Chapter VI Specters of Crowds in Late Qing Print C...
The previous section of this writing addresses the inward turn of emotion as it correlate with the “mechanical reproducibility”of modern writing in the eighteenth-century Britain.Sentiment and emotion become mediated through a saturating modern textual culture into forms of individual subjectivity.Our discussions on David Hume and William Wordsworth suggest that sentiments proliferate along with the rise of a textual media, and become a necessary component of the media.The moral philosophy of sentiments in Adam Smith regulates representations of modern subjectivity, and gives rise to a subject-less writing medium.At the turn of the nineteenth century, this medium becomes that of transparent exchangeability.At the same time, it leaves the un-representable interiorized emotions into the deep Unconscious, which pre-mediates the emergence of the psychoanalytic self.As an extended comparison and contrast to this genealogy of Western modern selfhood and writing, this chapter suggests a trace of an evanescent moment of collective being in late nineteenth-century Chinese pictorial culture.Rather than an interiorizing activity as reflected in writing, this historical moment presents itself through visual mediation in pictorial culture before the coming of the modern vernacular literature.It releases a collective subject-less subjectivity in urban crowds at the beginning of Chinese modernity, which provides a specter of comparison to the stories of Western individuality we outline in the previous sections.The comparison is spectral in that it is made between two different places, historical periods and media.If all the previous chapters in this dissertation try to theorize upon forms of individual subjectivity in textual media, this chapter traces an evanescent moment of inter-medial phenomenal collective existence in pictorial culture.All are examinations of the technology of self through media and mediation.In this sense, the spectrality of comparison may be justified by the spectral quality of this subject-less subjectivity before the coming of the modern Chinese literature as well, which is manifested through a hybridized visual culture.In this may lie a lost moment in media history, when we once had a hope of being different from the individualistic subjectivity often attributed to Western modernity.It is a hope with which this dissertation concludes as a critique of subjectivity of modernity developed through writing—a hope beyond critical discussions upon subjectivity.
This chapter uses The Dianshizhai Pictorial(see Figure 1 at the end of this chapter) as its specific archive, in which crowds are represented as audience as well as participants of image-making in late imperial Chinese pictorial culture located in the late nineteenth century.In the pictorial newspaper, there emerges an appearance of some amorphous state of modern and collective state of being in mediation, and it is to be replaced by a more intensive individual subjectivity.This historical shift reflects different attitudes towards visuality and textuality.The latter is reflected in the beginning of modern Chinese literature, which takes as its task to enlighten the crowds through literary education.This chapter argues that the pictorial culture in late nineteenth-century China embraces an accommodation of multi-media fertilization in the pictorial over a repressive regime of textuality.In between the pictorial culture and the modern Chinese literature to come there lies a specific sense of absorption and theatricality, and it produces a spectral existence of collective crowds at the emergence of a modern media culture, which intersects illustrated magazines, pictorial newspapers, modern popular theater, and early cinematic exhibition.
For about two decades now, the late Qing period has been labeled as that which was impregnated with signs of “incipient modernities”(Wang 1997:1), with regard to its literary and cultural productions.This argument was most famously developed in Der-wei Wang’s work on late Qing fiction writing, which he takes as “part of a Chinese contribution to global modernity predating the May Fourth period”(1).For Wang, this kind of “incipient modernities”were repressed and dismissed in the discourse of the Chinese modern to come in the New Culture Movement.A more recent work by Alexander Des Forges titled Mediasphere Shanghai:The esthetics of Cultural Production categorizes the aesthetic forms through which Shanghai cultural production(mainly fictions) and social practice are organized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into four tropes—simultaneity, interruption, mediation and excess, that is[1].With an investigation of the literary and visual dimensions of what Des Forges calls “these four narrative tropes, as well as their social and material effects,”Des Forges, through deploying Régis Debray’s neologism mediasphere, argues that
These forms give shape and meaning to the sensory and emotional overload ...that confronts individuals who come face-to-face with the city; they allow these individuals to impose a comprehensible and compelling order on that overload and convert a chaotic set of impressions into a coherent understanding of “what Shanghai is.”In so doing, these forms constitute a conceptual foundation on which Shanghai’s “social reality”is built, construct a frame through which the city can be perceived, and supply a template for the reader’s own experiences there.(Des Forges 2)
Working with, if not challenging, this thread of scholarship on late Qing and early twentieth-century China, this chapter draws the relational shift between pictorial newspaper and printed literary work into this historical picture of a formative Chinese modernity.It suggests a trace of an evanescent moment of inter-medial phenomenal collective being in late nineteenth-century Chinese pictorial culture presented through visual mediation in pictorial culture before the coming of Chinese modern vernacular literature, which is located in Liang Qichao’s reform propositions of the Chinese fiction in 1898 if not earlier.In this may lie a lost moment in media history and a form of being different from the individualistic subjectivity often attributed to(the dissemination of) Western modernity.
The major object of study in this chapter is the staging of crowds in the Dianshizhai Pictorial(Touching stone studio, 1884—1898).It is examined in conjunction with the coming of the individual at the beginning of the twentieth century.In this pictorial newspaper, crowds appear as audience as well as participants of image-making.There emerges an amorphous state of modern and collective state of being in mediation, and that is to be replaced by a more intensively individuated subjectivity.This historical shift involves how different ways of identitarian sensing are phenomenalized in visual and textual media.In his very thorough examination of installment fiction set in Shanghai from the 1890s through 1930s, Des Forges takes mediasphere—a neologism from Régis Debray the French mediologist, and gives it a particular and “a more productive level of historical specificity”(16).For him, mediasphere as “a form of cultural production”consists of:
(1) a visual and textual field characterized by the drive to expand without limit;(2) the simultaneous and regular appearance of the wide range of cultural products that make up this field—fiction and nonfiction books, newspapers, magazines, illustrated collections, and eventually, recorded performances, film, and radio; and(3) frequent connections and references between these cultural products acrossboundaries between different texts, genres, and media.(Des Forges 16)
It seems that Des Forges’ concern is more of media convergence—the coming together of different media and mediation, which explains the way he organizes various forms of materials for critical inquiry, including “fiction and nonfiction books, newspapers, magazines, illustrated collections, and eventually, recorded performances, film, and radio,”and “different texts, genres, and media.”He takes “mediasphere”as
a type of cultural production characterized by aspirations to comprehensiveness and omnipresence, an interest in defining the various genres of texts and images relationally rather than absolutely, and a commitment to complex interaction between cultural producers and consumers.(91)
What this chapter, through the case of the Dianshizhai pictorial print culture, focuses, is more of a kind of media divergence.It is to argue that different forms of media and mediation help to create different sensing and subjectivities.The textualization of media, categorized as the print modern in this essay, is reflected in the beginning of modern Chinese literature, which takes as its mission to enlighten the crowds through literary education in the written vernacular, for instance.Thus, the pictorial culture in late nineteenth-century China embraces an accommodation of multi-media fertilization in the pictorial over a more individuated regime of textuality to come.In between the pictorial culture and the modern Chinese literature there lies a specific sense of absorption and theatricality, with regard to audience making in a modern mass media environment.This produces spectral existence of collective crowds at the emergence of a modern media culture, which intertextualizes illustrated magazines, pictorial newspapers, modern popular theaters, and early cinematic exhibitions.
The Dianshizhai Pictorial is one of the earliest modern pictorial newspapers in Qing China.It was issued first as a newspaper supplement to the Shanghai-based newspaper Shenbao every 10 days in a consecutive span of 15 years.Also one of the most popular pictorial newspapers of its time[2], it publishes on contemporary news, Shanghai urban life, local customs and folklore stories among many other things.It perhaps can be taken as a continuation of the Chinese tradition of encyclopedias for daily use(日用类书, riyong lei shu) that began to become increasingly popular in late Ming[3].What was covered on the Dianshizhai may fall into the following categories:military battles, military transportation technologies, geography, medical technologies, strange or supernatural phenomena, governmental policies and administrative acts, social phenomena, news on family issues[4].Its coverage suggests its distribution and marketing strategy.The Shenbao describes the pictorial’s mission as the dissemination of new knowledge:
……外洋新出一器，乍创一物，凡有利于国计民生者，立即绘图译说，以备官商采用。既扩见闻，亦资利益，故自开印以至今日，销售日盛一日。
...Once those foreign countries invented a new technology or device, as far as we think it would be beneficial to the commonwealth of our nation, we would introduce it through pictorial representations, so that this can catch attention from the government and merchantsfor them to apply it.This broadens our view of the world, and brings actual interests.Thus, since its first print, the sale of the pictorial has been increasing.
Wang Ermin writes:
凡关外洋新知、西洋文化生活、中外时事要闻……大部分是由摄影照片以及西洋传来画片照选择，再交由画家画出……《点石斋画报》画家是由英人美查所主导和供给照片。
Of all new knowledge from foreign countries, cultural and living fashions in Western countries, news of China and other nations ....Most of them were selected from photographical copies or printed pictures from Western countries, and then given to the painters in charge ....The painters of the Dianshizhai were chosen mainly by the English merchant Ernest Major and they were offered photographical pictures by Major[5].
It is a dynamic integration of different popular traditions and information, and suggests a sense of realism different from the long history of literati painting dominating in the previous centuries[6].The pictorial’s reportage on new knowledge and contemporary news obviously attracts attention from Lu Xun(Lu Hsun), A Ying, Bao Tianxiao and Zheng Zhenduo.In his 《上海文艺之一瞥》(Shanghai wenyi zhi yipie) [“A Glimpse upon the World of Literature and Arts in Shanghai”] written in 1931, Lu Xun writes:
这画报的势力，当时是很大的，流行各省，算是要知道“时务”——这名称在那时就如现在之所谓的“新学”——的人们的耳目。
The influence of this pictorial was very wide then.Its popularity was spread among many provinces, and it was the ears and eyes of those who desired to be informed of the “current affairs”—the same thing begins to be called “new knowledge”nowadays[7].
A Ying writes in his 《中国画报发展之经过》(Zhongguo huabao fazhan zhi jingguo) [“An Experience of the Development of Chinese Pictorials”]:
因《点石斋画报》之起，上海画报日趋繁多，然清末数十年，绝无能与之抗衡的。
From the rise of the Dianshizhai, there began to have increasing pictorials in Shanghai.However, none of them could rival the popularity of the Dianshizhai in the last decades of the Qing Dynasty.
For him, it was because other pictorial newspapers either “画笔实无可观”[“Their painting techniques are not decent”] or they disregarded pictorial newspapers’ mission to “强调时事记载”[“focus on realistic records of current events of the world”][8].
Zheng Zhenduo goes further in complementing the combination of contemporary news and painting as “乃是中国近百年很好的‘画史’”[“a very good ‘painting epic of its historical time’ in China within the last hundred of years”][9].
Existing scholarship on the pictorial either takes a socio-historical approach, reading it as an illustrated guide to late nineteenth-century Shanghai urban life(Ye Xiaoqing, Rudolf G.Wagner, Hsiao-t’i Li, Chen Pingyuan), or locates it in the changing landscape of perceptual paradigms in late nineteenth-century Shanghai(Bao Weihong, Laikwan Pang).[10] The argument in this chapter, following these two threads of scholarship on this pictorial newspaper, identifies an evanescent trace of collective state of being in the modes of theatricality and absorption in the visual activities in the pictorial, and takes these modes as they correlate with other urban visual activities in Shanghai, including a garden culture and early cinema watching.It outlines an inter-media spectral phenomenal being spectrally existent in between media, tradition and modernity, word and image.
Zheng Zhenduo’s comment of “画史”[“painting epic of its historical time”] is not merely upon Wu Youru, the major artist for the pictorial[11].It is a recognition of the technological innovation that the Dianshizhai made in what Catherine Yeh calls a “visual revolution”happening in the Chinese pictorial newspapers in late nineteenth-century China[12].The founder of the famous Dianshizhai Lithographic Press(点石斋石印局, Dianshizhai Shiyinju), Ernest Major, was among the first to use the newly introduced visual technology of lithography into mass reproduction of dictionaries, ancient and rare books, newspapers and pictorials[13].Indeed, this adoption of lithographic printing “made cheap mass production of pages crammed with detailed images possible,”and “the image of the urban crowd”“no longer the exclusive property of the sovereign(or the elite classes)”, but “a commodity available to many members of that same crowd”(Des Forges 73).It is among the techniques fulfilling what Laikwan Pang identifies as the “realist desire”(Pang 2007:16) produced through cross-cultural contacts between Shanghai and the Western world.This desire of realism for objective descriptions is most effectively achieved through visual media, which, as many theorists have pointed out, serves as the privileged site to gain symbolic access to the modern world order[14].The introduction of lithography to China by the missionaries in the 1820s and its wild adoption in the 1870s was instrumental in constructing a sense of Western perspectivalism in portraying Chinese customs, events and objects, when Shanghai was witnessing the beginning stage of a mass media of modern newspapers.[15] Along with this new “arena of print and visual media”(Des Forges 75), a new readership and audience were emerging.
In late nineteenth-century China, Western visual techniques were often valued over traditional Chinese painting, the latter of which was often taken as one of the explanations for China lagging behind the modernity project.In August 1898, just when the Dianshizhai came to its last issue,《论画报可以启蒙》(“On How Pictorials Can Enlighten”), an essay published in the Shenbao probably as an elegy for the pictorial, critiques Chinese painting for its too much emphasis on the spirit of things and too little attendance upon verisimilitude of objects.It writes:
此种笔墨，非不夺天地造化之妙，然究为文士玩好之物，而非有裨于实用也。
This sort of painting steals the essential beauty from the creation between the earth and the heaven.Nevertheless it descends to the dilettante connoisseurship for the literati, and turns out to be of no practical use.
On the other hand, it takes skills and institutions of visual media as the foundation of Western civilization:
泰西以图画为重，不特天文地舆之学，精益求精，不差累黍，即人物器具，无不巧绘成图，使物物皆存于图，俾人人皆知是物。世但知其格致之妙，制造之精，而不知其绘图之妙也。又设蜡人馆、博物院、电照法，以补画工所不及。所以欧西之人，见闻日广，才识日增，而华人莫与比也[16]。
The West lays more significance on the visual effects of painting.In the sciences of astronomy and geography, more precision and accuracy are demanded.Even people and instruments are painted with high skills, so that every instrument can be precisely recorded in visual archives for them to be recognizable.Many know the wonders of the west in acquiring natural knowledge, and the precision of thewest in manufacturing.But few understand the beauty of its paintings.In addition to painting, visual institutions such as waxworks, museums, and X-rays are established to complement the painters’ works.Therefore, it came as no surprise that the Westerners obtains increasingly more information, and acquires increasingly more learning on a daily basis, while nothing comparable can be found in Chinese.
The intent of the Dianshizhai, as stated by Ernest Major in 《点石斋画报缘起》[“The Initiation of the Dianshizhai Pictorial”], was to entertain its audience with actual events as well as urban amusements in the aftermath of the Sino-French war(August 1884—April 1885):
爰倩精于绘事者，择新奇可喜之事，摹而为图……俾乐观新闻者有以考证其事，而茗余酒后，展卷玩赏，亦足以增色舞眉飞之乐。
Then those who excel in painting choose novel and entertaining incidents as their subjects, and put them into pictorial representations ...so that those interested in knowing social news could verify whether they are true while enjoying the pictures over cups of tea or wine.This is enough to bring forth pleasures and sensations.
In this “Initiation”essay, Ernest Major compares the difference between Chinese painting and Western visual techniques:
盖西法娴绘画者务使逼肖，且十九以药水照成，毫发之细，层叠之多，不少缺漏，以镜显微，能得远近深浅之致，其傅色之妙，虽云影水痕，烛光月魄，晴雨昼夜之殊，无不显豁呈露。故平视则模糊不可辨，窥以仪器，如身入其境中。而人物之生动，尤觉栩栩欲活。中国画家拘于成法，有一定之格局，先事布置，然后穿绰以取势，而结构之疏密，气韵之厚薄，则视其人学力之高下，与胸次之宽狭，以判等差。要之，西画以能肖为上，中画以能工为贵，肖者真，工者不必真也。既不皆真，则记其事又胡取其有形乎哉。然而如《图书集成》《三才图会》与夫器用之制，名物之繁，诸书以图传者，证之古今，不胜枚举。顾其用意所在，容虑夫见闻混淆，名称参错，抑仅以文字传之，而不能曲达其委折纤悉之致，则有不得已于画者，而皆非可从例新闻也。虽然，世运所至，风会渐开，乃者泰西文字，中土人颇有识其体例者，习处既久，好尚亦移[17]。
The Western style of painting puts many efforts to establish the verisimilitude effect, nine out of ten through the help of medical potion.As tiny as the turn of a hair, as many details as there are, all of them would be reflected, as if put under a microscope.Its coloring is so wonderful, that every difference between cloud shadows and water trace, candle light and moon rays, clear day and rainy weather, broad day and nighttime, becomes manifest to observe, whether in the vicinity or from afar.A scene looks blurry and indistinguishable when it is looked at with the naked eye; but with the instrument [of a photographic camera], one will experience the scene as if he himself is placed within it.Particularly the characters within paintings, they are so vividly represented as to come into life.Chinese painters, restrained by conventions and customs, have sets of patterns in their mind, and would arrange a framing first before they configure the space for the power of painting.Whether the pictorial structure is loose or tight, the spirit intense or light, is dependent on the depth of the painter’s learning and the extension of the painter’s vision.The essential difference is that verisimilitude is the priority in Western paintings, and delicate spirit in Chinese paintings.For the painting to be verisimilar, it has to be realistic, while it does not necessarily take realistic efforts to achieve delicate spirit.Since not all of it is realistic, it becomes not necessary to represent the incident through its appearance and shape.True, the Chinese tradition has books such as Complete Collection ofIllustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Current Times and Collected Illustrations of the Three Realms, the systematization of materials and instruments, and the sophisticated naming and ways of describing things.But, books of this kind communicate knowledge on things, materials and systems with illustrations from the ancient times to the present.Examples are countless.Its primary purpose is to avoid confusions in naming.Its primary means is words, which cannot convey the precision and accuracy of matters concerned.Some matters have to appeal to the power of paintings, and even those paintings are not following conventionalized styles of social news pictures.Nevertheless, now we are at a historical time when the world is where it is, and increasing open space becomes possible for foreign things.It becomes the case that some Chinese begin to familiarize themselves with styles of Western culture, and as they learn things gradually, social customs begin to move to new directions.
Major affirms the stereotypical dichotomy between the mimetic tradition of Western painting and the expressive modes that characterize Chinese painting, and attributes the verisimilitude of Western painting largely to the effect of photography.We will return to this point in the space below.
Crowds occupy a significant presence of the spectacles in the Dianshizhai.They very often appear as collective spectators, which are portrayed as urban spectacles in turn.Historically speaking, there were crowds thronging into Shanghai in the late nineteenth century when the urban environment in Shanghai had undergone drastic transformations.That creates what Meng Yue calls the “chaotic cosmopolitan culture in Shanghai”(Meng 100).This is a reflection of the demographic dynamics of the city.Refuges from wars, droughts, crimes among other natural or social misfortunes in neighboring provinces flooded to Shanghai, which became a treaty port in 1843 owing to the Treaty of Nanking(Nanjing) of the Opium War signed by the British and Qing governments.As early as in 1861, the Shanghai Xinbao, the first modern newspaper in Shanghai, writes in its founding issue:“In a place like Shanghai people from all over are mixed together.This creates obstacles to doing business, such as the inability to manage one another’s dialects and the failure to hear about news”(qtd.in Lee 362).The increasing growth and diversity of its populace has changed Shanghai’s urban geographic landscape[18].Along with its demographic changes came its social and cultural encounters with the modern.Since the middle of the nineteenth century, modern facilities were introduced into Shanghai very quickly:modern banks in 1848, Western-styled streets in 1856, gas lamps in 1865, telephone in 1881, electricity in 1882, tap water in 1884, automobiles in 1901 and trolley bus in 1908[19].The city became a place of high cultural diversity and social dislocation.It was “the great newspaper-exporting city”(Lee and Nathan 368).Art historian Jonathan Hay identifies that a sense of “big-city edginess”(Hay 87) existed in late Qing Shanghai school of painting.The city was the harbinger of Chinese modernity.A liminal space is thus cultivated at the edge of the Qing Empire with a bourgeoning mass media of print.
In their still classical study on the emergent mass culture from late Qing through the republican period, Leo Ou-fan Lee and Andrew J.Nathan point out that, in treaty-port concessions like Shanghai, many political and commercial journals sought registration often in the name of foreign agents for the purpose of avoiding government repression[20], and “[m]odern printing machines, which are essential to rapid production of a large number of copies of a periodical, were available only in large treaty ports, as was the imported paper that these machines required”(Lee and Nathan 368).According to Christopher Reed’s historical study, Shanghai publishing industry witnessed a rapid growth from the 1880s forward, and by 1937 “an overwhelming 86 percent of all books published in China appeared under a Shanghai imprint”(qtd.in Des Forges 17).Thanks to an efficient transmission network, including new roads and railroads, Chinese Post Office, local post offices(书信馆, Shuxin guan) from various nations, bookstores, traditional letter-carrying hongs, riverine paddle-boats and the like, “the urban-centered press achieved wide distribution throughout the nation”(Lee and Nathan 370).Newspapers from Shanghai or Tokyo could easily reach such distant inter-land places as Gansu and Sichuan.This enhanced the accessibility of the visual media of print pictorials under discussion here.
Regarding the rise of a “scopic regime”[21] and its correlative relation with Western modernity, art historian Jonathan Crary argues that changes of vision and visuality since the seventeenth- till the nineteenth- centuries are part of the larger rationalizations for reshaping the human faculty of sight, and that they came along with inventions of certain optical devices like camera obscura and the stereoscope.For Crary, vision and visuality relate to changing perceptions of human subjectivity and identity, and the observer become “the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and procedures of subjectification”(Crary 1990:5).The observer in the nineteenth-century West is that of abstraction through modernity experience, who “increasingly had to function within disjunctive and defamiliarized urban spaces, the perceptual and temporal dislocations of railroad travel, telegraphy, industrial production, and flows of typographic and visual information”(11).Different from this history of vision and visuality in Western modernity, the Chinese case of pictorial culture presented here promotes a liminal space of sensorial freedom, a way of being imposed by neither the Western possessive individualism nor Chinese feudalistic imperial subjectivity.In between the classical literacy institution and an emergent modern vernacular literature to come in late Qing China, the visual cultural practice does not fit into the configuration of Western modernity.Instead, it presents a liberating though evanescent moment of cross-fertilized subjectivity through modern media and mediation.This is what this chapter tries to salvage by examining representations of crowds in between the pictorial and the literary.
The Dianshizhai Pictorial presents crowds in various public viewing events, and they are often public and “collective voyeurs”(Bao 2005:445-446).In a piece from the Shenbao on September 20, 1896, a reporter was writing about his viewing experience in a Strange Garden(奇园, Qiyuan) of a huge painting from the United States depicting its Civil War.The reportage was written in classical language, which was accessible only to those with trained literacy.Historically, as early as in 1876, newspapers using vernacular Chinese appeared in Shanghai, the first of which was the People Newspaper(民报, Minbao).A broad vernacular movement occurred in between 1876 and the end of the Qing Dynasty [22].It was not until 1905 that the institution of imperial examination was still practiced, and the classical language, which was its official language for longer than a thousand of years, still enjoyed its supremacy of official status.As a language of the elite and the gentry, it is distinctively different from spoken vernaculars and takes years of training for its literacy.This is to say that, writings in the middle- to high-brow Shenbao, unlike illustrations in the Dianshizhai, discriminate classes of readers according to their literacy ability.It came as no surprise that literacy in urban areas was much higher.According to a historical study from Evelyn Rawski, male adult literacy in Daoguang era(1821—1850) in Guangzhou could be at 80 to 90 percent.[23]It should also be mentioned that there exists a gendered literacy rate.In the Qing Dynasty, basic literacy in the nineteenth century was beteen 30 and 45 percent for adult males, and between 2 and 10 percent for adult females[24].This “奇园观油画记”(“Qiyuan guan youhua ji”) [“Viewing a Painting in the Strange Garden”] of the Shenbao reads:
画为南北美利坚交战之图，经泰西画史穷十余年之心力，始克渲染告成。巨笔淋漓，大可蔽数亩。岁丙申，日人之好事者度地本邑泥城桥畔，支板为屋，命曰‘奇园’将书幅陈列其中，招人观览。中秋前二日，轻寒薄暖，细雨如丝。午后，园主折柬以招，乃偕友散步而往。门者速之入，初行小弄中，朦胧如黑夜。旋见一灯如豆，始知梯在是。蹑而登，不觉豁然开朗，别有一天……日色黯淡，阴云蔽空，李华《吊古战场文》恐亦无此惨状。考南北美利坚战务起于一千八百六十年，其始只缘黑奴故耳……迨至一千八百六十五年，新总统旋凯庆贺，而已。[25]
The painting is a war scene in the American Civil War, and it took over a decade’s hard work by Western master painters to get accomplished.Its painting brushes are incisive, and its size is as large as several mu of land.In 1896, some interested Japanese measured a piece of land by the side of a Muddy Town Bridge in this county, set up boards as an exhibition house titled as Qiyuan for the painting to be visited by people.Two days before the mid-Autumn festival, the weather was chilly, and only slightly warm.It was drizzling.In that afternoon, I, as invited by a letter from the host of Qiyuan, walked to there with a couple of friends.We entered the door, and strolled in a small lane under darkness like walking in nighttime, for a while.Then, we saw a light ahead small like one pea, from which we recognized the direction of a staircase.Light-stepped, we climbed onto and across it.All of a sudden, everything is enlightening and there came a whole new world ....The sunlight became grey and the sky was full of clouds.It looks even more miserable than in Tang Dynasty Li Hua’s Elegy to the Ancient Battlefield.A brief research would tell that the American Civil War was ignited in 1860, merely because of the black slave issue.It went on until 1865 when a newpresident celebrated its victory over the South.That is all.
A glimpse of this reportage suggests that the author entertains a cosmopolitan kind of knowledge of the world:the US, the West, Japan, the American civil war, slavery of African-Americans, Tang China.
On the September 2, 1896 issue of the Shenbao, the exhibition of this American civil war painting has been advertised:
开设英大马路近跑马场高大圆房便是：奇园南北花旗大战图,内设炮台营垒兵马战将交锋炮火连天尸横遍野……
This is in the high and large round house next to the race house on the main road in the British Concession:A painting of Americans fighting each other between the South and the North in Qiyuan:a picture of artillery fort, military barracks, soldiers and horses, shooting everywhere, corpses rampant.
However, what seems an exhibition of a museum kind open to the public in the Shenbao advertisement turns out to more of a private outing activity in the reportage.It was staged two days before the traditional Chinese mid-autumn festival, and many details were laid out previous to the activity.In the reportage we read how the Qiyuan was established by a Japanese resident, and how the painting took more than ten years to come to its completion, and what the weather was like.Historically speaking, it was in 1868 that Shanghai built its first museum, namely, the Museum of Natual History by the Jesuits[26].The way of describing in the Shenbao reportage reminds of conventional Chinese literati travelogue.It presents a sense of sociality recognizable in conventional literati travel writings, which is manifested through the contrast between the indoor space of enlightenment(“豁然开朗”) and the threshold of darkness(“朦胧如黑夜”)[27], the mention of Tang Dynasty Li Hua’s Elegy, and the moralization made upon the American civil war.That disillusionment through the long channeling of darkness was probably expected to be morally elevating, and the enlightenment afterwards shows a moment of awakening from media immersion.The literati writer of this Shenbao reportage enjoys “the primacy of spiritual vision and anti-illusionism,”“precisely the burden of the literati tradition that modern minded Chinese radicals were trying to unload”(Wang 2001:101).He probably did not realize what was realism and how it was considered as progressive by late Qing and Republican intellectuals.Or, this might be one strategy taken to accommodate the sense of shock of modernity—which the newspaper advertisement and public museumkind exhibition intend to arouse, and the new institution of public visuality is remediated into a tradition of literati gathering.This is a process of media shift.The old media of literary writing takes over the public space involved in museum visiting.Within this short reportage several kinds of media are hybridized together—painting(the American painting), gardening(Qiyuan), touring(the mid-autumn festival atmosphere and rainy day), historiography(Li Hua’s Elegy to the Ancient Battlefield, written in the eighth century about wars in centuries B.C.), and history(the American civil war).
What remains of more significance is to see the similarities as well as differences between this literary description and its visual representation, since there exists one Dianshizhai lithographical representation of the American Civil War painting watching experience of the 1896 Shenbao reportage on the Qiyuan event.The textualized news information reported in the Shenbao piece was “transposed”into a pictorial representation—an example of what media theorist Friedrich A.Kittler would call “a transposition of media.”[28]And according to Des Forges, this “transposition of a textual aesthetic into a new ‘extratextual’ dimension”was becoming a fashion when “‘diversion’ [消闲, xiaoxian] has taken on a new prominence in the theories of literature,”and this “brings the world and the text together in a dystaxic or intercutting relationship, putting narrative lines inside and outside the text to a certain extent on equal footing”(Des Forges 86).In the Dianshizhai lithographic representation(奇园读画, Reading the Pictorial in the Qi Garden, Figure 1), we see a painting engulfing the viewers, who stand inside the railing at the lower left-hand corner[29].The railing serves as a blurred media framing between the painting and its audience.The overwhelming visual impression from the painting seems almost not to be contained within the sensorial control of the audience.There is a tension of visual confrontation between those in the painting and the crowds watching it, and the boundary, which the framing tries to maintain, at the first sight, is not easily recognized.It is noteworthy that the verbal descriptions of the painting in both the inscription within the lithographic representation and the Shenbao reportage work to create a realistic dimension:the painting is reported to have been accomplished by a Western painter spending more than 10 years on it, and it is as large as able to cover several mu(亩, about 0.0667 hectares) area of land, almost as large as the garden in which it was exhibited.
Most of the Dianshizhai pictorials consist of journalistic paintings, battle depictions or portraitures, and the realistic effect was always a major concern for the management of the journal.Ernest Major claimed that Western perspectivalism and photography are superior techniques and technologies comparing to Chinese painting[30].The painting of the American Civil War reproduced in the Dianshizhai is drawn in the Chinese lithographic style of the time, and that is different from the realist art in Western tradition.Zheng Yimei(郑逸梅) thinks that the effect of observational realism in the Dianshizhai is even comparable to what was to be realized in those 1920s pictorials, which used direct copies from photography[31].However, the Chinese painters associated with Ernest Major and the Shenbao Press, the most famous of whom was Wu Youru(?—1893), distinguished their work from traditional literati painting.They were among the first group of modern Chinese professional painters, and their livelihood depended on mass market.The objects of their work were more likely to be realistic things and scenes[32].These artists, employed by the Dianshizhai pictorial, were paid to paint what they had never seen before—Western geography, natural plants and animals, new technological innovations and machines, et cetera.The objects of the painting art were changed into the contemporary things and events that the world was experiencing, rather than the previous generic themes of traditional Chinese painting, such as flowers, birds, worms, fishes or characters, hills or waters.Nevertheless, their work, as demonstrated in the lithographic pictorials in the Dianshizhai, contained traces of features from traditional calligraphy and painting.The cross-fertilization of their forms of art, traditional and modern, realistic and spiritual, helped to achieve commercial success for the Shenbao press.A piece from 《北华捷报》(Beihua jiebao) [North-China Herald] on May 25, 1889, titled as《上海石印书业之发展》(“Shanghai Shiyin shuye zhi fazhan”) [“The Development in Lithography and History of the Book in Shanghai”], writes:
石印的另一优点是比木刻容易保存书法的优美，石印局都雇有若干书法好的人，报酬较高。
Another strength in lithography is that it is easier to keep the beauty of calligraphy in it than in woodblock.The lithography office employed several hands great at calligraphic work and paid them with very decent salaries[33].(https://www.daowen.com)
On July 24, 1897, the Shenbao published an advertisement for the Dianshizhai —《照相石印各种名画发售》(“Zhaoxiang shiyin gezhong minghua fashou”) [“Marketing for Various Famous Paintings in Photographical Lithography”]:
本点石斋用照相石印之法，印成各种画幅，勾勒工细，神采如生，久蒙中外赏鉴家誉不绝口。兹又印成各种名画，与初写时不爽毫厘者若干种，特一一开列于下，诸君早日赐顾为盼。
Our Touching Stone Studio adopted a device of photographical lithography, printed various kinds of pictures, which are vividly made with precision and accuracy.This became widely acclaimed by connoisseurs home and abroad.Now, our studio begins to replicate various kinds of famous paintings, and they are almost as they were originally painted.The catalogue is as follows and we expect to see you as soon as possible.
A new sense of visuality was emerging, in the process of which there existed many cases of experimentation, anxiety and crises[34].In Chinese painting, the positions of its objects are always arranged through long traditions, the stability of which assures the sense of world order imposed upon the external world.The new objects brings a new way of knowing, which underlines objectivity, positivity and scientific methods.The combination of Chinese painting of this kind and the print technology of lithography produce a different sense of realism, and it brings forth a distinctive aesthetics of perceptual structures, subjectivity and sociality.
Laikwan Pang observes that “line is the main graphic element in Chinese lithographic art”and “natural elements like trees, mountains, and rivers are often depicted in the traditional Chinese style, whereas modern items like urban buildings and modern transportation devices are drawn with rigid lines and solid surfaces”(Pang 2007:44).Based on Pang’s point, this chapter argues that their combination suggests an embryonic state in between tradition and modern, and it produces amorphous representations that could be identified as “spectral.”It is a strange sense of hybridization of traditional Chinese painting and new things and social events, and it does not always come together.This is a manifestation of complicated modernity where a new mode of perceptual self comes into being through an imbrication of different media, Chinese or Western, old or new, verbal or visual.In the compositional structure of this lithography pictorial of the Qiyuan event, “the reception space and the pictorial space were rendered in the same style, further reinforcing the impression that the representation and its reception were within the same reality”(175).The crowd spectators are not discrete from their viewing objects, almost immersed into the war spectacle represented in the realistic American painting of civil war.A further look indicates that the inscription in the uppermost of the pictorial tells not merely the current location, its history of making, and its subject of the painting, but also “provides some hint of narrative”(175):
有中炮而血肉纷飞者，有受弹而僵踣于地者，有方为墙之进者，有因败衄而逃者。山麓之间，尸横枕藉……
Some were shot by guns and cannons.Their limbs flew out of bodies.Some, hit by bullets, fell down.Some, seeing a wall, chose to hide themselves behind it.Some, seeing they were losing, chose to run away.Corpses were everywhere, between hills and rivers.
This description is very suggestive of the causal relation of the incidents portrayed, which is communicated through a “progression of time”(175).Some happen to see a wall and hide themselves behind it, and some run away because they feel that they are losing.Along with descriptions of the verbal descriptions of the progressive time, the affective and psychological states of mind of the soldiers portrayed become accessible to the audience.This explanation of the pictorial within the lithography is made by the writer of the inscription and largely taken from the Shenbao reportage, the latter of whose classical style precludes those not trained in classical literacy.In late nineteenthcentury China, pictorial paintings, inscriptions within paintings’ pictorial compositions, and newspaper articles on the pictorial are usually by different authors[35].This means that the Shenbao reportage, the lithographic representation of the viewing experience, and the inscription within that representation could be from different hands.It suggests that the authorial subjectivity emerging through early modern in the West—as suggested through the death of author arguments by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault[36]—is not applicable in our investigation upon the relation between the image, and the two verbal descriptions.Narration in classical language is processed through trained literacy, and it speaks only to those sophisticated readers.
On the other hand, visual representation has a broader audience, and comes as pleasurable cultural products for consumption[37].Half a century after the last issue of the Dianshizhai in 1898, Bao Tianxiao, a novelist in the republican period, writes about his experience of the Dianshizhai in his Memoirs of Kushiro Studio:
我在十二三岁的时候，上海出有一种石印的《点石斋画报》，我最喜欢看了。本来儿童最喜欢看画，而这个画报，即使成人也喜欢看的。每逢出版，寄到苏州来时，我宁可省下了点心钱，必须去购买一册。这是每十天出一册，积十册便可以线装成一本。我当时就有装订成好几本。虽然那些画师也没有什么博识，可是在画上也可以得着一点常识。因为上海那个地方是开风气之先的，外国的什么新发明、新事物，都是先传到上海。譬如像轮船、火车，内地人当时都没有见过的，有它一编在手，可以领略了。风土、习俗，各处有什么不同的，也有了一个印象。其时，外国已经有了气球了，画报上也画了出来[38]。
When I was 12 or 13, Shanghai published a lithographically-made Dianshizhai huabao, which became my favorite.Indeed, children like pictures very much, and this pictorial was enjoyed by adults as well.Whenever it was published and disseminated to Suzhou, I would sacrifice my pocket money for snacks to get a volume.It had one issue coming out every 10 days.One could bind ten issues together and make a book out of it.Back then, I made several books of them.Though those painters did not have broad knowledge, one could always learn something from the pictures.Because Shanghai was a place of fashion, many new inventions and fashionable things, like steamship and trains, first went to Shanghai before people in the inter-lands even had chances to hear of them.With the pictorial, one could see what they were actually like.At that time, foreign countries already invented flying balloons, which appeared in the pictorial right away.
Thus, the pictorial newspaper could be enjoyed by a child of limited literacy, whose viewing experience of modernity is absorptive and pleasurable like consumption of snacks.Visual representations of modernity are thus more easily accessible to those at the margin of the traditional literacy institution, and they brought in new experiences of Western perceptual modernity.As a matter of fact, the balloon images in the pictorial were prominent, and literary scholar Chen Pingyuan takes it as part of the novel flying vehicles that appeared in popular science journals of the 1870s, illustrated newspaper such as the Dianshizhai, and science fiction at the turn of the twentieth century.For Chen, this is suggestive of the public fascination with the novel flying vehicle as embodying a new world consciousness and scientific imagination[39].Bao Weihong sees these balloon images “as a figure of a new mode of visuality which is both embodied in the image of the balloon and also realized in the image composition of the pictures where the balloon appears”(Bao 2005:436).
Verbal description within lithographic pictorials of the Dianshizhai often comments through a worldview of ancient historiography or the ethics of heaven or conventional Chinese wisdom.It tends to be more traditional, as indicated through the mention of Tang Dynasty Li Hua’s Elegy to the Ancient Battlefield in the case under discussion.What remains more significant to this lithography is the similar positioning of the inscription and the viewers in the reception space, who are rendered as if they are reacting to the sound, sight, and affective intensity of the Civil War painting.The sense of realism, as reflected in the large size civil war painting through its rigid lines and solid surfaces, is maintained within the Western-styled balustrade, while the balustrade tries to keep the viewing group of the Qiyuan distinct from their viewing object.The boundary between these two seems hard to maintain:the painting medium and its audience of media consumption in the Qiyuan almost come into each other, especially when some of the audience are stretching their necks to look beyond.One of the viewers dresses himself in Western clothing and mingles his appearance with the American soldiers in the painting[40].This, like the buzzy zone structure between performance space and other kinds of space in the Peking Opera theater of the same historical period[41], might be taken as an “immaturity”of late Qing modern visual media.It might result from the technical difficulties that the Dianshizhai painters had to accommodate an American realistic painting and a museum-like garden visual experience into one pictorial frame[42].It is exactly this kind of “awkwardness”that creates a “spectral”possibility of representations in the beginning of modern Chinese mass media.This is emblematic of the cultural hybridity in late nineteenth-century Shanghai.The audiences are intensively absorbed in their relation with the American painting, and turn out to be staged for the audience of the overall lithographic pictorial.The experience of Western modernity in viewing a modern war is thus mediated through a theatrical buffer zone in between representation and reality.This blurred boundary between absorption and theatricality throws light upon new forms of subjectivity and consciousness in an amorphous, embryonic and mediated state of being.The sight, sound, psychology of the American Civil war is represented lithographically to a group of audience.They, in turn, become a spectacle to the targeted audience of the Dianshizhai, who, owing to their limited literacy, may not be able to approach the Shenbao verbal reportage of the same visual event.This is an incipient sign of the perceptual modern in its spectral mediation before the coming of the well-defined May Fourth literary print modern.Its existence is framed through various layers of mediation and sensorial activities.
The Qiyuan duhua pictorial of the Dianshizhai is presented either as an ongoing reality or a stage performance.It is not a still picture.All of the viewers, standing inside the railing at the lower left-hand corner, are also portrayed in a theatrical situation, watching as well as being watched.Their attention upon the spatial environment is directed to the American civil war painting within the pictorial as well as to something without, probably the viewers of the lithography.If soldiers in the war are situated in a realistic war scene and choose to ignore its audience, the viewers of the war painting within the balustrade show a sense of awareness of its being watched.They are theatrically-staged, that is to say.The American civil war is mediated to its late Qing Chinese audience through their watching in the Qiyuan, whose geographical location mediates the war event through its mass spectators to the audience of the pictorial.It is a cross-fertilized media event represented through the lithographical technology, and its composition presents us an almost multi-media environment of painting, museum, theater, print and garden.All media activities squeeze into this one pictorial frame with meticulous details.This lithographic pictorial representation far exceeds what photography claims as its distinction from lithography—realistic mimesis, that is.
In the “Preface”of the Dianshizhai, Major compares the differences between Chinese and Western paintings.He affirms the stereotyped dichotomy between mimetic tradition of Western painting and expressive modes that characterize Chinese painting.The verisimilitude effect of Western painting is largely attributed to the modern technology of photography[43].The miraculous mimetic power of photography is manifest, as Major observes:“A scene looks blurry and indistinguishable when it is looked at with the naked eye; but with the instrument [of a photographic camera], one will experience the scene as if he himself is placed within it.”The photographic apparatus is accorded a quality of objectivity that complements the subjective—“as if he himself is placed within it.”The naked eye, instead, is a too subjective and embodied device to be able to make abstract objective lines and realities.The “blurry and indistinguishable”effect in the Qiyuan pictorial, however, complements a multi-media framing and provides an enriching mediated experience that “as if he himself is placed within it.”Rather than a clearly demarcated single media representation, the Dianshizhai produces a form of media immersion made possible through the lithographic pictorial print culture in late nineteenth-century China.The viewers of the war painting within the pictorial are self-reflexively aware of their being staged for the audience of the pictorial, the latter of whom are mirrored by the viewers within.The urban crowds become modern through their mediated presence in a relation to the sense of realism as displayed in an American civil war painting.The mediating stage within the lithographic pictorial may be read as a metaphor of Chinese means of accommodating the impact of modernity in late nineteenth century.The ambivalent status of being in between watching and being watched indicates an embryonic collective experience of theatrical modernity, differing from consciousness or subjectivity that is individuated, the latter of which was to be fabricated in the coming New Culture Movement 1919.
As a comparison, the emergence of Western modern art in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries experiences a strong sense of what W.J.T.Mitchell terms as “the purism of modernist abstraction,”which is a strong sense of the “negation of the beholder’s presence”(Mitchell 2006:44).Rather than cleansing the presence of viewers and their beholding experience, the Dianshizhai embraces them, and thus presents layers of theatrically mediated crowds.Spectators and viewing of this kind appear in almost every picture of the Dianshizhai[44].Bao Weihong argues that the collective viewing experience through a mediating device seems to “parallel the rather recent technological mediation of vision and experience that constitute public readership or spectatorship”(Bao 2005:444) and she locates the exhibition of early Western cinema in China as thriving on a pictorial print culture[45].Following this argument, this essay argues that the visual activities of urban culture reflect the existence of substantial urban crowds, and their spectral access to visual culture is self-reflexively represented in the theatrical experience located in between the visual and the print.The visual literacy of the crowds and their consumptive activities of staging and viewing are less than apparent to be traceable.Bao Tianxiao, who was to become a writer, offers a portal to examine this trace of visual consumption of modernity through literary writing.Our knowledge of his experience is made possible through his ability to write as a novelist.In other words, the access to a history of the cross-fertilized inter-media immersion is mediated through a modern Chinese literary writing.Bao’s autobiographical writing embraces individuated literary subjectivity, and this is suggested by its title—Memoirs of Kushiro Studio, which indicates a domesticated and interiorized memory.Many members of the chaotic crowds may not be able to perform what this literacy institution requires, and this makes it difficult to capture this spectral inter-media state of immersion.In this sense, the pictorial Dianshizhai is one of the sites where trace of spectral crowds of this kind becomes locatable.
Laikwan Pang reads the Shenbao piece on the Qiyuan event along with another report found in the Youxibao(Newspaper of Leisures) in 1897, in which a first-time moviegoer elaborately describes a film show that he saw in Qiyuan, and details his feelings of shock and amusement after watching the actuality films.Widely considered to be the first documentation of the earliest film viewing in China[46], the essay begins:
近有美国电光影戏，制同影灯而奇妙幻化皆出人意料之外者。昨夕雨后新凉，偕友人忘奇园观焉。座客既集，停灯开演，旋见现一影，两西女作跳舞状，黄发蓬蓬，憨态可掬。又一影，两西人作角抵戏……
There was an electric light shadow-play from the United States, with magical effects beyond anyone’s expectations.Yesterday evening was breezy.After the rain, some friends and I went to the Qiyuan to watch the show.When all the viewers had been seated, the lights were turned off.All of a sudden we saw an image of two Western women dancing.Their hairs were yellow, and their manners were cute and lovely.Then, it was followed by anther image, in which two Westerners seemed to be playing acrobatics ....[47]
Stylistically, it seems that both this writer and the reporter of the American civil war painting viewing event were prepared to confront the fantastic images.Pang notices that “the ritual of traveling through a dark passage had the effect of separating cinematic or painting spectacles from everyday life,”and “the passages helped them to rationalize the alternative reality presented in the theatrical space”(Pang 2007:177).Through this ritual of travelling, the American new media of actuality film is accommodated to its Chinese audience, for whom the American acrobatics is comparable to Chinese Jiaodixi.Both this Youxibao writer and the Shenbao reporter went to the same Qiyuan, which, as “part of an elaborate culture of ‘watching’”(179), housed motion pictures, the American Civil War painting, and probably many exciting horse races popular then in Shanghai.This highly kinetic viewing environment is “part of the new entertainment culture,”and “their [visitors’] ability to move in and out of the spectacles should be understood as a manifestation of their pride in their newly acquired modern identity and as an upper-middle-class privilege”(181).The ability of literary writing and publishing in newspapers like Youxibao and Shenbao to disseminate this knowledge of their viewing experience is correlated with this burgeoning upper-middle-class modern urban culture.In other words, that they went through “ritual of traveling through a dark passage”into “the alternative reality presented in the theatrical space”is performed through their privilege of being able to enjoy the institution of literacy.It becomes possible by the means of the reflexive effect of acts of writing coming after the visual experience.In both the Youxibao writing and the Shenbao report, a passage of travelling is clearly drawn before the viewing, and this is the style of traditional literati travelogue, which shows how Western new media such as the actuality film is accommodated into the Chinese institution of literacy.Their social and class status is also suggested by the cultural capital of the Qiyuan that they visited.In contrast, the lithographic representation of the same Qiyuan experience in the Dianshizhai is without any foreplay of travelling or disillusionment.In the lithographical pictorial, crowds rather than literary individuals reflect themselves spectrally through an inter-media unconscious.They act and react spontaneously, naturally, but not without mediation.They have a spectral existence in and without media representations in late nineteenth-century Shanghai.It is an amorphous form of collective spectatorship as reflected inter-medially.
The regime of visuality in the Dianshizhai case is of inter-media immersive absorption and theatricality, and its difference from writing brings significant light upon the perceptual difference between word and image.Let’s take another look at the 1896 Shenbao report.The Qiyuan, located west of the Muddy Town Bridge on Grand Avenue in the British Concession(“英大马路泥城桥西首有奇园焉”), was a temporary lodge built by Japanese(“日人之好事者”) expressly to show this painting.In the second part of the Shenbao reportage one finds its author sentimentalizing upon his past experience of the civil war painting, which is not mentioned at all in the verbal inscription of the lithographic pictorial:Six years ago, when China and Japan were in peaceful relations with each other, he saw this Civil War painting in a Tokyo Bodhisattva temple(“东京浅草观音寺之畔”), with three of his Chinese friends—two as Qing Dynasty officials, one as scholar—and three of his Japanese friends.One of the Qing officials died in the war, one of the Japanese died of illness, and the rest of them either lost contact with each other, or could do nothing about the deteriorating political tension between the two nations.Thus,
偶观斯画，益不禁枨触于怀已。至于画之新奇，则海上人诚见所未见，风清日丽，盍往观乎？
Accidentally seeing this painting again, I cannot help feeling sentimental.As to the novelty of the painting, it is surely something people in Shanghai had no chance to see yet.When weather is nice, why not go and see it?
A personal visual experience is connected with the geopolitical relations and the the War of Jiawu.This passage relating the personal with the political is reported only in the newspaper Shenbao in classical Chinese, and its accessibility requires considerable literary education.This is not presented in the Dianshizhai pictorial, the “reading”of which demands neither any substantial literary education nor any sense of enlightened subjectivity that goes with it.The sense of political education and enlightenment may be well beyond the understanding of Bao Tianxiao in his 12 or 13, who paid for the Dianshizhai his pocket money originally for snacks.The Shenbao was established in 1872, and here was its original ideal audience:
求其纪述当今时事，文则质而不俚，事则简而能详，上而学士大夫，下及农工商贾，皆能通晓者，则莫如新闻纸之善矣。
Its purpose is to record contemporary events.Its language style should be plain but not colloquial, the events in it should be simple and with details.There is nothing better than newspapers, which is approachable not merely to literati and officials, but also to every walk of life[48].
Unfortunately, this was not fully realized and part of the actual audience of the newspaper was probably the sentimentalized gentry class[49].The sentimentalized political knowledge that the Shenbao reportage contains may have been entirely incomprehensible to many members of the urban crowds audience of the pictorial, many of whom were refugees from inter-land wars and famines without any chances of trained literacy.These crowds of refugees probably would not have the privilege to initiate the Gongche Shangshu movement upon the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895—in the aftermath of the the War of Jiawu—as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao did.In the late nineteenth century, classical Chinese writing reached its limit to make a populist enlightenment for the salvation of the nation and experience of modernity.Historian Zhang Pengyuan estimates the per-copy readership of some late Qing periodicals at ten to twenty persons.[50]
In the case of a pictorial like the Dianshizhai, the per-copy readership could be wider.An advertisement on July 1886, 《画报招登告白启》(“Huabao zhaodeng gaobai qi”) [“Public Notice of Inviting Publications for the Pictorial”], from the pictorial makes the point very clear:
今又承各巨商切属踵行，谓：“天下容有不能读日报之人，天下无有不喜阅画报之人。近今告白借图以传，日报已有行之者，画报专精艺事，行之必有大效。”
As told by all important merchants:‘There might be people who don’t read newspapers, but people who dislike the pictorials don’t exist.Recently public notice is disseminated through help from pictures.There are also daily newspapers with pictures.Thus it is predictable that pictorial newspapers, well versed in arts and literature, would be very efficient to that effect.’
The editorial “On How the Pictorial Can Enlighten,”from the Shenbao August 29, 1895, three years previous to the last issue of its Dianshizhai, writes similarly:
上海自通商以后，取效西法，日刊日报出售，欲使天下之人咸知世务，法至善也。然中国识字者少，不识字者多，安能人人尽阅报章，亦何能人人尽知报中之事？于是创设画报，月出数册。
Since its opening as a trading port, Shanghai learned from theWest.The publishing of the newspaper is to enlighten people with the knowledge of the world.However, in China there are more illiterates than literates, and how can we let everyone read newspapers so as to know what is reported?For this purpose, we publish the pictorial at the base of several volumes monthly.
The rhetoric of enlightenment of modernity sounds not far from the correlation of the personal and the political in the Shenbao piece on the Qiyuan visual event.Both are communicated through the medium of writing.It comes very close to the pedagogy and enlightenment function attributed to the literary fiction by Liang Qichao in 1902 in his 《论小说与群治之关系》(“Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi”) [“On the Relation between Fiction and the Government of the People”]:
欲新一国之民，不可不先新一国之小说。故欲新道德，必新小说；欲新宗教，必新小说；欲新政治，必新小说；欲新风俗，必新小说；欲新学艺，必新小说；乃至欲新人心，欲新人格，必新小说。何以故？小说有不可思议之力支配人道故。
In order for a nation of people to become modernized, that nation’s fiction should be modernized first.Thus, to modernize morals, modernize fiction first; to modernize religion, modernize fiction first; to modernize politics, modernize fiction first; to modernize customs, modernize fiction first; to modernize learning and workmanship, modernize fiction first; to modernize people’s heart, to modernize people’s character, modernize fiction first.How so?Fictions can have amazing power over people.
Liang’s essay was published on the first issue of 《新小说》(Xin xiaoshuo) [New Fiction] in November 1902.The difference lies in their respective technological approaches.One proposes to use the pictorial newspaper evoking visual literacy, and another the literary print fiction for political enlightenment.Liang pinpointed four basic “powers”of fiction:its power to “incense”(熏), to “immerse”(浸), to “goad”(刺), and to “uplift”(提) the reader.For Liang, the power of uplifting the reader to a higher plane of the hero and to persuade him to emulate the hero’s exemplary behavior is of the greatest value of fiction writing to reform a whole nation’s morality, religion, politics, customs, arts, and personhood[51].As early as in his 1898《译印政治小说序》(“Yiyin zhengzhi xiaoshuo xu”) [“Preface to the Published Series of Translations of Political Fiction”], Liang attributes the political progress made in various modern nations to the dissemination of the political novel:
彼美、英、德、法、奥、意、日各国政界之日进，则政治小说为功最高焉。
For the increasing social progress one observes in the political works of the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Austria, Italy and Japan, political fictions have been its primary driving force[52].
Liang managed to elevate fiction to “a position of unprecedented intellectual respectability in China”(Lee and Nathan 379-380) because of its identitarian function in the reformation of a dynasty into a modern nation-state.It is an individualistic as well as societal campaign through the means of the literary print.The spectrality of crowds as reflected inter-medially in the lithographic pictorial is lost ever since.Crowds become the object of political education and mobilization that are realized through the modern technology of writing and reading.They are targets of political enlightenment and are turned into potential citizens and members of a modern nation-state in the making.The kind of qun in Liang’s scenario might be able to find its origin in Kang Youwei’s political conviction of “以群为体，以变为用”[“Take qun as form, and change as essence”].However, when Liang developed his theory of “新民”[“New People”] in 1902—the same year he wrote this “On the Relation between the Novel and the Government of the People,”his concept of qun began to turn radically from Kang’s harmonious picture of a dynastic Tianxia people into an idealized political order between individuals and communities under the category of a modern nation-state[53].Indeed, critics argue that for Liang of this period, qunzhi [governance of crowds] and xinminshuo [theories on new people] are exchangeable terms[54].The political significance of this qun lies in its connection with modern nation-state consciousness.As early as in his 1897《说群自序》(“Shuo qun zixu”) [“Preface to Discussions on Qun by Oneself”], Liang already attempted to make this point clear:
善治国者，知君之与民，同为一群之中之一人，因以知夫一群之中所以然之理。所常行之事，使其群和而不离，萃而不涣，夫是之谓群术。
The best governing is to know both king and common person are equal members of a qun, and thus to know how a qun is what it is.What should be done is to harmonize rather than disintegrate a qun, to gather rather than disassemble a qun.This is called the art of governing qun[55].
This rhetoric of enlightenment seems necessarily to require a gendered—particularly male—stance of literacy, which entails a denigration of visuality.Liang’s argument on the pedagogical function of fiction in the Enlightenment project can be seen as early as in Liang’s 《变法通义》(“Bianfa tongyi”) [“The General Meaning of Reform”] published before 1898 in《时务报》(Shiwubao) [Newspapers of Current Affairs], and might be attributed both to Kang Youwei’s influence in the latter’s《日本书目志》(Riben shumu zhi) [A Catalogue of Japanese Books] and to Liang’s exposure to Meiji Japanese literature and culture, especially the political novel of 《佳人奇遇》(Jiaren qiyu) [Strange Encounters with Beautiful Women][56].Liang’s “On the Relation between Fiction and the Government of the People”was published in the initial issue of The New Fiction(Xin xiaoshuo), a periodical established by him in Yokohama, Japan.The title of the journal was taken from its namesake of two Japanese journals respectively founded in 1889 and 1896.There is an explicit Japanese influence[57].Xin Xiaoshuo was one of the journals which published Liang’s articles on national Enlightenment to propagate his thoughts to the whole nation:
自是启超复专以宣传为业，为《新民丛报》《新小说》等诸杂志，畅其旨义，国人竞喜读之；清廷虽严禁，不能遏；每一册出，内地翻刻本辄十数。二十年来学子之思想，颇蒙其影响。
Since then [around 1900] Qichao takes political propaganda as his mission, has written for such periodicals as Xinmin Series Newspaper and The New Fiction to make fully clear of his political thoughts.Fellow countrymen loved reading them.Though the Qing court ordered to ban their dissemination, people still managed to obtain them.Once an issue was published, it would be reprinted a dozen times in the inter-land.For the last two decades, the thoughts of young people and students werestrongly influenced by these essays[58].
Liang’s move to elevate the position of fiction above other genres of literature, including traditional classics and poetry, came along with a political reality in which an emergent kind of crowds and individuals were moving to the center of history, particularly to “young people and students.”They were to be staged at the center of the New Culture Movement in the 1910s[59].For Liang, the function of literary fiction is political, national, and nothing but closely related to a sort of radical cultural picture of the Chinese nation-state imaginary[60].
Between 1903 and 1905, the Xin xiaoshuo journal published a serialized novel titled The Strange State of the World Witnessed over Twenty Years by Wu Yanren.In chapter twenty-two of the novel, the protagonist—the narrator “I”—comes back from outside:
只见我姊姊拿着一本书看，我走近看时，却画的是画，翻过书面一看，始知是《点石斋画报》。便问哪里来的。姊姊道：“刚才一个小孩拿来卖的，还有两张报纸呢。”说罢，递了报纸给我。我便拿了报纸，到我自己的卧房里去看。
Seeing my sister holding a book and reading, I walked to find what it was about.It turned out to be a pictorial.I turned it over, and came to know that it was The Dianshizhai pictorial.I asked how she obtained, and my sister answered:‘a moment ago a child came over to sell it, and there are two other newspapers there.’Right away she gave me the newspapers.I went away with them to my bedroom, reading.(Wu 216)
The novel does not bother to comment upon the pictorial, but leaving it to the sister, while the male protagonist takes with him the verbal newspapers.This seemingly insignificant detail makes a subtle but important distinction between pictorial newspaper and verbal newspaper, pictures and words, and their distinctively gendered consumptions.Visual literacy is attributed to be that of feminine consumption, whereas verbal literacy taken as masculine and enlightening.In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the literacy rate “was 1 percent—more or less—of China’s population … the audience still consisted of the highly literate minority … the ‘masses’ were not being reached by modern media”(Lee and Nathan 373)[61].Although at the turn of the twentieth century Shanghai, the modern reader figure is addressed in straightforward fashion in newspapers and guidebooks, [62] and it might be historically true that “by the 1890s women at a certain level of Shanghai society—and at least some men at every level—could and did read newspapers, tanci(narratives that consisted of both prose and verse portions), and novels”(Des Forges 10), it could be hypothetically true that a gender-based hierarchy of literacy was highly recognizable.In this novel the sister reading pictorials probably goes under the category of the illiterate “masses”of this historical period.The ability and probably the willingness to read, as manifested in this protagonist of Wu Jianren’s novel, belonged to the elite gendered as male, while the visual was accessible by the mass, like this protagonist’s sister.Another example of this is from Hu Shi, when he was in Anhui province 1891—1903 before he went to Shanghai:
至于学图画，更是不可能的事。我常常用竹纸蒙在小说书的石印绘像上，摹画书上的英雄美人。有一天，被先生看见了，挨了一顿大骂，抽屉里的图画都被搜出撕毁了。于是我又失掉了学做画家的机会。
When it came to learn to paint, it became more unlikely.I often put bamboo paper onto lithographic pictorial pictures of fiction books, and learned to mimic beauties and heroes from the books.One day, this was found out by the master, and I was given a great lesson.The picture books hidden in drawers were all taken out and torn into pieces.Then, I lost my chance to become a painter[63].
The spectrality of crowds as primarily existent in visual media and mediation, and its historical loss, thus present a gendered history of visuality and textuality.