed serial publication was made possible by the new technologies and cultural encounters of the late 19th century in port cities like Shanghai. As products of colonial modernity, these images offered a window on world events, both real and imagined.
  
  Perhaps unsurprisingly, images of trains appearing in the pictorial depicted this new marvel of transportation as a new way of moving, a problematic symbol of the dangers of western science, and a potential danger to local ways of life. Depictions of trains in the pictorial also situate them within the knowledge industry: a new mode of seeing and understanding the world, as well as being a new medium through which the world was put on display and rendered understandable.
  
  The images of trains appearing in Dianshizhai huabao speak more to a changing social landscape than they do to a landscape physically changed by railroads. Envisioned through GIS mapping tools, the railway lines in this module would appear as little more than points on a map from any scale that renders their geographic context recognizable. Were they to be spatially represented with the fourth dimension of time factored in, one of the railway lines would actually disappear before its representation in print. Naturally, images and news of trains circulated globally and crossed cultures much more readily than actual trains. 
   
• 1 2019-11-18T15:49:57-05:00 News Flows 10 Discussion of How News From Foreign Sources Circulated in Late Qing plain 2020-09-25T11:13:20-04:00

  Chinese science fiction critic and author Jia Liyuan (Feidao) has demonstrated how turn of the twentieth century Chinese science fiction novels like The New Era (Xin jiyuan 新纪元, 1908) drew on a process of circulation of real news for the arsenal of fantastic armaments that serve China in an imagined war with European powers. Real news on the discovery of elements like radium was translated into Chinese and repeated (often verbatim) in various popular science venues, before being adopted as fabao (法宝) or "magical weapons." Author Bihe Guanzhuren's liberal recycling of Chinese-language science news regarding topics such as electricity and radium was married to the semantics and syntax of martial arts fiction in order to narrate a reversal of early twentieth century European military domination of Asia. Depictions of the Mersey Tunnel seem to follow this same pattern.

  The pages of Dianshizhai huabao evince a similar process, by which news from foreign sources was translated into Chinese, repeated in various news outlets, and then imagined vividly and quite creatively in lithograph form. This process complicates the notion that cities like Shanghai were geographically and temporally distant from the center of scientific discourse. Fantastic news of trains and world expositions produced in Shanghai, like the image of the Trottoir Roulant is strikingly similar to contemporaneous reportage on the same events in the European "metropole," both of which were engaged in imaginations of future events.
  
  Likewise, as we have seen in the case of the Wusong railroad, news appearing in Dianshizhai could be the result of "borrowing" from European sources, but it could also be a case of an event being seen as equally newsworthy in both contexts. Take another look at this depiction of the Tianjin and Wusong railroads:
  
  
  and compare it to the image below, which was reprinted in Huatu xinbao in 1881.
  
  How many similarities can you spot between the Dianshizhai image, and this image printed in China (from an unknown western source)? The image appears to be a reprint of an engraving by Alonzo Hartwell (1805-1873), a prolific Bostonian engraver and author of children's parables active in the 1830s and 1840s.§ 

• 1 2020-03-26T10:15:31-04:00 The Aesthetics of Development - Not on Board 6 plain 2020-09-01T15:57:49-04:00 Nathaniel Isaacson

   In The Railway Journey: the Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch identifies a number of shifts in human perception and productive organization that were brought on by the advent of trains and railroads. One of these is the panoramic view afforded from within the cars of the train. The images appearing in Dianshizhai huabao use a panoramic layout, but they universally depict trains from an external perspective. There are no depictions of the landscape passing by as seen from within the train, or of the new social space within the rail car itself. Trains were relatively new and rare in China in the late 1800's, perhaps explaining why the ways the train transforms the landscape are seen from the outside. Whereas Schivelbusch cites depictions of telegraph lines that accompanied railways marking the speed with which riders perceived the passage of the landscape outside the train, Dianshizhai huabao tends to depict the passage of the train from the perspective of an outside observer, rather than a passenger.
  
  
  This universal depiction of the train from outside renders some class differences visible while effacing, but not completely erasing others: in the image and accompanying text presenting the Wusong and Tianjin Railways, there is no sense of the class divisions of the passengers aboard the train, or whether such differences even applied in rail travel in late-19th century China. The difference between the British engineers in the open-air locomotive and the Chinese passengers is immediately apparent, though. The image emphasizes a second set of social contrasts: one group of manual laborers appears to be maintaining the railroad bed, or perhaps porting coal from a fenced-in yard in the foreground over to the train and tracks. Meanwhile, a group of coolies carry an assortment of packages on shoulder poles. The laborer's sleeves are rolled up and some of them appear to be barefoot. A third group of men, clad in robes, mill about examining the scene. They are no immediately identifiable women. 

• 1 2020-09-01T16:27:44-04:00 China's First Railroads 2 Images of the Wusong and Tianjin Railways plain 2020-09-04T11:21:02-04:00