This module examines how artists represented trains in the pages of Dianshizhai huabao – a late Qing Dynasty pictorial printed by in Shanghai between 1884 and 1898 – and how those representations can help us understand popular approaches to science, technology and development in late Qing China. Occupied by a number of European powers, Shanghai in the late 19th century was a nexus of global exchange of commodities, capital and culture.

Funded by British entrepreneurs in a semi-colonial city, the pictorial was a hybrid product of colonial modernity, presenting readers with a sensorium of news items both domestic and foreign. Various presentational and representational techniques – Chinese and western perspectives, woodblock printing, landscape and ink painting, and other “traditional” representational modes were melded with photorealism, and occasional reprints of images from American magazines like Harper’s Weekly. These images were accompanied by extended prose commentary, both contextualized and moralized about the events and wonders they depicted. Accompanying text often closely resembled or borrowed directly from pre-existing literati forms like biji and youji: collections of interesting trivia, tidbits, and observations of the world at large alongside personal commentary situated at the margins of official history or accurate reportage.

In this module, I argue first that depictions of trains in the pictorial are symptomatic of a trans-national flow of information, by which news in one context would become fiction in another. Second, the visual style of the media clearly demarcates "western" and "modern" objects and spaces from purportedly native ones. Chinese and western objects and individuals are immediately differentiated through contrasting visual styles. Third, this visual style is symptomatic of a crucial technological problem facing late Qing modernizers a different approach to three-dimensional perspective and unfamiliarity with the conventions of technical drawing. These differences in visual representation hampered adoption of technologies like steam engines. Finally, depictions of trains in the pictorial also portray trains as part and parcel of 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.

Dianshizhai huabao was a supplement to the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao, appearing every ten days between 1884 and 1898. The bricolage of lithographic images therein were a product of colonial modernity, offering a window novel events and technologies, real and imagined, at home and abroad.

The Dianshizhai print-shop also produced this stand-alone volume, the Shenjiang shengjing tu (Marvelous Scenery Along the Huangpu River). The volume featured an image of the print-shop itself, and its lithographic print process. 

Various presentational and representational techniques – Chinese and western perspectives, woodblock printing, landscape and ink painting, and other “traditional” representational modes were melded with photorealism, and occasional reprints of photographs or images from American magazines like Harper’s Weekly and the Illustrated London News.

These images were accompanied by extended prose commentary which both contextualized and moralized about the events and wonders they depicted. Accompanying text often closely resembled or borrowed directly from literati biji and youji - literati journals, travelogues, and other unofficial histories comprised of collections of interesting trivia, tidbits, and observations of the world at large alongside personal commentary situated at the margins of official history or accurate reportage.

This module can be navigated by clicking on the links at the bottom of each page, or by following the links in the "contents" section at the end of an examination of a given image. Please continue by clicking "Trains in Dianshizhai" below.

For more, see this analysis of Dianshizhai at the MIT Visualizing Cultures website from Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Rebecca Nedostup.