Photography in China: Science, Commerce and Communication (Routledge History of Photography) [1 ed.] 1350108049, 9781350108042

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Photography in China

Emphasizing the medium’s reception among several Chinese constituencies, this book explores photography’s impact within new discourses on science, as well as its effects in social life, visual modernity and the media during China’s transition from imperial to republican government. General knowledge and academic teaching of early modern Chinese visual culture stops short of fitting photography into the larger context of visual practices and theories. This study redraws the boundaries by making photography the central concern within changing priorities of visual representation and its functions during a period of major cultural and political change. No other study draws on such intimate familiarity with the early glamour of photography as science, commerce and communication in the various local conditions of China’s cities and towns. Joining a body of critical writing that examines photography’s histories outside the familiar confines of the West, this book looks beyond the tourist and imperialist gazes of photographeradventurers from the Western powers and Japan. It defines instead the Chinese priorities of photographic vision that are abundantly evident in surviving photographs as well as in records as various as technical manuals and personal inscriptions. Local practices and local knowledge are the keys to explain the highly successful indigenization of a medium as globalizing as photography with reference to Chinese society’s own terms and practices. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art and visual culture, the history of photography and Asian art. Oliver Moore is Professor of Chinese language and culture at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. His research focuses on early and modern art history in China.

Routledge History of Photography

This series publishes research monographs and edited collections focusing on the history and theory of photography. These original, scholarly books may take an art historical, visual studies, or material studies approach. Jeff Wall and the Concept of the Picture Naomi Merritt The Materiality of Exhibition Photography in the Modernist Era Form, Content, Consequence Laurie Taylor The Image of Environmental Harm in American Social Documentary Photography Chris Balaschak Hybrid Photography Intermedial Practice in Science and Humanities Edited by Sara Hillnhuetter, Stefanie Klamm and Friedrich Tietjen The Selfie, Temporality, and Contemporary Photography Claire Raymond Photography in China Science, Commerce and Communication Oliver Moore Visual Culture Approaches to the Selfie Edited by Derek Conrad Murray Italian Neorealist Photography Its Legacy and Aftermath Antonella Russo

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-History-of-Photography/book-series/RHOP

Photography in China Science, Commerce and Communication

Oliver Moore



Cover image: Unknown studio, family group with earlier photograph featuring the father during childhood, c. 1950. Albumen silver print on paper, 42.5 × 50 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou. First published 2022 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Oliver Moore The right of Oliver Moore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-350–10804-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032–07899-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003–08634-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003086345 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Notice to reader Introduction

vi xiii xvi 1

PART 1

Science 17 1 Methods of invention

19

2 Terms of description

52

PART 2

Commerce 85 3 Sites of production 4 Interiors of the imagination

87 119

PART 3

Communication 149 5 Categories of content

151

6 Circuits of communication

190

Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6 Select glossary of names, titles and terms List of cited works Index

223 241 255 281

List of figures

0.1  Unknown photographer, Zhong Ziyuan (1861–1945) leading a photography demonstration en route to the World Fair, St Louis, 1904. Gelatin silver print on paper, 19 x 24 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library2 0.2  Advertisement by the photo- and lithographic supplies firm Asanuma Shōkai, Tokyo. From Shashin shimpō, 37 (1906). H 26 cm. Collection of National Diet Library, Tokyo 7 1.1  Eugène Jules Itier (1802–1877), Ma’ge (Ma Kok), Macao, October 1844. ­Daguerreotype, 15 x 10 cm. Courtesy of Musée français de la photographie, Bièvres 22 1.2  William Prinsep (1794–1874), Ma’ge (Ma Kok), Macao, c. 1839. Oil on canvas, 51 x 76 cm. Courtesy of HSBC Holdings plc 23 1.3  Hua Guan, portrait of Xue Chengji, 1799.  Ink on paper, 126.5  x 46.5  cm (image). Courtesy of Nanjing Museum 25 1.4  Pu Gua (Pu-Quà), drawing, c. 1790, engraved by John Dadley (1767–1817), published as “Old Man Polishing Crystals”. From George Mason, The Costume of China, Illustrated by Sixty Engravings, etc., London, 1800 26 1.5  Ren Xiong (1820–1857), Xu Zhi polishing a mirror. Album leaf, ink on paper, 29 x 34 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Museum 27 1.6  Zou Boqi (1819–1869), allegedly a self-portrait, c. 1860.  Direct negative on glass (viewed in reverse), 11.5  x 8 cm. Courtesy of Guangzhou City Museum 28 1.7  Unknown photographer, Zou Boqi taking a sun reading. Direct negative on glass (viewed in reverse), 12 x 15 cm. Courtesy of Guangzhou City Museum 29 1.8  Attributed to Horie Kuwajirō (1831–1866), portrait of Ueno Hikoma (1838–1904), 1861.  Direct negative in collodion on glass (viewed in reverse), 18 x 13.9  cm. Courtesy of College of Art, Nihon University, Tokyo 30 1.9  Yang Shangwen (1807–1856), drawing of light rays passing through a pinhole, provided in Yang’s publication of Zheng Fuguang, Rash opinions on observing with lenses (Jingjing lingchi), 1848 34 1.10  Unknown artist, diagrams of the human eye and camera reception. From John Dudgeon, The miracle of cast images (Tuoying qiguan), Beijing, 1872.  Collection of Victoria & Albert Museum (formerly

List of figures  vii coll. National Media Museum, Bradford; formerly coll. Royal Photographic Society). 38 1.11  Page from John Fryer, “Photographic devices” (“Zhaoxiang qi”), published in Science Compendium (Gezhi huibian), Shanghai, 1891. Collection of C.V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley 41 1.12  One of a series of advertisements by the Chinese Western Apothecary, inserted in Dianshizhai huabao, 324 (18 January 1893). Collection of British Library 42 1.13  Front page of supplement to mark the centenary of the public announcement of the daguerreotype in 1839, Liangyou, 150 (January 1940) 47 2.1  Scenes entitled “Professional portraiture: Timing an exposure and drawing a portrait”, published in 1909 in the Shanghai newspaper Tuhua ribao, 134 53 2.2 Client’s silhouette, presented after visiting Wan Laiming Studio, Shanghai, c. 1940. Paper cut, 16 x 8.3 cm. Private collection 59 2.3 Yu Suk, view of an artist inscribed “Second brother drawing the mountain’s appearance, giyu, 7/26 [12 September 1849]”. Ink on paper, mounted with other scenes on scroll, H 24 cm. Courtesy of National Museum of Korea, Seoul 61 2.4 Unknown artist, Camera (shashinkyō), in series of images depicting Commodore Perry’s arrival at Yokohama on 13 March 1854, ink on paper, mounted on eight-fold screen Perii torai ezu hari mazebyōbu, H 28 cm. Courtesy of Historiographical Institute, Tokyo University 62 2.5  Sanxing Studio, Shanghai, portrait of Dai Heng, 1874. Albumen silver print on paper. From Lao zhaopian, 12 (1999). Courtesy of Lao zhaopian 65 2.6  Unknown photographer, drawing shop in Yuanmenqiao, Yangzhou, 1930s. Unknown collection. From Wang Hong, Lao Yangzhou: yanhua mingyue, Nanjing, 2001 66 2.7 Ni Tian, portrait of Wu Changshuo (1844–1927), 1909. Ink on paper, 120 x 45.5 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Museum 67 2.8 Unknown studio, portrait of Wu Changshuo (1844–1927), 1903, inscribed by Wu Changshuo in 1909. Unknown collection. From He Haotian, Wu Changshuo shuhua ji, Taipei, 1985 68 2.9 Liang Shitai, portrait of Li Hongzhang, 1879. Albumen silver print on paper, 27 x 21 cm. Courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2006.R.1.4) 69 2 .10 Liang Shitai, portrait of Prince Chun, 1886. Albumen silver print on paper, 31 x 25.1 cm (album opening). Courtesy of Library of Congress, Washington, DC (LC-USZ62–132081) 70 2 .11 Zou Boqi’s portrait in Ye Gongchuo, Portraits and biographies of Qing scholars (Qingdai xuezhe xiangzhuan), 1928 and 1953. From Ye Gongchuo, Qingdai xuezhe xiangzhuan heji, Shanghai, 1989 71 2 .12 Lithographic reproductions of two rubbings, one woodcut and one photograph. From Guo Moruo, Illustrated series of bronze

viii  List of figures

2 .13 3.1 3.2

3.3

3.4

3.5 3.6

3.7 3.8 3.9

3.10

3.11 3.12

epigraphy from the two Zhou eras (Liang Zhou jinwenci daxi tulu), Tokyo, 1935 75 Zhou Muqiao (1868–1923), depiction of visiting a fortune teller, lithograph print, published in Feiyingge jishi huace, 15 (27 December 1894 [jiawu 12/1]) 81 Unknown photographer, Lihua (Lai Wah) studio, Nanjing Road, Shanghai, c. 1888. Albumen silver print on paper, 26.5 x 20 cm. Courtesy of Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam 88 Baoji studio announcement of its services in Shanghai since 1888, published in commemorative supplement for the Shanghai Shibao newspaper’s relocation. From Shibaoguan xinwu luocheng jiniankan, Shanghai, 1912 92 Unknown photographer, Xianzhen lou, Wuchang, c. 1930. The Aolüe tower (right), built in 1908, replaced the Yellow Crane Pavilion (Huanghe lou), burned down in 1884. Gelatin silver print on paper, 28 x 12 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library 94 Unknown photographer, Sanxing studio, Shanghai, c. 1895. Visible in the foreground is one side of Gongtai studio. Unknown collection. From Chen Shen and Xu Xijing, Zhongguo sheying yishu shi, Beijing, 2011 98 Sanxing studio, Shanghai, unknown subjects, c. 1900. Albumen silver print on paper, 15.5 x 10.5 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou 99 Western branch of Erwu studio, Nantong. From Nantong Erwu studio, Nantong Scenes of Industry, Education and Charitable Works (Nantong shiye jiaoyu cishan fengjing zhaoxiangce), Nantong, 1923. Collection of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Courtesy of Société de Géographie, Paris 101 Unknown photographer, Sanmin studio, Shanghai, 1932 or later. Gelatin silver print on paper, 28 x 12 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library 102 The “glass house” illustrated in John Dudgeon, Tuoying qiguan, Beijing, 1873. Collection of V&A Museum, London, formerly collection of Royal Photographic Society 106 Unknown photographer, Qiaozhen studio, Guangzhou, dated 22 May 1911. Gelatin silver print on paper, 10 x 6 cm. Courtesy of Billie Love Historical Collection and Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol 106 Unknown photographer, Baofeng studio, located in a former lodging house at Shuangtasi (Qingshousi), c. 1900. The towers were demolished during Beijing’s redevelopment in 1954. Unknown collection. From Chen Shen, “Jiu Beijing zhaoxiangye de xingshuai”, Renxiang sheying, 4 (1985) 108 Scenes at Zhangyuan, Shanghai, published in the Shanghai newspaper Minhu ribao tuhua, 17 June 1909 [jiyou 4/30] 111 Studio located in Zhangyuan, Shanghai, unknown subject, c. 1900. Gelatin silver print on paper, 15 x 10.5 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou 112

List of figures  ix 3.13 Huafang Baoji studio, Shanghai. Farewell gathering organized at Yuyuan by Chinese and Japanese staff of the Commercial Press ahead of the latter’s return to Japan in 1914. Gelatin silver print on paper, 20 x 14 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library 113 4.1 Unknown artist, “At the photography studio famous flowers preserve their images”, woodcut illustration from Illustrated explanations of Shanghai sites (Shenjiang mingsheng tushuo), Shanghai, 1884. Courtesy of National Library of Australia. London Missionary Society collection (NLA.obj-56642620) 119 4.2 Wu Youru, “Seeing you I love you even more”, from the series Images of one hundred Shanghai beauties (Haishang baiyan tu), 1890–1893, lithographic reproduction from Wu Youru huabao, Shanghai, 1909. Collection of Leiden University Library 125 4.3 Unknown photographer, interior of Yaohua studio, from Max Nössler, Shanghai, Shanghai, 1907. Courtesy of Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol 127 4.4 Ruiji studio, Suzhou, unknown subject. Gelatin silver print on paper with pigment tints, 20.5 x 12.5 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou 129 4.5 Yaohua studio, Shanghai, Ziliang, inscribed and posted to a friend on 5 D ­ ecember 1902. Gelatin silver print on paper, 23 x 18 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou 135 4.6 Unknown photographer, spectators at one of the Shanghai–Wusong railway’s inaugural train runs, 1876. Unknown collection. Courtesy of Institut de Recherches Asiatiques, Aix-Marseille Université, © Virtual Cities Project 137 4.7 Artistic Photographer, unknown location, unknown subject, c. 1910. Gelatin silver print on paper, 12 x 8 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou 139 4.8 Unknown photographer, Yuan Shikai (left) during his recuperation in 1908 at his estate near Anyang (Zhangde), Henan province. Gelatin silver print on paper, 18 x 14 cm. The image was published in Dongfang zazhi, 8.4 (1911). Courtesy of Shanghai Library 142 4.9 Studio of René Matton, Proven, Western Flanders, Belgium, Song Xiufeng and the son of the photographer, 1917. Gelatin silver print on paper, 24 x 15 cm. Courtesy of In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres 144 4.10 Yijilu studio, Huzhou, unknown subjects, 1919. Gelatin silver print on paper, 18.5 x 23 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou 145 4.11 Unknown studio, unknown subjects with a backdrop of the Wuhan bridge (completed in 1957). Unknown collection. From Jin Yongquan, Hejiahuan: 20 shiji 50–80 niandai de minjian xiangpian, Beijing, 2012 146 5.1 Scene entitled “True or False?”, based on a telegraph of 22 November 1909 (jiyou 10/10) reporting Shenyang (Fengtian) school students cutting their queues, published in the Shanghai newspaper Tuhua ribao, 104 154 5.2 Zhizhen studio, Shanghai, Xuan Jiaou, 1910.  Gelatin silver print on paper, 13 x 9 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou 155

x  List of figures 5.3 Lifu studio, Beijing, Wang Yian, 1912.  Gelatin silver print on paper. From Lao zhaopian, 12 (1999). Courtesy of Lao zhaopian 156 5.4 Unknown photographer, Qixian, Qu Yuanzhen, c. 1910.  Gelatin silver print on paper. From Cao Yu, Qixian lao zhaopian, Taiyuan, 2004 157 5.5 Unknown photographer, unknown subject, 1930s. Gelatin silver print on p ­ aper. From Lao zhaopian, 25 (2002). Courtesy of Lao zhaopian 158 5.6 Baoji studio, Shanghai, unknown subjects, c. 1910. Gelatin silver print on paper, 16.5  x 10.5  cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou 159 5.7 Taifang studio, Beijing, Mei Lanfang (1894–1962) in the role of Yuji, first performed 1922.  Gelatin silver print on paper with pigment tints, 14 x 20 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library 160 5.8 Weixin studio, Shanghai, unknown subjects, 1920s. Gelatin silver print on paper with pigment tints, 20 x 13.5 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou 161 5.9 Unknown photographer, Hu Hensheng performing a female role in modern theatre, Shanghai, c. 1913.  Gelatin silver print on paper, 9 x 12 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library 163 5.10 Donghua studio, Beijing, Puyi, c. 1917.  Gelatin silver print on paper with pigment tints, 26.2  x 20.8  cm. Courtesy Palace Museum, Beijing 165 5.11 Pinfang studio, Shanghai, unknown subject, c. 1920. Gelatin silver print on paper, 9.2  x 13.5  cm (image). Private collection 165 5.12 Artistic Photographer, unknown location, unknown subject, c. 1910. Gelatin silver print on paper, 12 x 8 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou 166 5.13 Taiping studio, Taipei, Zeng Tongwu, the studio owner, photographed by himself. Gelatin silver print on paper, 13.5  x 9.2  cm. Collection of Zeng Bowen. Courtesy of National Taiwan University 167 5.14 Illustration in Yashuang’s essay “Photographic methods for transforming the individual”, published in Kodak Magazine (Keda zazhi), 4.3  (1933) 171 5.15 Francis Stafford, Photoengraving Department, Commercial Press, Shanghai, c. 1915. Gelatin silver print on paper, 14.9  x 22 cm. Francis E. Stafford photographs, Hoover Institution Library & Archives, © Stanford University 172 5.16 View of Mingxing Films’ main office, Shanghai, 1920s. Gelatin silver print on paper, 30 x 14 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library 173 5.17 Tongsheng studio, Beijing branch, Guang’anmen Station, Beijing, terminus of the Beijing–Zhangjiakou railway. Gelatin silver print on paper, 27 x 21 cm. Included in the album Images of works on the Beijing Zhangjiakou line (Jing Zhang lugong cuoying), 1909. Courtesy of Shanghai Library 175 5.18 Tongsheng studio, Beijing branch, train on gradient below Great Wall. Gelatin silver print on paper, 27 x 21 cm. Included in the

List of figures  xi

5.19

5.20 5.21 5.22

5.23

5.24

5.25 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7

album Images of works on the Beijing Zhangjiakou line (Jing Zhang lugong cuoying), 1909.  Courtesy of Shanghai Library 176 Tongsheng studio, Beijing branch, “Car for pigs”, truck marked with the railway’s Chinese name, its Western acronym (Peking Kalgan Railway), and the number 193, given also in a commercial shorthand for numbers. Gelatin silver print on paper, 27 x 21 cm. Included in the album Images of works on the Beijing Zhangjiakou line (Jing Zhang lugong cuoying), 1909.  Courtesy of Shanghai Library 177 Unknown photographer, Changjiang Bridge during construction, October, 1956. From Wuhan daqiao gongcheng ju, ed., The Wuhan Changjiang bridge (Wuhan Changjiang daqiao), Beijing, 1957 178 Detai (Tuck Tai) studio, panorama of Bund, 1898.  Gelatin silver print on paper, 222 x 20 cm. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 181 Huang Yanpei (1878–1965) or Lü Yishou, view of Tianmenkan, Anhui, photographed during a fact-finding expedition through the eastern Yangzi region, May 1914. Gelatin silver print on paper, 21 x 15 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library 182 Liu Bannong (1891–1934), West Lake, inscribed by the photographer, probably 1931. Gelatin silver print on paper, 43 x 16 cm. Shanyin Museum. Courtesy of China Photographers Association, Beijing 184 Lang Jingshan (1892–1995), Huangshan peaks and trees, dated 1936, with later inscription (1937) by Ma Gongyu (1890–1969). Gelatin silver print on paper. Unknown collection. Courtesy of China Photographers Association, Beijing 185 Unattributed, composite image of aeroplanes and Great Wall, Liangyou, 131 (November 1937) 186 Unknown photographer, unknown subject. Gelatin silver print on paper with paper mount, pigment tints, glass and wood frame, mirror mounted on reverse, 27.6 x 20.3 cm. Private collection 191 Ruiji Studio, Suzhou, unknown subjects. Gelatin silver print on paper with pigment additions, 20 x 15.5 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou 193 Shen Jiahe, Single body, double presence (Er wei yiti). From Huachang yingkan, 21 (June 1937) 194 Scene entitled “Visions of Shanghai society: The Courtesan grants control of her portrait to a client”, published in 1909 in the Shanghai newspaper Tuhua ribao, 138 195 Baoji Studio, portrait of Li Hongzhang. Gelatin silver print on paper, 16.5 x 10.5 cm. Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen— Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden (RV-A166-36) 197 Commemorative medal for presidential inauguration of Cao Kun, 1923. Enamel on copper alloy, D. 4.6 cm. Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen—Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden (7053-3) 199 Peng Ruilin (1904–1984), Passers-by in Tsugitaka Taroko National Park, Taiwan, late 1930s. Gold and lacquer print on wood, 29 x 21 cm. Courtesy of Peng Liangmin 204

xii  List of figures 6.8 Zhu Shouren, Selecting a view (Qujing). From Zhonghua sheying zazhi, 2 (1932) 209 6.9 Weng Shouyi, photograph taken during expedition to Ningbo and surroundings, 1948. Gelatin silver print on paper, 26 x 20 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou 210 6.10 Qin Tailai, Urban style (Dushi fengguang). From Huachang yingkan, 21 (June 1937) 211 6.11 Unattributed, Intoxicated Shanghai / Duhui de ciji. From Liangyou, 85 (February 1934) 213 6.12 Hu Boxiang (1896–1989), Returning by nightfall (Shicheng wangui). From Liangyou, 55 (March 1931) 215 6.13 Sha Fei (1912–1950), The Eight Route Army fighting on the ridges of the Great Wall (Balujun zhandou zai changchengling), 1942. Print obtained from original negative. Courtesy of China Photographers Association, Beijing 218

Acknowledgements

I wrote this book with the help, encouragement and generosity of colleagues, students and volunteers at Leiden University, Groningen University, Leiden’s Museum Volkenkunde, and the libraries of each. I thank Bart Barendregt, Lindsay Black, Leonard Blussé, Karwin Cheung, Maghiel van Crevel, Remy Cristini, Paul van Dongen, Matthi Forrer, Curtis Gayle, Anne Gerritsen, Marc Gilbert, Tjalling Halbertsma, Arash Hassanizadeh, Jay Huang, Wilt Idema, Jiang Wei, Alice de Jong, Anne Sytske Keijser, Daan Kok, Kuo Ya-Pei, Stefan Landsberger, Hanno Lecher, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Ethan Mark, Lewis Mayo, Jan De Meyer, Viren Murthy, Ngo Tak-Wing, Allard Olof, Kiri Paramore, Paramita Paul, Frank Pieke, Rosalien van der Poel, Marlies Rexwinkel, Piet Rombouts, Ans de Rooi, Fresco Samsin, Florian Schneider, Ivo Smits, Onno Visser, Wang Jue, Jeroen Wiedenhof, Paul Wijsman, Guita Winkel, Joyce Wu, Melanie Yap, Kitty Zijlmans, Erik Zürcher. I owe Leiden’s Hulsewé-Wazniewski Foundation for Research and Teaching in the Art of China my largest debt for enabling me to assemble the research group whose members Guo Hui and Francesca Dal Lago offered constant example and endless discoveries, for helping us to enliven the Leiden atmosphere with visitors who spun the web of contacts and obligations ever further, and for facilitating visits to China to conduct invariably one-sided conversations with those who explained infinitely more about our common interests than I could. The Foundation’s secretary Maghiel van Crevel never tired in his role as engineer for every plan’s success, and did not once abandon his defining optimism following cases of the opposite. Many whose help and support I acknowledge joined the seminars on visual images that Patsy Spyer and I convened for several years between Leiden’s faculties of Humanities and Social Sciences. Those highly improving events inspired parts of this book, as did the lasting results of Patsy and Mary Steedly’s achievement in supervising a thrilling conference on visual images at the School of Advanced Research, Santa Fe. My unforgettable six months as a guest at Kyoto University’s Institute for Research in Humanities, impeccably organized and focused by Tomiya Itaru, provided time to write and to explore: out of Japan’s museums and libraries always something new. I imposed unambiguously on first Lin Li-Chiang, and then Yang Zhigang and Yang Yi who hosted me at Taiwan Normal University and Fudan University, and pointed the way to new contacts, things and places. For opportunities to address lively and challenging audiences at their home institutions and elsewhere, I am extremely grateful for invitations from: Aglaia De Angeli and Emma Reisz to the School of History and Social Anthropology, Queen’s University, Belfast; Alain Arrault to the École française d’extrême orient, Paris; Michaela Bussotti to the École des hautes études en

xiv Acknowledgements sciences sociales, Paris; Antoine Gournay and Pierre-Yves Balut, who, besides organizing an université d’été in the amenable surroundings of the Loire, expanded it as a branch meeting for the 34th CIHA congress held in Beijing; Guo Hui on behalf of the China Artists Association and Jiangsu Provincial Government, Nanjing; Christian Henriot and Wen-Hsin Yeh to the École Normale Supérieure (Lettres et Sciences Humaines), Lyon; Margaret Hillenbrand to Wadham College, Oxford; Andrew Jones to the Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Miao Zhe to the Department of Art History & Museum Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou; Gael Newton and Luke Gartlan to the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; David Odo to the Harvard Art Museums; Michael Radich to the Centre for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University; Frances Terpak and Jeffrey Cody to the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Wang Cheng-Hua to the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei. I have caused repeated disruptions for colleagues in museums, libraries and archives: Matthias Arnold, Heidelberg University; Sylvie Aubenas, Aurore Damry and Olivier Loiseaux, Bibliothèque nationale de France; Robert Bickers and Jamie Carstairs, Chinese Maritime Customs Project, Bristol University; Chen Guojia, Liang Ying, Xu Quansheng and Zhang Wei, Shanghai Library; Chen Shen, Liang Kewei, China Photographers Association, Beijing; Cheng Cunjie, Guangzhou City Museum; Siobhan Davis, Ruth Kitchin, Brian Liddy, National Media Museum, Bradford; Gu Yinhai, Lu Xun Memorial Hall, Shanghai; Anneke Groeneveld, Museum voor Volkenkunde, Rotterdam; Guy Hannaford, United Kingdom Hydrographic Office Archives, Taunton; Jimbo Kyoko and Kitadai Noriko, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Li Xiaoli, National Library of Australia; Isabelle Poujol, Photothèque, École française d’extrême orient; Deborah Rudolph and He Jianye, East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley; Shao Wenjing, Shanghai History Museum; Takamiya Mitsue, National Diet Library, Tokyo; Susan Whitfield, British Library; Yoshida Hiroko and Suzuki Ayoko, Library of the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University; Zhou Yanqun and Ling Lizhong, Shanghai Museum. I apologize to my valiant former students Wang Jingbo, Wang Wenxin, Zhang Biao and Zhang Hao whom I inveigled into making various indirect approaches to third parties. For many other acts of time-consuming help and much valuable advice I must thank: Stanley Abe, Julia Andrews, Roger Bowdler, Miriam Castorina, Andrea Cavazutti, Chan Hiu-Man, Chen Jie, Cheng Yü-Hang, Chou Fang-Mei, John Clark, Doris Croissant, Gail Feigenbaum, Imre Galambos, Gao Xiaokang, Kenneth Hammond, Michael Hitchcock, Eliza Ho, Hong Zaixin, Hou Shu-Tzy, Joshua Jiang, Joan Judge, Kamatani Takeshi, Jeroen de Kloet, Kogachi Ryuichi, Lai Yu-Chih, Liu Chiao-Mei, Liu Jianhua, Lo Shuk-Ying, Lu Hanchao, David McMullen, Marco Meccarelli, Julia Murray, Gil Pasternak, Chris Pinney, Pi Li, Chris Reed, Andrew Robinson, William Schaefer, Shen Kuiyi, Jan Stuart, Tani Akiyoshi, Jeremy Tanner, Francesca Tarocco, Régine Thiriez, Helen Wang, Wang Ya-Lun, Roger Ward, Stephen West, Caspar Wits, Xue Liyong, Katja Zelljadt, and Zheng Zu’an. Lisa Claypool read an early draft of the manuscript and talked me back from numerous foolish mistakes. Hsiao Yung-Sheng accompanied me over many miles into Miaoli county to meet the descendants of the Taiwan photographer Peng Ruilin; Li Hao escorted me to the China Printing Museum in Qingpu and opened the doors to objects that demand far more attention; Ma Meng-Ching devoted many hours to showing me rarely extracted photographs in the archives of the National Palace Museum, Taipei; in Jinan, Suzhou,

Acknowledgements  xv Beijing, and Hangzhou, Feng Keli, Tan Jintu, Tong Bingxue and Xu Zhongmin talked to me at embarrassing length on the subject of their own and others’ collections of photographs and that strangely named category “ephemera”; Lynn Pan accompanied me to Pudong to meet Chun Yuet-Bun, son of the photographer Qin Tailai; Xu Jianing travelled from far outside Beijing to meet me and discuss photographs on glass; Xu Jian guided us to Zou Boqi’s ancestral village in Nanhai and interpreted; in Shanghai, following merely one phone call, Zhao Zhenxin sent me the scans from his collection of early photography literature; in Taiyuan, Shi Honglei, Yi Bao and Liu Chengxu did everything possible to contact the descendants of the Shanxi banker Qu Yuanzhen; Tobias Kegler photographed items from the Tan Jintu Archive in extremely hot weather; Laura D’Haese dressed the glossary during the Netherlands’ first pandemic lockdown. All of this unsettles any certainty that books need to be written in ivory towers. Despite my regular tests of everyone’s patience, publication advanced through the encouragement of Nick Bellorini, Alex Highfield and Louise Baird-Smitth at Bloomsbury Publications and the unflagging enthusiasm of Louise Armstrong at Routledge to see everything to completion. Copy editor Laura Kopp’s dedication would have delivered untangled perfection, were it not for everything that is solely the author’s responsibility. The generous support of De Gijselaar-Hintzenfonds, Amsterdam, has graced the book with reproductions in colour. Whatever truths photography offers, they fade beside the constant guidance of my wife Anna and my children Phineas, Stella and Hannes. I owe most to their forbearance following the many phases of imposture that I have cast upon family life. To them, to my mother Jennifer, and to the memory of my father Timothy, I dedicate this book.

Notice to reader

A few words on established and adjusted conventions. Romanized spelling of Chinese words follows the Pinyin conventions of Standard Modern Chinese. To this I convert dialect pronunciations and all other romanization, except when Taiwanese and Hong Kong authors have established their own preferences. I add the fossilized spellings of some historical figures after their SMC form, e.g. Sun Yixian (Sun Yat-sen). I use macrons to indicate long vowels in Japanese words, except for place names and terms that have entered English usage, e.g. Tokyo, Shinto. Superscript letters appended to words in Pinyin indicate homonyms in the glossary. I refer to Chinese, Japanese and Korean persons in the common sequence of family before given name. I write all Chinese place names in SMC romanization, disregarding former spellings, some of which are still current. Most egregiously, therefore: Beijing for Peking (and Peiping), Chongqing for Chungking, Guangzhou for Canton (city), Guangdong for Canton (province), Xiamen for Amoy, Wulumuqi for Ürümqi. Not logically, I leave Hong Kong and Taipei as they are still spelled in most of the world. I impose modern province names with no historical delicacy upon former administrative units, such as Zhili (part of Hebei province), and Fengtian (part of Liaoning). Former names of cities and towns follow their current names in parenthesis. I use provinces to distinguish places with identical transcriptions, e.g. Liancheng (Fujian), Liancheng (Jiangsu). The glossary includes no place names, since all are searchable on the internet. All dates observe the solar calendar. Some sources, such as early newspapers, display only lunar calendar dates, so I add these in their conventional sequence: year, month, day. Years correspond to the sexagesimal cycle of binomial year names, the system in which users rarely erred. For example: 7 January 1839 [wuxu 11/22]. The sign + following any month number indicates that it was intercalary. Titles that do not feature in the “List of cited works” appear in the Glossary. The compilers of China’s multi-volume local histories are often identified by unwieldy committee names. I explain their shorthand citation above the “List of cited works”. Every photography studio mentioned in the text is listed in the Appendix, and keyed to its sequence number with the prefix “s”. Footnotes do not provide information concerning studios listed in the Appendix. Despite every effort to note the dimensions of photographs shown in illustration, their availability varies considerably, not least in respect of some images whose physical existence and archival location still resist disclosure.

Introduction

One convivial beginning is a photograph showing a young demonstrator explaining the workings of a camera (Figure 0.1). The concentrated pose of all the subjects, apparently indifferent to the presence of whoever took this photograph, projects none of the wriggling awkwardness that Roland Barthes famously aphorized as a sense of deceit (“imposture”).1 These were consummate actors in an image that hybridized the unsolicited documentary record with self-conscious consent for a portrait—only four of the twelve participants failed to stand where no one else obscured them. Little information accompanies this image—whose own survival is enigmatic—but it is certifiably a photograph of the official delegation that journeyed from China to the United States to oversee preparations for China’s exhibition in the St Louis World Fair. During a halt somewhere on an American lawn, the delegates straightened out their best clothes and paused to exhibit themselves as proxies for a topic far more absorbing than the purpose of their journey: China’s sure grasp of photography; likewise, this book’s discussion of photography in Chinese terms. Say for a moment that photography is not Chinese, then the arguments can enlist, for example, the empirical universals that explain its technology, or the aesthetic of indexicality that photographs infinitely generate, or even the regular coopting of light, a physical force available everywhere on earth. Conversely, say that photography is Chinese, then other arguments can solicit Chinese informants from the period in question to explain the previous points and most others of photographic factuality with cultural references, institutional entanglements, and social applications whose explanatory power is charged by its Chinese environment, and whose rhetoric of argument itself is Chinese. This book explores this second group of qualifications in appealing above all to Chinese terms collected within the three themes of science, commerce and communication. This book’s span is some one hundred years encompassing 1839, the year of photography’s public announcement in Paris, and 1937, the moment when Japan’s invasion of China ended ten years of Republican government in Nanjing, the “Nanjing decade”. The year 1937 is a conventional marker reflecting many verifiable realities, but it is no terminus before which certain developments in photography had run their course. Similarly, the Daguerrean year 1839 is not a boundary that cannot be moved closer to the previous century. The beginning and end of this study of photography are determined more by the plausibility of joining its three themes for the span throughout which they remained interconnected and visible. The excitement that science generated was far more palpable during the period under study than in the years that followed. Photographic studio commerce met hard times in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003086345-1

2 Introduction

Figure 0.1 Unknown photographer, Zhong Ziyuan (1861–1945) leading a photography demonstration en route to the World Fair, St Louis, 1904. Gelatin silver print on paper, 19 × 24 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library.

traumas following 1937, moderated its affinity for the private individual after 1949, and rebranded itself entirely in the economic directives of collectivization beginning in 1956. Not that this lasted irrevocably. Studio-fostered romanticism in the seemingly infinite fingering of perfect digital printing now reverberates along Chinese highstreets built less than twenty years ago, but they illuminate a different story for

Introduction  3 another study. Twelve years of warfare until the Communist victory in 1949 fostered changes in the content and patterns of communication that characterize each of the temporalities before and after midcentury with its distinct qualitative feel. None of these divisions should suggest that photography flourished in what some propose as the fat years of the first era before withering in the lean ones that followed. Certainly, the Nanjing decade was a period of international openness, which affected sometimes what photographers produced. 2 Whether the era before 1949 was conducive to better work remains all for the better, I think, an open question. For instance, although beyond the scope of this study, many of the late twentieth-century photographs circulated by publishers in the People’s Republic—too often trivialized as propaganda—were extremely good. Some images in this book are not photographs. One sole technical category of image is insufficient to explain photography’s history, and the medium was anyway not unaffected by other practices of image-making. Extra witnesses include some close and distant relatives: woodcuts, silhouettes, rubbings and paintings. Photographs, although the largest group, feature prints on glass, paper and wood, as well as photolithographic transfers onto journal pages and other surfaces, such as enamel. Each of these categories contributes as much as the others to understanding photography as a phenomenon within the wider context of its contemporary visual culture. Also, an ekphrastic method—the secondary reporting most familiar in literary craft—used to uncover historical realities concerning photography’s practices by means of the visual comment effected by a separate visual practice retrieves what otherwise might be lost. Visions of photographic practice published in woodcut and lithographic prints record ironies that no one consciously preserved. Diverse categories show photography in its surrounding visual economy, which—before addressing another sense in this description—characterized primarily the loans between photography and other reprographic possibilities that existed beside it. 3 Examples include photographs in styles that were reminiscent of contemporary painting, as well as photographic content that recalled contemporary cinema viewing. I refer throughout this book to media in the two senses that art historians commonly employ to indicate media of expression, of which photography and painting are but two examples, and to define media as materials, such as glass and paper. As if the ambiguity of modern English were not burdensome enough, I refer thirdly to media—despite the many definitions it sustains for specialists in media studies—as print media. This will seem to some an unsophisticated restriction, especially given the important role that Chinese and foreign cinema undoubtedly played in private and public aspirations to make and to perform in images in the twentieth century; later discussion indeed acknowledges cinematic affects in the pictorical choices that the subjects of certain photographs clearly made. However, in attempting to reimagine photography’s existence according to what primarily Chinese informants had to report via images and texts, the balance has yielded comparisons and allusions from a visual economy that was still quite narrowly—that does not mean unadventurously— constituted. No antipathy to media studies and media history has minimized their relevance to the discussion, but the sources’ most sustainend and commentated ascent of media across the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century was that comprised by changing forms of letterpress and the print media that these licensed. I argue that predominantly Chinese interests defined photography in China with their own internal logic yet also in terms prepared for scrutiny in the world at large. Explaining photography’s history from a Chinese viewpoint must use Chinese

4 Introduction sources, both visual and textual, and mobilize them towards identifying how intellectual, social and institutional forces articulated what photography was according to particular social conditions, agencies and uses, a conventional enough task in photography studies when dealing with a medium whose “nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work”.4 Adherence to one viewpoint nevertheless offers several angles of sight. Photography in China was both the object of well-educated scientific interest, but also a force of attraction to mass forms of fashion, cultural identity and entertainment, all increasingly if unevenly profiled by industrial commerce. The medium was in this extensive capacity an optimal ground for what historians of popular culture study in “a system of shared meanings”, an inclusive system with which many were acquainted even when not directly participant.5 Photography in China was an interchangeable moving part that attracted social attention upwards and downwards in the sometimes elaborate discourse of elite learning and the ever accelerating dissemination of common knowledge. Writing a history of photography in China without reference to any of its visual productions would be feasible, yet nonetheless a gross denial of the authentic analytical work that we can do with visual objects, however inconclusively we define them: photographs of China, from China, in China. Because the analysis of images within the interdisciplinary study of “the social construction of visual experience” requires a sensitivity distinct from that of analyzing linguistic expressions, it offers opportunities to grasp more of what shared conceptions, aspirations and fears demanded that images might be. Vision, W.J.T. Mitchell has argued, is a mode of cultural expression.6 It is also a mode of memory and imagination. Images survive, too, as objects whose existence possesses no rigid physical form, as fictional yet never entirely fictitious figments of the social imagination. Still to be written is the study exploring the riches yet to be extracted from literary sources whose authors imagined the production of photographs, their stylistic vigour, their lifespans and their terminal disuse. The acclaimed writer Zhang Ailing (1920–1995), for instance, had a Flaubertian sharp eye for photographs in her stories.7 The even larger significance of a possible literary inquiry is that photography was mediated not only by its material images but through human imagination and its corporeal lodging. Hans Belting has reminded us that images include a category that “the body stores in memory”.8 I have minimized but not exluded references to detecting this in the available sources, aware that memory, imagination and aspiration reveal crucial insights into photography’s Chinese histories of practice, production and reception. However reluctantly, I have conceded that Margaret Hillenbrand’s study of what she terms “photo-forms” in late twentiethcentury China, while also integral to the history of photographic images’ embodied circulations, belongs to a period beyond this book’s coverage.9 But, it is striking that her analysis has so much power, precisely because the role of memory is crucial to the history of photography and indeed that of any other system of visual representation. The book’s three discussions concentrate on how changing social constituencies conceptualized and understood photography, how they created and developed its allure within a wider range of practical, technological and cultural modernities, and how they stimulated new topics and methods of communication at levels ranging from everday visual pleasures to national politics. The three themes fit an advancing chronology, but not an absolute sequence of effects. That is, the growth of a constituency that grasped at least some of the science of what photography was and, more importantly, agreed what to call it was one precondition for how to conduct

Introduction  5 its commerce and how to direct it through various forms of communication. And, a vibrant commerce led by studios fostered photography’s first mass visibility, both as a factual presence on the street and as a rising object of the imagination. It also provided in a more negative sense an object of resistance against which individual professional and amateur photographers defined their independent exploits. Yet commerce drew its sustenance from fashionable scientific discourse only as much as it also generated it. Informed discussions of optics, chemistry and technological progress—coursing between Western and Chinese scientific traditions—attracted a limited number of discussants, mostly on one side of the literacy divide, mostly plugged into national or local politics, mostly able to observe currents of global exchange. By contrast, the zeal to understand and to use photography’s Chinese descriptions, while still linked to scientific knowledge and education, could also slip those moorings and drift safely towards cheerful resorts of gossip, clubbable parlours of learned discussion, and thronged entrances to mass entertainment. Both dimensions of discussing photography provided visual and imaginative affinities as well as the supercharge of scientistic glamour in which photography’s commerce prospered. Flows between commerce and communication were similarly two-way. Photography’s development in China happened in a period when patterns of sociality and the circulation of print media underwent far-reaching changes. Rudolf Wagner, long the advocate of applying to China the common sense in Jürgen Habermas’ analysis of community belonging, argues that modern Chinese history can also be viewed as the emergence of China’s own public sphere.10 Barbara Mittler’s work on the Shanghai press shows how nationally inclusive its readership was, and helps to frame how the aspiration to refine the reader’s knowledge of photographs, photography studios and photography journals was homologous throughout the country.11 In these contexts, photography’s commerce profited throughout a changing scopic regime, invariably relying upon the rise of newspapers, journals and magazines and the refinement of their address to various target audiences. But, switched around, communication arteries feeding the public sphere in China from the late nineteenth century onwards maximized their relevance by transporting to viewers a range of visual mages in which photography was progressively dominant. Communication was also crucial to explaining the ambitions of increasingly independent photographers to distance themselves from studios or the news industry—freelance independence was usually contingent—justifying their creativity in opposition to a narrow and sometimes contrived definition of commercial work, explaining when and where they organized the publicity of exhibitions, and expanding upon the fulfilling subject of who they were. *** Several Western studies have now established the importance of photography in succeeding waves of visual culture in China throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The medium has gained its place among the representational practices that now regularly feature in Art History and Visual Studies syllabi focused on China and Asia.12 Recent major studies by Claire Roberts and Wu Hung, respectively Photography and China and Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China, each titled to defy reducing photography to one single Chinese category, foreground the astonishing range of content and uses that professional and amateur photographers pursued in periods before and after 1949. Richard Kent and William Schaefer have concentrated exclusively on photographs made in the 1930s, still visible today due to

6 Introduction their publication mostly in Shanghai journals and magazines.13 Much of this publishing was the vehicle for the rapid rise and diversification in writing on photography, the first systematic reorganization of which by Long Xizu has been generally overlooked.14 Schaefer’s work marks an exciting achievement in what it is possible to glean from Shanghai’s past cultural scene as a productive site of modernism in his critical integration of photographic images and discourses during the Nanjing decade. I cheerfully acknowledge my debt to these earlier works, which feature several images that I also discuss. However, my chief preoccupation is the historical question of how photography arrived and matured in its Chinese midst, and how that process affected developments in the three main topics of this study. Much less has been said so far about photography’s status in China as a living history. Chinese historical scholarship has been a crucial aid in trying to fill in the blanks.15 So, too, has been the larger turn in how images guide historical as well as cultural inquiry. The historical text is no longer the supreme paradigm of both research object and information source, and a growing constituency of discussants now theorize images equally insistently, recognizing that photographs’ potentialities deserve a more advanced explanatory role.16 Paradoxically, the most methodical survey of emerging possibilities is Robert Bickers’ description of the sort of social history that the researcher can extract even from photographic archives limited to the concerns of the extraterritorial community of Shanghai in its exclusive status as a treaty port.17 Yet nothing impedes extending and adjusting this and other methods to look at the wider culture and society in which Shanghai was one of numerous parts, any of which likewise await exploration in similarly well-documented conditions. Indeed, how this book attempts to cover the existence of photography in China maps the topic’s spatial dimensions entirely anew. Whether global, local or suspended at the intermediate level of the East Asian region, photography’s status slipped between a world system anywhere and a parochial one somewhere. The divergence between local and global, which is usually axiomatic of an unequal distribution of power, exposes the Orientalist energies through which, Edward Said argued, European imperialist projects equated representation with control. Multiple arenas offer the scope to reimagine frequently oppressive structures of control—even though Said said relatively little concerning China—but some provide possibilities to go beyond the classic Orientalist viewpoint and to interpret global and local conditions as more mutually explanatory. To begin with some grinding realities of nineteenth-century imperialism, much of photography’s hardware first arrived in China from overseas, delivered in the wake of foreign powers’ military and colonialist ambitions. Chinese government and society overcame deep setbacks caused by unwelcome foreign interventions, but technologically, militarily and politically the Qing state and the Republic founded in 1912 were, successively, neither inept nor resourceless.18 Certainly, dark moments felt that much darker when powers that exploited their ability to threaten others weaponized observation and vision as techniques of imperialist expansion. In particular, Japanese politics’ nascent consciousness of its imperial destiny overseas—initially a regional problem—predicated its success upon photography as one technology among others configured for military control (Figure 0.2). Directed first at domestic consumers, the typically boastful assumptions in this advertisement of a scion of the early Japanese photographic industry also reached others in societies whose national fleets had met Japan’s unexpected naval genius with dire consequences. Wherever they were located along the entire Pacific seaboard, observers of this image would have comprehended why the Japanese photographic industry projected its future sales as a fancifully ironclad statement of the invincible.

Introduction  7

Figure 0.2 Advertisement by the photo- and lithographic supplies firm Asanuma Shōkai, Tokyo. From Shashin shimpō, 37 (1906). H 26 cm. Collection of National Diet Library, Tokyo.

8 Introduction The emphasis on Chinese agency in this book is not intended to ignore that external threats existed. Rather, the stress is upon photography’s successful progress in China, despite and beyond the dangers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century crises. But, this success is inadequately recognized. Excellent standard histories of photography purport a global approach, but mention China only as a site within a globalizing system bossed by other centres more manifestly in command of world affairs. They invariably cite the British photographer Felice Beato’s images of the Second Opium War (1856–1860) as a founding moment of photographic vision, not least a visual departure in depicting war with dead bodies.19 More insidiously, the same Opium War images feature also in recent discussions dedicated solely to China. 20 And, testament to Beato’s aptness as a point of reference for everyone, they appear again in Chinese histories that project irrefutably that the nineteenth-century camera was an instrument for invading sovereign territory. 21 In fact, intrusive techniques of vision had seemed threatening since the seventeenth century when Chinese officials had learned that the fascinating instrument of the telescope usually appeared in its symbiotic relationship with the musket or the cannon, and literary fiction soon retailed—or reworked—episodes in which invaders reconnoitered with scopic technologies before opening up with ballistic ones. 22 The stakes rose higher when later extraterritorial agents configured imperialist visions with geopolitical control in even more threatening confrontations. James Hevia, for instance, building on the work of Bruno Latour, presents an episode of foreign photographers’ work in China as a fascinating cycle of the “photography complex”, so termed according to its make-up from mechanics, optical theory, chemistry, reprographics as well as production and circulation networks. 23 Using photographs made in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion (1900), Hevia shows how imperialist agencies applied any of the complex’s various aspects to setting a formidable “tool of empire” to work. But, complexes are definable in many ways, a point that Hevia acknowledges in respect of the range of agencies available to characterize them. I do not describe a more compelling alternative, but emphasize instead the continuities that this book’s three themes offer towards analyzing how other agents operating along cooler distribution circuits achieved photographic aims perhaps in interaction with photography’s global status—they often did—and perhaps not. This stresses more conducive sequences of intellectual exchange, aesthetic formation and critical reflection, and it reanimates specific terms that commentators tested, adopted or rejected. These rich dimensions of photography’s local history in China are the means through which to show how Chinese agency also adopted controlling positions. The visualizations and voices which support this emphasis demonstrate a confidence and originality that, while not insouciant, often fretted remarkably little about the perils of visual subjugation or jeopardies to expressive autonomy. In some worst cases, the injured parties hit back. On more dignified occasions, when the outcomes concerned either the joint effort of translating a technical manual into Chinese or the photograph of a camera demonstration conducted in the same language, the respectively collaborative and emancipatory nature of these workaday realities was far removed from what others had to endure less comfortably from photography manipulated as a tool of empire. Intellectual exchange and cultural inquiry worked both ways across numerous attempts to impose barriers, divisions and zones of exclusion. Whatever impact photography had on Chinese society, it gathered pace in the mental

Introduction  9 and material landscapes where ideas and things were negotiated—translated, not least—across the porous divisions of shared spaces. The results could be unpredictable. Andrew Jones has discussed photographs of China’s architecture to demonstrate an indigenized form of geopolitical desire— attributed to the architectural historian Liang Sicheng (1901–1972)—but some of his discussion’s images and the conditions of their circulation in Chinese print media demonstrate forms of resistance. 24 They can contribute to understanding how, despite the starkness of Said’s vision of the Oriental pilgrimage in “a roomy place full of possibility”, colonial doctrines sometimes met challenges in visual practices conducted by those repudiating such assumptions of power, and they reinforce what critics in visual culture studies identify as a means to use Orientalism’s internal contradictions against it. 25 Rich sources from the history of technical craft in China also instance cases of technology and commerce eloquently weaponized against whomever its agents regarded as unwelcome intruders. 26 Even the huge questions of intellectual renewal, social reform and cultural renaissance—the central drives of May Fourth thinking—gathered pace in the confidence that Chinese discourse was empowered to select and reject its requirements at will. Lu Xun, whose critical voice was usually more powerful in satirical fiction that from the numerous positions that he adopted in his discursive essays, hit the nail on the head when he proposed that the “principle of self service” (nalaizhuyi) offered the best chance of keeping the future in Chinese control. 27 Within all three themes of this book, similarly constructed positions—aspirations at least—were not uncommon. In emphasizing the fissure between global and local conditions, I owe a great deal to pioneers of photography’s discussion beyond its most familiar theatres in America, Europe and Japan, challenging the primacy of European vision. The editors and contributors in Nicholas Peterson and Christopher Pinney’s (2003) Photography’s Other Histories provide several cases of how to comprehend the medium of photography as globally disseminated and locally appropriated. No less influential on thinking about photography within both tendencies is Deborah Poole’s study of Andean photography. Her quite different use of the term “visual economy” introduced a systematic description, which has remained useful ever since in grasping any defiant mass of photographs within a “comprehensive organization of people, ideas, and objects”, a system that is to a large extent locally self-sufficient yet also open to processes of import and export. 28 Imagining an organization in this way assists the student of visual culture to make sense of a photograph created in Lima as an object both linked to and distinct from its visual cognates in Paris by understanding transatlantic flows of technology, pictorial conventions, women’s fashion, and so on. Like a political economy—which obviously impinges on it—the visual one contains social relationships, expressions of power and the appearance of shared meanings. As an encompassing method of analysis, this provides a valuable frame, for if we cannot gain a sense of global dissemination, how can we identify what was local? And, in turning to Asia, as Rosalind Morris points out, photography’s ingress within various societies was a process of confrontation with numerous existing “economies” of representation. 29 This economic way of thinking about local conditions is also a means to intuit what Clifford Geertz called a local public’s “visual capacity”, and to invest meaning in the images produced among its members. 30 But, an analytical strategy accommodating long distances also spatializes both photography’s visual productions and its

10 Introduction discourses within local as much as global circuits, showing processes that interlock or else spring apart. As discussion in the last part of the book shows, the commercial power and the institutional status of such agencies as Kodak and the Royal Photography Society—major stakeholders in almost any construction of a photography complex—offered circuitry to which some submitted their aims while others refused. To understand the interlay of diverse circuits allows more nuance in interpreting images attached to or detached from their separate and overlapping politics and aesthetics. Finally, an “economy” sets the stage for actors in a narrative of appropriation, one that Poole characterizes as a story of “indigenista photography”, a shorthand that Stephen Sheehi also employs in his tantalizing suggestions of what the still “unwritten” history of Middle Eastern photography might be. 31 No less suitably does this characterize a history of photography in China. Good precedents exist, then, for proportioning global and local conditions, and equally regional ones, notably those shared between China and Japan in a period when China still enjoyed its “effortless pre-eminence”. 32 Chinese culture was still such a central concern to the Japanese intellectual elite that Chinese scientific texts contributed to Japanese debates over what to name photography. Ancient Chinese literary tropes served Japanese poets—writing in Chinese—even when they addressed the emotive power of photographs. Popular Japanese guides to Shanghai explained to Japanese readers what went on in photography studios whose cultural reference point remained still Chinese. Eventually the object of emulation and the top destination for overseas study, Japan exerted a huge reformist influence over modernity in China in almost all its expressions, not least over the discovery of the self—few among the tens of thousands of Chinese students who settled temporarily in Japan to study (and to visit photography studios) travelled en famille. The subject of China and Japan’s intercultural existence is a whale, while my remarks in the following chapters on its pertinence to this history of photography are herrings swimming in currents that discussions of photography throughout East Asia have tended to avoid. 33 On whatever scale is possible, the presence of Japan fits with recent interest in various categories of Chinese–Japanese exchange along inter-metropolitan circuits between Shanghai, Yokohama and other cities. 34 It fits, too, within the recent tendency to construct more global approaches to photography elsewhere. Elsewhere includes another region: China’s interior. Shorter distances of travel, communication and the regional geography in which they happened offer congenial conditions in which to show how photography’s science, commerce and communication relied on numerous internal institutions and systems to make them spread: regionalized intellectual exchange supported by the delivery of letters and new publications, and enlivened by a social life that constantly honoured intellectual heritage in its regional and local settings; rivers, roads and railways along which travelled the intrepid bringers of studios from one region to another; a public sphere that was arterially distributed surprisingly far from the main bases of news publishing located principally in Shanghai and Tianjin. These conditions are not replacements for more commonly told narratives of photography’s early journeys—a British warship anchors in the Yangzi and one of the company photographs whatever the noonday sun shows on shore35 —but certainly alternative settings in which to uncover other developments that left behind even more lasting effects. ***

Introduction  11 Too few data preclude shining more light on the local objects of this book’s interest in the smaller settlements of China’s huge space. A distortion on quite the opposite scale is fostered by the sources’ disproportionate representation of Shanghai, exceptional in so many ways, not least in the “semi-European” status in which even as seething an anti-imperialist as Lytton Strachey supposed it basked. 36 Other cities—Hankou, Haerbin, Tianjin—can compete, but Shanghai’s successful venture into urban modernity is continually argued through political, commercial and cultural analyses.37 Wen-hsin Yeh presents the extraordinary feats of imagination and ingenuity that helped to effect the city’s pre-eminence, and Alexander Des Forges rightly characterizes literary texts relevant to the city’s status as merciless directives to make visitors “convinced even before arriving that the city is the most up-to-theminute and fashionable in China”.38 Of strongest relevance to the final section of this book is the Shanghai setting of William Schaefer’s account of photography’s intertextual affinity to literary productions and forms in a gripping story of East Asian modernism. But, Schaefer also admits that, without the city’s illustrated journals and newsprint, the authors of this phenomenon would have met serious challenges to convert it into the texts and images of undoubtedly powerful currents. 39 Performing and spectating urban modernity was privleged in a city that by 1937 produced probably 90 percent of China’s books.40 Using these sources, many of them undissimulated reflections upon only the city that produced them, is as convenient as it is distracting. To a highly serviceable Chinese account of photography’s history in Shanghai no one has yet added a study focused on any one of a dozen other cities.41 Accepting Shanghai’s exceptional status can distort as much as clarify. Questionable, for example, is the common premise of an absolute nineteenth-century shift of culture and society from the eminent inland canal-based cities—Hangzhou, Suzhou and Yangzhou—coastwards to Shanghai.42 In all three sections of this book I point out how often learning, techniques and finance flowed back from the great port city as well as into it. Moreover, much that was learned in Shanghai had also been learned somewhere else, not to mention sometimes earlier. Many other places gained striking profiles in widely distributed experiences of urbanity which their chroniclers turned into verse and diary recollections to celebrate everyday transitions into the new excitements of the mundane and the secular. Even the modern enterprise of writing a city’s economic history first inspired a masterpiece of prosaic description devoted to Chengdu, hundreds of kilometres above the scheduled and international sailings between Hankou and ports downstream.43 More recent studies have returned to these sites and added others that inform the history of photography in China.44 Moreover, even granting that Shanghai did boast a distinctive identity, it was by no means absolutely intrinsic. The city was the significant destination of numerous migrations, notably from Guangdong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. The prolonged contribution of Guangdong migrants to the cultures and economies of Shanghai and other cities was outstanding. Nevertherless, ignoring the mass of existing data in, from and about Shanghai would impose serious limits. I draw much from them, but rely also on reports from other places, notably newspaper notices and advertisements, travel diaries, fiction— much still remains untapped—and the popular verse genre of “bamboo twig verse” (zhuzhici). I have mined information on studios from modern local gazetteers (difang zhi), whose recent publishing spate was largely concentrated in the early 1990s. These documents, edited by local government committees, are by no means infallible, but

12 Introduction their centralized compilation principles ensured a dependable structure in which to collect surviving knowledge concerning photography’s commerce and sometimes its social organization—it is unlikely that sufficient living memory now exists to rerun the oral interviews that supplied much of this information. Used most extensively in Chapters 3 and 4, the selection of these studio records presented in the Appendix is also testimony to a bank of Chinese folk memory distributed in but also far beyond any of the major cities. *** So much, then, for several degrees of space. What characterized local practicalities, and how do the three parts of this book order them? First, photography fits into a much larger narrative of science and scientistic glamour. Chinese theorists and practitioners explained and named photography in disclosures that bore many hallmarks of recounting an invention, not in a counterfactual retelling of what Daguerre and Fox Talbot had achieved, but certainly with its own rhetorical force, its own chemical recipes, its own references to Chinese premises in physics. Much of this elitist inquiry was long hidden from view. More thrilling social interest eventually emerged amid cultural references to optical knowledge and social observations of variously technological and pharmacological modernizations, profiled all the more sharply when they overlapped with commercial activities. One inspiration in this book’s description of photography as science is Benjamin Elman’s strong thesis that Chinese science met Western science with sufficient resources to explain it.45 Of even broader relevance are the insights of Michel Serres and his colleagues who have argued for understanding science in terms that relativize the otherwise Cylopic control of its history by narratives of invention. As Bruno Latour points out, rather than define inventions almost invariably as inevitabilities, we might look back to long-abandoned hot zones in order to sense again the contingencies of discovery and learning, and be aware of what Serres characterized as eras when discoverers understood only faintly what they were looking for, all the while intuiting it exactly in a state of blindness. Geof Bowker extended all of his colleagues’ points into a powerful reminder that another history of science is the history of industrial discovery, whose closest relationship to what preceded it was alchemy.46 The silence that typically surrounds industrial discovery—and alchemy—is one reason why this category of science in China has hitherto attracted little attention. The disdain with which cultural elites—not only Chinese—regarded industrial careers is another. This book ventures into areas of science where the grip of secrecy was weaker and attitudes to industry more open. The proposal in Chapter 1 of how an indigenous “invention” of photography eventually gave ground to an imported Western narrative conforms to Meng Yue’s analysis that scientific modernity was built upon the erasure of deep and authoritative traditions and instead endowed with a Western identity. Shanghai publishing declared this overcoding in an hermeneutical monument of the era, the dictionary Font of words (Ciyuan), prefaced in 1908 with the claim: “those who went to study abroad did not understand what had already existed in their homeland when they returned. We therefore published this dictionary…”.47 The horror of a morphic spell cast from “abroad” upon etymological sensitivity was never really a present danger, and Chapter 2 presents developments whose no less conservative nature demonstrates

Introduction  13 how conceptualizing photography in Chinese terms mustered items from the lexicons of deeply established visual practices rarely if ever opposed by modernists. The book’s second part assembles the evidence for studios’ physical appearance, commercial projection and the captivation of their clients and passers-by. The question of how studios appeared even to those without the wherewithal to patronize them has gained attention.48 Less has been said about the larger field of commerce in which they operated. The variously collaborative, associative and parasitical strategies that studio owners adopted in order to make their studios viable concerns are among the vital holds with which to approach a period whose modernity Wen-hsin Yeh, one of its most expert interpreters, suggests is commercial rather than political.49 The sources of photography’s business thinking as well as a multilocal visual heritage of business addresses and studio fronts—a formation in itself remarkable—provide new insights into photography’s commercially inflected culture where extra concerns of medicine and physical health, for example, also intervened incessantly. And a culture inflected no less intellectually. The elite concerns discussed in Part 1, even those wrapped thickly in classical learning, often became the widely held common property of a studio life that traded hard across their values. This was especially obvious in studio names, which showed a widespread homogeneity in expectations of what studios represented, furthermore distributed to places where no one has previously looked for it. These outward enticements differed but did not distract from others, such as references to consumer goods, travel, theatre, cinema. Studios enfolded any or all of these into the thoroughly performative nature of their work, so that clients could discern adroitly what sort of studio spaces they preferred to enter. Once across the threshold, they understood their own demands for visual capital extracted from a visual economy fine-tuned—but always requiring updates—for its double circuitry around both global and local symbols: to insert the body into the gondola below a zeppelin or dress it with the martial costume and weaponry of a famous role from Beijing opera? These issues remain relevant to Part 3, which addresses categories of visual content and their relevance to forms and patterns of communication. Chapter 5 considers primarily attitudes to images as a means to understand some of the uses for which photography was adopted, notably in reflecting upon the visual self, recording the changing world of work and the material environment, and in reducing the limitless scale of nature to the symbolic dimensions of a photograph. This restricted survey also uncovers how often photographers disassociated their roles from studio service and press employment. Even though accounts of reaching this fork in the road were usually exaggerated, the enthusiastic public perception of photography as an emancipated and independent vocation was influential. Real or not, one of the reasons for this shift was the intense repudiation that studio work met with its production of what critics attacked as an excessively commercialized secularity. Chief among their targets was the popular category of “two selves” portraiture, sustained by a technical capability to produce the subject twice in one image, and a fashion that variously loaned and regenerated its form in other dimensions of the visual economy, not least cinema. Chapter 6 discusses again this question of photography’s secular existence and the reaction to it in the context of how the nature and status of images was determined by acts of gift and transfer as well as via circulation in print media. Deep changes occurred in the practicalities of donating images to recipients according to different social situations, but even amid the visual economy’s

14 Introduction rising industrialization, and despite the forceful modernity of Alexander Des Forges’ precocious “mediasphere”, 50 apparently unbreakable continuities operated in thinking of the image as a gift as much as a form of communication. Finally, a few last preliminaries on topics that receive short measure. I survey some one hundred years without bridging the boundaries between Nationalist and Communist spaces, apparent as these already were even before 1937. Photographers in the Communist bases worked almost exclusively for nascent state organizations, accepted firm political direction, rejected all intimate forms of addressing images to others or themselves, and circulated their work solely in print media whose design and production they had a large hand in controlling. 51 The history presented in the following chapters did not determine what happened in the second half of the twentieth century, but it proposes continuities even amid extremely different conditions. I regret that reference to Taiwan is restricted to business and family ties between the island and the Chinese mainland’s southeast. Quite a different story of photography’s uses and meanings developed in the conditions of a Japanese colony (1895–1945) largely defined by administrative and economic decisions in Tokyo, as well as by educational, cultural and training resources also in the capital and in Osaka. A recent collection of studies sensitively addressed to intimate and environmental aspects of colonial Taiwan’s visual culture says too little concerning photography beyond its functions in the Japanese administration. 52 Be that as it may, although discriminatory enterprises emerged from both mainland China and Taiwan and sought their objects in Japan and even farther afield, common Taiwan experiences typify how art, technical training and cultural knowledge on the island were naturalized facing away from as much as towards China.53 *** The machinic thrall of photography’s operation determined everywhere a technical equalization, fostering an emancipation of roles that sometimes privileged no one. The photograph’s startling indexicality, especially every photographic exposure’s unplanned contingencies, implied, as Fox Talbot early on observed, a kind of loss of technical control. 54 That implied further that everyone was equally helpless in claiming full ownership of the image, let alone of the medium. Such helpless ownership is the point at which to begin.

Notes 1 Barthes (1980): 30. 2 Dikötter (2008): 54. 3 For this use of “l’économie visuelle” to discuss photography and engraving, see Bann (2001): 23. 4 Tagg (1988): 63. 5 Burke ([1978] 2009): xiii. 6 Mitchell (1995): 540, 544. 7 Jin (2011): 85–85. 8 Belting ([2001] 2011): 44. 9 Hillenbrand (2020): xix. 10 Introduction to Wagner (2007a); Wagner (2007b). For a selection of Habermas’ arguments in their relevance to studies of popular culture, see Mukerji and Schudson (1991): 398–404.

Introduction

15

11 Mittler (2004): 38. 12 For the first reference to a photograph made by its Chinese subject in a wider art historical discussion, see Clunas (1997a): 199. 13 Kent (2009); Kent (2013); Schaefer (2017). 14 Long (1988). 15 Chen et al. (1987); Chen & Xu (2011); Ge (2003); Gu (2010); Gu & Fang (1989); Jiang (1989); Jiang et al. (1998); Shanghai sheyingjia xiehui et al. (1992); Su (2009); Tan (2004); Tong (2016); Wu (1984); Wu (1986). Essays on historical issues appear regularly in the monthly journal Zhongguo sheying, published by the China Photographers’ Association/ Zhongguo sheyingjia xiehui. 16 Henriot and Yeh (2013): vii–xxv. 17 Bickers (2013). 18 For an account of important technologies during this transitional era, see Waley-Cohen (1999). 19 Jeffrey (1981): 50; Clarke (1997): 48; Marien (2002): 106–107. 20 Roberts (2013): 19; Wu (2016): 47–83. 21 Wu (1986): 15; Chen et al. (1987): 35. 22 Idema (1990): 466, 471. 23 Hevia (2009): 81–82. 24 Jones (2010): 626, on Liang. 25 Said ([1978] 1995): 181; Pinney (2006): 136–137. 26 For a political historian’s analysis of northern Zhejiang construction workers’ confidence in weathering the onslaught of foreign trade during the early 1900s, see Perry (1993): 40. 27 Emrich (2014): 64. 28 Poole (1997): 8. 29 Morris (2009): 1. 30 Geertz (1983): 103. 31 Sheehi (2020): 365. 32 Harding (2018): 178. 33 The exceptions are Fraleigh (2006); Wang (2012a). 34 On Shanghai and Yokohama, see Shanghai he Hengbin lianhe bianji weiyuanhui (1997); for overviews in a wider range of Chinese–Japanese exchanges, see Fogel (1996); Fogel (2012). 35 Bennett (2009): 1; Bickers (2013): 5; Henriot & Yeh (2013): viii; Wu (2016): 7. 36 Strachey ([1918] 1986): 193. 37 Lee (1999); for a survey of Shanghai scholarship, including interesting remarks on Harbin, see Fogel (2010). 38 Yeh (2007); Forges (2007): 9. 39 Schaefer (2017): 38. 40 Reed (2004): 207. 41 Shanghai sheyingjia xiehui et al. (1992). 42 In the context of a superb study of Shanghai’s numerous expressions of cosmopolitanism, I can also understand why to argue that Shanghai “rose on the debris of Yangzhou’s ruin”. See Yue (2006): xvii. 43 Fu (1910) 1987. 44 Buck (2000); Carroll (2006); Claypool (2005); Dong (2000); Miles (2006): Rhoads (1974); Shi (1998); Shiba (1999); Shiba (2011); Stapleton (2000); Tan (2004); Tan (2009); Tsin (1999). 45 Elman (2005); Elman (2006). 46 Bowker (1989): 477; Latour (1989): 423; Serres (1989): 4. 47 Yue (1999): 16; for a tight summary of the argument, remarks on dictionary knowledge and her translation of the Ciyuan preface, see Yue (2006): 30, 52. 48 Gartlan & Wue (2017). 49 Yeh (2000): 7. 50 Forges (2007): 16. 51 For remarks on photography in the Communist bases areas, Roberts (2013): 91–104; for dedicated studies, see Bellinetti (2018) and Ho (2009). I list more sources at the end of

16

Introduction

Chapter 6. For the most authoritative account of the bases’ popular culture, whose author says nothing concerning photography but provides a spectrum of visual and literary production with which future research on photography will have to engage, see Hung (1994). 52 Kikuchi (2007). 53 Hsiao (1994); Moore (2013): 131–135; Moore (2020): 372–373. 54 Jeffrey (1981): 10–12.

PART 1

Science

1

Methods of invention

In 1936, three years short of the centenary of photography’s world announcement in Paris, a columnist at Shanghai’s Evening News (Xinwen yebao), interviewed the renowned educator Ma Xiangbo (1840–1939), who recollected his teacher Father Claude Gotteland (1803–1856) in 1850 making daguerreotype portraits of him and his fellow novices in front of the St Ignatius church. Ma Xiangbo hit the bull’s-eye that is so often the outcome of unrehearsed anecdote when he recalled the long preoccupation of theorists and historians, namely the aims that photography was meant to serve, and the success of its technology to fulfil them: Gotteland’s portraits of his human subjects were blurry failures, but St Ignatius looked resplendent in all its architectural detail.1 Most readers contentedly assumed that Shanghai owed its sovereignty in science and culture to a visitor from France, the distant yet by now familiar headquarters of photography’s invention. Only a few that year might have noticed a celebrated photographer’s observation that he had seen daguerreotypes stored at a studio in Yichang, the Yangzi town below the river’s notorious descent from Sichuan. 2 While this chapter cites such relevant Niépce-Daguerrean antecedents, it turns primarily to practical and rhetorical acts produced—and forgotten—by the Chinese community not usually considered in photography’s history. Even so, the end of this discussion is a return to the 1939 centenary when the dominantly expressed Chinese public consciousness of photography’s historical existence in China was inflected by a rarely questioned enthusiasm for its origins abroad. Until Chinese researchers uncovered some quite unexpected truths during the course of photography’s unprecedented ethnographic fieldwork in the 1960s, early Chinese methods serving photography’s invention in China had been buried in collective amnesia. The local reorganization of a global medium through affinitive processes of invention and translation was so successful that what emerged as technical commonplaces in China eventually sank beneath a popular assumption of the medium’s introduction from abroad and its reliance on Western scientific discoveries. This chapter argues that China owed as much to Chinese as outside ingenuity, and its most important sources both voice and visualize the Chinese discourse that contributed to photography’s invention in China. Modern science, one of its historians has shown, was reinvented during the early twentieth century in China with a predominantly Western identity.3 The more fluently Chinese writers, critics and photographers rehearsed this position, the more efficiently they undermined some of photography’s most original Chinese observers and interpreters. They disregarded the success with which previous generations had increasingly countered the irruption of Western science with Chinese explanatory DOI: 10.4324/9781003086345-3

20 Science terms. They ignored the value of science and technology in previous generations’ lives and their recorded experiences. This neglect is worth examining across several fields, among which, for instance, medicine provides a striking parallel relevant to some of the points in this chapter as well as to later ones discussing commerce. Charmed by a Western discourse explaining the West’s industrial revolution, interpreters of photography’s emergence in China accepted the common adulation of inventors bequeathed by an age of sustained inventions—when perhaps the greatest invention was invention itself.4 Geoffrey Batchen has discussed photography’s inventions as a plurality of technological and imaginary engagements in a Foucauldian commitment to map photography’s existence as the “regularity of a discursive practice”. This chapter extends that discussion to include individuals who have been only minimally noticed if at all, and it attempts similarly to recognize their significance in the pursuit of a discourse.5 In photography, as François Brunet has pointed out, discourse often pre-empted fact.6 This chapter’s first section discusses photography as an invention in China. Not a counterfactual adventure, the point is to demonstrate that the sound arguments that have globalized photography’s invention in settings outside Europe and North America are equally applicable in China. While translation into Chinese was a crucial means of transnational communication, its function in shaping new technical knowledge was contingent as much upon local Chinese intellectual input as upon incursions from abroad. The next section situates the earliest Chinese technical literature in its diverse social contexts. Not only did the advocates of a new technology of vision combine Chinese epistemes and material resources on its behalf, they adopted unprecedented styles of discourse, especially performance, to profile their knowledge. The centralizing topic was “camera vision”, which its interpreters deployed in order to discuss an existing intellectual inheritance concerning light behaviour and the camera obscura, and to promote the emergence of a new scientific self in China. The following section turns to a body of texts that progressively provided up-to-date technical information translated into Chinese via collaborations between foreign visitors and local scientific experts, and joined autochthonous and imported knowledge to construct a scientific discourse paying attention to objective vision and the work of the human eye. These texts appeared when readers’ interest in optics was about to cede to the desire for more workaday photography manuals. A generation of writers returning from abroad obliged. The final section considers how photography’s history was reviewed in Chinese opinion one hundred years after the announcements of the medium’s existence in 1839. By then the history of photography in China was subject to a retroactive teleology that downplayed or ignored the Chinese ambitions in the earliest accounts of its existence.

Contesting inventions Photography in China within a wider pattern of contesting inventions helps to recognize how busily several generations of Chinese scientists and educators engaged with profiling their knowledge both as confirmations of their contribution to an era’s epistemic renewal and as definitions of their achievements in cultural acts of commemoration. Comparison of photography’s inventions in different places also throws into relief varying priorities, which in China first ranked the virtues of “camera vision” above the new machine’s reprographic potential.

Methods of invention  21 In graphical terms at least, Nicéphore Niépce’s (1765–1833) first permanent visual capture of the view from a window in his house at Le Gras locates one beginning for photography to either side of noon on a bright day in rural France in 1824. Not long afterwards, Niépce began to collaborate with Louis Daguerre (1787–1851) a theatrical illusionist and master of multimedia effects, and by 1837—four years after Niépce’s death—Daguerre had perfected a technique for obtaining sharply focused images on chemically sensitized copper plates. His next achievement was to set his own name upon descriptions of both the process and its results. The new technology was acquired by the French state and publicly announced on 19 August 1839 to intense international interest. In Britain, William Fox Talbot (1800–1877) tested methods quite different from those of Daguerre, and in the same year as the Paris announcement completed his experiments for a sustainable negative-positive system that heralded the advent of the multiple photographic image. Long disputes over technical precedence and scientific definition ensued. For example, the British scientist John Herschel (1792–1871) had made a public announcement of “photography” to the Royal Society on 14 March 1839, and he proposed that the Académie des Sciences adopt the same term.7 Irrespective of photography’s names, to which the following chapter returns, Niépce, Daguerre and Talbot remain the most widely cited figures in accounts of photography’s coeval yet divergent inventions, each of which has since stood as an entirely European achievement. Research on photography now challenges views of Europe in isolation, and it accepts photography’s multiple paternities dating to diverse eras. Particularly striking is the story of Hercules Florence, a Savoyard artist, typographer and explorer whose work led him deep into the forests of Brazil along paths that Claude Lévi-Strauss would later tread and—not inconsequentially—in the process found modern anthropology. In a remote village, according to his diary, Florence perfected another negative-positive system as early as 1833, formally publishing his discoveries to little or no acclaim in a São Paulo journal in 1839.8 Even this terminus is replaceable. Using the scattered correspondence of the Niépce brothers, Pierre Harmant relates the gripping story of how they probably elaborated a means of image retention in Sardinia in 1796 during a lull in the Napoleonic wars.9 Harmant also drew a list of twenty-four “first inventors” of photography, and Geoffrey Batchen further expanded it on the basis of who “took up the idea of photography”.10 These plural and scattered conditions for inventing photography form the background against which Chinese figures made other contributions during the early throes of China’s own intellectual reformation, one of whose outcomes was a new priority for the epistemic virtue of the optical. Photographic technology travelled eastwards rapidly. Photographic experiments were in progress in Calcutta during the Paris announcement in August 1839, and three years later British military officers were operating daguerreotype cameras during the First Opium War.11 Probably the earliest surviving photographs executed in China were authored by Alphonse Eugène Jules Itier (1802–1877), a French customs official, who in 1844 made daguerreotype views and portraits in Macao and Guangzhou. His view of the Ma’ge (Ma Kok), the well-known “temple” in Macao (Figure 1.1) appears frequently in histories of photography in China. Consonant with Ma Xiangbo’s recollection of taking a photograph in Shanghai one decade later, the success of this image was its faithful record of architectural detail. Less commonly remarked upon is the position of this photograph in the temple’s longer visual history. The British artist George Chinnery (1774–1852), a Macao resident from 1825 onwards, sketched and

22 Science the position of this photograph in the temple’s longer visual history. The British artist George Chinnery (1774–1852), a Macao resident from 1825 onwards, sketched and painted the temple on numerous occasions. His student William Prinsep (1794–1874), on leave from Calcutta, was one of many visitors to work at the same viewing spot (Figure 1.2).12 Itier, then, not only recorded a particular site in the lateral reversal

Figure 1.1  Eugène Jules Itier (1802–1877), Ma’ge (Ma Kok), Macao, October 1844. ­Daguerreotype, 15 × 10 cm. Courtesy of Musée français de la photographie, Bièvres.

Methods of invention  23

Figure 1.2 William Prinsep (1794–1874), Ma’ge (Ma Kok), Macao, c. 1839. Oil on canvas, 51 × 76 cm. Courtesy of HSBC Holdings plc.

typical of daguerreotype images, he did so by reconfirming the temple’s presence in a scopic circuit privileged by his and other Western travellers’ presence along any number of passages to and from China. He photographed an extraterritorial community’s most parochial object in direct relation to previous local image practices. Itier’s image is typically the production of a foreign visitor, arguably an item of Western art like Prinsep’s painting. But, in definitions that cannot operate as absolutely for painting, Itier’s image is photography’s mathematical and physical analogue of real conditions. That it is a photograph of China explains why it features so often in histories of photography from China. It flickers—as daguerreotypes do—as a founding moment. I propose another view. If the stress is upon photography as a history deduced primarily from Chinese agency, then the relevance of Itier’s image could be justifiably discounted. This topographical view raises the possibility of collaboration between local and visiting agents in a category of praxis whereby the latter solicits guidance from the former to decide where to photograph what. This is impossible to judge definitively, but common visual preferences often existed beyond cultural and political dividing lines. Two decades later, when one of the first Chinese photography studios in Fuzhou created a panorama of the city’s waterfront, its photographer stood at the same position that local painters had adopted as early as the seventeenth century to depict bird’s-eye city views that Dutch mariners, for instance, brought back to the United Provinces.13 Itier’s photograph of the Macao temple proves nothing in attempts to reimagine the specific conditions of his visit, but it belongs to the small body of early photographic work in which any expectation of collaboration is not necessarily off target. Indeed, the photographs that weeks later Itier took of some of the political elite in Guangzhou

24 Science are undoubtedly the result of another order of collaboration.14 The wide range of cautious doubt exposed by these conditions is also the measure for understanding the central topic of this chapter, namely the degree to which Chinese and foreign agents exchanged, pooled or withheld efforts to cooperate in the epistemological renewal and the technical advances that photography’s successive explanations dictated. A history in which Chinese persons and practices take lead positions summons evidence that has so far gained little attention. The following discussion, therefore, refers often to technical manuals and scientific news, because their claims demonstrate photography’s technological prestige in everyday Chinese visual modernity. Wooden boxes, glass slides and the human retina are, admittedly, not thrilling subjects, but as referents to visual mechanization, technical advance, and intellectual fashion they help to explain how photographic technology gripped the imagination of both elite and popular constituencies. These texts are examples from highly varied categories of writing, not all of which are easily united into a single community of writing, what Alan Trachtenberg called a “collective intelligence”.15 But, the earliest, which explained photography’s technology most optimistically as local, as well as the latest, which commented on photography’s origins elsewhere, offer a diachronic wholeness that maps photography within intellectual and social change. Writings at the end of this continuum reflect in turn the more or less complete acceptance of the history of photography as a Western importation—thereby preparing Itier’s seat at a Chinese table—but they provide a stark contrast to the perceptions and predictions of successive earlier stages. Profiling knowledge One of these earlier stages is superbly visualized in the portrait of the Suzhou physician Xue Chengji (Figure 1.3). Little is known of Xue, but medicine was his forefathers’ vocation, perhaps also that of his son leaning in from the edge of the scene. He commissioned a portrait that showed him poor—the cultural delights and raucous commerce of Suzhou are not in the picture—and in his favourite persona of the erudite craftsman; he further solicited a circle of friends to surround his image with inscriptions on this biographical theme. They obliged with unvarying reference to the ancient cultural hero Fuju, a byword in repurposing oxidized bronze mirrors through elaborate chemical treatments and polishing, in turn metaphors for restoring health. The lead inscriber, the gigantic intellectual figure Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), added the title Polishing mirrors (Mojing tu). Xue’s portrait is one of numerous images showing how members of the intellectual elite desired to be depicted as experts in optics—and science more generally—and a reminder that this elegantly understated idiom of profiling technical knowledge still languishes in obscurity. Visitors to China in this period fumbled their reports of indigenous optical knowledge. Some noticed the strange yet familiar “peep show” machines that, like the camera obscura, pre-empted the first machinic cameras and offered one popular introduction to Western perspective vision. The obsession with peep shows pulsed through Chinese cities as busily as it did in London in the same era.16 Major George Mason, a Royal Madras Fusilier in Guangzhou before the turn of the century, achieved renown with an account of his stay—mostly in a sanatorium—for which he commissioned illustrations from Pu Gua, one of the Guangzhou painters from whose ranks the first generation of studio photographers would duly emerge. Mason described one of Pu Gua’s figures uncontroversially as the operator of a peep show,17 but he totally

Methods of invention  25

Figure 1.3 Hua Guan, portrait of Xue Chengji, 1799. Ink on paper, 126.5 × 46.5 cm (image). Courtesy of Nanjing Museum.

26 Science

Figure 1.4 Pu Gua (Pu-Quà), drawing, c. 1790, engraved by John Dadley (1767–1817), published as “Old Man Polishing Crystals”. From George Mason, The Costume of China, Illustrated by Sixty Engravings, etc., London, 1800.

misconstrued another as a grinder of crystal, blithely unaware that no one manufactured lenses on the street (Figure 1.4). Nor did Mason understand the Chinese synonymy that collapses lenses and mirrors into one word jing, often one category. Pu Gua had simply composed the same classic image of technical competence that Hua Guan painted for Xue Chengji. Authored by Chinese painters for their Chinese clientele, paintings of a technically expert scholar polishing a mirror to heighten its reflectivity drew upon a visual topic evident since the sixteenth century and refreshed in the eighteenth for a fashionable portrait trope. In deeper paradox, the market for the man of letters dressed up as an artisan of antiquity also spread to Shanghai, boss city of banking, shipping and urban modernity. Ren Xiong’s (1820–1857) depiction of the historical figure Xu Zhi (97–168) polishing a mirror (Figure 1.5) is not a portrait, but the generic representation of a maligned official who never abandoned his love of optical experiments. Another painter, Fei Danxu (1801–1850), developed the same theme.18 Painting cultural heroes of antiquity had become all the more lucrative in seething urban conditions, and Ren Xiong’s painting connotes remote antiquity amid both local lake scenery and the gossipy loitering that filled a city alley when the itinerant grinder set up for the morning. These deceptively artisanal images connote a deep interest in science throughout the nineteenth century and earlier, not least in visual formations

Methods of invention  27

Figure 1.5 Ren Xiong (1820–1857), Xu Zhi polishing a mirror. Album leaf, ink on paper, 29 × 34 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Museum.

that spoke unambiguously to biographical desires to make optics part of the modern scientific persona. Such images and the intellectual lives and careers to which they related reported also the social milieu in which emerged the first truly competent commentator on photography. This central figure was Zou Boqi (1819–1869), mathematician, cartographer and member of Guangzhou’s prestigious Sea of Learning College (Xuehai tang), founded by Xue Chengji’s friend and patron Ruan Yuan. Zou wrote fluently about photography’s optics and the photographic image, and was probably the first Chinese writer to emphasize photography as a practice of seeing. His status as a self-conscious scientific self empowered to see and know things is also crucial to grasping photography’s first intellectual reception in China. If photography was a universal medium successfully adapted to the local conditions of China, such a feat happened neither because the medium was culturally neutral, nor because it was a global development that included everyone, but because it surfaced amid the rise of both established and new epistemic virtues of observation and record. Zou may also have been the author of his own portraits taken with a plate camera that he constructed himself. One of these, which has been frequently published (Figure 1.6), fits closely with the studio portrait conventions of the day. Zou was not the only practitioner at such an early date. In northwest China Yang Fang (1830–1894)

28 Science started to photograph his family and friends as early as 1845.19 He owed much to his father Yang Shangwen who collected scientific texts and sometimes readied them for publication with his own explanatory diagrams (Figure 1.9). Yang Fang travelled

Figure 1.6 Zou Boqi (1819–1869), allegedly a self-portrait, c. 1860. Direct negative on glass (viewed in reverse), 11.5 × 8 cm. Courtesy of Guangzhou City Museum.

Methods of invention  29

Figure 1.7 Unknown photographer, Zou Boqi taking a sun reading. Direct negative on glass (viewed in reverse), 12 × 15 cm. Courtesy of Guangzhou City Museum.

abroad and later resided in Beijing where the British photographer John Thomson (1837–1921) visited him. 20 One of Yang’s extant portraits, a frontal view of the senior court official Dong Wenhuan (1833–1877), dated 1872, is a paper print mounted on a silk scroll. 21 The use of photography for this style of portraiture was common, but Zou’s activities show a radically different pursuit. Now damaged, another image shows Zou operating a sextant, the earliest photograph of a Chinese performance of science taking place perhaps at Zou’s home in Nanhai, the garrison county not far upstream from Guangzhou (Figure 1.7). Two surviving images of Zou show, then, the adoption of conventional portrait habits, but also the intention to perform as a scientist using Western tools: the scientific self at a distance sufficient to theatricalize the control of one of the modern world’s crucial measuring implements. The differences in a contemporary portrait from Japan are striking. Ueno Hikoma sits behind his own foregrounding of jars of chemicals, the tools of a studio trade that he founded in Nagasaki in 1862 (Figure 1.8). That same year he published instructions that detailed in the clearest possible terms the methods for coating and loading wet plates. 22 No member of the late Qing clerisy was likely to create or to commission an image in which symbols of leisure and mental exercise have been replaced with the tools of an unfamiliar trade. Although Zou paid close attention to Western science, he relied predominantly on Chinese epistemes in a way that typified attitudes since the eighteenth century. One of his surviving papers is titled “On Western methods which China invariably possessed in antiquity”. 23 Similar formulations were soon points of dogma among both academics and officials, and, as Benjamin Elman has shown, they played crucial heuristic roles in the construction of modern science. 24 Zou steered a middle course through

30 Science

Figure 1.8 Attributed to Horie Kuwajirō (1831–1866), portrait of Ueno Hikoma (1838–1904), 1861. Direct negative in collodion on glass (viewed in reverse), 18 × 13.9 cm. Courtesy of College of Art, Nihon University, Tokyo.

these dangerous academic politics. His professed adherence to antiquity was consonant with neither his acceptance of Copernican theory (when it was still controversial in China), nor with his employment of Western conventions of longitude and latitude to draw a map of China. He also anticipated future generations with strikingly modern ideas which envisaged photography as a means to promote universal standards in projects where the visual was paramount. Zou’s writings, published posthumously, contain two important essays: Science updates (Geshu bu) and Notes on a device for capturing images (Sheying zhi qi ji, hereafter Capturing images). 25 The first reviews the considerable Chinese literature on lenses; it explains methods for constructing telescopes and microscopes; finally, it sets out the theoretical principles for constructing camera lenses. Although not formally published, the text was highly acclaimed and recommended for inclusion on the syllabus of Guangzhou’s new Interpreters’ School (Guangfangyan guan).26 Capturing images provides a lucid account of the optical principles of the camera obscura; the text also documents that Zou carried out his own experiments, listing quite independently of Western formulas the chemicals with which he prepared glass plates for a wet-plate method of photography. Given what Capturing images reveals of Zou’s activities, it is likely that he completed it in or before 1844. Some historians in China propose

Methods of invention  31 27

that Zou discovered his own photographic process alone. Certainly, however, Zou’s skills in photography depended on longstanding Chinese acquaintance with the camera obscura, an optical device that Chinese artists had been using in Guangzhou since the 1820s at least. 28 Zou did not declare any source of practical inspiration, but his phlegmatic description of a “device” was also that of the camera obscura upon which he based his construction of a working box camera, eventually an object displayed in a Nanhai middle school until its disappearance with the outbreak of war in 1937. The enthusiastic thesis that Zou invented his own photographic process builds upon more of his notes discovered in Michong in 1962. These show that he prepared his plates with a recipe composed of salt, an extract from fruits of the ubiquitous soap nut tree (sapindus muckrossi), usually harvested for the seeds to make prayer rosaries. To this he added asbestos ore and a red rock ferric oxide fetched from the Guanyin Cliff and other nearby sites. He made this base light-sensitive with mercury, zinc and nitric acid. After exposing the plate, he developed the image with a solution of hydrated iron sulphate (melanterite), alcohol, acetic acid and salt. Equally striking is his recipe for a fixing agent. Besides alcohol and lead tetroxide (red lead), he insisted upon an amalgam containing deer’s horn, more commonly required for medical recipes. 29 The same notes’ references to black lacquer and albumen emulsions may reflect his awareness of advances abroad. Lacquer “sealed” the glass negative in the last step necessary to create a single positive image; alternatively, albumen served to protect a sensitized glass plate in order to reuse it as the negative to generate multiple prints. These processes correspond to Western techniques published in the 1850s. Higher standards of glass manufacture supplied the basis of a new process first publicized in Britain by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851, and improved by James Ambrose Cutting in the United States three years later. Commonly called the wet-plate process (in reference to collodion, the solution of nitrocellulose poured onto a glass support), its images were known as collodion positives or ambrotypes (from Greek ambrotos “immortal”). These sharp negative images presented the first qualitative rival to the daguerreotype, and offered the potential for multiple reproduction, since the collodion plate is a negative image whose transparency permits a positive exposure on paper. However, an alternative to this secondary process was to display the glass image against a dark background—or brush it with a dark sealant—whose effect is to exchange the tonal values: the light-sensitized silver on its surface—dark areas—above a dark background now reflect light and appear pale, and less sensitized areas show progressively darker. Zou, however, was little if at all interested in the reprographic potential of photography, preferring to pursue his growing knowledge of an instrument of seeing, more precisely a category of camera vision. Camera vision “Camera vision” may serve to describe Zou’s emphasis on optics as practical acts of looking at the world via the camera obscura or the photographic camera. Aside from its scientific and artistic life in Europe from the Renaissance onwards, the camera obscura also possesses a Chinese history from at least the moment when European priests in China shared their knowledge with members of the late sixteenth-century elite. The nineteenth century in Europe witnessed the culmination of a long shift from aural to visual modes of interpreting experience.30 The Chinese nineteenth century was equally a period of rapid advance in adopting new technologies of vision and

32 Science observation. Zou Boqi reviewed long descents of Chinese knowledge, and tried to fit them within the epistemological renewal that accompanied numerous efforts to bring China in line with Western and Japanese modernization. In Capturing images Zou’s description of how to obtain images in a camera obscura opens: “If you have a sealed room and you open a single aperture in its front wall to let in light then all objects outside the room will appear as reversed images on the back wall”.31 Crucial in this statement is Zou’s affirmation that the camera image records all objects within its optical range. Stating the fact perhaps for the first time in China, Zou grasped what fascinated millions the world over: the camera’s seemingly magical delivery of an exact and all-inclusive transcript of everything at which the operator points it. At the same time, however, Zou’s reactions were typically those of the camera obscura viewer who observed that the mechanism delivered visions of the external world in colour: “On paper the shapes, colours and positions do not err by a fraction”. These were indeed the common properties of the camera obscura as well as the photographer’s early box camera. Zou’s reference to paper reveals that the camera functioned for Zou also as a drawing device. Clearly, he worked with a camera both to draw and to photograph: his biographer observed that Zou was unusual in including glass plates among his painting equipment.32 Zou’s construction of his camera with a rear view-hole differed from the contemporary norms of building a box camera allowing light to be projected onto a semitransparent screen acting also as the rear side of the box. This permitted the viewer to see the projection from outside, and to trace it with pen and paper. Devices of this sort had appeared in Japan soon after its opening in 1854.33 Zou’s design demanded that an observer look into the interior and observe images on an internal screen. This, the mode of viewing, was at least as important as the means to record the image. However inconvenient, it allowed him to outline a dramatic link between modern science and epistemes established far earlier in ancient Chinese texts. The authority to whom he turned is Shen Gua (1033–1097) who compiled his collection of scientific observations, Mengqi bitan, in the eleventh century. Shen Gua’s writings had long attracted interest. Tao Zongyi (c. 1320–c. 1402) remarked that “In the Tiger Hill pavilion in Pingjiang [Suzhou] they use a board with a hole in it. When the sunlight is bright and clear they hold a large white paper to receive an image (yinga)”.34 Similar entertainment was recorded at a monastery in seventeenth-century Beijing.35 Shen Gua’s remarks on light describe the effect of light passing through a pinhole. They begin by reducing to one single category of “image” the separate phenomena of solar shadows and lens-refracted projections. Zou passed over this silently, while no doubt aware of ancient findings that rationalized both the “image” and “shadow” of a bird “bunched (like tightening a belt) through a small hole in a window [screen]”. Instead, he seized upon Shen Gua’s conclusion, which more pertinently matched modern diction: “Another example: the image of a pagoda passed through the hole or small window is inverted after it is bunched”.36 Confirmations of scientific method from eminent Chinese sources must have exerted strong appeal, especially as military threats mounted in the years following the outbreak of the Opium War in 1839, the first of several crises that Guangdong residents were the least likely to ignore. After British forces started to bombard Guangzhou in 1857, the Sea of Learning College sent the wooden printing blocks of its most valuable project to Zou’s home in Michong.37 So long as disastrous international relations did not distract him, Zou aimed to acculturate a new technological

Methods of invention  33 application to Chinese conditions by reference not to exotic origins but to indigenous paradigms. Several were on offer in the field of optics, including knowledge of experiments on focal length conducted by the fourteenth-century mathematician and astronomer Zhao Youqin, as well as fragmentary reports of the lost text History of lenses (Jingshi) by the famous Suzhou optical technician Sun Yunqiu (b. c. 1630). 38 Increasingly, however, nineteenth-century scholars claimed pinhole projection as an experiment dating to China’s late Bronze Age. Their textual authority was the Mozi, a canon attributed to the Warring States philosopher Mozi (or Mo Di, late fifth–early fourth century BCE), whose interests in engines, siege warfare, light refraction and the notion of universal love must have seemed eerily in step with modern conditions. One notoriously ambiguous passage in Mozi describes either light passing through an aperture or else onto a concave surface. 39 New interest in the text—a rigorously annotated edition had appeared in 1783—arose as aggressive Western imperialism stimulated ever keener searches for science’s origins in classical traditions, informing reformist academic discussion and policy for the rest of the century.40 China’s predicament was not unique. In India, Dayananda Saraswati (1824–1883) urged his fellow reformers to reread the Vedas, convinced that these could reveal all of modern science.41 Inevitably, the nativist symbolism of the Mozi was soon supercharged in a wide range of scientific discussions, as when, for example, the Haining scholar Chen Qiyuan (1811–1881) adduced its precedents in his review of recent telescopic observances of the planets.42 Although Zou made no reference to the Mozi in his writings on photography, the composers of his official biography cast him as another orthodox supporter of the text as “ancestral to Western science” (xixue zhi zu), even though this support is somewhat qualified by what may have been the prosaic need for a safe public position.43 He and his friend Chen Li (1810–1882) shared private doubts about the canonical scholarship to which they were tasked to contribute at the Xuehai College.44 Wherever Zou’s allegiances lay, he was in step with several similarly original contemporaries. Zheng Fuguang (1780–c. 1853), an even more reclusive figure, promoted camera vision as a means to advance other visual practices, most notably painting. The reprographic potential of photography interested him no more than it did Zou. Zheng’s major work Rash opinions on observing with lenses (Jingjing lingchi), which he started in 1835 and expanded until its publication in 1848, became an indispensable manual for making lenses for cameras, telescopes and microscopes. He noted the use of copper or glass plates, proving an awareness of both daguerreotype and wet-plate techniques. He boasted that his explanations, which were laconic, offered “what no painter can achieve”, and suggested that his own practice conformed to an explanation entitled “The dark box for painting paintings”, which reviewed the principles of camera vision. The early photographer Yang Fang’s father Yang Shangwen, a voracious reader and book collector in Beijing, published Rash opinions in a series of his library’s rarest texts, having first drawn its explanatory diagrams, including one for light rays that gestured to Shen Gua’s description (Figure 1.9).45 Not only Shen Gua’s claims but their visualization had become by now thoroughly standardized. Only in Japan, where Shen Gua was commonly read, did a noticeable adjustment happen when Yanagawa Shunsan (1832–1870), one of the earliest Japanese writers on photography, redrew what was essentially Yang Shangwen’s diagram with a church, perhaps a gesture towards the European sources that the Russian consul Iosif Goshkevich (1814–1875) shared with him.46

34 Science

Figure 1.9 Yang Shangwen (1807–1856), drawing of light rays passing through a pinhole, provided in Yang’s publication of Zheng Fuguang, Rash opinions on observing with lenses (Jingjing lingchi), 1848.

Nor was optical experimentation an exclusively gendered practice. Huang Lü, daughter of Huang Chao, whose scientific interests connected him frequently with Zheng Fuguang, features in a collection of lyrical recollections devoted to famous Hangzhou women. She owed this honour to her erudition and skill in building optical instruments, including a telescope mounted on a “box”, which allowed the viewer to see objects as “sharply as in a painting”.47 Albeit imprecise, this record suggests that Huang had combined established principles of vision from what was known by then of the telescope and the camera. And, the inclusion of her achievement in Chen Wenshu’s (1775–1845) Paean to the women of Hangzhou broadens the imagination of photography’s optical history among a scholarly class in which women could usually enjoy only vicariously the status and rewards granted to men. What accounts for the long neglect of Zou’s contribution and those of his predecessors? Posthumous publishing of his work certainly gained him some recognition, but not sufficiently and not fast enough. Zou, like several other writers of his generation, did not benefit from the faster and broader circuits of publishing that became available after his lifetime and underwent their most persistent exploitation in Shanghai with the almost inevitable effects of biased assumptions.48 More important, in acculturating a new technology to immediate needs and preferences, Zou advocated functions that photography historians quite reasonably seldom if ever consider. For instance, his suggestion to put camera vision at the service of charting the Chinese seaboard stressed observation and measurement on behalf of an unfulfilled graphical— and publishing—outcome. That China’s entire coast had been charted already by foreign navigators does not disqualify a creative application of new visual techniques in order to renew an established Chinese system of symbolic representation.49 Zou’s great-grandson also claims that Zou used his camera to calculate the distance from Michong village to the Zhenhailou, the watch-tower on the northern heights of Guangzhou.50 This seems eccentric, except that in Hangzhou Huang Lü also advocated the use of her camera combined with a telescope’s magnifying power in order to “capture images of what is several miles further away”. Or, Zheng Fuguang, like Huang located in a region more famous than any other for garden design, extolled the use of his portable camera obscura for drawing his contemporaries’ private property;

Methods of invention  35 somewhat as an afterthought, he suggested its use for drawing portraits. Such engagements suggest a fascinating early alternative to the camera’s eventual applications ever since taken for granted as the teleological object of photography’s invention. Such a revision is all the more valid, considering that an authority such as Herschel never abandoned his conviction that photography offered advances to human knowledge in terms of both a technique of vision and an extra mode of representation.51 For Zou Boqi making pictures as the camera’s primary application was not a paramount aim; for later writers the aim was nothing less. Shen Gua’s eleventh-century observations of light rays entering a pinhole and forming images of the external world on a facing wall was a precedent for the theoretical discussion of photography in China no less valid than the camera obscura’s function as visual technique and discursive reference in the European Renaissance. That Zou Boqi could enunciate a theory of photography by drawing on Chinese knowledge concerning optics and light refraction controverts narratives—including many published in China—that assume that photography was embedded in a technological determinism, which the West first experienced before its revelation elsewhere. Through his emphasis on camera vision Zou grasped that viewing through a lens marked a point of rupture, and he anticipated the next generation of thinkers who stressed even more forcefully how modern progress was defined by dramatic contrasts of past and present seeing. The work of translating Western science into Chinese could have expanded upon Zou’s early achievements, supposing that the translators were as keen as Zou to key modern photography to optical science in China’s deep past. They were not. Besides, Zou’s enthusiasm for external mechanisms of vision isolated him from the trend that now followed and included another intellectual break, which was the rising interest in theories of embodied vision, one of the prime targets of translators’ efforts to present optical science in popular Chinese texts.

Translating novelties Recent research on the history of photography has shown how much in terms of Western historical claims and instructional advice concerning the medium was available by the 1870s, 52 but much less is said concerning the impact of this writing outside European and American publishing circuits. The vital motivation for some of its translation was its Chinese readership’s engagement with the popular imagination of science and art. If the laws of optics were in Hillel Schwartz’s suggestion “the crux of modernity”, 53 Chinese readers conformed by sharpening their expertise in light, the human eye and the optical principles of photography. One effect of these new areas of knowledge was the growth of a fascinating yet also disturbing awareness of embodied vision primarily in its medical context; less auspicious was the effect of shifting Chinese knowledge of photography into a set of entirely rehistoricized origins. Wang Hui’s recent study of the centrality of science to May Fourth cultural commentary has corrected the common impression of that movement as a predominantly humanistic literary project. 54 The movement latched onto a broad demand for scientific knowledge, and many complained that the engagement was too slow. In particular, early catalogues of translated literature reveal readers’ exasperation that knowledge of photography was so widespread that texts published twenty years earlier were no longer worth consulting. 55 In a comparative light, no evidence suggests

36 Science that science attracted less interest in China than it did for the intellectual life of industrially advanced Western nations. The structures for science education in China were relatively new, but the situation in Europe was only better at the summit of modern educational systems. In Britain, the Devonshire Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science described science teaching in 1875 as a “national misfortune”. One year later, French universities together boasted no more than 293 students in their science faculties, and British student slang for the new Association for the Promotion of Science was “mudfog”. 56 The translation of Western scientific literature into Chinese was another process of collaboration. Eventually, the preeminent storehouse of its expertise was Shanghai, specifically the Jiangnan Machine Manufacturing Works (Jiangnan jiqi zhizao zongju), established in 1865 and commonly shortened to the Jiangnan Arsenal, a lavishly endowed institution, which soon radiated a stirring sense of maritime modernity, even if not enough to tempt Zou Boqi to accept another job offer. The Arsenal’s translation school, founded in 1868, functioned like a research academy, and its Chinese and foreign staff collaborated regularly to produce scientific articles and books. Typically, one partner “dictated” (shu) the text, and the other (if not a committee) “translated” (yi) and composed the Chinese version. Not every “dictator” scrupled to record the name of the “translator”. Recent reconstructions of the translated corpus of “Western learning” (xixue or “New learning”, xinxue) from the 1840s onwards show that publications on photographic technologies interpreted as part of optics remained in demand until the early 1880s. 57 This matches perceptive remarks by Shen Taimou (1864–1926), an early collector of photographs in Beijing, who saw studies in Western optics and electricity—“dawning one after the other”— as the crucial fields in which photography had developed. 58 Fascination with light generated the new name “light studies” (guangxue). In 1876, the American missionary Carl Kreyer and his collaborator at the Jiangnan Arsenal, Zhao Yuanyi, published Guangxue, a translation of Six Lectures on Light by John Tyndall (1820–1893), one of the century’s most celebrated popularizers of science. Six Lectures appeared after his sensational speaking tour of the United States during 1872–1873. The New York Daily Tribune printed each American lecture the day after its delivery and published a special reprint of all six lectures, selling 300,000 editions. 59 Tyndall’s publications and lectures—he was a legendary performer—also attracted close attention from Chinese intellectuals. China’s first ambassador to Britain, Guo Songtao, also a strong supporter of Zou Boqi’s work in Guangzhou, attended Tyndall’s lectures, and confided to his diary the delight of meeting him.60 Someone posted an edition of Tyndall’s Guangxue to the Royal Photographic Society whose library still holds it. Western contributions to the field of optics still required, however, an explanation of their relevance to photography, and those who supplied some answers were Western medical practitioners who authored—with assistance—texts in Chinese. Benjamin Hobson (1816–1873), a member of the London Missionary Society who transferred his medical practice from Hong Kong to Guangzhou in 1848 published New treatise on anatomy (Quanti xinlun) three years later.61 This devoted a long discussion to the eye, illustrated with a section of the eyeball, and his broader treatise Natural philosophy (Bowu xinbian, 1855) contained a division on optics.62 Hobson did not explain photography, but his younger contemporary, the Glasgow surgeon

Methods of invention  37 John Dudgeon (1837–1901), did so in a manner that owed a lot to the pathological context that Hobson had established. Dudgeon’s The miracle of cast images (Tuoying qiguan, below Cast images) appeared in 1873 in four woodblock-printed volumes, a set of which again someone posted to the Royal Photographic Society. Sent to China in 1863 by the London Missionary Society, Dudgeon was professor of medicine and physiology at the Beijing Interpreters’ School (Tongwenguan), founded the previous year and afterwards the model for similar institutions in Shanghai and then Guangzhou, where Zou Boqi was invited yet declined to teach. Dudgeon was also superintendent of a recently established Alms Hospital (Shiyiyuan, 1861), which published his work—and stored the printing blocks. In the preface to his work, Dudgeon claimed that, overwhelmed with requests for photographs, he composed an instruction manual to contribute to the ongoing rise of science education among the elite. His commitment to his medical work—and satires of his good intentions in the British press—reveal him as an unusually sympathetic observer of Chinese conditions.63 Cast images devoted considerable space to the camera obscura, comparing the device to already questionable notions of ocular vision (Figure 1.10). Nevertheless, he received strong support from the official arbiters of what a Western scientific syllabus should be. An extra foreword to his text by Wanyan Chonghou (1826–1893), a senior member of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Zongli yamen) was an intriguing intervention. This Manchu aristocrat, some years later scapegoated for the disastrous negotiations leading up to the Livadia Treaty with Russia, wrote his foreword just after returning from a mission to France where he had been tasked with extending an official apology for the “Tianjin massacre”, a deadly anti-missionary riot that almost touched off another war in 1870. Wanyan had been the Tianjin magistrate that year, and, like everyone else, he was aware that one of the fuses to a series of Catholic lynchings had been the rumour that French priests and nuns purchased kidnapped children and removed their eyes. Any sober explanation of how the eye works like a modern optical machine was a welcome substitution for still persistent rumours of its uses in foreign witchcraft. He probably also noticed Dudgeon’s keenness to acculturate his explanations to Chinese orthodoxies, in one case visible as Shen Gua’s bird in Dudgeon’s lower diagram. Chonghou’s brother Chongshi (1820–1876) added poems to the former’s preface. The opening verse declared that “optics must follow the precision of chemistry”, a prioritization that fitted closely how these senior administrators envisaged the evolution of the new educational programme—chemistry had a status equalled only by mathematics in the Tongwenguan syllabus. Esteem for photography had not been self-evident in Beijing in 1872, and Dudgeon presented his subject almost furtively. In his preface he announced that photography “is a minor stream in the arts, for the whole process is a mere seven stages, but the principles of Optics and Chemistry are particularly numerous”. He also admitted that he only “played” with taking photographs. But, even if only an amateur, he was a serious one. He had recently accompanied John Thomson—an exact contemporary also from Scotland—to visit Beijing’s Summer Palace.64 Dudgeon’s reticence concerning his knowledge of photography is not entirely fathomable, but it may have reflected caution in launching his text onto the more treacherous waters of the capital’s readership. Sensitive to conservative opinion, he lodged photography within the larger and more prestigious constellation of natural science.

38 Science

Figure 1.10 Unknown artist, diagrams of the human eye and camera reception. From John Dudgeon, The miracle of cast images (Tuoying qiguan), Beijing, 1872. Collection of Victoria & Albert Museum (formerly coll. National Media Museum, Bradford; formerly coll. Royal Photographic Society).

Embodying vision Dudgeon’s diagram of human vision reflecting the external world through a machinic grasp of coordinates is the first of its kind in any Chinese discourse on vision. Diagrams were a new publishing phenomenon, which early Chinese medical readerships regarded with some scepticism.65 However, they enabled Dudgeon to locate the visual possibilities of photography within what Chris Jenks has analyzed as the centrality of the eye in Western culture.66 Dudgeon’s eye section is crude compared to the more sophisticated contemporary illustrations in Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (1867) by Hermann Helmholtz (1821–1894), one of the ophthalmoscope’s inventors. But Dudgeon’s stark illustration reveals his participation in one of his century’s shifts from debates on seeing via visual technologies like the camera to those concerned purely with the subjective agency of the eye. Acknowledging that Chinese knowledge of the camera obscura dated to the fifteenth century, Dudgeon opened his explanation of this device with an ecstatic tribute to the human eye, and claimed that the principles of the camera obscura and other viewing mechanisms did not differ from those of the human organ.67

Methods of invention  39 Popular ideas concerning the eye already connected it to photographic functions. Mao Xianglin (c. 1815–c. 1893), a Suzhou physician resident in Shanghai, documented a famous misapprehension of the day: the permanence of an optical image on the retina of a slaughtered steer or, even more sensationally, a murder victim.68 Although perhaps only rarely performed after the seventeenth century, Descartes’ famous experiment had proved the forming of an inverted image on the retina of a bull’s eye.69 The post-mortem durability of any retinal image, which might offer a forensic aid to police work, was a fantasy that long persisted in crime literature, as well as in the Chinese popular press. Shanghai’s enormously successful international lifestyle journal Young Companion (Liangyou huabao, 1925–1949, hereafter Liangyou) produced an earnest stage-by-stage explanation of recovering evidence from retinal images as late as 1934.70 Dudgeon’s emphasis reflected what theorists of vision now claimed, namely that the human body was the primary site of vision. The importance of the previous century’s greatest symbolic episteme of visual knowledge as well as the mechanism of an optical system—the camera obscura—had declined. Commenting on these changing conceptions of vision, Jonathan Crary has pointed out that nineteenth-century science now considered “vision that had been taken out of the incorporeal relations of the camera obscura and relocated in the human body”.71 And, the boldest study to date, Daston and Galison’s lengthy examination of shifting epistemic virtues, albeit solely those of Western scientific communities, traces the convergence between mechanical objectivity— served primarily by photography—and the trained judgement of subjective knowledge, a category of subjectivity that the authors call the “willful self”.72 Such a figure, thickly involved in science and tasked to discipline the intuitions inspired by visual objects, is by no means irrelevant to Zou Boqi’s exertions towards a new scientific self, while Dudgeon conceptualized this nineteenth-century shift at a more developed stage. How Dudgeon’s Chinese text was received, and the extent to which he may have further shared his reconstitution of vision with a Chinese constituency can only be supposed. Less tentatively, however, his predication of camera vision on human physiology alluded directly to the emergence of subjective vision. This aligned with a Western epistemic renewal whose rhetoric also relied on visual technologies and the scientistic ideology that accommodated them in the formation of visual modernity. The logic through which Dudgeon linked photography to medical practice soon operated also in the practical distribution of photographic equipment, which is considered further below. Other important texts following Dudgeon’s publication were translations sponsored by the Jiangnan Arsenal. Since this institution’s primary function was to explain and build machines, most of its translation staff’s indifference to the human body and its sensorium is not surprising. In 1880, the British missionary John Fryer (1839–1929) and the celebrated chemist and translator Xu Shou (1818–1884), both Arsenal employees, published Outline of methods of photography (Zhaoxiang lüefa). The work was serialized in the famous science journal Science Compendium (Gezhi huibian), just one of a plethora of scientific translations that Fryer contributed to the journal, his work rate perhaps inspired by an edition of William Chalmer Burns’ Chinese translation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which he annotated exhaustively.73 Fryer and Xu acknowledged no source for their translation, but many readers were aware that their work was not original. The Shaoxing scholar Xu Weize, compiler of an important bibliography of

40 Science Western learning, marked his entry on Zhaoxiang lüefa as “selected by Fryer”—an unusual indication of anyone’s acquaintance with translated texts and their possible sources.74 In fact, Fryer and Xu’s work was the translation of a popular manual, namely The Negative and the Print (1866) by John Towler. Fryer and Xu had already released essentially the same translation under the risqué title Colourful (or: Sensuous) appearances bequeathed to truth (Sexiang liuzhen), but they added extra remarks on image enlargement and photolithography before republishing it with a more dignified title for the Science Compendium. An immigrant to the United States from Yorkshire, Towler, who was minimally interested in optics, typified the practical instructor in this early period of popular photography texts. In his longer manual, The Silver Sunbeam, he encouraged readers to think of what he called “actinic drawing” as “brilliant hues on the side of an apple … observed by the first occupants of earth”75 —so not just any apple—but the bulk of his instructions concerned chemical procedures, precisely the technical knowledge that Fryer and Xu mediated to a readership including photography studio personnel and the new clientele of prestigious apothecaries, which sold photographic equipment and chemicals. Manuals typically appeared in Chinese translation without attribution. Although Fryer published the long article “Photographic devices” (“Zhaoxiang qi”) in Science Compendium in 1891 without declaring its source, he drew much of the material from the trade literature of the Birmingham manufacturer J. Lancaster and Son. The article updated Fryer and Xu’s explanations of some years earlier, especially in respect of the latest dry-plate methods, and stated Shanghai market prices for all the equipment shown. Not every item that the article illustrated needed to be shipped from overseas—the text encouraged potential buyers to engage a local carpenter to complete a box onto which to mount imported metal fittings.76 The article’s illustrations were reproductions of drawings first executed by industrial draughtsmen in Britain and published in one of the Lancaster firm’s catalogues of photographic supplies (Figure 1.11). Founded in 1835 to manufacture spectacles, telescopes and other optical equipment, the firm began to make cameras in the early 1870s, claiming by 1898 to have sold over 200,000 cameras; it ceased production in 1955.77 The firm’s catalogue How to Be a Successful Amateur Photographer, first published in 1886, featured within its own covers as one of the items included in the full set of equipment, now remediated in a Shanghai publication by Fryer and an unknown assistant. This knowledge from Birmingham travelled even further. Its remediation of Jiangnan Arsenal publications in pharmaceutical advertising reiterated how the popularity of photographic science was almost inescapably indebted to that of medicine. Birmingham’s photographic machinery resurfaced in one of the most rapturously received Shanghai publications of the century’s end, the lithographically printed Touchstone Cabinet Illustrated Journal (Dianshizhai huabao, hereafter Dianshizhai). The advertiser, the Chinese Western Apothecary (Zhong Xi da yaofang), placed foldout advertisements for photographic equipment in successive issues of the journal, which appeared every ten days (Figure 1.12).78 Located on Shanghai’s Fuzhoulu (Fourth Avenue), one of the city’s premier sites of cultural consumption, the Apothecary was the first entirely Chinese-capitalized venture to trade in both Chinese and imported medicines. Its founder Gu Songquan (1856–1927) began his career in the dispensary of the British Hospital (Daying yiyuan), which was importing British photographic

Figure 1.11 Page from John Fryer, “Photographic devices” (“Zhaoxiang qi”), published in Science Compendium (Gezhi huibian), Shanghai, 1891. Collection of C.V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Methods of invention  41

42 Science

Figure 1.12 One of a series of advertisements by the Chinese Western Apothecary, inserted in Dianshizhai huabao, 324 (18 January 1893). Collection of British Library.

equipment by 1891. The following year Gu transferred the hospital’s entire photography business to his apothecary. The illustrators who drew Gu’s advertisements—with steel nib pens most likely also imported from Birmingham—arranged increasingly frenetic street scenes amid crowded displays of imported technology that the Dianshizhai lithographers transferred either from another Lancaster and Son’s catalogue or from Fryer’s translation. They mixed local and foreign visual registers with impressive fluency, capitalizing on the ten-day intervals between issues to adjust the advertisements’ visual content in the weeks before New Year, the most auspicious season to enhance old custom and win new. The commercial glamorization of machine tools had as yet little precedent, except in Japan where businesses had commissioned illustrations of their goods since the 1820s when the prestigious Tokyo stationer Ōsumi Gensuke first catalogued models of the camera obscura, spectacles and other optical devices. The Apothecary advertisements’ insertion of machines into contemporary life was more explicit. Their artists adapted also the visual rhetoric of popular New Year’s prints, which invariably depicted breakneck eagerness to be out and about at fairs and entertainments. The

Methods of invention  43 designers of that ephemeral yet lucrative genre excelled in the kind of representational prolixity also visible in these advertisements’ sense of rush. Reminiscent of photographs of commercial premises are the managers, two denotative figures standing in the doorway (compare a photograph pose in Figure 3.4). The advertisements stressed the Apothecary’s contribution to the industrial and social dimensions of the photographic economy at both local and international levels. Not only had its stock of equipment been shipped from abroad, so too had the female occupant in one of the carriages. The crush of lenses, cameras, projectors and other equipment at mixed angles along the pages’ edges was by no means visual illiteracy in typographical conventions where unidirectional alignment had low priority. Exotic hardware was welcome freight in projecting a prestigious Shanghai business’s connections with smart industrial technology from overseas. The prestige spread far. In each advertisement the Apothecary licensed its products and goods to retailers in some eleven cities and towns in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, as well as in the more distant yet navigable destinations of Tianjin, Hankou and Chongqing. An entirely symbolic presence is the horizontal arrangement of four-character congratulatory maxims, effectively a calligraphy display by high officials: Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), Zhang Zhiwan (1811–1897), Weng Tonghe (1830–1904), Shen Baozhen (1820–1879) and others. More than one name attached to the same inscription in different editions of the advertisement reveals careless or even spurious attributions. Shen Baozhen, once superintendent of the Fuzhou Arsenal, had died eleven years earlier. However, their joint political patronage apostrophized public confidence in several grand propitiations: successful retail of the latest products vouchsafed scientific knowledge; the modern pharmaceutical industry was the inheritor of ancient alchemy; new learning supported sensible politics; science (gezhi) guaranteed fortune. In the more populated image Roberta Wue has rightly identified the innovative juxtaposition of gazes among different categories and genders of shoppers, their servants and supervisors (observe the Sikh policeman), further juxtaposed with various machines that see, record, enlarge, print and so on.79 In addition, this rapid social scrutiny outside a shop was depicted for an audience about to celebrate New Year. The juxtaposition of this familiar fairground content with two roundels showing a man and a woman each operating a camera in Birmingham’s leafy suburbs—Lancaster and Son specialized in “Ladies’ cameras”—is visually incongruous, but it offers one of the first appearances in a Chinese publication of photography as a popular science shared by both genders, and may have added an exotic argument for including other women elsewhere on the same image surface. Finally, this serial adoption of a group of images for different purposes locates the popularization of photographic knowledge beside medical health. The first foldout of the series featured surrounding borders listing dozens of medicines and health tonics, and advertised most prominently one of the Apothecary’s signature products: Plum Blossom Opium Abstinence Tablets. The advertisement’s subsequent iterations first replaced the medicine lists with the Birmingham equipment, and then dropped the tablets from pride of place in the upper border and inserted an explanation of photography— shown in Figure 1.12. The maxims by famous persons remained to do their old work unaltered. Pharmacology and photography were commercially interchangeable. This convergence between photography and medicine is evident again in medical services that photography studios, the subject of Chapter 3, often accommodated beside photography as late as the 1950s. The same convergence also surfaced two decades later

44 Science in a hilarious ballad recital—the pingtan genre of narrative and song often performed in Suzhou dialect to lute (pipa) accompaniment—recounting how Daguerre’s father, about to go blind, journeys to Italy and receives treatment from the Neapolitan polymath Giambattista Della Porta whose death in 1615 does not leastwise impede this buoyant narrative. To mark his gratitude the older Daguerre makes his young son promise to invent photography.80 The author of this fascinating creation was perhaps a female performer from the theatre world, yet equally plausibly a writer who specialized in composing examples of this theatrical genre aimed at a reading public.81 Certainly, however, while readers in 1916 were moderns laughing at the incongruities of wilfully distorted European biographies, they may not have entirely mocked Della Porta’s therapeutic touch releasing an avowal to invent photography, because the act was key to an acknowledged perception of photography and pathology’s advances in conjunction. The camera obscura had indeed served in Della Porta’s famous analogy of the eye. The Suzhou pingtan ballad jumbled Western historical facts into a superb work of popular performance, but its nonsense also appealed to listeners and readers who knew the real facts of French and Italian biography. And, with the publication of this secret familiarity in a journal whose iconoclastic agenda was to recategorize literature as modern and demotic, common photographic knowledge was on offer as an object oriented to the future, the foreign and the international. Some decades later Birmingham’s photographic exports appeared unwieldy and heavy, and smarter manufacturing ingenuity in Germany gained increasing attention. Fryer’s translations, which had laboriously explained visual material soon to be recycled in the even more eclectic realm of advertising, were received critically. The opinionated bibliophile Xu Weize was dismissive of both Dudgeon’s work (“obsolete”) and Fryer and Xu’s (“incomplete”). Perhaps such disappointment, if it was widespread, motivated a new generation of enthusiasts to popularize photography with new translations, which, in another spate of publishing after the turn of the century, related direct experiences of practice with cheaper and more widely available equipment. Commercial Chinese publishing had modernized—faster than the political system that it inhabited—to the point where a single author could see a manual on photography turned rapidly into print. Most of these writers had enjoyed an elite education and perhaps studied abroad. Chen Zhaochang had earned a government degree before he set up a reformist college to teach English and mathematics in Beijing. In publishing one of the first popular instruction manuals, New compilation on photography (Zhaoxiang xinbian, 1906), he confessed in the preface that he had asked a friend to check his text’s legibility, effectively admitting that the language of his highly educated background was for many readers incomprehensible.82 Wu Yangzeng (Y.T. Woo, 1862–1940), a mining engineer and former student of Columbia University and London’s Imperial College, authored a text under exactly the same title in 1907, and acknowledged debts variously to Sir William Abney (1843–1920), astronomer, chemist and photographer who regularly lectured at London colleges, and to several recent Chinese guides published in Guangzhou. The lawyer Zhou Yaoguang published Practical photography studies (Shiyong yingxiang xue) in the same year, adapting a foreign manual that he did not identify. He preserved its artwork, and used a colloquial Guangdong word (yingxiangb) in his title to signal that a regional description was still valid beside other writers’ enthusiasm to establish the universal descriptive terms of a national language. Finally, Zhong Ziyuan (1861–1945) studied at Yale University.83 In between studies and sports—notably as

Methods of invention  45 coxswain of the university eight during 1880–1881—he took up photography and published another manual, A photography primer (Sheying chufan) before 1911. The photograph of him demonstrating a camera to a group of colleagues (Figure 0.1) dates probably to 1904 when the group were members of a diplomatic representation travelling to the St Louis Fair, the first world fair in which China participated. The purpose of this image is unknown, but its painstaking staging and everyone’s efforts to look their best declare unequivocally that scientific demonstration demanded the application of a public performance. Zhong, who could recite in Greek and Latin at secondary school in Springfield and won a Yale sophomore prize for declamation, was eminently suited for this role.84 Since the image earns its place along a continuum beginning with Zou Boqi taking a solar reading, its authentication of a scientific persona is an exciting yet not necessarily novel confirmation. His companions had perhaps long ago grasped the explanation he repeated beside a tripod camera on an overcast day in America, but this does not mean it was trivial, since an internationalist political outlook included photographic knowledge as a crucial element in its formation. Only one decade earlier, Xue Fucheng (1838–1894), during his years in Europe (1890–1894), recorded in his journal that he possessed a fluent grasp of solar optics and human vision, bolstered by his deference to the usual orthodoxy that the basics of Western science had long existed in China.85 And, when photography studios in the Republican period cornered almost the entire publishing market for photography manuals, they squandered no opportunity to signal the approbation of political patrons. Ouyang Huiqiang, owner of Shanghai’s Baoji studio, inveigled the reformer Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and the distinguished Commercial Press editor Zhang Yuanji (1871–1959) to write respectively the foreword and preface to his Guide to photography (Sheying zhinan), which probably the Commercial Press printed. Bombarding news readers with pre- and post-publication hype, Ouyang fuelled welcome publicity of his—actually his father’s—connections with Kang. The first printing sold out in one day (said Ouyang the day after).86 Rehistoricized origins During China’s transition from empire to republic the history of photography became subject to a teleology casting it as a technology imported from the West—Japan was rarely mentioned. Political emancipation, it seems, was no reason to disregard a solely Western narrative of technology now established as universal. Rather, swept up with the May Fourth quest for national modernity, it may have had the opposite effect. Cursory discussions of photography’s history in instructional manuals—even those published in Guangzhou—say nothing, for example, about Zou Boqi. Chinese knowledge of Western history was certainly accurate, and, while positivist outcomes and rhetorical precedents were equally discussed, the former won priority in at least their biographical relevance. Guo Songtao—who had once tried to employ Zou Boqi—during his diplomatic residence in London, passed happy hours discussing the history of photography. He was confident that the medium had been invented “forty-five years ago”, that is in 1833, so he did not dispute Niépce’s crucial role. He was also sure that ancient Chinese philosophers had long ago understood photography’s optics and chemistry, but he did not name any particular figure.87 Newer genres of literature propounded just as enthusiastically the notion of photography’s exclusive elaboration abroad. In Wu Zhihui’s (1866–1953) novel Chats

46 Science comparing old and new (Shangxia gujin tan), written in 1911 but published posthumously, a highly contrived sequence of conversations on China’s progress towards technological modernity, the indefatigable narrator explains the achievements of Wedgwood, Niépce, Fox Talbot, Herschel and Daguerre. Wu Zhihui’s characters refer to local conditions merely as the breeding ground of popular misconceptions and superstitions. Significantly, the narrator is a broadly travelled mariner—Wu had spent time in Paris where he helped to found an illustrated magazine with no less a figure than the future minister of education Cai Yuanpei—and his audience consists of a group of young women eager to withstand the narrator’s firehose of information concerning technical and social changes in Europe and America.88 More dignified accounts of photography’s history appeared in other journals whose impressive readership numbers offered unprecedented opportunities to insert photography into a reading programme pursuing expressions of national identity and new justifications of personhood. In 1911, for example, Du Jiutian, a painter, photographer, publicist and writer from Shaoxing, released six articles outlining photography’s history in Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi, 1904–1948), edited by his brother Du Yaquan (1873–1933), the educator who had founded China’s first chemistry journal in 1900.89 An obvious continuity from earlier Shanghai literature was evident in the articles’ illustrations, which the Du brothers stripped from a recent Lancaster and Son’s catalogue. The magazine’s circulation had recently hit 15,000,90 and such favourable exposure encouraged Du to republish his articles as New edition of photography’s techniques (Xinbian sheying shu, 1913). However, his forte was in magazines, and in 1925 he relaunched his expertise in Women’s Magazine (Funü zazhi, 1915–1931), taking charge of readers’ questions and his own erudite answers. He set a predictable tone in responding to the first question from a Suzhou reader who asked whether photographs on porcelain still circulated in Shanghai.91 Du patiently explained that printing on porcelain was no longer fashionable in the great metropolis, implying genially that Suzhou residents should try to catch up. The column lasted for two years, after which Du republished its contents as another book, Advice on photography’s techniques (Sheying shu guwen). Come the centenary year of 1939, Liangyou seized the opportunity to introduce readers to predominantly professional Shanghai photographers participating in photography’s global circuits. The magazine’s Special section: Photography in 100 years features one of the most familiar portraits of Daguerre (Figure 1.13). Its inner pages contained a brief yet broadly transnational account of technical developments tested by Wedgwood, Niépce, Daguerre, Fox Talbot, Bayard, Herschel and many others. Even photography’s pre-1839 history was represented by the reproduction of Daguerre’s celebrated 1837 photograph of the interior of a Cabinet of Curiosities.92 No name of any Chinese scientist was included. Nor did these pages mention Dudgeon, Fryer and Xu. Nie Guangdi, who authored this survey, disclosed no sources, but most of the images that he chose had appeared in leading European surveys, such as those by Georges Potonniée (1925) and Josef Maria Eder ([1905] 1932). Key images of photography’s history in the West now circulated globally, and the Shanghai editors of Liangyou were keen to mark their presence on this international metropolitan circuit. The importance of Shanghai as a new and modern urban culture can hardly be downplayed, and photographic studios and their personnel there were prominent as recorders and even agents of the city’s history. Yet, despite the urban fixations of these and later commentators, paradigms of modernity need not be entirely city-bound. If

Methods of invention  47

Figure 1.13 Front page of supplement to mark the centenary of the public announcement of the daguerreotype in 1839, Liangyou, 150 (January 1940).

48 Science so, Zou Boqi is one of those figures who, in seeming paradox, leads historical strands of China’s modernity into the obscure circuits of old family estates and the resistant temporality of village life. Yang Fang, briefly mentioned above, especially following his move from Beijing to his family property in Lingshi in southern Shanxi, is another example. Such historical reimagining would have gained short shrift from the editors of Liangyou in 1939, even though most of them shared a Guangdong background. The common Shanghai belief that photography first arrived in China in a form already completed somewhere else neatly fulfilled the technological historian Lewis Mumford’s contemporary analysis that invention had been reduced, beside science, to a “derivative project”.93 In fact, the process had begun earlier. In 1883, a guide to Shanghai’s theatrical entertainment claimed that the history of photography in China flowed through Shanghai into the interior.94 Two decades later, the printer and bookseller Pei Xibin completed another survey of Shanghai commerce and entertainment, and made the same claim, noting that the process would now speed up with the opening of the railway to Suzhou—he reproduced the timetable and fares.95 Part of this chapter tells the story of photography’s ascent in Shanghai. Subsequent chapters emphasize a similar point, but the Chinese indigenization of photography might not have happened as swiftly as it did, were it not that Shanghai was first heir to a sophisticated print-culture and print-commerce from its larger regional surroundings.96 This accounts for the usual metropolitan chauvinism on the part of historians and journalists keen both to advertise and to enact the city’s leadership in pioneering new forms of the visual image. In that case, should not Liangyou have paid any attention to the achievements of local missionary translators such as Fryer and his collaborator Xu Shou? More significant, probably, is the disdain for mechanical work that permeates recollections of photography’s first one hundred years. Fryer and Xu described mechanical reprographics, but, just as a series of industrial revolutions in Western nations and Japan transformed notions of work, so too in Shanghai references to mechanical operations and manual labour became increasingly pejorative. All the Chinese photographers featured in the Liangyou centennial edition celebrating photography’s invention emphasized their intellectual outlook as artists, albeit artists in a field now irrevocably altered by its operation within industrial commerce. Several of them stressed that precisely their incompetence in the manual demands of mimetic drawing first drove them to take up photography.

Conclusion An entire photography complex was neither unloaded, translated, loaned, plagiarized and conceived nor assembled by carpenters, apothecaries and opticians in one single act. Other constituents, such as the further conceptualization of the photographic image, the medium’s commercialization and social imagination, its forms of communication and circulation, are the subjects of later chapters. But at the level discussed so far, the translation of Tyndall’s construction of optics, for example, was unpacked separately from that of Towler’s practical engagements, and restricted to the most educated circles. Clear, however, is a gradual disengagement between the need to understand optics and a much stronger desire for knowledge to operate a camera, to extract the images that it produced, and—the concern of the next chapter—to decide what to call these. Any divergence between high science and everyday knowledge is not surprising, all the less so in an era when photography’s successive inventions and

Methods of invention

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adjustments tended towards making the technical execution of photographing simpler and cheaper. Optics’ glamour, for instance, never dulled, so that it remained an authoritative invocation in all manner of secular enterprise, irrespective of what level of scientific learning was on hand. When in 1926 a new studio (s 286) threw an opening party in one of Shanghai’s most vibrant entertainment quarters, its owners crowed that the company was packed with press people as well as “many optics experts”. What is remarkable is that positivist hindsight by 1939 hardly if ever granted Chinese roles in a history of ingenuity located entirely abroad. Part of Bruno Latour’s analysis of how to research the history of science has drawn attention to the divergent channels of scientific communication, respectively official and semi-official (officieux).97 This distinction offers perhaps the opportunity to imagine how a figure as important as Zou Boqi was almost abandoned at a junction where one route of prestigious learning and philosophy forked from another of more everyman categories of learning and its dissemination. If this suggestion is not off the mark, then it fits within a period when the official status of learning ceded many of its privileges to the rising popularity of new forms of science’s commerce and communication. Zou Boqi is often invoked—as in Chapter 5—as a speaker to every individual’s somewhat unsettling photographic existence. Similar remarks in similar terms were about to swamp the decades that followed. But, the recombined sherds of an image showing Zou in action below the noonday sun show a performance of the scientific self quite separate from even if less forcefully eloquent than the metrical organization of increasingly standard verse addressed to photographs. No less important are more prosaic rhetorical expressions of technological progress. A new accommodation for the indigenous roots of photographic science has delegated a different historical order in which applying science to the pursuit of practical outcomes has been retrieved from neglect. The contrast with the established status of Ueno Hikoma (Figure 1.8) is once again instructive. An early account of his pioneering studies and possibly the first reproduction of his portrait—also fractured— appeared in an historical essay on photography as early as 1917 in Photography Monthly (Shashin geppō), then Japan’s leading photography journal.98 After one hundred years the earliest contributions to the introduction of photography were subject to a retroactive teleology whose imagination of history disregarded locally acquired skills of photography beside the sparks of genius that flew from the French and English countryside into international circuits of metropolitan modernity. If only correcting evidence had surfaced earlier, then the exaggeration of photography’s entirely Western invention might have been controlled, and crucial elements of photographic knowledge, like some of the metaphors of their description discussed in the following chapter, might have claimed their parentage in China sooner.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Zhang Ruogu, “Sheying jiuhua”, Xinwen yebao, 3 October 1936: 8. Lang (1939a): preface. Yue (1999): 16; Yue (2006): 3–61. Whitehead (1926): 120–121; Frizot (1989): 103–104. Batchen (1997): 24–53. Brunet (2009): 16. Kemp & Wilder (2002): 360–362. Kossoy (1989): 73–78; Kossoy (1998): 23–24; Bajac (2001a): 19–20.

50 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Science Harmant (1980). Harmant ([1960] 1977): 39; Batchen (1997): 35–53. Pinney (1997): 17; Lane-Poole (1894): vol. 1, 31; Bennett (2013): 1; Wu (2016): 7. Tillotson (1987): 48–50. Tongxing’s (Tung Hing) panorama at Cody and Terpak (2011): 170–171; panorama in ink and colours at Corrigan, Campen, Diercks & Blyberg (2015): 70. Bajac & Planchon-de Font-Réaulx (2003): 354. Trachtenberg (1980): viii. Porter (2000): 39. Mason (1800): pl. X; Kleutghen (2015): 766. For a survey of these artisanal images, see Ma (2011). The earliest image of Zhang Mu (1805–1849) is lost; for a list of all figures whom Yang photographed, see Li (1995): 115; on his methods, see Guo (2010); He & Shen (2017): esp. 494–498. A patronizing account accompanies three photographs at Thomson (1873–1874), vol. 4: illus. nos 12, 13, 14. Reproduced at Li (1994): 41. Despite Li’s statement that this scroll was destined for the Museum of Chinese History (since renamed China National Museum), Beijing, no museum record of this object is available (communication, 9 June 2020). Ueno (1862). Wang & Hong (1986): 185. Elman (2005): 320–351. Zou (1873). Zhu ([1923] 1988): 42.34b–35a. Chen et al. (1987): 11–12, 22–24; Peng (1980): 14–15; Wu (1984): 79–88; for a more cautious assessment, see Wang & Hong (1986): 179–187. Examples include two oil-painted views of Guangzhou, dated c. 1825 and mid-1830s, located in Hong Kong Museum of Art, accession nos AH 1992.0008 & AH 1989.0002. Wu (1984): 83. Crary (1990). Zou (1873): 18a. Zhu (1923): 42.32b–33a. See, for example, an illustration in an encyclopaedia of Western machines, at Hashimoto ([1862–1865] 1967): 107. Tao ([1366] 1935–1936): 15.12b–13a. Liu & Yu ([1635] 2000): 3.140. Shen (1987): 3.111 (no. 44); see also Needham (1962): 97–98. Instead of “bunched”, Needham proposed “collected”. Miles (2006): 173–174. Screech (1996): 106–109; Needham (1962): 123; Zhang (1997): 74–89. Graham (1978): 376–378. Elman (2005): 340–342. Mishra (2012): 221. Chen ([1875] 1989): 128. Liang & Zheng ([1872] 1967): 18.13b. Miles (2006): 217. Zheng ([1848] 2014): 31–32. First published in Yang Shangwen’s library selection Lianyunyi congshu. On Yanagawa’s possible debt to René Dagron (1819–1900), the French originator of microfilm, see Fukuoka (2012): 155; on contacts with Goshkevich, see Ozawa (1997): 76, and Fainberg (1967): 509. Chen (1827): 13.7a. See also Wu (1984): 76–78. For the example of an overlooked authority in the Shanghainese history of modern printing, see the case of Qu Ya’ang (active 1810–1840), also a Guangdong native, at Reed (2004): 61–62. On charts available to British mariners by the 1850s, see Dunsterville (1860). Peng & Li (1981): 36.

Methods of invention 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

51

Kemp & Wilder (2002): esp. 361–363. Gasser (1992): 5–60. Schwartz (1996): 182. Wang (2006). Xiong (2007): 81. Daston & Galison (2007): 325–326; Hotten (1865). Xiong ([1994] 1996); Xiong (2007). Shen ([1928] 1995): 190. Sopka (1981). Guo (1984): 140. Chan (2012). Heinrich (2008): 117–147. Andrews (2014): 64–65; on Dudgeon’s engagement with Beijing life, see Naquin (2000): 666 et passim. On this trip dated 18 October 1871, see Thomson (1899): 246. Reed (2004): 75; Heinrich (2008): 130–131. Jenks (1995): 14. Dudgeon (1873): 1.25b. Mao (1985): 16.254. For a 1970s re-run of the experiment, see Zusne (1980). Liangyou, 95 (October 1934): 6–7. Crary (1990): 16. Daston & Galison (2007): 37. An edition now held at the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, Berkeley. Xu ([1902] 2007): 81. Towler (1866): 11. Fryer (1891): 4b. See “Lancaster” in Hannavy (2007). Starting on 9 December 1892, the campaign ran until 7 February 1893, ten days before Chinese New Year. Wue (2014): 134–135. For “Plucked Rhymes on Photography’s Invention”, see Yishui (1916). For further clarification of two confusable outputs, see Sung (1993). Wu (1986): 95–97. Rhoads (2011): 147 et passim. Rhoads (2011): 106, 130. Xue (1981): 598–600, 699–700. Shenbao, 28 January 1923: 1; 2 March 1923: 17; 19 April 1923: 17; 24 April 1923: 17; 26 April 1923: 17. Guo (1984): 753–754, 849. Ranging over chapters 8 and 9, the questions and explanations on photography are concentrated at Wu ([1955] 1979): 141–155. Despite its quirky presentation, the information concerning Wedgwood and Niépce is minutely informed. Dongfang zazhi, 8.4–9 (1911); see also Wright (2000): 178–179. Reed (2004): 215. Funü zazhi, 12.1 (31 December 1925): 259–260. Batchen (1997): 127–130, and fig. 4.7; Clarke (1997): 13, fig. 2; Bajac & Planchon-de FontRéaulx (2003): 58. Mumford ([1934] 1962): 217. Zhimisheng (1883): 3.10a; Hay (2007): 103. Pei ([1905] 1906): 5.7b. Reed (2004): 17. Latour (1989): 423. Akiyama (1917): 59.

2

Terms of description

The juxtaposition of drawing and photography (Figure 2.1) published in the still relatively new illustrated press caught the eye, because it showed a common expectation of gendered social pursuits: a certain class of men dropped into drawing shops to have their features drawn and tinted by hand; a certain class of women headed for studios to be photographed against backdrops of flourishing parkland—less usually in real parks and gardens. This separation was more an acceptable conceit than absolute reality, but the original thrust of the pairing alerted viewers to changing terms of description whose purpose was to distinguish photography from older visual practices, and, significantly, to suggest that the latter were not rapidly about to dissolve. Technical treatises, new translations, and live demonstrations spread knowledge of photography in China, and so too did an even smaller discursive unit: photography’s Chinese names through which the medium emerged in telling descriptions of reality, verisimilitude, and alterity. Some of these appear in the explanatory texts accompanying the scenes in Figure 2.1. Three in particular describe the photograph as a result of “capturing” (shea), “transcribing” (xie) and “reflecting” (zhao), and they were tied if not limited to notions of “image” (yinga), “authenticity” (zhen), “resemblance” (xianga), and “appearance” (xiangb). Singular among these main descriptions and several others to be mentioned is “capturing images” (sheying), since it is the only allusion to an optical process discussed before the known arrival of photography in the early 1840s, and it endures as photography’s most common Chinese description today. By contrast, “transcribing authenticity” (xiezhen) was a unique loan from the graphic arts. The meanings of the versatile verb xie include drawing and painting— Hua Guan uses the word in his signature (Figure 1.3)—quite distinct from its colloquial usage for writing. None of the three Chinese names for photography had European points of departure. The number of contending Chinese terms is remarkable, but not the sign of a befuddlement that other cultural experiences of photography luckily bypassed. How photography’s terms were contingent upon older practices and vocabularies was remarkably similar in many of the medium’s other histories. The wider Asian context is also informative. What the Chinese language offered its users to describe photography is apparent also in parallel usages in Japan and Korea where the Chinese lexicon was no less dispensable to shared intellectual and cultural challenges. Many expressions have reflected in the past as much as they do now the resistance of discourse to adjustment or renewal in the wake of technical change. The English description “to take photographs”, for example, was no absolute neologism soon after the triumphant announcements of Daguerre and Fox Talbot’s discoveries in 1839. Painters DOI: 10.4324/9781003086345-4

Terms of description  53

Figure 2.1 S cenes entitled “Professional portraiture: Timing an exposure and drawing a portrait”, published in 1909 in the Shanghai newspaper Tuhua ribao, 134.

were on hand decades earlier to “take” their subjects’ pictures, if we accept that flirtatious conversation between characters in Regency fiction are believable records of how men and women talked about portrait desires.1 Walter Benjamin observed pertinently that enduring allusions to painting were due to a superior prestige working its way downwards to levels of society where the desire for a portrait even in its newly mechanized execution was beyond the means of the majority. 2 Similarly, although the most persistent Chinese expression “capturing images” (sheying) represented an intellectual feat, partly preconditioned by early and scrupulous observations on using a camera obscura, Chinese popular discourse constantly disserved the significance of this term by eulogizing photography in an utterly different order of technical competence, predominantly that comprised by drawing and painting. This categorical muddle allowed many authors to describe the wonder of photographic presence in a highly literary commentary whose terms they loaned from the more senior graphic medium.

54 Science Expressions are crucial to considering photography’s emergence not only as the invention of a medium but as the recognition of a concept and the language through which observers established it. When the British astronomer John Herschel (1792– 1871) remarked with habitual percipience that “the imposition of a name on any subject is an epoch in its history”, he drew attention to a metaphorical level of discovery that is often assumed to be transparent. 3 First devoting his energies to images of veined leaves and worked lace, Fox Talbot agonized between these objects’ calls to lodge photography in either nature or culture. Geoffrey Batchen historicizes these fundamental alternatives as the poles of a nineteenth-century medium that either reproduced nature or allowed nature to reproduce itself, while Don Slater analyzes the dichotomy that observers experienced in a process aiming “to transform science into the cultural form of magic”.4 Chinese terms for photography mapped their writers’ interest in a subject both converging with knowledge from abroad and diverging from it, and they also referenced it through an adjusted imagination of local visual practices and notions of representation. Their new terms were more properly extracts from the traditional lexicon rehearsed with updated meanings and dressed in renewed intellectual glamour. While priorities for objectivity and truth were crucial to an emerging discussion of photography, the terms in this discussion were autonomous, and Chinese writers rarely interrogated what seemed to be familiar and self-evident meanings. The work of translation converted new expressions from Western and Japanese discourse into familiar possessions, and, so long as these end products functioned reliably, their parallels in the Western lexicon were hardly relevant any more. The Chinese transliteration futuogelaifu, for instance, was unusual—as is transliteration generally in Chinese discourse—and it invited satire in a series of bamboo twig verse (zhuzhici) devoted to pidgin expressions. The term never caught on, not simply because an erudite linguist mocked it for an erudite readership, but in its failure to perform as an indigenous possession. It looked and sounded like spoof. 5 This chapter engages at the level of words, confident that past attitudes to photography can be retrieved in the ambitions of metaphorical allusion. Translating any relevant expression as “to photograph” reflects merely critical reactivity’s level zero. More demanding attempts to reimagine early conceptions of photography in China must take into account how they were affected or distorted by their reliance on literary sources whose authors tried perennially to write in an orthodox literary idiom. Their efforts were often repaid with the advantages of common linguistic values—most obvious in the case of Japan—but they were largely restricted to intensely evolved poetic forms. Although that would change, not least in response to what Wang Hui has described as the huge challenge that Western science posed to modern Chinese expression, the shift was never absolute. Wang has also remarked that histories of modernization are often over-determined by a Weberian insistence on science’s function in restraining traditional forms of culture.6 The attempt to create a national language—another long May Fourth project—that might function more prosaically in the service of science and the humanities, did not issue photography with a modern consensus holding a range of highly divergent local terms in a unifying grip. Instead, the effort erected only fleetingly the illusion of a conceptual universality, and the historical task is to recover conditions when the community of usage was seldom united, and to examine a multiplicity of terms whose occasional multivalence could cause interesting ambiguities. To repeat, the semantic slippage never fully controlled in the word jing, which stands for “mirror” and “lens”, is one egregious

Terms of description  55 example already raised in Chapter 1. In this chapter I examine other divergences, such as those produced in certain Chinese terms’ usage in Japan, and others shown by Chinese dialect forms, which were defiant escapes from literary rhetoric’s default towards common standards, a tendency further assisted by the contracting effects of ever more centralized publishing. To organize the selection from some unruly data, the following discussion explores the three descriptive terms “capturing images” (sheying), loaned from the science of optics, “transcribing authenticity” (xiezhen), the most graphic of the three with its origins in drawing and painting, and “reflecting appearances” (zhaoxiang), which fused ideas to do with light, appearance and prognostication. The first and last terms are still in use in China today; the second is not.

Capturing images Photography’s first Chinese neologism was Zou Boqi’s notion of “capturing images” (sheying), a metaphor indebted to his and earlier experiments with the camera obscura. Nevertheless, his autochthonous description appropriated the notion of “image” (yinga) from Chinese canonical texts containing descriptions of light behaviour. This description of the image also featured in a venerable tradition of discussing painting, but its function as the object of a capturing process now uncoupled it for a new conceptual emergence. Contemporaries were certainly aware of the value of lens-projected appearances for drawing and painting. The physician Mao Xianglin, for instance, who wrote a brief account of the camera obscura’s relationship to daguerreotypes, stated that lens projection allowed its user to “position an appearance and paint it” (an ying hui zhi).7 Before the nineteenth century, the most important reference to a capturing technique was in conjunction with the material forms (xing) described by the seventeenthcentury Anhui polymath Fang Yizhi (1611–1671) who had described how to operate the camera obscura, extolling a Western method of its usage in drawing. Fang’s explanation of the camera obscura (anshi “dark room”) was laconic, but its central point was the intromission of external visual objects. The user could capture forms in the outside world through a virtually organic process that matched “capturing” with “inhaling”. He elaborated upon “the method for tracing by means of inhalation captures (xishe) through a glass lens”. And, in an intriguing revelation of his equipment, which probably featured a mirror angled at 45 degrees above the lens, he remarked: With paper on the table we can draw these in detail. This is transcribing authenticity (xiezhen) to the utmost degree of verisimilitude, equally good for flowers, trees, living creatures and things.8 This is the first mention of “authenticity” (zhen) in the mechanical context of an apparatus intended to enhance observation towards new expectations. No one else explained visual objects’ passage through a lens as “inhaled”, but practitioners and theorists of the visual arts—in which Fang was also interested—often stressed things’ dynamic agency, to the extent that one of their most original observers in the fourteenth century transferred analogous terms from medical pathology to landscape depiction.9 Scholars have previously suggested that Fang Yizhi was a lone voice trying to invest things—matter in updated terms—with intellectual significance, since they assume that the Confucian orthodoxy long represented by the outlook of the

56 Science philosopher Wang Yangming (1472–1528) downplayed the world’s physical objects as secondary to how the mind conceived them.10 Ideas that Fang may have shared with theorists of visual representation suggest a more empathetic current of thinking whose existence is important in the prehistory of photography. One particularly perceptive comment by one of Fang’s contemporaries, the mathematician Jie Xuan (1613–1695), was inserted into a printed edition of Fang’s text: “In the Far West this method is called materializing the image in order to image material (wu xiang xiang wu)”.11 Who exactly expressed this Western wisdom remains obscure, but its pithy Chinese reiteration is an eerily modern summary of a new priority. Fang provided an authoritative precedent for Zou Boqi’s emphasis on capture, for Fang used the analogy more than once. He recorded also his observation of an object’s inverted reflection (also termed yinga) in water, and proposed that this, too, could be captured.12 Few thinkers said more about this until the nineteenth century, but in the intervening period Fang’s text remained a primary reference, not only in China but also for Chinese readers outside her borders. These included almost certainly the Korean polymath Jeong Yak-yong (1762–1836), who described setting up a camera obscura remarkably similar to Fang’s. One generation later, another Korean scientist, Yi Gyu-gyeong (1788–1856), described the camera as a “lens for capturing images” (seobyeonggyeong).13 Fang Yizhi’s intervention into optics is significant for two more reasons, respectively practical and conceptual. Attentive as he was to painting techniques, Fang’s Notes on the principles of things (Wu li xiaoshi) include a section on “Methods for painting portraits” (xieying fa), in which he advocated well-tested means of transferring a human likeness onto paper via proportional rules for representing the human body, which “if standing, is seven times [the height of] the head; when sitting, five times the head”. Further subdivisions prescribed the correct vertical distances between forehead, eyes, chin and so on.14 So, despite the exactitude that Fang described in depicting “living creatures and things”, the irrelevance of the camera to human portraiture is a striking instance of technical progress bypassing its potential functional application. Without the contexts that generated new expectations of what portraiture could be, the camera was not a sufficiently stupendous tool with which to challenge old expectations of the portrait as a metrically exact set of ratios. Besides, portraiture was not yet a genre that attracted serious aesthetic consideration. Conceptually, however, Fang’s observations were crucial. The consistent logic with which he discussed painting’s “appearances” in isolation from capturing “forms” is highly significant, since it suggests his acceptance that the analogue processes of the camera obscura were irrelevant to painters’ reliance on their instincts and skills to create paintings. Further, if concrete forms were lodged in an outer material world, yet could be refracted for redisplay inside a mechanism, this implied, unlike the mental work required of painting, a disembodied sequence. Two centuries later, Zou Boqi adjusted these priorities. Given that his understanding of the same word yinga was tied to a classical interpretation of light and shade, he apparently invented a concept of capture whose object was now the physical material of optics, no longer the matter that a Ming observer restricted to the concrete reality of “forms”, and no longer reserved solely for discussion among painters and their critics. Zou’s coinage stressing instead a sense of “capture” (sheying) not only anticipated a notion central to modern thinking about photography, well represented in famous essays by Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag,15 but in nineteenth-century China it

Terms of description  57 became an ontological figure in marked isolation from other knowledge of visual representation. This separation was a precocious coup, by no means invalidated by how much Zou’s contemporaries and later observers tended to ignore it. Other uses of the notion of “capturing” were rare. A physiognomic adaptation of the expression from the southeastern city of Xiamen, “capturing faces” (shexiang), was a local development of everyday currency.16 And, the short-lived Japanese neologism of the “lens to tether the image” (ruieikyō) to describe the camera did not outlast its inventor Sakuma Shōzan (1811–1864), best remembered for his contribution to Japan’s first telegraph system.17 Even Mao Xianglin, whose broad fascination with photography included its pioneering role in Belgian prison administration as early as the 1840s, preferred a description that retained the conceptual matching of photography with painting, namely “reflected paintings” (zhaohua).18 The notion of “capture”, by contrast, offered observers in China the scope not only to insert a conceptual distance between painting and a new representational practice, but also to turn the relevance of this description towards its crucial reliance on chemistry. Much of this anticipates Roland Barthes’ emphasis on the instant of photographic record as the result of grabbing or surprising (saisir, surprendre), which Barthes’ two Chinese translators have rendered as down-to-earth acts of snatching and ambushing (e.g., buzhuo, touxi).19 Barthes’ metaphors also fitted within another strong emphasis on the photograph as a result of chemistry and—he added—alchemy. 20 Japanese descriptions of photography followed initially the early Chinese usage of “capturing images” (sheying; Jap. satsuei). Japanese scientific circles were almost certainly aware of Fang Yizhi’s notion of optical capture, since his writings achieved enormous impact in Japan.21 Another early yet quite distinct Japanese description satsukei probably also drew from Fang’s emphasis on “capture”, but foregrounded a markedly different object: “forms” (xing; Jap. kei). The Japanese use of either this description or the subsequently more familiar compound with “image” (yinga; Jap. ei) emphasized an optical array in front of the camera, initially in front of the camera obscura, whose existence was first discussed in an explanation of a Dutch import and its name: donkere kamer. Among the most important statements is that of Ueno Hikoma (Figure 1.8), the founder of Japan’s first photography studio at Nagasaki in 1862, who that year described the camera in a widely published manual as a “lens device for grasping images” (satsuei kyoki). He may have intended to promote Fang Yizhi’s earlier description in the same terms, and he certainly gestured to Fang in recalling his description of “grasping forms”. 22 While Ueno’s various descriptions seem to indicate a transnationally uniform imagination of photography between two communities, any ontological and functional consensus proved fugitive, as Japanese descriptive priorities soon shifted. When in 1867 Yanagawa Shunsan published his Explanation of the lens for transcribing authenticity, he used the term shashin (Ch. xiezhen) to describe both the camera and the photographic process. But, he justified what was eventually a final description as such, because the process had passed through the intermediate stage of “grasping forms” (satsukei), a progress that he presented within a European teleology: “the lens to grasp forms (satsukei) was invented about three hundred years ago by a man named [Della] Porta …”. In other words, the virtue of capturing an image through optical observation was entirely bound by the technical limits of the camera obscura. Just as crucially, Yanagawa observed: “two men named Niépce and Daguerre invented a new lens to draw authentically (shashin)”. 23

58 Science The sum of these views contrasts sharply with the lack of interest in China to elevate photography above other media of visual representation. No Chinese discussion relegated applications of “capture” to a stage of development due to be outmoded by subsequent progress. Only a few years after the publication of Yanagawa’s treatise, the term “transcribing authenticity” (shashin) became the dominant Japanese description for photography, a position it still occupies. 24 The same term (sajin) took hold in Korea in the same period. 25 Not only did the choice of xiezhen signal a specific conceptual preference—to be explored in the following section—it marked a distinctive resistance to the early seventeenth-century intellectual inheritance that had hitherto been attractive to modern scholars in China. Japanese thinkers by and large saw ideas of capture as old premises, established earlier and now bypassed in a new order of optical truth. Maki Fukuoka (2006, 2012) has placed this in its aesthetic and ethical dimensions of a long Japanese century of epistemic renewal. Remarkably, however much the terms of the debate shifted, this Japanese move relied on the use of an established Chinese painting term. Japan presents a conceptual evolution dislocated from its precedents in China. Other variants in the conceptualization of photography emerged with numerous emphases on the image (yinga), the act of capture’s direct object. For instance, Chinese painting discourse fostered an inevitable bias towards interpreting yinga as “image”, and in both philosophy and folklore the word designated the shadow of any living being as a numinous double. Dudgeon would employ yinga in the description “to cast an image” (tuoying) that he selected for his lengthy treatise on photography, a fascinating expression from Beijing parlance already current since at least the previous century. Its use by writers of fiction in this period and later alluded to how the artist magically enabled a portrait subject to cast—to shed—his or her features into a form of representation.26 The publication of Dudgeon’s work is the most obvious sign of a new status for this expression, which also began a brief afterlife in Japan. In 1874, one year after publication of Dudgeon’s Cast images, the Tokyo photographer Fukasawa Yōkitsu founded a magazine under the decidedly literary title Evening Chats on Cast Images (Datsuei yawa), which he rapidly changed to the more exotic Fotogurafii and eventually the more comprehensible Photography Magazine (Shashin zasshi, 1877)—Japan’s first such publication—whose title joined the consensus pioneered by Yanagawa. 27 The semantic proximity of “image” and “shadow” is further compressed in Chinese by their expression in one word, yinga. This was the central term that featured in Chinese–Japanese exchanges on photography during Perry’s second expedition to Japan in 1854. Luo Sen, a Guangzhou cloth merchant who kept a diary of his interpreting duties on behalf of the American command, talked with his Japanese hosts about “daytime portraits” (ri yingxiang), which one or other side of the conversation adapted from their knowledge of a common term for “portrait” (yingxianga; Jap. eizō). This fertile ground for imagining how to secure both shadows and images coincidentally matched early nineteenth-century European interest in the classical myth of the origins of painting, the story of the Corinthian potter’s daughter tracing her lover’s shadow on a wall. Joseph Wright (1734–1797), who painted one of the best versions of The Corinthian Maid (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), was celebrated for his dramatic renditions of scientific experiments on behalf of a constituency that discussed the optical science leading up to its application in photography. 28 Gadgets that could repeat the Corinthian performance in a period when

Terms of description  59

Figure 2.2 Client’s silhouette, presented after visiting Wan Laiming Studio, Shanghai, c. 1940. Paper cut, 16 × 8.3 cm. Private collection.

discussions of shadows and light were in vogue were popular, and, as Timon Screech has shown, their operators were also welcome at scientific debates and at fairgrounds in Japan. Japanese temples that hold trace images of past society figures still draw enthusiastic crowds. 29 Material evidence for shadow drawings (yingxianga) dates to later in China, but the gift of a silhouette as the highly publicized free inducement of a Shanghai studio (s 249) shows a commercial viability no doubt based on deeper interest (Figure 2.2). Contrary to an earlier Parisian history recounted by Gisèle Freund, photography did not put the silhouette portraitist out of business in Shanghai. 30 The term sheying owed its origin to debates in elite circles of scientific discussion, which encompassed both the earliest intuitions of Western optics and hermeneutical expertise in China’s own classical tradition. Only after Zou Boqi’s lifetime did his term gain currency as an expression for almost the entire range of photographic operations. Until then, however, Zou’s contemporaries and the following generation discussed photography with terms borrowed from portrait painting.

Transcribing authenticity In the context of Chinese painting and its connoisseurship, the skills required for transcribing within or across pictorial media are rarely if ever denounced to the same

60 Science degree that they are in Western discourses. Not long into the photographic age, Ralph Waldo Emerson dismissed photographs taken of him as “transcripts”, and his housemates rubbished them as “ridiculous”. 31 The indissolubly manugraphic term xiezhen, which Fang Yizhi had used in conjunction with his notions of image capture, was a loan from painting discourse. The verb xie in the literary Chinese register means to paint or to draw—colloquial Chinese usually denotes these as hua—and a wide range of East Asian usage has long validated either meaning. When the Korean artist Yu Suk (1827–1873) painted his brother drawing a mountain he added an inscription to state that his brother was indeed drawing (xie, Kor. sa) the view (Figure 2.3). The early adoption of painting terms was by no means a unique solution in China and East Asia more generally. Some of Daguerre’s allies certified his productions as “tableaux”, and when the academician and deputy François Arago presented Daguerre’s methods to the Académie des Sciences in 1839, he claimed more cautiously that the results “… are not paintings, they are drawings; but drawings pushed to a degree that art can never reach”.32 Arago identified the dichotomy that the new “drawings” are only definable as such within a realm that is no longer art as it was hitherto conceived. Photography in China—and East Asia—underwent no such grand announcement, but its emergence likewise borrowed locally established terms whose familiarity was bound to disguise some of the disruption to former epistemological and representational certainties. Other techniques to create realistic simulacra existed. Modellers who made figurines with clay, fabrics and real hair were among Guangzhou’s most famous artists. One of them cut a figure at London’s Royal Academy and met the diarist James Boswell. 33 Guangzhou boasted also a history of portraits done in oil paints and mostly destined for export.34 And, the city was an important meeting place for Chinese artists and foreign naturalists who co-produced a substantial corpus of botanical and zoological paintings.35 Despite this abundance of skill, Chinese observers seldom if ever deigned to comment positively upon art whose primary objective was authenticity (zhen). This included “transcribing authenticity” whose status had varied radically over the previous millennium when it was not invariably a portrait genre. By the eighteenth century, however, it referred almost exclusively to portraiture, and its more fashionable production enjoyed an unprecedented if not absolute emancipation from the usual disdain that the best educated ascribed to craft work. 36 By contrast, in Japan the objects of xiezhen (Jap. shashin) observation steadily multiplied.37 More important, such observation practices led to their association with pictorial media other than painting. Maki Fukuoka has shown how the received Chinese description xiezhen (shashin), which stood for an ideal of authenticity, underwent dramatic renewal in its fusion with vision, photography and the ideal of nonintervention, inseparable from the mechanical virtue of “blind sight” upon which in 1864 the Lille printer Louis Blanquart-Evrard lectured large audiences of his fellow professionals—enthused by the “marvellous but mindless work of the camera”—and which Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison foreground in their history of modern scientific objectivity: “unprejudiced, unthinking, blind sight”.38 Unsurprisingly, not every passage of this empiricist confidence was smooth. When, during Commodore Perry’s mission to enforce the opening of Japan in 1854, naval personnel had unloaded a camera onto the Yokohama shore, this vaguely familiar machine caught many Japanese observers unprepared. In a cultural confusion almost as remarkable as Major Mason’s uncertain grasp of crystal (Chapter 1), whoever created a meticulous record of Perry’s gifts mis-transcribed the Chinese ideal of “transcribing authenticity”

Terms of description  61

Figure 2.3 Yu Suk, view of an artist inscribed “Second brother drawing the mountain’s appearance, giyu, 7/26 [12 September 1849]”. Ink on paper, mounted with other scenes on scroll, H 24 cm. Courtesy of National Museum of Korea, Seoul.

62 Science

Figure 2.4 Unknown artist, Camera (shashinkyō), in series of images depicting Commodore Perry’s arrival at Yokohama on 13 March 1854, ink on paper, mounted on eightfold screen Perii torai ezu hari mazebyōbu, H 28 cm. Courtesy of Historiographical Institute, Tokyo University.

with a nevertheless uncanny portent of the camera’s most popular function: “the lens for transcribing the body”, or just as translatably: “the self” (Figure 2.4). This forgivable confusion arose probably because “authenticity” and “body” are Japanese homophones, so that either meaning was represented in the Japanese pronunciation shashin, and the chance for avoiding mistakes was often jeopardized by the necessity to rely on Chinese interpreters who addressed their Japanese hosts in Chinese. This eccentric yet eminently sensible description of the camera was a red herring that soon vanished into an archive, but the episode remains a unique trace of a conversation about photography, conducted as normally as possible during an extraordinary beach performance of international relations. The Chinese and Japanese intellectual approaches to photography were not mutually isolated, but, despite the misconceptions arising from a coloured drawing and its earnest description, a longstanding preference in Japan for the broad epistemological programme of authenticity is clearly audible from what someone committed to paper during an important moment of exchange. The contrast in this period with how rarely Chinese observers conceived links between photography and authenticity—even in the narrower sense of its portrait function—could not be starker. One of the earliest Chinese accounts of making a

Terms of description  63 photograph is an explanation of the process, drawing only casual distinctions between different representational media and techniques. The Manchu official Fuge (fl. 1850s), who kept copious records during his provincial duties, subsumed all the representational practices that he observed in Guangzhou under the single category of xiezhen portraiture. His description opened with an emphasis on the body’s proportions, and then turned to representational techniques in the most ubiquitous sourcebook of cultural reference, the theatre: I have seen actors performing plays, and when a skinny man plays a martial role, he is by definition imposing; when a fat man plays a scholar role, he is incontrovertibly slender. To know this is to be able to do portraiture. 39 More startling than explicable, this equation at least demonstrates the irrelevance of portraiture to any kind of independent visual theory. Other comments concerning portraiture had long concentrated solely on functions, stressing physiognomic and moral qualities beyond verisimilitude. The ethically minded, concerned with various forms of family cult, even elaborated arguments against portraiture, because the chances for good verisimilar outcomes seemed so poor.40 Popular views of portraiture contained similar suspicions. One common description of the portrait photograph in central Zhejiang was “young Buddha” (shaofo), an obvious admission that Buddha images reported nothing authentically true about the Buddha’s appearance.41 One of the provincial capital’s studios was Living Buddha (s 100). Mathematically rigorous methods for verisimilar correspondence between subject and image engaged Fuge only so far; his final remarks are polite but not enrapt: In the portraiture of Eastern Yue [Guangzhou] they practice a Western method: light and dark are juxtaposed; the pen strokes are extremely thick; and, when you observe it from a distance, the face protrudes from the paper [sic]. They do rather capture the spirit of aliveness. Recently, in overseas countries you also use a mirror to reflect the image. You smear [it] with chemicals and layer the paper on top in order to peel off a print. Every hair is present, for it is in all senses that person. The method is quite a mystery, but the productions really are miraculous.42 Fuge’s progressive description foregrounded an astute realization that Western principles of oil painting, like the science of photography, stressed the contrasts of light saturation to create the illusion of three dimensions. His serial discussion argued that portraiture, when executed through photography, exceeded the limitations of Chinese painting practice. The general tone, however, is resistant, especially compared to more optimistic observers who isolated descriptions of photography from other representational systems. One instance is the later juxtaposition of the draughtsman and the photographer’s portrait techniques cited in the opening of this chapter (Figure 2.1). This comparison delivered its point most strongly to readers who were acquainted with the pencil portrait shops (qianbi zhaohuadian) now established in many cities and towns (see also Figure 2.6).43 Several of these shops occupied an entire row around the corner from the premises of Tuhua ribao, the newspaper that published the two contrasting images. Ironically, although their captions distinguished each activity as “photographing portraits” (pai xiaozhao) and “drawing portraits” (hua xiaozhao), their technical proximity was emphasized in a series, which over many

64 Science issues presented similar pairings under the larger title of “Commerce transcribed authentically” (Yingye xiezhen). The metaphorical application was by this date unusual, perhaps only the preference of one of the newspaper’s Japanese editors. The images nevertheless balanced two operations in the shared result of a portrait, and celebrated the confusion between human scrutiny (in a drawing shop) and mechanical capture (in front of a camera). Functions were a different matter. The verses above both scenes comment respectively on photographs as romantic keepsakes and drawn portraits as family obligations to commission a likeness. Drawings are impugned as unreliable, since family members will apparently miss any correspondence between the subject and the artist’s work, whereas photographs are unimpeachably accurate. Equally positive towards photographic veracity was Shen Taimou, a keen collector of many forms of art in late nineteenth-century Beijing, who insisted that “whatever photography (sheying) teaches has caught up with painters (huagong) in an even race, and is now about to overtake them”.44 At stake in either Shen’s or Fuge’s conventional views was undoubtedly the notion of authentic likeness, but, except as a heading before Fuge’s remarks and as a journalistic shorthand, “transcribing authenticity” was not invoked. This classic description had emigrated to a more secure home in Japan. Heterographic combinations Those who invested most in the changing graphical outcomes of portraiture pursued their fondness in ways that effectively disabled the photograph’s absolute machinic capture with non-photographic adjustments. Their expectations produced heterographic images combining photography with older visual techniques and forms. Probably the earliest surviving image from one Shanghai studio shows how its staff created photographs that were the closest possible analogues of painting, even incorporating gestures of ink drawing on the image’s surface (Figure 2.5). The sketchy pencilwork of Dai Heng’s portrait no doubt answered a particular set of expectations. The exactitude of facial portraiture was demanding, so many painters subcommissioned the face to a portrait expert—or received it already completed—and then added extra depictive elements and an inscription. The sequence determined also that portrait specialists often produced minute facial portraits on large expanses of paper speculatively.45 Connoisseurs of completed collaborative projects were generally less interested in the work devoted to depicting the face, until in the mid-nineteenth century a new appreciation celebrated the small number of artists who possessed the skill set required for the entire production. Versatile Ren Xiong was one of them, and some of his portraits demonstrate exactly how he worked in two quite different idioms to produce the style of which the Sanxing portrait of Dai Heng was a conscious continuation.46 But the heterographic quality of such photographs has long condemned them to the status of oddity. When European observers spotted the technical and formal combinations of photography and painting in Chinese studio production they not only satirized them as aesthetically incompetent; they pretended that similar exchanges between pictorial media had never occurred elsewhere. The Chinese ambassador Guo Songtao (1818–1891) knew better: he visited a London photographer’s studio in 1878 to sit for an image that the society painter Walter Goodman used for an eventually controversial oil painting, exhibited soon afterwards at the Royal Academy and subsequently lost.47 Guo was adamant that photography was

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Figure 2.5 Sanxing Studio, Shanghai, portrait of Dai Heng, 1874. Albumen silver print on paper. From Lao zhaopian, 12 (1999). Courtesy of Lao zhaopian.

66 Science

Figure 2.6 Unknown photographer, drawing shop in Yuanmenqiao, Yangzhou, 1930s. Unknown collection. From Wang Hong, Lao Yangzhou: yanhua mingyue, Nanjing, 2001.

a heuristic device that both Western and Chinese portraitists could work from. In Beijing Shen Taimou, similarly keen to digress on what photography entailed in terms of social engagement, rehearsed for his readers the social niceties of any request to a celebrated artist to remediate portrait photographs as paintings and to relaunch them with a new cultural status.48 The emerging Chinese market in portrait services shared Guo Songtao’s confidence in photography’s functions. In an advertisement of 1889 the Nanjing painter Qian Shouzhi broadcast his ability to paint “landscape portraits” (shanshui xiaozhao). For the face Qian demanded a fixed price, while he charged different fees for the landscape background according to the client’s preferences for size and content.49 Qian seems to be a classic illustration of Weber’s maxim that the market declassifies culture.50 Presenting himself in a heterographic field, he mixed content genres and made crossing their boundaries the commercial attraction of his art, but he appeared also as a subtle market operator who understood that the social values around landscape depiction conferred prestige. In short, he reclassified his mastery of a modern visual technology in a painting culture that still prevailed. Also, despite Chinese portraiture’s disadvantageous toleration as what Richard Vinograd terms a “fundamentally secondhand art”, its relegation could also be latent encouragement for some exponents to innovate with hybridized techniques.51

Terms of description  67

Figure 2.7 Ni Tian, portrait of Wu Changshuo (1844–1927), 1909. Ink on paper, 120 × 45.5 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Museum.

68 Science Drawing shops, which often distributed work to portraitists, were largely staffed by specialists who transcribed photographs onto paper and other surfaces (Figure 2.6). Their skills passed mostly unnoticed, so that the image of how a draughtsman worked in a no doubt unhealthy endurance of two-way monocular observation is extremely rare, perhaps only committed to record because his business thrived in one of Yangzhou’s most glamorous zones of cultural production. The use of a grid reference allowed drawing shop staff to create strong correspondences between sources and targets, and enabled successful enlargements and reductions, tasks that studios eventually performed more efficiently. Close examination of painting surfaces sometimes reveals the faint grids that copyists drew before transcribing the face from a photographic referent.52 The painter Ni Tian may have used this technique for his portrait of Wu Changshuo, which he completed with a different visual code for the body and landscape (Figure 2.7). Equally feasibly, a studio perhaps printed the photograph of Wu’s face onto the paper, and Ni further worked up the final production. The Baoji Studio, for instance, had long before advertised a paper manufactured specifically for printing portraits that painters could amplify with their own techniques. 53 Ni Tian confessed that his commissioner provided a “portrait” (xiaoying) and asked him to “fill in the scenery” (bujing). Clearly, Wu Changshuo kept several editions of this portrait, made by a photography studio six years earlier. One is dedicated to another acquaintance in the same year that Ni Tian completed his painting (Figure 2.8).

Figure 2.8 Unknown studio, portrait of Wu Changshuo (1844–1927), 1903, inscribed by Wu Changshuo in 1909. Unknown collection. From He Haotian, Wu Changshuo shuhua ji, Taipei, 1985.

Terms of description  69 This practice was so common that the Dutch diplomat, writer and collector Robert van Gulik, a fastidious observer of Chinese cultural forms, adopted it when turning a photograph of his lute teacher’s face into a large-scale scroll featuring him performing amid the inscribed encomia of eighteen students. 54 Remarkably, because Ni Tian listed his fees in a commercial directory, a comparison of the charges for painting and photography reveals that the latter now commanded greater market esteem. 55

Figure 2.9 Liang Shitai, portrait of Li Hongzhang, 1879. Albumen silver print on paper, 27 × 21 cm. Courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2006.R.1.4).

70 Science

Figure 2.10 Liang Shitai, portrait of Prince Chun, 1886. Albumen silver print on paper, 31 × 25.1 cm (album opening). Courtesy of Library of Congress, Washington, DC (LC-USZ62–132081).

Not only did photographic studios impact on technical and aesthetic aspects of an older medium, they sometimes reconfigured its economics to their own advantage. Painters adopted these heterographic tactics at the same time that photographers invoked painting’s techniques and forms in photographs. Liang Shitai worked with greatest success in Tianjin and Beijing where he photographed the national political elite in the 1870s and later. To his portrait of Li Hongzhang, made in the same year that Guo Songtao issued his instructions to a London portraitist, Liang added minute blooms with dark pigment touches to the image’s glass surface (Figure 2.9). Like the inscription—another painterly conceit—these printed in white. Liang’s image of Prince Chun and a deer shows analogue reality similarly undermined—and enhanced—by pigment additions that mimicked how a painter dots seeds along a pine branch (Figure 2.10). The image also exemplifies a collaboration between the photographer and his subject in the insertion of the latter’s personal seals. These paratextual features of painting summoned once more the viewer’s consciousness of another medium, and asserted what many have noted as the interventions of inscription and impress, which make the image surface the primary and unavoidable level of engagement. Exactly this exploitation of surface displaced the mimetic realities of the prince and the deer in an alternative system of symbolic representation, one whose traditional usages were more public than private.56 Prince

Terms of description  71 Chun’s large seals marked the intimacy of his and Liang’s shared past. The right seal names the assignment that Prince Chun received to head a lengthy naval inspection in China’s northern ports, and the left gives his name and the epithet “Riding the wind over the Bohai gulf” (Boxie cheng feng), a lyrical recollection of both men’s experience of photographing the manoeuvres at sea some months earlier. 57 Photographer and subject quite probably collaborated in planning how much empty, unfocused space they required for Liang to transpose the Prince’s seals into the image. That Liang did so by first transferring a light-resistant outline onto the plate—subsequently appearing white on the positive print’s albumen surface—marks an early instance of the photographer converting the impress of ink into the obliteration of light. The laborious sequence was also a technique that outmanoeuvred a sealing gesture usually executed by the image’s subject and owner. The modernization of printing technology, particularly advances in lithography and offset printing, soon extended the possibilities for heterographic combinations even further. Zou Boqi’s portrait in a late nineteenth-century collection of scholars’ portraits—included purely to commemorate his mathematical prowess—matched his head from a photograph (probably no longer extant) with a freehand drawing of his body and furniture to produce the new unity of a lithographic imprint (Figure 2.11).

Figure 2.11 Zou Boqi’s portrait in Ye Gongchuo, Portraits and biographies of Qing scholars (Qingdai xuezhe xiangzhuan), 1928 and 1953. From Ye Gongchuo, Qingdai xuezhe xiangzhuan heji, Shanghai, 1989.

72 Science The wider relevance of this posthumous composite of Zou’s appearance is that it fitted within a larger collection of cultural figures whose first collector Ye Yanlan (1823–1897) had initiated through the laborious means of copying available paintings either in his own hand or that of an assistant. Having assembled some 170 portraits of figures from the seventeenth until the mid-nineteenth century, he bequeathed this exhausting project to his son—who hardly put his shoulder to the wheel—and with more effect to his grandson Ye Gongchuo (1881–1968). Gongchuo had the collection published in 1928 by the Commercial Press more or less in the state in which he received it, and then embarked on a new quest to track down another two hundred images of nineteenth-century figures, which he published in 1953. One fascinating aspect of this work spanning three generations was its tenacious engagement with the changing transmedial processes of collection and reproduction over almost one century. Gongchuo likewise engaged a copyist-painter, but admitted that he particularly welcomed photographs from descendants of their subjects. 58 Zou Boqi’s remediated portrait was typical of so many other images and their post-production histories’ connections to painting and other pictorial media, an intersection that studio owners kept in constant play in order to promote precisely their own professional interests. In 1896 the Baoji Studio published a long essay on painting and photography, a statement that inevitably shared its rhetoric with advertising.59 Both erudite discussions and advertisements now functioned to standardize aesthetic norms on behalf of a visual culture stimulated by both elite and popular attitudes. Continuities between photography and painting expressed also the readiness to accept the interventions that heterographic practices can hardly conceal on either photographic or painted surfaces. And, graphic enhancements explain why studios often advertised their skills in reproducing images on such prestigious materials as porcelain and ivory. Not only did these offer choice surfaces, they provided scope for other artists with the right skills to adapt the image to new levels of complexity. Verisimilar transfer Even more technically germane was the process of verisimilar transfer that direct surface contact offered in the closely analogous arts of rubbing and pressing (or moulding) directly from surfaces. In his comments translated above, Fuge noted that photographers “peel (tuo) off a print”. This highly revealing misapprehension was based no doubt on his familiarity with one of elite scholars’ highest paradigms of visual authenticity, namely an ink rubbing taken on paper from a second surface of stone, metal or wood. What Fuge called the “mirror” must have been the photographic plate, because he stated that the crucial operation was “to smear [it] with chemicals”. That it was then possible to peel off the image may be a muddle of the steps used in respectively daguerreotype and wet-plate (collotype) photography. Wetplate photography, which included the possibility of negative-positive transfer, used glass plates and paper, and it is the only technique that tangentially matches Fuge’s perception of peeling something from a surface. Rubbing was a skill that closely approximated photographic report. Executed as perfectly as possible, images and texts in the form of ink rubbing gave rise to a highly researched and minutely critiqued history of visual record. Dudgeon’s cast image (tuoying), used in the title of his Chinese treatise on photography, also aligned photography with this notion of transfer. The era of photography’s ascent in China was

Terms of description  73 also the period in which experts in the most exacting category of “full form” ink rubbing (quanxing taben) achieved unprecedented standards of accuracy. Also known as “composite rubbings”, their producers executed the closest possible coordination between a paper sheet and the surface of a target object. Transfers from even the most defiantly angled surfaces of ancient bronze objects and stone carvings exemplified a technique aiming to represent an object’s solidity in perspectival depth. The most successful results resembled photographs, and producers of rubbings did not hesitate to use photographs—photographs of one object from varied positions—to help them to target successively each surface of an object at angles sufficiently correct for a coherent two-dimensional result.60 Whether it played any role in these processes is unknown, but one early Shanghai studio was called the Epigraphy Library (s 120). Fuge’s confusion of plate photography with other methods of imprint is also significant because it denotes the importance of surfaces, exactly the level at which photography and rubbing could both transform three dimensions into two. The analogical function of rubbings is close to that of photographs, while some of the technical steps in one medium explain almost directly those of the other. Soaking the paper before making a rubbing, for instance, enhances surface receptivity to the maximum. A following step relied on an adhesive ingredient—the common orchid bletilla striata (baiji)61—traded in the same medical economy where other customers succeeded by trial and error to invent photography’s chemical recipes. Albumen, which is applied to rubbings in order to add lustre, is also the material used to provide albumen prints with their characteristic gloss. The highest acclaim for rubbings often emphasized their success in “transmitting the spirit” (chuanshen) of an object, the common aspiration recalling the portrait ambitions of both photography and painting. Faith in rubbings as the most authentic—and affective—reproduction of forms endured well in to the twentieth century in China. Shana Brown has demonstrated how nineteenth-century writers and collectors sublimated their antiquarian interests into new forms of historical writing and personal narrative. Rubbings were signatures of objects’ new tangibility in reproduction, not simply replacements for absence or loss, and they lured viewers ever deeper into aesthetic elaboration, financial outlay and sensual indulgence. At least one collector, Liu E (1857–1909), “loved antiquity like sex”.62 And, as late as the 1970s, when another expert admitted that he could also smell the quality of a rubbing, this imperious art form still commanded deep sensorial responses.63 The functions that photography shared with other analogical techniques has attracted notice before. Mould-casting, which in Western art academies and hospitals used dried plaster, for instance, provides an extra means to reimagine how photography was conceptualized during its early Western history. Quentin Bajac’s research demonstrates numerous contexts in which both photographs and moulds were alike saturated in a magical sensation of ecmnesic presence delivered by surface reiteration.64 Whether applied to create individual portraits or to meet the ideals of nineteenth- century anthropometry, moulding and photography were closely homologous processes, and the latter won sole preferment only relatively late. Tokugawa scholars applauded the photograph’s authenticity, because its art of transfer was invariably “direct” (choku), and thus dispelled doubt as surely as the sensory infallibility of taste.65 Directness was empirically satisfying as the means to “pictorialize physical contact between the object and the representation”.66 Maki Fukuoka has adopted the Japanese discourse on “transcribing authenticity” (shashin)

74 Science as the lexical axis of a history of objectivity intersecting with various graphical methods. Two techniques that the long-running Japanese debate eventually paired in the same discussion were rubbing and photography, which opposed the virtues of an imprint of the substance with the capture of an optical array. Both relied on nature, but the former stressed authenticity through its reliance on tactile recording, a surface-to-surface technique whose authority Japanese discussants often acknowledged in the naturselbstdruck—the “natural imprint”—of longstanding European practice. Japanese observers could hardly miss its similarity with methods that they had long shared with China for creating rubbings, translatable as “imprinted originals” (takuhon; Ch. taben).67 When Yanagawa Shunsan (1832–c. 1871) argued for the adoption of shashin and repudiated the use of satsuei (sheying), he formalized distrust of what he understood as the image’s capture, and relegated it to a manugraphic stage of technique—a non-mechanical stage of development—complying only with the use of a camera obscura. Publications of rubbings in China show that a similar convergence between photography and rubbing occurred, but the former was merely a secondary service. Nevertheless, in first constructing a photographic archive of China’s art treasures, photographs replicating reprographic techniques in a visual recall of traditional cultural practices were entirely welcome, not least if their material substance remained a prestige brand of artists’ paper, the same one used for rubbings.68 Such connoisseurship demanded no urgent distinctions between photography and ink rubbing. Rong Geng, who was instrumental in stripping the antiquarian heritage of fanciful attributions and fakes—and establishing modern museum work in China—used alternatively rubbings and photographs in numerous prestigious publications of bronze antiquities. Entirely effacing the backgrounds in the photographs, he presented their main objects in stark isolation on the page, thereby reintroducing the aesthetic of ink impress.69 Guo Moruo executed a similar project during his long residence in Japan when he assembled as comprehensively as possible all available illustrations of ancient Chinese bronze vessels and weapons. He and his publisher and friend Tanaka Keitarō (1880–1951), placed woodcut images, rubbings and photographs on the same page in the compendium that they produced in 1935 (Figure 2.12). Their indifference to graphical distinctions was certainly not customary in Japanese publishing, and it belies what had been hitherto an engrossing debate about elevating an autonomous system of transfer above alternatives requiring more intense manipulation. Of course, photography, painting and drawing are linked through shared if unequally realized ambitions for verisimilitude, but nonintervention is truly only the property of a photograph whose ineluctably mechanical result is that “blind” ideal. “Transcribing authenticity” had deep roots in both Chinese and Japanese discourse, but by the modern era only its Japanese expression (shashin) stood consistently for referential content other than the human portrait. Japanese debates on objective representation, which predated by some decades the invention of photography, soon adopted shashin as the leading description of their aims for a higher level of objective representation. In China, by contrast, deliberate or naive confusions of photography with processes of moulding or impressing reveal the extent to which it was not always distinguished from techniques relying on direct surface contact. Even if photography was the supreme method for capturing and recording an optical array facing the camera, its success in China had to contend with representational media which, despite transgressing the laws of perspective, reproduced physical surfaces

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Figure 2.12 Lithographic reproductions of two rubbings, one woodcut and one photograph. From Guo Moruo, Illustrated series of bronze epigraphy from the two Zhou eras (Liang Zhou jinwenci daxi tulu), Tokyo, 1935.

equally or even more accurately. Whereas Japanese opinion stressed photography as the most closely allied to modern virtues of truth and objectivity, Chinese assumptions were more cautious. The irony is that Japanese rapture for a modern project of vision expressed itself in a leading description borrowed from Chinese painting terminology, a description that Chinese observers and critics ultimately downplayed in scientific discourse. Only in the huge mass of lyrical texts devoted to photographic images did many writers use their favourite painting metaphor—and many others to be considered in later chapters—as a trope that deflected the indiscriminate realism of photographic capture back towards the conceits of artistic genius and the painter’s skilled hand.

Reflecting appearances Reflection is perhaps photography’s most self-evident metaphor, since optical reflection is a function of the camera’s principal instrument, the lens (jing)—synonymous with the mirror in Chinese—as well as an effect stabilized in the image on the camera’s receiving plate or film. When Zheng Fuguang (see Chapter 1) first published his treatise on lenses in 1846, he described the photographic camera as a “lens for

76 Science reflecting scenes” (zhaojing jing). He did not differentiate the camera obscura from the photographic camera, because the latter’s reprographic function did not interest him. One year later, having arrived in the United States and purchased a daguerreotype camera, Lin Zhen described the thrill of its operation with the same word for lens and plate and added another analogy of surface impress: Landscapes and people, inside the lens, if they face the sun, leave a form. [The camera] has a magic mirror (shenjing). By refining compounds (lianyao) we can use the sun’s light to reflect (zhao) flowers, birds, people and objects, and in a moment it retains an impression (mo). I have mastered the details of this process.70 Ideas about the supernatural qualities of mirrors, especially in their parallel with alchemical refining, were centuries old, and they fitted with the archaistic metaphors drawn from painting discussed above.71 “Reflecting” (zhao) expressed representational practices more generally, and it has remained the commonest expression both in standard and regional expressions for taking photographs.72 The synonym yingb, a verb in Guangdong dialect, is a common alternative, but only zhao is a longstanding cognate for drawing or painting portraits. Perhaps because Lin Zhen’s autodidactic effort with his new camera was so precocious, he needed to add the more plastic sense of surface impress (mo), enabling readers to intuit better the idea of direct transfer. He was almost certainly aware that the terminal process of moulding—which destroys a mould to retrieve a cast—was an analogy already established in order to interpret the equally terminal process of daguerreotype photography, the method that receives one image, a singleton that is not the anticipant for generating multiple editions. Such concrete references were not uncommon. Korean visitors to Beijing in 1863, having visited a studio at the Russian legation, reported the photographic process also by recourse to the term for moulding.73 All these comparisons spread the imagination of photographic processes between the poles of active production and passive reception. Daguerre no less had early on drawn attention to mould analogies as a leading validation of his technical achievement. He photographed casts of antiquity and zoological fossils as artful arguments for the validity of his technique to serve the visualization of both science and art, and contributed these images as a category to photography’s founding corpus.74 Nie Guangdi, when writing a centennial history of photography for Liangyou, included a reproduction of Daguerre’s Intérieur d’un cabinet de curiosités, an arrangement of casts photographed in 1837 and offered to Alphonse de Cailleux, chief curator of the Louvre, the following year.75 The function of such an image and the social formation that deposited it in Cailleux’s hands was a remarkable pre- emption of photography’s values to Chinese antiquarians, but Nie did not comment. The reflection as “portrait” Another early observer, who reported photography in terms of drawing and painting practices, is the Hunan scholar Zhou Shouchang (1814–1884). Zhou spent three months travelling through Guangdong in 1846, and perhaps at a demonstration of scientific instruments at the Guangzhou Hospital—or Hobson’s Hospital—he watched the operation of a camera and the use of an electric dynamo. He named the process of

Terms of description  77 taking a person’s photograph in a more colloquial reference to painting a “miniature portrait” (xiaozhao). A later editor tactfully redrafted some of Zhou’s inaccuracies in a printed edition of his travel notes in 1883. The following translation includes this re-editing—shown in parenthesis—beside Zhou’s original text: Miraculous instruments are numerous, but among the greatest miracles are two. The first is a method for drawing portraits. You sit the person on a stage, facing east. You set up a mirror (jing), and the technician obtains a portrait (yinga) with the day light. Combining some chemicals and spreading them evenly, you use the mirror to retain it. If you have not let its vitality seep away, then in a moment whiskers, eyebrows and clothing will appear in full. The spirit and feel are exactly faithful. Anyone skilled in drawing cannot match this. If you don’t break the mirror then you can keep the image until the end of your life (alternative: for ever). Obtaining an image has to be during hours V and VI [07.00–11.00]; there must be clear weather and sun.76 That Zhou’s “mirror” was breakable indicates a glass support. Whiskered luminosities are male, a confirmation of this text’s origin in a period when photographic portraiture’s functions were decidedly gendered. That would soon change, not least in urban economies where women’s roles were visualized in multiplying variety. Even at this early stage, however, Zhou Shouchang apprehended posing for a photograph as an exercise “on stage”, a playhouse element that soon massively enhanced photography’s popular appeal. So long as the sitter faced east in favourable weather, the sun would do what became eventually the work of studio lights. Illumination outdoors is an undisputed given, casting this description of photography as a natural process. Whoever demonstrated photography to Zhou may also have impressed him with the contemporary debate concerning photographs as the works of solar impress. They did not disabuse him of the idea that a photograph’s existence was coterminous with the natural span of human life. Following an adjustment some forty years later, Zhou’s text insisted instead that a photograph exceeded the term of its owner’s existence. Lin’s idea of impress and Zhou’s notion of the photograph as a reflection, itself an emanation of solar force, suggested a sense of bearing upon the human body, and so too did his witness to the force of electricity, which he observed in a second demonstration. Its starring technology, which was a “box” with hand-held charge nodes to pass electric current though a body, demonstrated the use of electrotherapy—or electrophysiology. The treatment was clearly intrinsic to an occasion at which Zhou witnessed the receptivity of photography partnered with another natural behaviour, namely electricity’s penetration from outermost surfaces to inner organs and tissue. While one machine arrested the body in eternal stillness, the other compelled its muscles to convulse involuntarily. Coupling dynamos with cameras seems to have been a standard demonstration. Only a few years later in 1852, an entrepreneur in Istanbul organized a lottery: first prize an electric dynamo; second a daguerreotype camera.77 The year before, the American medical missionary Daniel MacGowan (1814–1893) had published a treatise on electrotherapy in Ningbo,78 and the Japanese telegraph inventor Sakuma Shōzan claimed in 1862 to have applied “Galvanic shocks” with his own battery to cure his wife of cholera.79 Shocking demonstrations could still sell tickets in Shanghai half a century later. Pei Xibin urged those in search of entertainment to watch demonstrations of the “box for controlling pain” at the city’s

78 Science waxworks collection, an institution that merited description next to that of Shanghai photography studios, both places that proved for Pei the therapeutic values of Western medicine.80 Such events were merely the latest instance in almost one century of putting science on show, and also testament to science’s enduring entertainment purposes, within which Don Slater has shown that early photography assumed the leading role in summoning the effects of “natural magic”.81 Apparently before anyone had capitalized on a lottery opportunity in Istanbul, this Guangzhou performance of two machines, which bombarded local participants with at least two branches of physics, suggests a context for photography within a larger group of techniques directed towards exploring human presence as a junction of outer surfaces, visceral contents and physical instincts. No doubt, the demonstrators in Guangzhou, most probably members of the London Missionary Society, were confident that Western hegemony in their century was manifest also in scientific experiment. But, one of their onlookers, although enchanted by both photography and electric current, reduced the first of the two acts to the category of a “portrait”, whose ontological existence he rehearsed in decidedly local terms. Later editing would revise the magical powers that he attributed to the image, but not without abandoning the conviction that the photograph was a reflection. How exactly was reflecting practically effected? The current Chinese term paizhao (to photograph) is usually overlooked, but it is solid evidence of early photographic method. Disclosed in a recollection of early photography in Hankou, pai, “to beat time”, is an etymological fossil of the method by which the studio photographer measured exposure time with a set number of words from the Thousand characters canon (Qianzi jing), a ubiquitous school primer, reciting each syllable to the beat of a wooden block.82 This distinctive measurement of time was another acculturation to Chinese conditions. Not only was the slapping of wood a teahouse performance borrowed from the professional storyteller, but the action recalibrated time as an indigenous quality. Moreover, expressed as a local preference, the actual practice of fixing a length of light exposure trivialized the Western system of time measurement. It was a tiny instance of dodging the systematic temporalization of the world that Xiaobing Tang describes as a narrative and hierarchical order imposed from the old and new worlds of the West.83 None of this impinged on Liu Shuping (1857–1917) whose famous school primer Literacy explained and illustrated included elegantly limpid explanations of such common words as pai “to clap”, “to auction” (literally “to bang”) and paixiang, a now obsolete alternative for “to photograph” based on the same local sense of timing an exposure (see Figure 2.1). Liu’s guess that this expression, which he felt compelled to list, originated in a Western form as the modern term for “capturing images” was far off the mark, but it instanced again the fascinating process in which their users mistook as Western terms that had been coined indigenously. International transport was too often the default accompaniment to explanations of technological modernity. Wu Zicheng who drew and composed the primer’s illustrations—with the familiar graphical piracy used in so much work of this period—added a Chinese photographer aiming his camera from the shore at a distant ship.84 What were the results in a process described as “reflecting”? Numerous descriptions’ most common passive agent of reflection is xiangb, one of several Chinese terms for “appearance”, and more specifically for the human face as an object of physiognomic scrutiny. The word is not always easy to disentangle from another, also pronounced xianga, whose meanings are connected by its service for “image”, “portrait” and “illusion”, and overlaps in meaning were—and remain—unavoidable.

Terms of description  79 More concrete related expressions are those denoting the photograph as either the “reflecting plate” (zhaopian) or the “image plate” (xiangpian). These are the calcified terms of current usage. “Appearance” (xiangb) stands for both inanimate and human forms. The Korean painter Yu Suk’s painting (Figure 2.3) shows his brother drawing a “mountain’s appearance” (shanxiang), but, although the figure sits by an open frame, this indoor scene does not determine whether the artist transcribed an object according to interiorized precepts of representation (a mental engagement) or by extracting an appearance from his surroundings (a task of scrutiny). Either act owes its ambiguity to what it shares with the other, while the most important conclusion is that the image is repeatedly susceptible to actions ranging from the transformations of drawing to the transpositions of reflection. These were and sometimes remain standardized terms, but other examples from the rich reserves along China’s dialect continuum show yet more ways of subjecting the image to actions that define the photograph. The northern Zhejiang expression “to invent a portrait” (nie xiaoxiang), still current in Huzhou,85 suggests that a full-scale ethnography of photography’s varied terms could be a rewarding project. Photography and prognostication Actions in control of the image defined another practice, namely prognostication, or reading and discussing the human face. Theories and the lore of painting had long classed the face as a prognosticatory surface and its portrait representation as virtually synonymous. Wang Yi’s Secrets of portrait painting (xiexiang mijue, 1360), one of the earliest surviving texts on the subject, connected physiognomy and drawing explicitly, and copies of related Chinese texts preserved in Japan date to even earlier.86 Cheap blockprinted diagrams of facial physiognomy sold briskly in towns and villages, retailing information that was common throughout East Asia.87 Multicentric familiarity with physiognomic theories does not mean that portraits in Suzhou, Hanseong (Seoul) and Kyoto all looked the same, but it does account for why a Korean envoy in seventeenthcentury Beijing could complain that a local painter’s depiction of his face was “incorrect” according to criteria that everyone understood.88 In his extensive guide to 1880s Shanghai life, Roaming through Shanghai, Ge Yuanxu described portrait photographs in a mixture of the painting lexicon and terms of facial physiognomy: Western people take a chemically treated glass plate and clamp it in a long wooden box. Countersunk on the front of the box is a small concave lens. They point this at a person and capture their image (sheying) on the glass, which is removed to be bathed and washed with a chemical solution. Now we see the person’s face with its expression and physiognomical points (buwei), which are absolutely lifelike. Again they use chemicals to treat a sheet of paper which, once laid on the glass and held up to the sunlight in reverse, allows the face, traces of the costume and arranged objects to appear on the paper. They enhance it with colours so that it surpasses the resemblance of a portrait (xiezhen).89 Ge’s progressive description of the image nearly suggests that its form happened in serial stages of production: one for the face, another for clothing, one more for all the surrounding paraphernalia. He was hardly that naive, but he could not resist a

80 Science descriptive logic borrowed entirely from the successive stages of painting a portrait. The final touch of colour, which imparted the familiar appearance of painting, denoted also the pigment tints that photography studio staff now regularly added. The transnational and local histories of Ge’s text are also highly revealing. His guide was among the first to attract international attention as a Chinese description of urban modernization, and, one year after its publication, Tōdō Ryōshun, a Japanese literary entrepreneur, republished it with a title that recalled popular works devoted to the modern thrills of Tokyo and Yokohama. The section on photography was, like every other section in Tōdō’s volume, reproduced with extra punctuation and glosses to help a Japanese reader make sense of Chinese words and grammar. Only beside key terms did Tōdō add equivalent expressions in Japanese, which were, to repeat, those first loaned from the Chinese lexicon. Tōdō marked Chinese zhaoxiang “photography”, for instance, as shashin; however, he glossed Chinese xiezhen as “portrait” (gazō); he glossed photography’s major site of production, the “house for reflecting images” (zhaoxianglou) as the “shop for authentic transcribing” (shashinya).90 Tōdō passed silently over the term for physiognomy, since its meaning was unambiguous. Tōdō was content to allow Ge’s misconceptions concering photographic process to run unchecked, but the Chinese circulation of Ge’s text entailed its adjustment. Because he had abandoned journalism and returned to medicine, Ge passed the task of editing a second edition to his friend Yuan Zuzhi (1827–1898). Yuan, grandson of the celebrated writer and painter Yuan Mei (1716–1797) and first editor of the Shanghai newspaper Xinbao, reissued the text in 1888, with significant additions. Rather than say that the face, clothing and objects appear on the paper, he insisted that they are transposed (tab), using a familiar term from the art of ink rubbing. He added too that “from one transposure there is no reason why you can’t take some hundred thousand”. Finally, he remarked that the photographic image could be further multiplied through the use of lithography.91 Most intriguing in what was now both Ge and Yuan’s text was the confusion of photography’s functions with physiognomy in a period when this popular science was all the rage in Europe and America. Early photograpers rapidly stole the claims and expectations associated with physiognomy to burnish the significance of their own art. Balzac—everyone’s favourite example of the modern catoptrophobe— maintained his cynicism towards photography in a seamless continuation of his distrust of physiognomists.92 More positively, Daguerre may have entertained the possibility that photographic report equalled phrenological evidence amid the mounting enthusiasm for that pseudoscience on both sides of the Atlantic. His famous pose (Figure 1.13) featuring one hand resting on the back of his head was plausibly a gestural concession to the gripping fashion to read character and motives from their cranial manifestations.93 In China the commonality of prognostic reading and photographic capture, both observations of the body’s surface, was apparent in contemporary publishing (Figure 2.13). Zhou Muqiao, one of his generation’s foremost news illustrators, drew an image that his own news journal turned into a lithographic print. It depicts a visit to a fortune-teller, one of scores of mundane yet fashionable pursuits that attracted the attention of artists now creating the images of an illustrated press and its advertising. A young woman’s visit to a master of physiognomy matched a visit to a photographic studio in more ways than one. She went chaperoned by her maid, and sat to be scrutinized by an expert technician. His authority in this illustration is guaranteed

Terms of description  81

Figure 2.13 Zhou Muqiao (1868–1923), depiction of visiting a fortune teller, lithograph print, published in Feiyingge jishi huace, 15 (27 December 1894 [jiawu 12/1]).

as the regeneration of methods first perfected by an ancestor who gazes sternly on the proceedings from his hanging portrait—his xianga, a pun on portraits and fortunetelling. Physical contact between the expert and his patron is avoided through the use of a pointing stick—likewise, photography requires no direct touch with its objects. In Chinese medical theory, from which physiognomy borrowed so much, skilled observation did not rely on touch. Physicians who diagnosed with their hands were deemed the least skilful of their profession.94 While listening to the prognosis, the woman observes a mirror—instead of a lens—in order to correlate the physiognomist’s remarks with points on her face. The four-character legend below Sun Jianming’s name proclaims “honest words to discuss your appearance (xiangb)”, and on the wall a smaller notice tells customers: “Honest words brook no censure”. Any visitor may be displeased with what a prognostic reading discloses, just as the most scrupulous adherence to procedures in making a portrait photograph may result in dissatisfaction. In their instructions to novice photographers (Chapter 1), Fryer and Xu warned readers on exactly this point, urging them to prepare to use any methods of adjustment that will rework the photograph’s appearance and please the client.95 Reports from abroad also declared that redoing a photograph was a reasonable expectation. Having visited a Paris studio in 1866, the Qing emissary Zhang Deyi wrote that “if even the slightest inaccuracy appears in the face, they wipe [the plate] to take another photograph and redevelop it as it should

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be”. Without assuming that photography was an occult power, this presumptuous faith in the amenability of Parisian studio management implied that the image should be invariably redeveloped in line with the way that clients wished to see themselves. Or even in ways that satisfied higher demands in a technical history that remained latent far into the twentieth century: Chen Shilin, acknowledged as the most skilled manipulator of the raw material used to create standard images (biaozhun zhao) of Mao Zedong, first trained at a Yangzhou studio (s 118) in the late 1940s.97

Conclusion The methods for redeveloping photographs were various, but the camera’s capture of an image upon which any redevelopment was contingent—transpositions and heterographic overlays of pigments and inscriptions—was not open to interference. Those predicting the future declared similarly that their science was off limits to even casual suggestions of alternative ways of doing things. Everyone accepted, however, that the wonders of prophecy and photography both depended on appearance, crucially one that was disenchanted by both the camera and the prognosticator’s indiscriminately realistic techniques, and, as Slater argues, equally ready to be re-enchanted as visual spectacle.98 Neither intellectual nor social conditions subscribe exactly to etymological axioms, and there is no single history to invoke as the metaphorical logic underlying the naming of photography in China. Several terms contended. The sense of “capture”, which touches bottom in seventeenth-century Chinese scientific discourse, was by no means the oldest, but it offered a welcome consistency from which its users could develop coherence between concepts and practices. Eventually the winner among its contenders, “capture” is a signal glossic mark, which may attest to the early scientific exchanges between China and Europe, and stands as an eerie anticipation of a key Barthesian metaphor (saisir/surprendre). The Chinese autonomy that operated in adopting “capture” is all the more apparent when juxtaposed to the parallel Japanese discourse, which reached another conclusion, recalling usefully that the same options were available in distinct contexts before their critics and demonstrators either adopted or rejected them. Pursuing the question of what to call photography through predominantly Chinese sources suggests finally that the Chinese choices of conceptual terms emerged in the discursive ecologies of enquiry, reform and enchantment. Many Chinese engagements with photography were their witnesses’ responses to performances of re-enchanting what the camera “sees” in indiscriminately realistic terms as an array of the world’s disenchanted facts. No reality was reinvented, but a great deal of its ordinariness was re-enchanted, most remarkably in turns of phrase, literary allusions and cultural forms to embroider another narrative of modernity that sometimes disguised the restraining power of tradition, and sometimes subverted it.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Austen ([1813] 1996): 51, 92 (chs 10 & 18). Benjamin ([1931] 1980). Kemp & Wilder (2002): 360. Batchen (1997): 56–78; Slater (1995): 220.

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83

5 Yang Xun, Bieqin zhuzhici, Shenbao, 17 March 1873 (guiyou 2/19): 1; Gu (1996): 39; Ge (2003): 12. The rest of the series appeared the same year at Shenbao, 3 March (2/5): 2–3; 5 March (2/7): 2–3; 13 March (2/15): 3; 17 March (2/19): 1–2. 6 Wang (2006). 7 Mao ([1870] 1985): 16.254. 8 Fang ([1643] 1981): 12.18b. For a “wind-mill” overhead arrangement of mirror and lens employed by Johannes Kepler and demonstrated to an English visitor in 1620, see Steadman (2001): 11–12. 9 Liscomb (1993): 90 et ff. 10 Peterson (1975): 378. 11 Fang ([1643] 1981): 12.18b. 12 Fang ([1643] 1981): 8.17a. 13 Oh (2015): 378–379. 14 Fang ([1643] 1981): 8.10a–b. 15 Barthes (1980): 23; Sontag ([1971] 1979): 4. 16 Miyata & Xu (1999). 17 Fukuoka (2006): 204. 18 Mao ([1870] 1985): 16.254. 19 Xu (1995): 19; Zhao (2002): 14. 20 Barthes (1980): 23 (#4), 126–127 (#34). 21 Peterson (1976): 81. 22 Koizumi (1985): 14. Two Japanese words for “to grasp”, both pronounced satsu, were often interchangeable. 23 Yanagawa ([1867] 1983): 311–313; Fukuoka (2006): 241. 24 Kinoshita (1996): 6–22; Yokoe (1997): 51, 168. 25 Oh (2015). 26 For uses by Cao Xueqin (c. 1717–1763) and Wen Kang (c. 1850), see Cao (1953): 101.1155; Wen (1981): 29.508. 27 Ozawa (1997): 249–250. 28 Batchen (1997): 113–120. On distinctions between ancient silhouettes and shadow painting, see Belting ([2001] 2011): 118–119. 29 Screech (1996): 112–115; a shadow drawing (eizō) of the actor Sanyūtai Enchō (1839– 1900), stored in Tokyo’s Zenshōan, is discussed at Kinoshita (1996): 64. 30 Freund (1974): 11–18. 31 Orvell (2003): 24. 32 Adamson (1989): 191. 33 Clarke (2011): 15–84. 34 Clunas (1997a): 198–199. 35 Fan (2004): 57. 36 On common disparagements one century earlier, see Clunas (1997b): 91–93. 37 Croissant (2006). 38 Daston & Galison (2007): 16. 39 Fuge (1984): 8.168. 40 Clunas (1997b): 91. 41 Miyata & Xu (1999). 42 Fuge (1984): 8.168. 43 Laing (2004): 117. 44 Shen ([1928] 1995): 190. 45 Qi Baishi (1864–1957), who began his career as a portraitist, painted his father’s face within a diameter of 10 centimetres on a 2-metre length of paper, now located in the Palace Museum, Taipei. 46 For example, Ren’s portrait of Ding Wenwei (1827–1890), dated 1856, in the Zhejiang Museum, Hangzhou. 47 Guo (1984): 489, 513. The painting and its execution became the subject of a bitter row in the Shanghai press after Guo’s enemies published anecdotes of his superstitious behaviour in the artist’s studio—Goodman denied being the source of these tales. Guo refused to take delivery of the finished work, but during his visit to Italy in 1878, Li Shuchang, one

84

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

Science of Guo’s embassy counsellors, was surprised to see the painting hanging in the Hanbury family’s villa on the Ligurian coast (Li [1985]: 523). Shen ([1928] 1995): 191. Shenbao, 15 July 1889 [jichou 6/18]: 6. Weber ([1921] 1968): vol. 2, 937. Vinograd (1992): 13. See the portrait of the underworld leaders Du Yuesheng and Huang Jinrong, completed by Yu Ming in 1924, now located in the Shanghai Museum (Knight & Chan [2010]: 80). Shenbao, 29 February 1892 [renchen 2/2]: 4. Location: Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden, accession no. RV-5263-1. Shangwu yinshuguan ([1909] 2012): 297–298, 299–302. Clunas (1997b): 142. On this naval episode, see Zhou (1982). Wen (2016). Shenbao, 4 April 1896 [bingshen 2/22]: 4. Zhang (2004): 42, 45. Starr (2008): 40–43. Brown (2011): 52–55. Wu (2003): 58; Zhang (2004): 57. Bajac (2001b). Kinoshita (1996): 8–10; Ozawa (1996): 33–36; Ozawa (1997): 18–40. Fukuoka (2006): 146. Fukuoka (2006): 108. Liu (2014): 69–95, esp. 85 on paper. Rong (1934). Lin (1985): 38. For early religious writing on mirrors, see Robinet (1979): 51–52. Expressions such as zhao xiaozhao (Yangzhou) and zhao zhaoxiang (Jinhua), in Miyata & Xu (1999). Oh (2015): 367. For a large number of these famous images, see Bajac & Planchon-de Font-Réaulx (2003). For this title, see Bajac & Planchon-de Font-Réaulx (2003): 58; for alternative titles and incisive comments on Daguerre’s aims, see Batchen (1997): 126–133. Zhou (1987): 9.198. Öztuncay (2003): vol. 1, 44. Elman (2006): 104. For this “machine” (mashine), now located in Nagano’s Sanada hōmotsukan, see Kokuritsu kagaku hakubutsukan (2003): 52. Pei ([1905] 1906): 4.9b–10a; 5.7a–b. Slater (1995): 226–232. Zhang (1983): 21. Tang (1996): 230. Liu (1901): 4.36a. Huzhou (1999): 1884. For example, Collected physiognomies of seventy-two practitioners (Shū shichijūni ka sōsho), the Kamakura copy of a Northern Song imprint, located at Shōmyōji, Kanagawa. Vinograd (1992): 1–27; Bussotti (2011): 39. Oh (2015): 371. Ge ([1876] 1989): 2.19. Tōdō (1878): 2.2a–b. Ge (1888): 2.1b. Aspersions on physiognomy appear in Le Père Goriot at Balzac ([1835] 2004): 131. Becker & Brunet (2013): 133–147, esp. 135. Kuriyama (1999); 153–154. See remarks on lighting and chemical adjustments respectively at Fryer & Xu (1880a): 13a–b; Fryer & Xu (1880b): 12b. See also retouching the plate by hand at Fryer (1891): 5b. Zhang (1981): 49. Mu & Zhang (2011). Slater (1995): 222–223.

PART 2

Commerce

3

Sites of production

Photography studios possess many histories. Not only sites of production and agencies of visual articulation, they were units of cultural organization, consultancies for healthy living, and objects of social imagination. Some of this is apparent in looking at a late nineteenth-century photograph of the corner of a Shanghai studio, the Lihua (Lai Wah) Portraiture and Enlargement studio (Figure 3.1). Its authorship unknown, successive owners reproduced the image for casual sales and in a postcard reproduction.1 Most of these reproductions helped to keep Lihua visible long after 1888 when the firm abandoned photography and turned to general grocery. The print reproduced in this book was acquired not long after its creation in the 1880s. 2 Similar editions were acquired by international travellers who inserted them into albums where they entered the sequence of towns and cities through which the purchaser had passed. In the logic of this arrangement, the Lihua studio stood more often than not as the sole memento of a stop in Shanghai, implying that only in this city had such modern amenities as studio photography and enlargement truly emerged. Chinese recollections of early photography often made the same point. Few other images capture as well some of the ways in which to imagine studios at the centre of China’s history of photography, and none other reconvenes so efficiently the historical actors who participated in—or at the edge of—studio life. Lihua appears in perhaps the only visual record of un-posed action beside a nineteenth-century studio in China, including passers-by inspecting photographs in the studio’s windows. Notable, too, is Lihua’s presence on Nanjing Road, only minimally visible in the image but nonetheless the site of a perpetually regenerative commercialism that has for some time now occupied a central position in interpreting modern Chinese history.3 Studios like Lihua remained the most enduring site of photography’s production during the first one hundred years of the medium’s history in China. Admittedly, almost nothing is known of the countless travelling photographers who carted and shipped the minimum of equipment from village to village, their status generally held in contempt. Guangzhou residents sneered at itinerants’ wooden box cameras, which they compared to the rat bins of neighbourhood hygiene drives.4 At a higher level, upon which many digressed more volubly, studios were the dominant sites of production; their economic power was the strongest; their means of circulation the most effective; and, they adopted no casual means in the outright pursuit of commercial fame and success. This chapter explores studios’ earliest discernible beginnings. It considers what can be known of studio numbers before turning to some of the conditions of studios’ establishment, both separate and mixed stories of international and inter-regional entrepreneurship. It then analyzes the abundant evidence of studios’ DOI: 10.4324/9781003086345-6

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Figure 3.1 Unknown photographer, Lihua (Lai Wah) studio, Nanjing Road, Shanghai, c. 1888. Albumen silver print on paper, 26.5 × 20 cm. Courtesy of Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam.

emergence in commercial combinations with other industries and professions. Finally, it establishes what was distinctive in studios’ spatial design and their location in predominantly urban environments.

Counting studios Studio numbers are a vital topic in social descriptions of photography’s growth, revealing most notably the scale of studios’ presence in the changing functions of urban life. The biggest numbers from photography’s Western headquarters are daunting: New York City already had two hundred studios in 1858; Paris’ total climbed from fifty in the early 1850s to over four hundred two decades later. 5 One British survey has retrieved records for 2,760 studios founded in the greater London area during the period 1841–1901.6 Massive totals contribute merely a circular proof that a few cities were exceptional, and these early Atlantic statistics certainly dwarf conditions almost anywhere else. However, if worldwide comparisons are set beside population centres of comparable size, then the figures in several Chinese cities are equally significant. Shanghai, home to the most fastidiously documented conditions, has produced the highest numbers. Recent research has counted up to fifty-eight studios opened in Shanghai between 1863 and 1900.7 Another count totals one hundred studios in the

Sites of production  89 8

period 1880–1911. When compared to Dublin, where a cumulative total until 1900 amounts to eighty-nine,9 two port cities at each end of the Eurasian landmass look evenly matched. Other totals from this period also suggest densities by which no one city could be absolutely differentiated from the others. Studios in Manchester in 1865 totalled seventy-one.10 The total in Tokyo in 1877, according to a listing produced by the studio owners themselves, was 116.11 While historians of photography have usefully exploited numbers to extrapolate photography’s aesthetic ascendance, economic success and mass appeal, they have catered less to revealing processes by which the numbers were gathered. Government, business and press attention to the number of studios that competed in towns and cities expressed an emerging civic pride that modernization fostered with new establishments in a range of services and amenities. In Shanghai, for instance, during the period of the Republic, the Commercial Press (founded 1897) produced a series of city guides and business registers, covering intermittent years between 1909 and 1937. Chinese commercial directories itemized studios as one among many specializations that contributed to Shanghai’s glamour as an industrial centre. The cover art of the 1931 directory featured belching factory chimneys in an aestheticized statement of shared if dirty progress, promoted also by photographers, avant-garde woodcut printmakers and cinematographers.12 Commercial Press publications listed thirty studios in 1909 and seventy in 1931,13 by which time the city’s population exceeded 1.8 million.14 These totals are probably not exhaustive, since not all Japanese businesses were listed, and some studios preferred a listing as a painting studio. However, studio numbers climbed steadily, as high as forty in 1918, beyond fifty in 1921 and as high as seventy one decade later.15 These are totals as high as or higher than those recorded in Japanese cities. Tokyo’s 1938 commercial register lists sixty-eight businesses. The totals listed in various years in Osaka and Yokohama during the 1920–30s were lower than the contemporary totals in Shanghai.16 In other cities too, the energy supporting the necessary research was as remarkable as the results. In his erudite commercial survey of Chengdu, completed in 1910, Fu Chongju (1875–1917) counted more than ten photography studios. He categorized portrait painting separately from photography, but this division was not absolute, since Fu admitted that the earliest owner of a studio was also the city’s most acclaimed portrait painter.17 Fu’s reformist engagement with Chengdu’s modernization was an especially early refocusing of a Qing scholar’s interests towards a changing environment.18 Twenty years later, the Republican government drew on similarly readjusted urban interest in mobilizing surveys to issue the most informative economic reports ever produced. Published in 1935, for instance, a survey of Nanjing’s economy listed sixty-eight studios.19 The city had apparently only two studios before 1911, 20 and this dramatic rise probably followed Nanjing’s repurposing as the national capital. Studio businesses did not grow in every Yangzi city with the same rapidity. In Yangzhou, not far downstream, studio history began equally late, and the city’s later total of eight had not climbed higher than fifteen by 1949. 21 During the same decade, in Beijing, where the atmosphere had succumbed to that of an ex-capital, the number of studios nevertheless climbed, but an approximation of seventy in 1919 was probably still an underestimate that did not distinguish between Chinese and foreign ownership. 22 One impressive survey team counted forty-eight studios in their survey published in 1932. 23 That same year, a survey of Hangzhou listed thirty-five studios. Even during a world slump, twenty-four were turning a

90  Commerce profit; three had closed. 24 Before the outbreak of full-scale war with Japan in 1937, the numbers in smaller eastern cities, such as Ningbo and Fuzhou, ranged between ten and twenty. 25 The war caused studio numbers to climb in the wake of refugee migrations. Chongqing had sixty-two studios by 1942; Chengdu 118 in 1949. 26 Nanjing’s sixty-eight studios in 1933 had multiplied to 126 by 1948. 27 The total in the same year in Wuhan—the unification of three adjacent cities in 1926—was 132. 28 Dozens of gazetteers report the same phenomenon of wartime refugees arriving from east coast cities to re-establish themselves in the interior. But the growth in studio numbers contained another factor with which recent Chinese sources deal only cursorily. In even quite remote areas under Japanese control, studio numbers reached unprecedented heights, because the occupying government imposed regulations for the population to acquire passbooks with identification photographs. This enforcement explains the soaring rate of studio foundations in Shanghai and the surrounding counties. In 1942, in fact, Shanghai studios had published a list restricted to less than two hundred establishments carrying out the occupier’s demand, but this under-represented the substantial growth in studio numbers during these years. Chongming—the island midstream in the Yangzi estuary—had a staggering twenty-nine studios by 1947. Shanghai boasted over four hundred studios in 1945 when the population had reached 3.7 million. 29 War and migration had by now swelled numbers in cities even as far away as Lanzhou where in 1950 thirty-one studios functioned in a city population of less than one quarter million.30 The situation in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat is difficult to quantify more exactly, partly because the last guides and registers of the Republican period now said less concerning photography. Familiarity had bred indifference. A Shanghai city guide of 1947, for example, does not list a single studio, but expands broadly on sports, Chinese opera, Western theatre and cinema. 31 And, when in the mid-1970s Xie Juzeng described his sojourns along Fuzhoulu and other Shanghai thoroughfares sixty years earlier—admittedly a long recall—he mentioned none of the thriving studios that he must have passed. 32

Founding studios The enterprise behind studio foundations was international and inter-regional. Several of the earliest recorded photographic activities in Hong Kong, Guangzhou and other port cities were those of foreign visitors. Their names survive from a period when they made early use of a nascent English-language press to advertise their presence, while most local competitors did not. By the 1860s the visibility of Chinese photographers had grown considerably, and their studio presence would eventually prove to be the more permanent. 33 The importation of equipment was in the earliest years of all studios’ history crucial, but its volume was probably much smaller than the known numbers of studios might imply. Changes in ownership were rapid, and the material basics for equipping a studio were constantly offered for sale and resale amid harsh realities. Reports of studios falling into rent arrears and defaulting on loans—often drawn from medical businesses—were recorded in detail, because those close to these catastrophes often renounced their liability publicly. In 1910 when one Shanghai studio owner disappeared into the night with all the studio equipment, the landlord gave notice that

Sites of production  91 he was not complicit (s 25). Another landlord sued the wife of the absent owner of a bankrupt business and secured the profits from an auction of its cameras and fittings (s 153). Often studios were direct beneficiaries of others’ disasters. When the Yaohua studio, by 1899 a household name in Shanghai, acquired the floundering Guanghuilou, the new owner announced primarily for the attention of worried creditors: “Guanghuilou’s past is no present concern”.34 Even changes of management were announced with the same aggressive caution. 35 Knowledge too was for sale, or at least ready for exchange. Early 1870s advertisements to teach photography at no charge were open appeals to recruit a pupil who might eventually acquire the advertiser’s stock and meanwhile act as sales representative.36 Another deceptive factor was the result of studio owners claiming that they had acquired equipment from an exotic supplier. Technical literature discussed in Chapter 1 shows that many items of precision tool-making were foreign imports, but that the larger boxes and armatures into which to fit them were the constructions of local joiners. In the early twentieth century, patriotic claims to be using Chinese factoryproduced photographic paper are also open to doubt. Typical of the difficulty in judging exactly the origins of some of photography’s required materials, no one commented on where best to buy glass, but an initially foreign-owned factory in Pudong (the seaboard zone east of Shanghai) had started production by 1905. 37 Questions surrounding overseas personnel and their reputations are equally slippery. Early studio names did not invariably stand for the expatriate identities that they suggested. For example, Edinburgh-born Hugh Mackay arrived in Hong Kong probably in 1845, the year that he advertised his import business in the relatively new weekly China Mail. One year later, Mackay and Co. announced its acquisition of daguerreotype equipment, soliciting clients for portraits at their business premises. Nothing discloses who made the photographs, and no detail confirms whether the space in which they operated was a studio. Mackay soon announced the sale of his equipment, and left Hong Kong in 1849, perhaps lured by the Gold Rush to California where he died in 1857. 38 Who bought his studio goods and to where they might have shipped them is anyone’s guess. A similar case is Louis Legrand (or Le Grand), in Shanghai by 1856 and in partnership with Dominique Rémi, a watchmaker from the Loire.39 Sometimes describing themselves as “photographers”, they combined watchmaking with general imports. Legrand was an accomplished photographer of outside scenery, but how much this occupied his time is unclear.40 In 1858 he travelled north where supplying drinks and groceries to French troops during the Second Opium War was clearly profitable. The traveller and writer Henri Este, who met Legrand in Shanghai, adopted him as a character in his novel La tasse à thé (1865), and created a dilettante with various talents for the violin and—in an interesting pairing—the production of maquettes and photographs. Other records that similarly suggest early studio foundation can be just as treacherous. For instance, the daguerreotypist Herman Husband spent barely a few weeks in Shanghai during the summer of 1852.41 He hired rooms at an import company on Fuzhoulu, but set up no permanent studio.42 Some names represent figures who perhaps never turned up at all. Also in Shanghai, the studio of H. Salzwedel, for example, owed its name to Herman Salzwedel, a German optics expert, who founded an eponymous studio in Surabaya. He sold up in Java in the mid-1880s and departed.43 Whether he or his successors travelled to Shanghai to establish H. Salzwedel there is

92  Commerce unclear. In fact, by 1892, Shi Dezhi, a permanent Shanghai resident of mixed Chinese and foreign descent, had acquired H. Salzwedel and renamed it Yaohua (s 277)—not the only use of this name—and reopened on Chinese New Year’s Day, quite possibly having bankrolled the business from an earlier date.44 Even if indigenous presence usually bested overseas management, many studios adopted symbols of overseas connection yet did not attempt to hide their Chinese identity. The newspaper Shanghai News (Shenbao, 1872–1949), founded by Chen Huageng and the English businessman Ernest Major, soon put Shanghai New Journal (Shanghai xinbao, 1861–1872), another foreign-owned Chinese-language newspaper, out of business, and then took over its role in advertising studios in a golden age of exaggeration, which included predictable references to foreign expertise and equipment and expectations of both Chinese and foreign visual tastes. The hybrid identity of many successful studios was central to the profiles that they cultivated. For example, when another Shanghai press giant, Eastern Times (Shibao, 1904–1939), moved to its landmark new premises in 1912, it issued a commemorative supplement containing a page on which the Baoji studio declared its own existence since 1888 with a cluttered array of elegance (Figure 3.2). Other studios elsewhere in China used the name Baoji, but only the Shanghai studio’s achievements are set in stone via a neo-classical architrave above Baoji’s name presented in calligraphy retrieved from the surface of

Figure 3.2 Baoji studio announcement of its services in Shanghai since 1888, published in commemorative supplement for the Shanghai Shibao newspaper’s relocation. From Shibaoguan xinwu luocheng jiniankan, Shanghai, 1912.

Sites of production  93 an ancient epigraph and set each side of the international commonplace of a sinuous nymph. The name is also given as Powkee, closer to Baoji’s name in Guangdong dialect—an international touch from the Roman alphabet if still the disclosure of a regional identity. The addition “… and sons” imputes a regenerative future not usually supplied in Chinese business rhetoric. Several Chinese studio owners adopted Western names in order to project an international status despite disentangling their activities from any reliance on foreign expertise and capital. They resorted to cunning rhymes and puns to swell both Chinese and foreign names with auspicious associations. The Lizhu studio—formerly the studio of the Japanese photographer Ueno Hikoma (1838–1904) until its acquisition by Liang Jiechen—operated under the English name Rich, because this both matched the Shanghainese pronunciation of Lizhu and spoke unambiguously to wealth. Such English usage, which was also common in the medical industry, was not necessarily a ploy to create greater affinity with the foreign community.45 Anyway, businesses that affected extraterritorial status, and even the few that truly possessed it, were bound to be saturated by the culture and economy of their surroundings. Studio staff were predominantly Chinese. Reverend Darwent’s famous guide to Shanghai lists pidgin English expressions used for requesting—with invariable condescension—the development and delivery of photographic plates.46 That customers contracted services directly with Chinese staff suggests that foreign visitors and residents relied preponderantly on a Chinese personnel; it reveals, too, that the owner’s presence at a foreign-owned studio was not to be assumed. Studio advertising in the Chinese press also enmeshed international circuits within local patterns. For example, Sentai studio, which was advertising its services by 1863, was the venture of the British photographer William Saunders who had arrived in Shanghai after establishing another studio in Yokohama.47 Sentai, which is the transliteration of Saunders, is one of the more authentic Chinese names for a business that was either completely or partly foreign-owned. The studio supplied the lucrative international market for gruesome images of Chinese labour, poverty, vice and punishment.48 However unsaleable these images were to the society from which they were extracted, Sentai announced its opening with an advertising campaign in Shanghai xinbao,49 qualifying Saunders as the first foreign photographer to grasp that competing with Chinese studios hinged on breaking into the Chinese print media that could transmit his demands for custom in local terms. Allowing the ambiguities surrounding studios’ variously extraterritorial and local status to run unchecked was no doubt advantageous for two commercial communities, which in Shanghai were closely interrelated. Foreign photographers contended with fierce local competition in the new image economies now emerging in more than one Chinese city. Meanwhile, Chinese operators spared no effort to dominate the new market through hints at overseas connections, not least because some of their most formidable competitors were international adventurers ready to adopt Chinese identities and local techniques for publicity. Early conditions in Shanghai, Tianjin and Xiamen, for instance, offered attractive image markets to Japanese and Western photographers hitherto resident in Japan or inbound from farther away. Too many surviving photographs contest any tidy proposition that Chinese residents visited some studios and foreign customers called exclusively at others. Numerous Japanese visitors arrived, because they saw Chinese studios as the most advanced. Ueno, who had previously diversified his operation between Nagasaki,

94  Commerce Vladivostok and Hong Kong, landed in China in the footsteps of several predecessors.50 In 1863 Yokoyama Matsusaburō (1838–1884), best known as the pioneer of a genre fusing photography and painting (“photographic oil painting” shashin abura’e), travelled to Shanghai and visited a number of studios. He opened his Tokyo studio under the decidedly Chinese style of name Tower To Heaven (s 248).51 In Fuzhou, the Japanese photographer Kimura and his wife opened the Lushan Gallery (s 177) in 1860 where they trained a number of local students.52 Conversely, Japan was also the destination to which many visitors from the mainland travelled in order to acquire technical expertise and equipment. Ren Jingfeng (c. 1847–c. 1928), member of a prestigious northeastern Manchu banner family, founded Beijing’s famous Fengtai studio in 1892 after a lengthy sojourn in Japan.53 Another noble entrepreneur was Gongsang Nuoerbu (1872–1931). Prince (jasagh) of his Mongol banner—thus confident of his descent from Genghis Khan—Gongsang travelled to Japan in 1903 to visit the trade fairs in Osaka and Tokyo, before returning to found Harqin’s first studio with the equipment that he had acquired.54 Social status and money counted in such ventures, but so too did the prestige of having swum in the now fast currents of Japanese modernization. In the Republican dawn of 1912, Chang Runlin gave up whatever he was studying in Japan and sailed back to Jingmen. Here he unloaded his new equipment and founded this central Yangzi city’s first photography studio (s 20).55 Of course, any studio owner who could demonstate a permanent presence and long business hours had a marked advantage over absent rivals. Presence intimated success. Perhaps this is why most early photographic records of studio premises include their owner or manager standing in the foreground. The figure below the Xianzhen studio in Wuchang is certainly its owner (Figure 3.3). So too is one of two figures in the doorway of Sanxing (Figure 3.4), and perhaps also outside Lihua the one in the throng who owned shoes, a watch and an umbrella (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.3  Unknown photographer, Xianzhen lou, Wuchang, c. 1930. The Aolüe tower (right), built in 1908, replaced the Yellow Crane Pavilion (Huanghe lou), burned down in 1884. Gelatin silver print on paper, 28 × 12 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library.

Sites of production  95 If writing a history of studios in China emphasizes indigenous patterns of development, when and where did these begin? Exact answers are impossible, but the larger environment of inter-regional studio migrations and foundations was crucial, even if it has been hitherto overlooked. Coastal and inland shipping supported the early spread of studios, and expanding rail networks accelerated it. Not only a transport medium, rail adjusted commercial life. New railway cities, especially those planned by Japanese authorities in northeast China, developed the conglomeration of urban businesses near stations. 56 Local Chinese records also emphasize the location of studios in proximity to waterfronts where passengers joined and left ships. Eventually, when one mode of travel caught up with the other, the railway platform favoured studio trade with a convenience hitherto served by the wharf. In Changzhou (s 136) and Shangrao (s 135), the first studios opened respectively in 1900 and 1932, and the railway followed only a few years later. The foundation of a studio in Tengxian (s 86) in 1908 preceded only briefly the town’s railway station on the Beijing–Shanghai railway. Yet, when events forced the pace, the most adventurous photographers were not daunted by arduous and even dangerous travel. Unwilling to let the Russian Civil War block his plans, Yu Songtao freighted his equipment from Vladivostock up the Amur and Sungari rivers in order to re-establish himself in Haerbin (s 305). Much of the earliest evidence documents Hong Kong and Shanghai as the two ports where photographic activities first happened. Shanghai’s earliest recorded foundation (s 281) dates to 1864. This relative precocity is reliable only in so far as news press in Shanghai was among the most rapidly developed in China. Even so, it documented studios far away in the interior, such as a studio (s 196) founded in Nanchang in 1875. Although press advertising elsewhere was less developed, other records show that studio developments in provincial backwaters did not invariably lag behind. Liancheng, a landlocked town in southern Fujian, may even have been a frontrunner, since one studio (s 188) existed there as early as 1855. Other documented foundations locate early studios quite broadly across China’s southern zone. The earliest known founding date of a studio in Guangzhou is 1862 (s 279). In the same period Kimura opened his business in Fuzhou (s 177), and Guangzhou’s Yichang studio provided staff and funds for another studio in Fuzhou (s 278). Studios appeared in both Jinan and Chongqing (s 204 244) in the early 1870s, 57 and early too at Hankou (s 205) in 1872, Tianjin (s 84) in 1875, Xiangtan (s 285) in 1875, Wuchang (s 255) in 1878, Chengdu (s 257) in 1883, Jiaxing (s 130) in 1884 and Quanzhou (s 184 284 300 317) in 1885. Except for Chengdu, Fuzhou, Jiaxing and Xiangtan, immigrants and returnees from Guangdong founded the first studios in all these cities and towns. China’s southernmost region deserves another emphasis. The pragmatics of art production in Guangzhou were deeply affected by the city’s position as an international hub. The Guangdong model of doing art, running a business and living abroad drew confidently from international experiences, but its exponents also capitalized on inter-regional connections and opportunities, which were no less significant to the history of studios in China than photography’s global travel in the same period. In his ground-breaking history of Shanghai’s early Guangdong community, Song Zuanyou chronicles how Guangdong entrepreneurs in many fields started moving northward into China in the 1840s, exactly the period of photography’s first maritime–metropolitan spread around the world. Dozens of the most successful Guangdong business leaders and politicians came from the same handful of counties. In funding much of Shanghai’s initial rise, these immigrants—and their rivals and

96  Commerce partners from Ningbo—attributed their success to their own regional loyalties and alliances, and viewed whatever prestige they created for their host city as incidental. 58 Shanghai’s first studio under totally Chinese management was probably Yichang. Opening in 1864, it had relied on funds and expertise inherited from one of the Yichang studios founded two years earlier in Guangzhou and Fuzhou. Their staff, former employees of a Yichang painting business in Hong Kong, had retrained as photographers. 59 Other big Shanghai studios included Sanxing, which first advertised its services and its Guangzhou origins in 1873. This painting business was quite likely the establishment that the English traveller and watercolourist James Wathen visited in Guangzhou in 1812. He met “an artist of considerable reputation” and three of his pupils “busily engaged in copying some English prints”.60 Wathen’s empathetic recollections provide a sense of Guangzhou art made in a period when photography had not yet prompted foreign visitors in China to revile artistic creativity’s frequent resort to copying. Before he eventually moved north and created his striking images of the government elite (Figures 2.9 and 2.10), Liang Shitai advertised his establishment (s 219) in Shanghai in 1876, having run a studio for several years in Hong Kong. Also in Shanghai, Richeng, Jinshizhai and Lizhu had opened in respectively 1876, 1887 and the mid-1890s thanks to Guangdong expertise and capital. Although it was equally possibly a separate business, the Nanjing branch of Shanghai’s Baoji studio (s 10) advertised that it was originally a Guangdong studio. Guangzhou was also the first port to inspire and distribute professional photography across the vast expanse of East and Southeast Asia. For instance, in one of the earliest stories of studio origins, Wen Dinan learned photography from an American visitor to Guangzhou in the 1860s, and opened the Binlun (Pun Lun) studio at the same premises as his father’s textile business, hence the name (“gorgeous warps”), an old name retooled for new enterprise. Since the Wen family imported cloth from Suzhou and Hangzhou, Dinan could not have been unacquainted with another Guangzhou cloth importer, Luo Sen, who had spent so much time with the Perry mission in Japan discussing wet-plate photography (see Chapter 2). When the American fleet returned to China, Luo Sen disembarked at Ningbo—his last diary entry. Dinan’s brother sailed to Vietnam to open another studio and complete perhaps the first export of Chinese studio business abroad. The traffic was no by means one-way. The Wen family contracted another of its members to study in Japan before welcoming him back in 1868 to run Binlun’s Hong Kong branch.61 Guangdong photography’s parasitical reliance on the cloth business endured long. Shi Qiang (1876–1943), founder of the Erwo studio in the Taiwan town of Lugang, having decided to convert his painting business to photography during a visit to Hong Kong in the early 1890s, afterwards stayed abreast of professional news and gossip, thanks to a Lugang cloth merchant resident in Hong Kong.62 Guangdong photographers advanced in an arterial growth that no other group matched, regenerating studios from one city to another. Already mentioned, Liang Jiechen who acquired Ueno’s Shanghai business, established the Lizhu studio in the 1890s.63 Liang learned his trade from the relative who at a young age went to work in a Hong Kong painting business before returning to Guangzhou in 1870 to found a studio (s 61) on the prosperous thoroughfare of Shuangmendi.64 Liang Jiechen apprenticed here before he founded Guangzhou’s Tongsheng studio in the government area of Shibafu. Leaving Tongsheng, he restarted in Shanghai, and then invested in another studio (s 268) in Suzhou in 1899, and further set up its branch (s 269) in Wuxi. Not long afterwards he established a fourth studio (s 107) in Kaifeng.65

Sites of production  97 Guangdong immigrants were the first to arrive and establish studios in several towns in Fujian and Jiangxi (s 21 135 179 240), still largely untouched by railways. Travelling the Yangzi and its tributaries upstream, they made further landfalls northwards (s 136 224). Although eventually the most famous studio in Wuchang was a local foundation (s 261, Figure 3.3), three of the first five known Chinese studios in Hankou and Wuchang were Guangdong foundations (s 182 205 255). Guangdong adventurers established the first studios in Guiyang, Yueyang and Laohekou (s 183 266 307), and set up two strong competitors in the early Xi’an market (s 168 287). The first photographer in Jinan, provincial seat of Shandong, arrived from Guangdong in the 1870s and advertised his address with street posters.66 By 1914 six Guangdong businesses had followed him (s 114 181 204 254 276 312). Photography’s most prestigious early figure in Tianjin was Liang Shitai, but the workspace often assumed to have been his studio (s 220) was perhaps only an address for visitors with appointments.67 Liang nevertheless competed with a Guangdong rival who had opened his studio (s 84) in the French concession in 1875. Liang’s success in Tianjin was closely tied to the northern port’s growing importance in modern commerce and political reform. He no doubt also benefitted from his initial employment as garden designer for the recently founded China Merchants Steam Navigation Company. In the frequently reproduced image of Li Hongzhang (Figure 2.9), Liang marked his own identity as “lodged” at Xinghuacun, a compound of Tianjin’s British concession. The drive from Guangdong contributed more to the the early spread of photography studios in China than even the most determined efforts of any overseas adventurers. The Guangdong region incubated and projected a cultural foreignness, itself not merely an alien implant but a mature translation of overseas forms. Some of the literature cited in Chapter 2 effectively imported Guangdong knowledge northwards. Shanghai’s early illustrated press, which has been so abundantly used in recent discussions of the city’s visual culture, also retailed visions of another Chinese delta region whose engagement with the outside world kept producing categories of the exotic that were ectopically nurtured yet locally familiarized. The paradigmatic publication Dianshizhai huabao, which pioneered the novel visual genre “news painting”, reported and depicted sensational Shanghai events every ten days, but also retailed news and gossip from Guangzhou and its nearby towns. Typical was the story of a Dongguan woman’s reincarnation and its authentication by the widower’s expedient possession of a photograph made before her death.68 This new journalism, itself supported by numerous Guangdong innovators, thus emerged to cater for curiosity about another gateway inlet separated by a vast inland zone and a long seaboard.69 Shanghai readers of the Dianshizhai huabao—and those on the other side of the literacy divide who nevertheless turned the same pages—were often more informed of scandals and marvels in southern Guangdong than in many regions upstream from Shanghai. An intra-regional familiarity in which markers of local identity were not entirely distinct inflected the earliest studio culture in Shanghai, and it is only a lack of equally early sources that precludes judging whether the same was not often true elsewhere. The older technique for portraiture (xiezhen), an important element in photography’s early conceptualization discussed in Chapter 2, comprised a professional commitment that some studios claimed still to possess or to have modified (s 19 85 267). The founder of the Xianzhen studio in Wuchang (Figure 3.3), formerly a painter for a missionary press, allegedly inveigled a Japanese studio owner to teach him photography in exchange for painting lessons.70 Others simply abandoned painting in favour

98  Commerce of learning photographic skills. Sun Dianqi, one of the acutest observers of the late Qing Beijing art market, detailed precisely how drawing shops (chuanzhen shi) that once flourished in the Liulichang and other quarters of the capital declined after the rise of photography studios in the 1870s.71 The same yet earlier technical transition in Guangzhou was not merely a point of historical precedence. Guangdong photographers’ precocious readiness to found new enterprises far from their home province offered an entirely new export model in the pragmatics of creative production. Migrating Guangdong photographers transported also the symbols of their professional identity assembled from conventions established in the painting and modelling industries. They used the common regional epithet gua to acknowledge their inheritance—or descent—from the practitioners of these skills.72 Shanghai’s Sanxing studio used Zhou Gua (Chow Kwa) in its early studio credits, because this was an established means of familiarizing the studio to Chinese and foreign customers whose longest experience of photography was located in—or reported from— Guangzhou (Figure 3.4). Early studios employed a bilingual imprint on their photograph mounts to address Chinese and foreign readerships. The alignment of painting with photography targeted also a constituency of foreign visitors who could rationalize it on the basis of most experiences abroad. One typical Sanxing mount announces Zhou Gua with other information in English, while the adjacent Chinese legend states only Su Sanxing (Figure 3.5). An almost mythical aura surrounded Guangdong daring and skills, qualities that were both exotic and indigenous. As late as the 1920s, Guangdong workmanship still

Figure 3.4 Unknown photographer, Sanxing studio, Shanghai, c. 1895. Visible in the foreground is one side of Gongtai studio. Unknown collection. From Chen Shen and Xu Xijing, Zhongguo sheying yishu shi, Beijing, 2011.

Sites of production  99

Figure 3.5 Sanxing studio, Shanghai, unknown subjects, c. 1900. Albumen silver print on paper, 15.5 × 10.5 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou.

100  Commerce commanded high respect. When Beijing’s Taifang studio hired a new colourist to tint portraits—comparable to the exquisite workmanship at Suzhou’s Ruiji (Figure 4.4)— it told readers that this expert had arrived from Hong Kong, and it urged them to return faded colour images for retinting. Taifang’s allure resided in the multicultural securities its expertise offered both the visual past and its future, promising to rejuvenate faded prints and boasting of its market lead in the form of imported German camera equipment.73

Combining commerce The acculturation of photography studios to Chinese life happened in several combinations with high street commerce and also in the general perception of politics. Some of the commerce is evident in a vast body of local surveys. Following editorial precepts sometimes adhered to even before 1949, local gazetteers mostly compiled—and sometimes reworked from older surveys—in the 1990s standardized the collection of historical and economic data concerning studios and four other fixed categories of service industry: laundries, hotels, hairdressers, and baths. The zealous relegation of personnel in all these categories of work to the same status exaggerated their equally proletarian identity. Shanghai bath attendants, for instance, who had usually migrated from Jiangsu province,74 suffered stigma to a degree that few studio personnel experienced—even if an outburst from Feng Zikai was perhaps not exceptional (see Chapter 6). However, drawn across a geographical range without parallel, these gazetteer data show exactly how commonly studios exploited the parasitical advantages of combined services. One obvious combination was, once again, painting. Several businesses combined photography with sales of painting materials, scroll mounting, retinting and other services. At the turn of the century, the leading stationery business (s 122) in Fenghua contained a section for taking photographs. The owner of one studio (s 194) began his career in Anyang with a stall—one of the few recorded—that he eventually moved from behind a well-known paper merchant. In Qufu, Confucius’ hometown, He Xiru opened a studio (s 83) under his own impressive name—“the river sits down for the sage”—having been previously an itinerant photographer and one of the founders of a scroll-mounting business in nearby Taian. The combination of photography and watch repairs was also widespread. Technicians of the posed portrait mended the instruments that both told their clients the time and appeared in their images. One studio (s 13) in Shandong, first attached to a ceramics business, restarted in 1910 as a studio also retailing watches. During the 1930s, a southern Fujian studio (s 314) combined photography and watch-mending, and apparently six studios in the prosperous Zhejiang port of Haimen offered watch repairs.75 In the 1920s Confucius’ seventy-sixth grandson summoned a photographer from Beijing to photograph all the sage’s living descendants. During breaks in this task, staged in the Kong family’s spacious guest quarters, he mended everyone’s watches.76 In nearby Jinzhuang, the Zhu family concern (s 333) combined photography with watch repairs, printing and dental care. Indeed, aside from the desire to be photographed, the biggest preoccupation that clients brought to studios was their dental health. The Erwu studio in Nantong, on the Yangzi’s north bank above Shanghai, was typical of many studios that also offered dental surgery (Figure 3.6). The studio’s manager-photographer photographed

Sites of production  101

Figure 3.6 Western branch of Erwu studio, Nantong. From Nantong Erwu studio, Nantong Scenes of Industry, Education and Charitable Works (Nantong shiye jiaoyu cishan fengjing zhaoxiangce), Nantong, 1923. Collection of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Courtesy of Société de Géographie, Paris.

its frontage in the pristine splendour of direct sunlight, unimpeded by visitors or his own presence. The windows on each side of the doorway showed the studio’s recent work, notably framed portraits and wide-angle views of recently established colleges and factories in and around Nantong. The organizer of Nantong’s spectacular modern readjustment, Zhang Jian, China’s “top-ranked industrialist” (zhuangyuan shiyejia), inscribed the studio’s name board over the doorway.77 Notices either side of this entrance declared that Erwu’s business was “new style photography” and “precise denture work”. Clients received dental treatment on the ground floor, and went upstairs to pose for photographs. Those working in most of these professions accepted that they were allies in a shared economy. In 1945, the members of a new trade guild in the Gansu town of Pingliang were photographers, dentists and watchmakers.78 Yangzhou’s earliest studio (s 290) offered dentistry, and one Suzhou studio (s 268) advertised in 1918 that its American-trained dentist could “restore youth” to any set of teeth. On Beijing’s crowded Langfang toutiao, the Tongsheng studio (s 246) re-established itself directly opposite an imposing dental surgery.79 Yaohua, one of Shanghai’s most prominent studios, hired a foreign dentist to run its dental department in 1900, while studios in Duchang in northern Jiangxi owed their photographic and dental skills to Protestant missionaries.80 The Zhejiang town of Pujiang’s first studio (s 88) was a “photography and dentures studio”, and across the river from Hangzhou, four out of the six of Xiaoshan’s recorded studios entreated their clients to have teeth removed and reset— preferably in gold—as the preliminary conditions of a portrait.81 Variations on this advice were common throughout the country.82

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Figure 3.7 Unknown photographer, Sanmin studio, Shanghai, 1932 or later. Gelatin silver print on paper, 28 × 12 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library.

Hairdressing was another adjustment of the physical body towards the best odds for photogenic success. Shanghai’s Sanmin studio (Figure 3.7), photographed on a warm midday by an unknown photographer, watched only by a Sikh policeman with little traffic to direct, was located below a men’s and women’s hairdresser, consequently encouraging the two businesses to advertise together and attract custom first upstairs and then down.83 The studio, located on one street corner—on which more below—and opposite another accommodating an apothecary, was a spatial ensemble fitting further into north Shanghai’s Hongkou district, also dubbed “Little Tokyo”. Its main artery, North Sichuan Road—receding into the distance—was an avenue to many of the city’s fashionable shops and numerous printers and publishers, including the Commercial Press located a stone’s throw away to the left of this crossing. Photography’s intersection with personal care, health and hygiene only reiterated the logic of stockpiling photographic equipment in apothecaries (see Chapter 1). Commercial diversification minimized risk, such that one Songjiang studio (s 24) abandoned photography and streamlined its business as solely an apothecary.84 The norm, however, was an integration of each business’ functions and a parasitical enhancement of its affinity. Before the turn of the century, Shanghai’s Ruichang studio (s 208) retailed drugs to counter the alarming rise in elderly persons feeling breathless and women not getting pregnant.85 In one sublime promise of photography’s regenerative powers, two of Shanghai’s photographic enlargement companies, including the renewed Lihua business, acted as sales agents for male potency pills.86 Shi Dezhi, owner of Shanghai’s Yaohua studio, keen to assert his status as the sage of opium abstinence, retailed a line of anti-addiction drugs. These turned into such a liabilty that in 1915 Shi posted a reward of one hundred pounds for information to annihiliate the fake brands featuring his portrait; four years later he published a denial of the gossip ridiculing his own opium use.87 This narcophobic episode also suggests one studio’s attempt to retain its position in a progressive discourse on health: the opium pipe was no longer an innocuous gadget, even while its pernicious

Sites of production  103 influence was replaced only by the cigarettes now appearing in a legion of more modern portraits.88 Health was also linked to a consumerist passion for one of the most instantly gratifying wonders of global modernity: fizzy drink. More than one studio benefitted from their clients’ heady abandon to a liquid commodity that only traditional diehards viewed as hazardous. Foremost was Suzhou’s Ruiji studio which shared its name with a drinks brand first marketed in 1906. The studio’s founder Wu Ruisheng was the major investor in Suzhou’s first carbonated drinks factory.89 He was not the first to spread his investment risks in this way. Shi Dezhi, owner of Shanghai’s Yaohua studio, developed a “magical syrup” drink, and became eventually the major shareholder of Coca-Cola in China.90 Earlier, Ren Jingfeng, founder of the Fengtai studio in Beijing, had opened his sensational Linji goods store, a major importer and a byword for fizzy drinks. When Boxer rioters burned Ren out in 1900, they smashed the offensive stock and sluiced it onto the street.91 Even in calmer conditions carbonated drinks required time for their acculturation. So too, of course, did studio photographs, but the two novel commodities lifted each other’s status through the commmon local circuits of their production and circulation. “Holland water” (helanshui), was the early term for carbonated drinks, another neologism from Guangzhou where importers had first sourced their supplies from Dutch traders in Southeast Asia. The new drink had already stirred Shanghai. In his guide to the city, first published in 1876, Ge Yuanxu wrote expertly about “Holland water” and lemonade, summer constituents of a foreign gastronomy now infiltrating their urban surroundings. A Western application of chemistry enthralled urban onlookers with its penetrating powers, and Ge urged caution, especially to those with weak constitutions whom he worried might imbibe too much.92 By century’s end, Pei Xibin urged vistors to Shanghai to drink more.93 That Ge published earlier musings on ingestion’s tingling effects in a text that contains also his remarks on the rise of portrait photography suggests a readiness to consider the human body’s inner and outer surfaces as equally available to be sensitized. The physical impact was distinct from what Zhou Shouchang noted at a demonstration of electric current in 1846 (see Chapter 2), but similarly permeative. Also, whether the stimulations were nervous or digestive, photography’s alignment with medically induced physiological effects burnished its commerce. These several episodes recall also Daniel Miller’s famous ethnography concerning a “black sweet drink”, more commonly Coca-Cola, illustrating how consumers choose material products via signs and messages that ultimately strengthen local rather than global reasons for affinity.94 Finally, signal among the possible combinations was politics, since so much Chinese business added the favourable attestations of high political figures to express its status in lyrically and visually hypertrophic forms. This was most evident in the iconological role that portaits of leaders performed through their display in studio windows (Figures 3.1 and 3.6) or as banners hung outside. Lu Xun, Liang Shiqiu and the Latvian Journalist Sergei Tretiakov, described studios as sites that publicized the latest political leader of the moment.95 Lu Xun did so with characteristic antagonism, while only Tretiakov, perhaps because he was a visiting outsider, elaborated upon how the visual codes of power met those of sensuality in the images of beautiful women paired in the same displays. Liang observed that studio owners courted danger if the image in their windows failed to reflect the latest political tendency. Superstition also insisted

104  Commerce that the visual was linked to political portent. Soon after the minister of war Tang Hualong’s (1874–1918) assassination in Vancouver, a Shanghai newspaper reported from Beijing that a fierce squall had only days earlier ripped the victim’s portrait off a studio front in the Xiangchang district.96 Conscientiously Republican visitors to Beijing enjoyed satirizing studios in the warlord capital as lamentably primitive in their mutating displays of who held the whip hand, conveniently ignoring that Shanghai studios likewise accepted pressure to promote political one-upmanship.97 Studio owners had to be sensitive to widespread expectations of their erstablishments’ political purity. One observer in Hangzhou noted how numerous studios organized public bonfires of portraits of the president and imperial pretender Yuan Shikai as soon as it was safe to do so after his death in 1916.98 Nor could purity tolerate that Japan’s commercial and military presence ever appeared entirely innocuous. In Wuchang, when a Guangdong entrepreneur and a Japanese partner planned in 1908 to open a studio in the smart Doujiying district, the competition mobilized and the police told the Japanese investor to back off. Shanghai’s Modern studio (s 191), whose name was unfortunately also a recognizable Japanese cliché, sacked its Japanese photographer after the Kantō army in northeast China committed its hitherto most egregious aggression in 1931.99 Yet, as examples from politics must also suggest, purity was never a fixity, and the most successful studios adjusted to changing winds. The Tongsheng studio, which transferred its operations from Guangzhou to Shanghai and then to Beijing, won the Qing court’s confidence in 1909 to allow its photographers to record the funeral processions of Emperor Guangxu and the empress dowager Cixi. But, to honour its loyalty promised elsewhere, it soon afterwards supplied official portraits of sedition’s eventually triumphant advocate Sun Yixian (Sun Yat-sen).100 Studios were not necessarily more politicized than other institutions, but the sociability of their commerce fixed them so seamlessly along the thickest arteries of news and gossip that they became enmeshed in even the most radical politics, offering optimal venues to hide revolutionary activity in plain sight on the high street. In 1909 the United Alliance (Tongmenghui), the secret society founded by Sun Yixian and others in 1905, established a studio named Guarding Truth (Shouzhen) in the Beijing book quarter of Liulichang as a venue for their regular meetings. Two years later, the Alliance also started to use the Dual Truth studio (Lizhen) in Guangzhou’s Shibafu as their communications centre. A member of the Progressive Society (Gongjinhui) in Hankou offered his studio (s 203) for society meetings, and permitted the members to manufacture explosives in the dark room before the Wuchang uprising in 1911.101 In Shanghai, the next generation of revolutionaries, the Communists, used Sanmin studio (Figure 3.7) to store firearms.102 Studio interiors were, of course, eminently adjustable spaces, and this suited multipurpose functions. One studio in Shanghai offered its space as a night-time dance hall.103 But, perhaps because the majority of visitors came to collect visual productions, this primary constituency recorded nothing concerning watch repairs, dental work, hairdressing and fizzy drinks, and they passed over politics entirely—exactly why gunrunners could not stay away. However, before studios became an urban commonplace, visitors did pay close attention to the kinds of architectural spaces that they entered, and the regularity with which studios broadcast changes to their buildings emphasizes how sensitive their clientele was to fashionably appointed space and design.

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Designing studios Studio space varied first in the descriptions of what exactly enclosed it. Purely for convenience, “studio” is used throughout this book, but a richer variety of Chinese terms and their associations deserve some comment. The commonest descriptions of studio premises were guan and lou, which, although often confused, suggested different things. Generally uncontroversial, guan stood for objects as various as inns, colleges, stores and official residences, and, at the smaller end of the scale, private libraries, scholarly studios and lodges. The “pavilion” (ge) and “gallery” (xuan), although used less frequently, suggested much the same. Another versatile description was the lou, “tower” or “house”, also erected on boats and invariably storeyed. Entertainment and leisure had long housed their arts in buildings featuring the upstairs seclusion and discretion which offered the eternal charm of watching the world pass in the street or waterway below. The term stood for theatres, restaurants, teahouses and brothels. When early studio owners advertised their business in zhaoxiang lou—and here it is necessary to invent “houses of photography”—they did not deliberately gratify a range of other expectations, but they were often casual in preventing confusion. Often named with citations from ancient Chinese literature, their associations with modern pleasures also defined those studios in Japan that opted for a Chinese affectation. Shimooka Renjō in 1867 named his Yokohama studio the Zenrakudō (Hall of Total Pleasure), but hoisted an equally large plaque up beneath the eaves to advertise the premises as Sōeirō (House of Images), and one year later Yokoyama founded his “tower” (s 248) beside Tokyo’s Shinobazu lake, a feature that recalled Hangzhou’s West Lake in miniature. The concrete discrepancies were less acute, because the minimal requirements of studio building and orientation were universal. The passage of light requires the translucence of glass, and the fullest southern exposure offers the longest exposure to the sun. Besides practical considerations, glass structures affected their visitors to degrees that are hard to exaggerate. The anthropology of space, indebted to earlier architectural aesthetics, has noted the initially “blinding”, disorienting and liberating novelties of experiencing an unprecedented sensation of light-space (Hellraum) within interiors constructed for numerous modern functions.104 Dudgeon recommended building a “glass house” (boli shi) and illustrated it directly adjacent to a windowless dark room (Figure 3.8).105 One early twentieth-century description from Hunan records the common ploy of replacing roof tiles with glass panes.106 A more thorough conversion into a glass canopy at the Qiaozhen studio caught the eye of a British visitor to Guangzhou (Figure 3.9). The function of any glass house exhilarated onlookers far less than its translucence—even tales of translucence. In Shanghai in 1866, waiting for his ship to Suez, Zhang Deyi took note of a luxurious “glass photography house” (boli zhaopeng) located in front of the guest hall at the city magistrate’s official residence.107 One decade later, Shi Dezhi advertised that he had built Yaohua’s glass house according to principles proposed by Dudgeon. Someone read Dudgeon, then, suggesting that even this late his text validated the studio enterprise.108 Not that it cramped anyone’s style: Yangzhou’s first studio (s 290) boasted a double glass canopy across its property each side of a passage flagged with the no less novel material of terrazzo (shuimo shi). Eventually, however, glass’s validity persisted in rhetorical as much as material terms. A view of the Baoji studio’s rebuilt Shanghai premises, completed in

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Figure 3.8 The “glass house” illustrated in John Dudgeon, Tuoying qiguan, Beijing, 1873. Collection of V&A Museum, London, formerly collection of Royal Photographic Society.

Figure 3.9 Unknown photographer, Qiaozhen studio, Guangzhou, dated 22 May 1911. Gelatin silver print on paper, 10 × 6 cm. Courtesy of Billie Love Historical Collection and Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol.

Sites of production  107 stripped classical style in 1921, shows the simpler verticality of Spitalfields weavers’ windows—glazing that filled each bay of the studio’s top (third) floor. Baoji called this a “glass house” (bofang) anyway, boasting that it was the city’s largest.109 A protracted Shanghai glass war followed. Yingming studio countered within months that it had completed a new “glass house”; Baode insisted that it, too, possessed one; opulent Huanghou announced the opening of its “giant glass hall” in 1932. At the turn of the century, the developers of several of the new commercial bazaars in Beijing planned buildings with broad skylights in the hope of soliciting studio tenants.110 These early glass structures rose ahead of the gripping cinema history into which Weihong Bao has inserted Shanghai’s crucial “culture of glass”.111 And, electricity only added to the established thrill of translucence. The lights went on in Shanghai in 1882, even though some years later a Chinese traveller still rhapsodized about the electrification of studios in London.112 Bao has also connected glass to the use of electric illumination in the Shanghai history of cinema architecture—modernist buildings that could be seen (and photographed) during both night- and daytime. Once connected to the grid that deepened even further the independence of technology and nature, studios similarly extolled their perpetual services even in places other than Shanghai where commerce claimed loudest its inalienable exceptionalism as the “city that does not do nights” (buye zhi cheng).

Locating studios Prominent street frontage or the popularity of recreational destinations decided studio fortunes in no small measure, but time also located photographic production. Studio business hours were initially restricted by the amount of natural light available. The Sentai studio limited portrait-making to the hours between ten and three in 1863.113 Time when it means weather was also determining. Shanghai’s Yaohua studio reminded visitors in the summer not to call after lunch when it was too hot to dress up and pose.114 The time required to make a portrait photograph could be long. Another diarist, Zeng Jize (1839–1890), the diplomat and son of the celebrated loyalist marshal Zeng Guofan, documented an appointment at Liang Shitai’s Shanghai premises late in November 1878, noting tersely that the session lasted two hours before he could escape home.115 Studios’ locations in space were more varied, but certain patterns repeated. Like early Japanese studios, which also congregated around landmark temple precincts,116 numerous studio entrepreneurs in China owed their success to landmark locations, notably the temples that permitted lengthy festival fairs on their grounds. Religious sites’ broad function served many constituencies. Dudgeon, for instance, relocated his Alms Hospital to the site of a Fire-god temple.117 Photography’s early advertising art in China poured an improbable mêlée of carriages along modern streets (see Chapter 1), showing how even business owners in an internationally urbanized economy still imagined commercial advantage as the seasonal noise and rush of the fairground. After his stay in Japan, Ren Jingfeng joined the Catholic Church, invested in several apothecaries, including the Chinese Western Apothecary in Shanghai, and established his Fengtai studio at the Earth God shrine in Liulichang, the capital’s renowned book quarter.118 Another influential Beijing studio, Hongji, founded in 1898, trained the staff at some dozen others concentrated around the Longfusi, a temple whose grounds had supported large fairs since the previous century.119 Shanxi province’s most famous

108  Commerce shrine, the Jinci, housed also the branch of a Taiyuan studio (s 211) in the 1930s, and by 1935, effectively resetting religious orientation to postal directions, Shanghai’s Central studio (s 332) opened its branch in the Old City’s Confucian Temple.120 These studios created visual capital from their proximity to architectural height, ancient trees and other features. One record of Beijing’s Baofeng studio is another example of the minor genre of studio managers fronting their work premises, in this case two figures magnificently exceeded by the twin towers of the Shuangtasi (Figure 3.10). Similarly, the success of Wuchang’s Xianzhen studio owed much to its position beside the city’s most famous pavilion (Figure 3.3). Weather permitting, the larger space around the studio was integral to the experience of commissioning a photograph here, and perhaps also visiting a specialist in the physiognomic arts discussed in Chapter 2. He conducted his business in a building halfway up the steps to the pavilion.121 Culture and religion counted, but so too, again, did political society. Early studio businesses in Guangzhou took up positions in Shibafu and Shuangmendi, the prosperous government districts in the city’s western and eastern ends. Residents of Shibafu included descendants of the Cohong merchants who had made their millions in the fat years before the Treaty of Nanjing opened other Chinese ports for foreign trade.122

Figure 3.10 Unknown photographer, Baofeng studio, located in a former lodging house at Shuangtasi (Qingshousi), c. 1900. The towers were demolished during Beijing’s redevelopment in 1954. Unknown collection. From Chen Shen, “Jiu Beijing zhaoxiangye de xingshuai”, Renxiang sheying, 4 (1985).

Sites of production  109 Shuangmendi was Guangdong province’s largest entrepot of books, equating it to Beijing’s Liulichang and Shanghai’s Fuzhoulu. Bibliophilia both led and trailed other pursuits. Finally, at a surface beyond which it is hard to excavate, that is street level, the outstanding contribution to studio success was the street corner where the converging angles of a building caught the eye (Figures 3.1, 3.4, 3.7). The same was true of apothecaries (Figure 1.12), competitors in the market for photographic equipment and medical drugs, and no less so in terms of their visual presentation, which emphasized converging avenues and even the transport that delivered clients to the door—quite possibly a rickshaw across the street from Sanxing (Figure 3.4) was no chance inclusion in the image. Aside from the commercial advantage of visible prominence, the corner is also remarkable as an aesthetic phenomenon in the analysis of spatial and urban culture that Georg Simmel first elaborated following Berlin’s most rapid urban redevelopment. The corner offered the obviousness of the fixed point least affected by the levelling of modern street numbers.123 The Shanghai street corner attracted comment from another German observer, Fritz Secker, whose lengthy description of Shanghai, first published in 1913, was a popular read that the publishing firm Max Nössler reissued two decades later. Its founder Maximilian Nössler (1860–1922) distributed his interests between Shanghai and Yokohama, and hosted the cinematographer Fritz Lang during his East Asian voyage in search of the urban phantasmagoria of Metropolis (1927). Secker devoted his more humdrum aims to a species of progress report entirely his own, matching photographs of his first edition with new images of the same sites, including one of an imposing street corner (“eine der ersten modernen Ecken”) in order to stress the city’s advance into modernity. He seemed unaware that numerous owners of Chinese businesses had already arrived here more than forty years before.124 Shanghai’s earliest known photographers, including Legrand and the Guangdong operators of Yichang operated at street corners.125 Sanxing and Gongtai’s diagonal symbiosis (Figure 3.4) was contemporary with Japan’s first view of a studio, the Zenrakudō founded in 1867 on a street corner in Yokohama.126 Gongtai eventually collapsed first when its landlord, a French apothecary with premises elsewhere, sued for rent arrears.127 Many more studios no doubt set up business on similar patches of commercial medicine’s urban estate. The apothecary at an intersection was anyway a regular feature in the towns and cities in which the big medical businesses established their branches.128 Peng Ruilin’s studio (s 3) straddled a Taipei street corner in the 1930s in order to display portraiture in one street and his own aesthetic preference for Taiwan’s rural landscapes in the other.129 The Sanmin studio’s position at an intersection exposed the street corner as a condensation of fashionable engagements—photography and hairdressing—and multiplied their value in relation to an apothecary on the corner opposite. These services in such efficient adjacency may have been primary in enticing a photographer to create their premises’ panoptic street-level portrait. The view was certainly encouraging compared to the outrage provoked by an earlier view of the same site wrecked by the Japanese forces that bombarded northern Shanghai during the Shanghai Incident (28 January–3 March, 1932). Probably the first recorded studio casualty of modern warfare, the photograph of Sanmin’s smashed shop front had been far more widely publicized as an emblem of international atrocity in a swiftly marketed album edited for consumption both at home and abroad.130 Repaired, repainted, reglazed and redressed (and soon renamed), Sanmin’s reappointment to its rightful street-corner dominance was an urban as much as optical restoration.

110  Commerce Modern forms of location—foremost street addresses and telephone numbers— enforced modern habits of finding directions, but many studios still relied on historical sites to guide customers to their doors. Hangzhou’s Erwo Gallery, for example, stood next to China’s most famous lake. Wuchang’s Xianzhen studio occupied high ground beside China’s most famous waterside tower, the legendary Yellow Crane Pavilion (Huanghelou). The tower burned down in 1884, and the rebuilt structure gained a different name, but popular preference stuck with Huanghe. The mounts of photographs from Baoji, one of the industry’s national giants, provided a simple address of the least dissimulated arrogance: Shanghai (Figures 5.6, 6.5). Studios also took up locations in new patterns of commercial concentration. In Beijing, studios totalled nine lease-holders in five of the six big commercial bazaars that Jermyn Lynn described in his highly readable survey of the city in the 1920s. Usually built on two or three floors, these new emporia concentrated goods, services and leisure opportunities like department stores, but were laid out extensively over several streets.131 The new bazaar arrangements took over where older temples left off. Photography historian Chen Shen has listed eleven studios at the Dongan Bazaar alone.132 The less ostentatious bazaar studios were weak competitors in the merciless natural selection of social memory. Besides, precise address details were often superfluous, because brevity of expression encouraged nostalgic sympathy for locations at major sites of cultural reference, and the barest references to locations matched how the cognoscenti retailed this information in both speech and writing. Garden spaces, likewise uncluttered by modernization’s inelegant numbers, enclosed their visitors in quite a different order of enchantment. The early creation of parks in China has caught historians’ attention in principally two divergent contexts: in Shanghai, various entrepreneurs laid out gardens and parks within the city’s developing fabric or else made formerly private spaces commercially accessible. In Beijing the most adventurous reformist projects seized opportunities to repurpose the defunct imperial government’s altar grounds as public spaces. An extensive property in Shanghai was the garden and amenities that Zhang Shuhe opened to visitors in 1885. Known popularly as the Zhang Garden (Zhangyuan), and well known to international visitors,133 the various buildings and parkland offered space for more than one photographic operation. The presence of photographers was probably quite transient. The newspaper image of a photographer working with only minimal attention to risk is not quite plausible within the narrow street leading to the Zhangyuan entrance (Figure 3.11). Nevertheless, it blended the actuality of outings with the thrill of talking about them, and the opposite image of a couple in their carriage is certainly a close imitation of one of the thousands of photographs that visitors commissioned in the garden while riding the vehicles available for hire. Not only the Zhangyuan’s intrinsic repute, but the large commercial events, such as the trade fairs that the garden periodically hosted, attracted studios from elsewhere in the city to set up for temporary trade.134 The subject standing on a fabric floor-covering amid potted plants, taken somewhere in the Zhangyuan (Figure 3.12), was the production of a photographer whose credit, Zhangyuan (Chang yuen), most likely lasted for a season’s trade rather than indicating a studio’s premises, much like the Willow Breeze Cabinet (s 154), which advertised its specialty in “garden scenes in the Zhang Garden” in 1891 and then vanished from record.135 The image and studio credit in Figure 3.12 suggest that the fact of visiting the garden was just as important

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Figure 3.11 S cenes at Zhangyuan, Shanghai, published in the Shanghai newspaper Minhu ribao tuhua, 17 June 1909 [jiyou 4/30].

as visualizing it in a photograph. The subject stands, after all, not in the Zhang garden, but in front of a screen located there. In the Shanghai deluge of news and gossip from and about urban gardens, these venues became the increasingly popular sites for images from the 1880s onwards. By the turn of the century, studios urged clients who owned gardens to summon their photographers for home visits. When the Guanghuilou advertised its sympathy for female customers not permitted to visit studios, it proposed to send staff to those who possessed a garden.136 But, many studios depended on more accessible outdoor spaces. One regular assembly of friends, who met in a Shanghai garden, while affecting a studio identity (s 199) was probably not a truly commercial venture, but within days of going public, this association relaunched its profile again with a garden name (s 250), before adopting yet another (s 70).137 Photographs made in gardens, often termed “garden view photographs” (yuanjing zhaoxiang), sustained, for example, an advertising campaign by the Yuelairong studio, which soon lengthened its name to the Xu Garden Yuelairong studio.138 One corner of the Xu Garden features as the setting for Chinese and Japanese literary colleagues in an image whose location and authorship show how fluidly studios sometimes operated across boundaries (Figure 3.13). The Huafang Baoji studio and address, printed on the mount, included an opportunistic name that this business probably plagiarized from two market leaders of

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Figure 3.12 Studio located in Zhangyuan, Shanghai, unknown subject, c. 1900. Gelatin silver print on paper, 15 × 10.5 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou.

the day, while its address at the Yu Garden in west Shanghai—not east Shanghai’s Yu Garden still operating today—records an operating base that did not prevent it from accepting commissions at alternative venues. That photographing outdoor events like this Commercial Press gathering still faced competition from painters may account for the studio’s inclusion of hand-drawn details in the form of plain gowns worn by the Chinese hosts, a use of traditional appearances to make a poignant distinction between one group due to depart and another about to mourn their absence. Paintings of such events in garden spaces were still in demand. Only recently, the writer and polymath Liu E (1857–1909) and his associates had commissioned a painting of their banquet in the Yu Garden, apparently the Huafang Baoji’s studio usual base.139 Available sources say most concerning Shanghai, but garden studios appeared in other cities. Whether Liang Shitai’s initial duties as a gardener in Tianjin in the late 1870s were related to his photography is unknown. He certainly capitalized on the florescent surroundings of Prince Chun’s Beijing mansion after he was summoned there to take a series of the prince’s portraits. Another photographer, Shen Shisu, who came from Shanghai to found Jiaxing’s first studio (s 130) in 1884, later moved it to the town’s famous Garden of Emplacement—a name apt for all pictorial desires. In Yangzhou, famed for numerous gardens, Liang Mosheng, founder of the city’s first

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Figure 3.13 Huafang Baoji studio, Shanghai. Farewell gathering organized at Yuyuan by Chinese and Japanese staff of the Commercial Press ahead of the latter’s return to Japan in 1914. Gelatin silver print on paper, 20 × 14 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library.

studio (s 290), also owned the Liang Garden, located four doors further along—the name plaque was still visible on the street in 2020. Liang and his family founded two more Yangzhou studios (s 17 149), including the Liang Garden, the name of a royal garden of venerable record and a topos in which leading Yangzhou painters had specialized. By 1915 Jinan boasted three studios located in garden settings (s 133 229 309), each drenched in nostalgic associations with the ancient past. Probably Zhangjiakou’s first studio was the Garden Lodged in Spring (s 106), and Chongqing’s many studios included the Garden of Success (s 26). Commentators continually evaluated the merits of garden venues, and photographs of large social events in these settings provided guidance for draughtsmen and printers to create new—sometimes barely contiguous—images in the lithographic production of illustrated journals.140 Staff in Chinese studios devoted considerable forethought to cater for large groups in a range of appropriate settings, demonstrably exceeding the usual norms in metropolitan centres abroad. During Zhang Deyi’s term as ambassador to Britain (1901–1905), the Chinese Embassy was startled to learn that no studio in central London could accommodate its entire staff for a group portrait. Two days were spent finding a suitable venue in the suburbs.141

114  Commerce Not a reality until the early twentieth century in China, the “public garden” (gongyuan) was a neologism plucked from its currency in Japan. Examples of recent park design were available from sites in Europe, the United States and Japan. These new amenties, whose early layouts were conversions of the defunct Qing state’s cultic real estate, appealed to every sense, including even the tactible. Parks were a welcome topic for political reform for which ministerial advocates agitated on behalf of “new citizens” whose identity amid unprecedented opportunities for leisure needed to be explained to them. In bodies dawdling beside fenced stands of peony bushes and other attractions studio entrepreneurs recognized customers displaced from their usual passage down streets and past display windows. In 1916, having already transferred its main business to Beijing, the Tongsheng studio opened a branch for business in the city’s Central Park (Zhongyang gongyuan). Here, on the former grounds of the Altar of Earth and Grain (refurbished as parkland in 1914), the novelty of perambulating in a designated public space matched if not exceeded that of being photographed. Entrance to the park cost twenty copper cash in a period when an urban worker’s wage was barely twice that amount, but Jermyn Lynn recalls that in the 1920s up to five thousand visitors entered the park daily, and twice as many on festivals when entrance was free.142 Participation in the life of new public spaces happened also beyond the bigger cities. For instance, in 1914, one leading Changzhou studio (s 156) opened a branch in the city’s new People’s Park (Renmin gongyuan), formerly the garden of a merchants’ association. In any conditions, however, studios must have been grateful that even under tall canopies of ancient cypress park visitors’ expectations of enjoyment remained fundamentally urban as well as firmly guided by newspapers that so effectively exploited photographic performances in parks and gardens. Even the Beijing Zoological Gardens’ famous talking parrot had been trained to hawk loudly the latest edition of the news (maibao).143 Studios’ contributions to funding parkland spaces established an investment pattern for this category of urban renewal. Following his contentious appointment as Comissioner of the Summer Palace in 1924, Reginald Johnston, the last Qing emperor’s personal tutor, raised funds for the site’s administration by establishing an hotel, a teahouse, a photography studio and a soda water factory.144 Studios in parks gained the advantage of ready custom, but this did not repay parks with extra prominence in new images. The surviving mass of photographs shows that even as late as after the collectivization of studios in 1956 consumers preferred as often as not to pose in the studio interior. As Chapter 4 shows, studio artifice rather than arrangements of nature satisfied the most common desire for visual adventure.

Conclusion Apparently mundane practical aspects of studios’ existence enhanced their allure. Economic surveys, for instance, however modestly executed, were assessments conducted to reflect upon—and to create—an era of conscious cultural reinvention. And, as the following chapters will elaborate, the concrete and experiential dimensions of studio history are essential to social and aesthetic readings of the photographs that studios produced. Studios theorized only in terms of modernity and its visual experiences in the West will not sufficiently explain studio culture, its forms of appeal, its spaces and locations in China. Global narratives of modernity—whether tourist literature or academic

Sites of production  115 writing—have often exalted Paris, New York and Shanghai on equal terms, but they do not adequately distinguish how the imperatives of global conditions also depended upon and interacted with particular local ambitions. And, if local conditions are a valid target of exploration in Shanghai, why not elsewhere in China too? This chapter’s initial guiding example, the Lihua studio, is the epitome of a cultural and commercial site connected to the global circuits of a visual medium. Despite its location on a Shanghai street, it was also embedded in the needs and aims of an autochthonous discourse on studios that spread far afield. Its material presence was that architectural hybrid of the elegant and wealthy residence built in the cities and villages of southern Jiangsu and Zhejiang—the combination of tall verticals and long swoops—now adjusted with the open balconies and high window arches adapted from European architecture. This interesting appearance typified many more studios that blended in as much as they stood out. The quite conservative terms that described them were feats of an inclusive publicity, so successful that studios’ functions as sites of production were richly combined with—even dissimulated by—other activities of significant social interest. Modern polytechnic commitments heightened the commercial allure of these establishments within a local order of priorities as much as all the components of their versatility profiled some of them along international circuits. Much less of this allure was visible in studios’ photographic productions than the materialities of either their interiors or their visual objects, which the following chapter explores. But, it remained relevant to the discourse that enlivened photography’s commerce as well as the consensus that this effected in demanding, looking at and responding to photographic productions.

Notes 1 Groeneveld (1994): 95; Zhang (2002b): 26; Lao zhaopian, 32 (2003): 94–95; Tan (2004): 158 for a postcard reproduction; Tong (2016): 67. 2 The Dutch travel-writer Gerrit Verschuur (1882, 1900), who visited Shanghai twice, suggested none too categorically that he acquired this image of Lihua during his first visit. Zhang Wei dates the Lihua studio’s beginnings to the 1870s and its abandonment of photography to 1888 (Zhang [2002a] 65; Zhang [2002b]: 26). For later dates, see Tong (2016): 67, 376. 3 Cochran (1999). 4 Guangzhou (1996): 637. 5 Bajac (2001a): 52. 6 http://www.photolondon.org.uk. 7 Zhang (2002b): 29. For an exhaustive retrieval from Shenbao, see Tong (2016): 372–388. 8 Zhang (2011): 69. 9 http://www.irisharchaeology.info/genealogy/photographers. 10 Bajac (2001a): 52. 11 Kinoshita (1996): 21–22. 12 For example, Chen Jinshi’s photograph Labour’s refuge (Laodong zhi ku), published in Heibai yingji, 2 (1935): pl. 32, reproduced at Chen, Hu et al. (1987): pl. 210, and Kent (2009): 24. 13 Shangwu yinshuguan ([1909] 2012): 299–302; Shangwu yinshuguan (1931): 628–629. 14 Yang et al. (1995): 1304. 15 Shangwu yinshuguan (1918): 113–115; Shangwu yinshuguan (1921): 151–153. 16 Tōkyō shōkō kaigisho (1938): 429–434; Yokohama shōkō kaigisho (1939): 227–228; Ōsaka shōkō kaigisho (1918): 169–170; Ōsaka shōkō kaigisho (1921): 400–401; Ōsaka shōkō kaigisho (1933): 477–479. 17 Fu ([1910] 1987): 96, 112–113.

116 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Commerce Stapleton (2000): 115–117. Ye & Liu ( [1935] 1966): 12.1064. Jiangsu (1999): 311. Yangzhou (1997): 2543. Chen (1985): 31. Lou et al. (1932): 592–595; for the same figure adopted by Wu Tingxie (1863–1947) and his colleagues for their survey of 1938–1939, see Wu et al. (1998): vol. 3, 526. Jianshe weiyuanhui, etc. (1932): 403–404. Shiba’s (1999) figures, based on Ningbo tax returns, are revised in Shiba (2011): 199; see also Wang Du (1982): 11. Chongqing (1997): 219; Sichuan (1996): 178. Jiangsu (1999): 312. Wuhan (1989): 798. For 179 Shanghai studios authorized in 1942 to take passbook photographs, see Shenbao, 7 May 1942: 4; also, Tong (2016): 389–391. For later totals, see Shanghai shehui kexue xueyuan (1983): 614; Yang (1995): 1359. Gansu (1993): 363. Wang (1947). Xie (1983): 76–81. For pioneering efforts to collect early photographers’ names, see Chen et al. (1987), Bennett (2009), Bennett (2013), and Tong (2016). Shenbao, 21 April 1899 [jihai 3/12]: supplement, 4. For a similar tone following Hexing studio’s acquisition of Zhizhen studio’s equipment stock, see Shenbao, 15 April 1911 [xinhai 3/17]: supplement, 1, 7. See notice of Zhonghua studio’s new management at Shenbao, 24 February 1923: 5. See a campaign beginning at Shenbao, 30 September 1873 [kuichou 8/9]: 5. Pei ([1905] 1906): 7.9a–b. Lai (2003). Hobin (2010). Thiriez (2001). For quite informal arrangements to commission Legrand, see Bennett (2009): 30. Wang & Cai (2004): 98. See a series of five advertisements on the first page of North China Herald, 24 July (issue 104), and 7, 14, 21, 28 August 1852 (issues 106–109). On Husband’s intercontinental itineraries, see Bennett (2009): 19. For images by H. Salzwedel in Shanghai, see Shanghai Library (2007): 217. More are located in the Netherlands National Archive. Tong (2016): 375. Cochran (2006): 39–41. Darwent (1905): 8. Kinoshita (1996): 14; Kinoshita (2003): 19, 29. Fraser (2011): 91–96; Cody & Terpak (2011): 156–158, pls 38, 39, 40. Six weeks’ advertisements begin at Shanghai xinbao, 5 March 1863 [guihai 1/16]: 1. Ozawa (1997): 187. Kinoshita (1996): 81; Ozawa (1997): 229–236. Xu (2007): 26. Ren’s career was summarized in a society column devoted to Beijing modernization, published in Xin Beiping bao—shehui ban, 18 March 1938. See also Chen (1985): 30; and Chen et al. (1987): 51–52. Kalaqinqi (1998): 571. Jingmen (1994): 383. Buck (2000). Jinan (1997): vol. 4, 222; Chen et al. (1987): 52; Little (1898): 211–212. Song (2007): 4–18. Deng (1922): 97; Chen et al. (1987): 18. Wathen (1814): 188. Deng (1922): 97; Wu (1986): 5; Guangzhou (1996): 632.

Sites of production

117

62 Hsiao (1995): 1–7. 63 In 1910 Lizhu claimed to have been in business for “over ten years” (Shenbao, 14 July 1910 [gengxu 6/8]: supplement 1, 6). For the suggestion that a different individual—also from Guangdong—founded the Lizhu studio, see Wang (2007). 64 On this Guangzhou quarter, see Tsin (1999): 62. 65 Wu (1986): 6–7. 66 Jinan (1997): vol. 4, 222. 67 The putative foundation of Liang’s studio in Tianjin is dated 1887 at Tianjin (1996): 267. This may not be wrong, but the editors say nothing about Liang Shitai’s irrefutable presence in Tianjin many years earlier. 68 Illustration and text for Wenxiao’s rebirth (Wenxiao zaishi), in Dianshi Zhai huabao, pao series (1892–1893), reproduced in Dianshi Zhai huabao (2001): vol. 9, 253. 69 On Guangdong contributions to specifically Shanghai publishing, see Reed (2004): 80, 114–115, 117, 241. 70 Zhang (1983): 20; Wu (1987): 35. 71 Sun ([1962] 1982): 194. 72 Yan (1993): 10–13. 73 Shuntian shibao, 9 November 1926: 8. 74 Honig (1992): 276–277. 75 On studios in Haimen, now a district of Taizhou, see Jiaojiang (1998): 486. 76 Shandong (1995): 383. 77 On Zhang Jian’s reappointing of Nantong, see Claypool (2005). 78 Gansu (1993): 363. 79 For the photograph of 1912 by Stéphane Passet, commissioned for Albert Kahn’s project “Archives de la planète”, see image A 69 027 located in Musée Albert-Kahn (http://collections.albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.fr). 80 Hong (2009): 103 (n. 19); Duchang (1995): 292. 81 Xiaoshan (1989): 223. 82 Gansu (1993): 363; Taihu (1995): 332; for records of photography-dentistry in six more cities and towns, see Tong (2016): 17, 73–76. 83 See advertisement at Jinlong, 14 March 1929: 2. 84 Che & Gong (1990): 252. 85 Shenbao, 11 March 1898 (wuxu 2/19): 7. 86 Shenbao, 11 February 1900 [gengzi 1/12]: 10. 87 Shenbao, 15 December 1898 [wuxu 11/3]: 5; Shenbao, 8 October 1915: 9; Shi’s letter at Shenbao, 22 July 1919: 11. See also an advertisement of Yaohua’s photography and drug retail at Shenbao, 8 October 1915: 7. 88 On debates concerning opium usage, detoxification and rising tobacco usage, see Dikötter, Laamann & Zhou (2007): 28–34. 89 Tan (2009): 79–86. 90 Hong (2009): 104 (n. 47). 91 Xin Beiping bao—shehui ban, 18 March 1938. 92 Ge ([1876] 1989): 2.40. 93 Pei ([1905] 1906): 7.9a. 94 Miller (1998): 169–187. 95 Lu ([1925] 1981): 181; Liang ([1949–1986] 2005–2006): vol. 2, 178–179; Tretiakov (1934): 289. Tretiakov’s documentary novel first appeared serially in Soviet magazines from 1927 onwards. 96 Xiao shibao (Shibao supplement), 12 September 1928: 3. 97 Longbao, 24 September 1930: 2; Zhengqi bao, 7 October 1930: 3; Shanghai bao, 12 December 1933: 7. 98 Shibao, 8 July 1916: 5. 99 Xinwen bao, 8 March 1908: 10; 3 November 1931: 12. 100 For Tongsheng’s authorship of this portrait, see an edition that Sun presented to Yan Huiqing (1877–1950) in 1912, reproduced at Gemingshi ziliao, 8 (1987): inside front cover. 101 Wu (1986): 11–12. 102 Miao (2010): 166.

118 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

Commerce Xiaobao, 18 April 1928: 2. Schivelbusch ([1977] 2014): 45–51. Dudgeon (1873): 2A.20b. Yizhang (1995): 529. 19 March 1866 (bingyin 2/3) at Zhang (1981): 7. Shenbao, 5 October 1894 [jiawu 9/11]: 10. Shibao tuhua zhoukan, 61 (1921): 2. For the studio’s appearance after another rebuilding in 1931, see Shanghai huabao, 698 (1931): 1. Chen (1985): 31. Bao (2015): 197–261, esp. 217, fig. 4.9 for the earlier record of a glass house in Guangzhou, represented in a lithographic reproduction of Jules Itier’s photograph. On Shanghai’s lighting, see Xiong (2003): 100; the London observation is in Zhang Zuyi’s (1849–1917) collection “London bamboo twig verses” (Lundun zhuzhici), postface dated 1888, reprinted in Wang & Wang (1994): 209. Shanghai xinbao, 5 March 1863 [guihai 1/16]: 1. Shenbao, 5 July 1898 [wuxu 5/17]: 11. Diary entry for wuyin 10/21 at Zeng (1985): 131. Fukuoka (2011): 362. Naquin (2000): 666. See note 53. Chongyi ([1862] 1982): 39–40; Chen (1985): 30. On fairs, see Naquin (2000): 29–31. Shenbao, 15 October 1935: 13. For a Xianzhen studio photograph showing subjects standing below the tower and the fortune-teller’s business, see Tong (2016): 45. Rhoads (1974): 102. Most of Simmel’s essay Soziologie des Raumes (1903) is translated at Frisby & Featherstone (1997): 137–170; see esp. 147–149. Secker (1932): opposite 81. Xue (1998): 177. See Kinoshita (1996): 33; Ozawa (1996): 137; Ozawa (1997): 111. Shenbao, 27 September 1899 [jihai 8/23]: 3. Cochran (2000): 79, 81. Moore (2013): 134. North-China Daily News & Herald (1932). Lynn (1928): 83–95. Chen (1985): 31. For its position on early tourist routes, see Yeh (2006): 71. See an advertisement of 1907 cited at Wu (1986): 11. Shenbao, 13 October 1891 [xinmao 9/11]: 9. Shenbao, 10 March 1898 [wuxu 2/18]: 11; 16 March 1898 [wuxu 2/24]: supplement, 4; 18 July 1898 [wuxu 5/30]: 11. Shenbao, 7 June 1887 [dinghai 4+/16]: 5. Shenbao, 4 December 1887 [dinghai 10/20]: 6. Zhu Naifang’s Elegant gathering at Yuyuan (Yuyuan yaji tu, 1902), located in the Nanjing Museum. For a gathering at the Xu garden in 1890, see Hay (2007): 106. 11–12 October 1878 [wuyin 9/16–17] at Zhang (1986): 610–611. Lynn (1928): 61; Shi (1998): 245. Deng (1982): 114. Johnston ([1934] 1985): 363.

4

Interiors of the imagination

One illustration of a vividly imagined studio interior, woodblock-printed in voluptuous crimson, appeared in a book that assembled generic views of commercial and cultural venues in Shanghai (Figure 4.1). This counterfactual image presents an interior that is anything but a studio workspace; rather, the artist’s fancy is that his photographer set to work in the residence of the courtesans whom he photographed. The voyeuristic scene is further enchanted through the superfluous curtain swag that reminded the viewer that he (most probably) was privileged to draw this fabric aside. This inter-visual logic—this print’s perspectival illogic—was sustained by thousands of contemporary photographs of women positioned beside bunched fabrics offering the same hint. Some photography studios completed their images by painting a curtain on the surface of the photograph.1

Figure 4.1 Unknown artist, “At the photography studio famous flowers preserve their images”, woodcut illustration from Illustrated explanations of Shanghai sites (Shenjiang mingsheng tushuo), Shanghai, 1884. Courtesy of National Library of Australia. London Missionary Society collection (NLA.obj-56642620).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003086345-7

120 Commerce Each of the book’s images illustrated an urban novelty whose accompanying text explained its origins, functions and any alternative descriptions, which were often neologisms imported straight from Guangdong dialect. An announcement of the book’s publication in the newspaper Shenbao conformed to the fact that both shared the same readership, a constituency ever more acculturated to photography by its reception of studios’ advertisements and further news concerning photography’s commerce and aesthetics. 2 Like other images reproduced in this chapter, this opening view informed its observers of the theatrical nature of studio visits, and it bequeathed the extra material with which historians today analyze photographs as imaginative staging and performative action. Imagination and performance have long been evocative. Nineteenth-century readers would have recognized the “enchanted castles”—perhaps even the irony of their location in a predominantly urban fabric—with which the French critic Ernest Lacan (1828–1879) characterized the studio venues that confronted him in the United States.3 Lacan, an incisive articulator of Western photographic culture, was aware of the enchantment through which photography studios closed the gap between material realities and extra appeals to the imagination. None of the studios discussed in the previous chapter was any more a castle than contemporary studios in America and Europe, but each drew from the same dichotomy and bound visitors and onlookers in the same spell. But, imagination and performance were not limited to the bodies that produced their configurations, since they depended also on what materially enveloped them. The unmissable tell-tale in the image with which this chapter begins is the wealth of material detail that a Chinese illustrator in the 1880s crammed into what the process of making a photograph was supposed to be. In a discussion of Javanese studios, Karen Strassler points out how deprecating the synthetic features of studio visuality is to fail to understand that such elements were by contrast central to her distinctive description of “landscapes of the imagination”.4 This chapter builds similarly on the recognition of that visuality’s concrete components, points of reference from which studio visitors—and aspirant visitors—both pre-empted what they desired images to be and indulged their satisfaction in the results. It uses images and texts to explore photographs not only as productions from studios’ physical interiors, but also as contracts drawn up and acted upon in the mental interiors of the imagination. Not only manufacturers of goods, then, studios were sites imagined among a growing constituency of those who visited them, read of their existence and wrote or talked about their knowledge as the psychological private property of no one in particular. The rich store of ekphrastic testimonies to studios’ existence—including the woodblock image above—far exceeds the more authentic photographic documentation of actual sites. Valuable though these sources are for an expanded discussion of photographs, this chapter’s first section shows why scepticism is essential to test some of their statements at face value. Shifts in imagining studios sometimes translated into deliberate recategorizations to eliminate the disjoints between earlier and later experiences. The next section looks at some of the visual evidence and the highly lyricized terms that perpetually modulated a discursive consensus on what the interior of a studio comprised. A selection from this flood of trivia isolates some of the recurring preconditions that were key to what the following section explores: pre-emptions of the image that habitually drew upon aspects of established scientific glamour, and heeded—and advised—studios’ publicity claims to define the pictorial desires of photography’s growing clientele. Finally, urged by Strassler’s sympathetic

Interiors of the imagination  121 analysis of how much synthetic features can contribute to the private and shared imagination, discussion turns to the backdrop, the fictive surface of depiction that ruled so many decisions to venture into studio interiors and commit to a visual statement within the visual economy to which both photography and painting’s artificial supports contributed.

Recategorizing descriptions Visitors came to view images irrespective of whether they commissioned or purchased them. One of the first Chinese records of the intelligentsia’s interest in photography is a witness to looking at photographs. Wang Tao (1828–1897), a translator at the London Missionary Society Press, journalist and diarist, published prodigiously on the modernization of Shanghai. He recorded that he visited the photographer Luo Yuanyou on 13 March 1859, accompanied by several eminent contemporaries. Particularly intersting, however, is that Wang’s diary account is no exception to a perpetual habit of updating his early writings in later decades. Consequently, he contributed wittingly or not to the myth that Shanghai first consolidated the essential forms of studio life and then distributed them to the rest of the country. The version of his text free of later amendments says: In the morning I accompanied Xiaoyi [Guan Sifu], Renshu [Li Shanlan], Ruoting [Hua Hengfang] into town.5 We went to the Halted Cloud Inn [s 198] to admire the pictures (huaying), and to see the images of the grand commissioners Gui [Guliang] and Hua [Huashana] which were on view. The painter (huashi) is Luo Yuanyou, a man from Guangdong, who was once chief accountant for the former intendant Wu Jianzhang, but has since gained instruction from an Englishman in the Western methods of pictures. His prices are not too dear. The eyes and eyebrows are clearly visible and nothing is not mercilessly lifelike. He has far outstripped the Frenchman Ligelang [Legrand].6 Wang Tao’s enthusiastic arrival somewhere in Luo Yuanyou’s personal space in 1859 may not be exactly the founding moment that is often assumed in respect of studio history. Wang Tao does not specify the functions of the Halted Cloud Inn, and the name does not have to define a studio premises. Luo Yuanyou was indeed from Guangdong, and so was his former boss Wu Jianzhang who had been Shanghai circuit intendant (daotai), the Qing government’s chief representative in the city. Wu was disgraced when the Small Swords uprising flushed him out of the city in 1853, after which Luo Yuanyou hastily backwatered out of politics. Wang mentions Legrand—photographer, violinist and welcome sight to French troops—but he does not say that he ran a studio. Only a few weeks after Wang Tao and Luo Yuanyou’s meeting, the seminarist Guo Liancheng—Pietro Guo—arrived in Shanghai from the Catholic mission in central Hubei to stay for one month before sailing to Naples. Upon his return he would unpack the first camera seen in Yingcheng. Guo, another meticulous diarist, was treated to a tour of the London Missionary Society Press, and it is conceivable that he met Wang Tao there. He also roamed—quite widely for a postulant—through Shanghai’s streets. If by this date one or more photography studios were doing business in the city, then surely Guo might have learned a more gripping description than a “place for painting images” when

122 Commerce later that year he entered a Turin studio, perhaps the flourishing premises of Luigi Montabone.7 Neither Wang Tao nor Guo Liancheng felt compelled to confide that they had visited a studio. Luo Yuanyou’s photographs had prices, but the social event of collective viewing interested Wang Tao more than sales. What else fascinated Wang Tao and his companions was no doubt far above commonplace. Li Shanlan, for instance, had translated mathematical treatises by John Herschel, one of photography’s most eloquent early theorists. Luo Yuanyou must have stayed in touch with high politics. The chief draw on the day of Wang Tao’s visit were images of the senior Manchu official Guiliang (1785–1862) and his younger Mongolian colleague Huashana (1806–1859), the two plenipotentiaries charged to negotiate the treaties of Tianjin between China and her opponents in the Second Opium War the previous summer. Portraits of these figures by British photographers have survived, albeit in sometimes thoroughly altered conditions.8 But, Luo’s lost work represents the first instance of a Chinese photographer contributing the visual referents through which an influential level of society made sense of the latest international news. Before long those passing a studio on the street would have fleeting access to the same category of image placed in the window. This political function may have perpetuated one that was already familiar to commercial painting studios. Arthur Cunynghame recalled that the Macao-based painter Lin Gua (Lamqua), for instance, was a “great politician”, and more than one Chinese diarist recalled the social life that enlivened the parlours of the more luxurious photography studios.9 Turn-of-the-century politics so enthralled the owner of one Beijing studio (s 216) that he explained the name of his business as a blend of Confucian ethics and journalism: “esteeming friendship and talking news” (shangyou jiangbao). Since Beijing newspapers promptly reported this modernization, he effectively created a space of dialogue between the capital’s nascent press and the most inquisitive category of studio visitor. Neighbouring Tianjin at this time boasted six prestigious reading rooms.10 Wang Tao’s account is a crucial document, testament to his sharp eye for social change, but in the process of successive rewriting it accrued claims long overdue for deconstruction. Wang redrafted his visit to Luo Yuanyou at least once in the process of re-editing his diaries for publication as a miscellany of Shanghai cultural lore. Not until 1875 did he have this ready, but in that interval he added new material and adjusted old.11 Like most rewriting, Wang’s was bound to succumb to retrospective distortions, not least in imagining studio life as purely generated in Shanghai. He inserted the term sheying, a reliable indication that the term was not widely current in the 1850s. He added also a bamboo twig verse by Sun Rong, since its subject, the photography studio, now featured frequently in this ever more popular genre. Indeed, the studio as an object of fashionable lyricism two decades later may have licensed Wang Tao to convert the Halted Cloud Inn into the sort of studio familiar to 1870s readers. And, he recast one of photography’s earliest entrepreneurs as Chinese, no longer an immigrant from Guangdong. These are crucial revisions to an influential text, one that Guo Songtao read during his stay in London, and that Qiu Weixuan, compiler of a popular photography manual, still felt compelled to cite in 1901.12 The larger trend of rendering early photography’s history more Shanghainese than it actually was is partly attributable to Wang Tao, for all that he knew far better. Personal recollections of visits to studios are scarcer than generic discussions of studios in the expanding circulation of commentaries on urbanized taste and

Interiors of the imagination  123 experience—exactly the genre of writing into which Wang Tao reinscribed the raw stuff of diary record, perhaps to restock his credibility as a Shanghai commentator following his long exile beginning in 1862. During this absence, visits to photographers had gained sharper definiton as visits to studios, but the visitors arrived with the same voyeuristic assumptions of their privilege to see images on display. For instance, an unidentified diary writer, an acquaintance of the celebrated painter Ren Bonian (1840–1895), filled his days with reading news, visiting horse races, theatres, and a circle of Japanese friends. In the late summer of 1871, after a enjoying a string of musical performances, he joined a party to tour the photographic studios (zhaoxianglou) and admire the latest portrait images (xiaozhao) of courtesans.13 Talking about studios had entered the discourse that a garrulous constituency now sustained. Keeping pace with many fashionable topics, Ren Bonian’s playboy friend kept a diary typical of the records and notes that friends shared and sometimes circulated in print. Ge Yuanxu’s technical description of photography, discussed in Chapter 2, was another contribution to this literary current. Ge, originally from Hangzhou, had lived in Shanghai for fifteen years when he finalized his guide to Shanghai on the authoritative model of contemporary guides to Beijing opera, intended likewise to aid the reader to expand confidently on popular themes. Ge claimed that his notes were a compass to the city, but connived anyway in the most expert readers’ knowledge that famous garden sites, for instance, were crowded and noisy. His observations on studio visits included assiduous reference to technological expertise—to which he was probably indifferent—but the sum of all his remarks demonstrated the everyday cultural knowledge required to navigate a rising discourse on modern urban life. Confident, too, that Shanghai would be pre-eminent in distributing an imported technology and its associated cultural status to China’s inland provinces, he concluded that “the establishment of photography studios (zhaoxiang lou) has spread to all provinces”,14 entirely disregarding how much the Shanghai photographic economy at this date still owed to interior patterns of trade and migration originating within China, not least from Luo Yuanyou’s native region of Guangdong.

Imagining studios The recollection that Wang Tao and his companions went “to admire the pictures” almost certainly meant that they went to admire images of women. By now many members in a wider social circle had contributed to a lyrical discourse on the studio production of a particular genre of the female image. Sun Rong’s poem, which Wang Tao now added to his re-edited account, had first appeared in a series, Poems on things along the foreign waterside (Yangjing zashi shi), a celebration of recent urban change: Adding hairs flutter by flutter a miracle transmits the spirit; A chemical substance can engender life, an image is made anew. Within the lens those moth eyebrows seem to understand what I say; They outmatch a mural [painting] and call truth true. The final line ends with a pun: “They outmatch a mural [painting] and summon Zhen Zhen”. Zhen Zhen (“True Truth”) was the figure of a famous medieval story in which a painter follows a magician’s instructions to paint a female image into human

124 Commerce existence. The woman’s image steps away from the wall surface that she occupied and requests to become the painter’s wife. Life and matrimony are assured when she consents to drink a special alcohol, but years later, suspected of being a demon, Zhen Zhen flees back to the two-dimensional coordinates she inhabited on the wall, having thrown up the chemical fixative of her physical form.15 The legend, which had a popular hold similar to the nineteenth-century obsession with Ovid’s story of the carver Pygmalion, surfaced in thousands of poems written on studio photography. It thrived at the intersection between studios, entertainment, female presence and the new newspapers which published a huge output of verse similar to Sun Rong’s. The explanation following the illustration of a puported studio scene (Figure 4.1) invoked the figure of Zhen Zhen, somewhat incongruously beside a reference to the photographic files of Belgian prison inmates, an anecdote probably lifted from Mao Xianglin’s report some years earlier (see Chapter 2). Her legend dignified the pursuits of modern urban life with traditonal learning—and a taste for the ghoulish. So too did the notion of fluttering (xuxu) in Sun’s poem, an unmissable onomatopoiea from Chinese literature’s most famous existential delusion, Zhuang Zi’s dream that he was a butterfly. Sun Rong’s poem presented a lyricized interplay of erotic fantasy and technical wonder, straying from particular realities to a generic literary fixation. Writers employed the same lyrical responses to studio conditions even outside China. When admiring studio displays in Tokyo, Huang Zunxian (1848–1905), attached to the Chinese legation in 1877, described Japanese female images as personifications of Zhen Zhen, exclaiming nostalgically that photography’s “miraculous medicines” (lingyao) captured (shea) wandering spirits. He circulated this trope through Tokyo’s Chinese poetry clubs, which intersected with Japanese literary circles, because Zhen Zhen and other legendary Chinese female figures were items in composition’s transnationally available toolkit. Huang published his poems soon afterwards, but revised many of them for a new edition twenty years later, uncomfortably aware that Japanese modernization had outpaced his earlier impressions.16 Significantly, he did not touch the photography poems, probably because the conventional—and international— archaism of photography’s lyrical eulogies stayed in fashion. Japanese diplomats in Europe and America submitted poems on photography studios to Japanese newspapers in the same acquired language of literary Chinese.17 Traditional themes affected also the publication of studios’ visualizations. Wu Youru’s image of two courtesans from the early 1890s is the earliest realistic drawing of studio behaviour, but the image’s romantic caption was taken from the few surviving passages of Duji (Stories of Jealousy), a fifth-century collection of stories set in the great river capital Jiankang, today’s Nanjing (Figure 4.2). One relates how a wife’s jealousy was aroused after her husband introduced a concubine to the household; initially planning to murder the girl, the wife eventually is entirely mollified on first glimpsing her and pronounces the words with which Wu Youru captioned his drawing. This blatantly male account of consensual sympathy had long been well known, because it was cited in Stories of the ages in a new telling (Shishuo xinyu),18 the famous ancient collection of historical anecdotes and supernatural lore, which Wu Youru and other artists of his generation frequently mined for themes to illustrate in new and fashionable urban settings. Conveniently, the news presses for which these artists worked often produced affordable editions of the text that so often inspired them. The conflation of the story with an indoor studio scene was powerfully evocative, because the wife’s famous exclamation licenced actual sight as the crucial sense

Interiors of the imagination  125

Figure 4.2  Wu Youru, “Seeing you I love you even more”, from the series Images of one hundred Shanghai beauties (Haishang baiyan tu), 1890–1893, lithographic reproduction from Wu Youru huabao, Shanghai, 1909. Collection of Leiden University Library.

through which to refine emotions. Wu Youru retained this power of sight—we all see the scene he has drawn—but added historical analogy to assist the interactions of the eye and the lens. Otherwise, beyond literary hermeneutics, the content of the scene familiarized any onlooker with one of the most commonly imagined performances of visiting a studio. Wu Youru demonstrated his familiar attention to creating perspectival recession in a drawing that is the first to depict the painted backdrop. What would otherwise be a nonsense of angles and distances is grounded in mathematical reality at the right with an upright bracket supporting a screen, corroboration that the waterside balcony is only a painted surface. The photographer used a tripod, but stood misaligned with any possibility for capturing the women’s frontal view, because Wu copied from any number of available photographs. He lifted in the floor tiles via photolithographic transfer. Other artists redrew the same scene, invariably dispensing with Wu Youru’s carefully constructed visual hint that his actors were performing in front of a two-­ dimensional artifice, and dumping the historical references. Precisely the studio habits that art reimagined in word and image threatened to dishonour them. Public opinion disparaged women visiting studios, since the practices of female portraiture too often complied with the venal aims of the entertainment industry, which, in a helpless vicious circle, existed also to showcase the latest progress in fashion. Within this conundrum, some studios tried to isolate spaces exclusively

126 Commerce for women. The Yaohua studio’s owner Shi Dezhi urged female clients in 1894 to receive his photographers at home.19 The Guanghuilou, where Shi Dezhi had previously worked as a photographer, advertised several times in 1898 that its staff was available to visit private residences where women could pose for photographs. 20 Then, in a new appeal to the female market, Shi Dezhi explained that in 1905 Yaohua had two premises, at one of which his liberally educated daughter could “take solely women’s photographs in deference to female domesticity”. 21 Shi Dezhi needed to strike a convincing tone, since in the same year Yaohua also advertised halving the costs for any “equerry” (guan)—regional slang for courtesans—wishing to increase the availability of her portrait, which so many studios promised to enlarge, hang aloft and enter into competitions with honours plagiarized from the state civil service examinations. 22 Catherine Yeh has shown how Yaohua also utilized the press to distribute the images. 23 Studios under female management emancipated women’s performance in front of the camera via the promise of discretion, provided that they truly supplied an image only to the subject commissioning it. The Baoji studio had advertised in 1889 that it would not market the portraits that it made of female clients. 24 The Yuelairong studio, based in the Xu Garden, assured readers that it would guard images securely, an emphasis suggesting that the studio expected to photograph many female visitors to this park attraction. Yaohua, in its attempt to convince female clients to engage its portrait services, guaranteed to deliver both the image and the negative plate from which it had been printed, thus renouncing more absolutely than anyone the possibility of profiting from new reproductions. 25 Confessing an open secret, some studio managers clearly recognized the need to address the fears of a nefarious commerce. Shi Dezhi’s ownership of two studio premises and his perennial willingness to theorize anything must have helped, especially when he published another advertisement in Shenbao, grandly titled “The argument for women’s photographs”. 26 Generally, however, even if studios run by women served female clients, they also attracted male ones keen to witness the novelty of women in professional roles, not to mention those still thrilled by gendered habits of voyeurism. News of a Hankou studio run by women, reported by the Shanghai newspaper Shibao was exciting, because this female staff’s reported good looks guaranteed so much custom. 27 In a similar indication of how imagining a feminine commitment was a male exploit, the female management of Shanghai’s House Where I Care Twice (s 34) boasted that they had solicited their business name from the society figure Ren Jinshu (1881–1936), a son of the painter Ren Bonian whose reputation rested on closely observed male portraits and idealizations of female beauty. 28 Perhaps expectations around gendered roles had shifted slightly in 1929 when a female painter moved from Changshu to open her photography studio in Shanghai, and one year later when a women’s magazine illustrated its argument for women in the workplace with a photograph of the female clerk in charge of retail accounts at Shanghai’s Resplendent (s 206). 29 The care taken to soothe the social anxiety surrounding the decency of photography studios reveals also the unabating urge to cross their thresholds. The canniest studio operators addressed this conundrum head on, ensuring that their premises’ fabled enchantments dispelled any resistance to visiting them. Early reports detailed how studios were grandly furnished, and rehearsed an assumption that such visible wealth inflected the equally wondrous techniques of performing for images and producing them. One recollection of a visit to a foreign studio in Guangzhou in 1861 described the interior of what was apparently also a rented home for the photographer and his

Interiors of the imagination  127 family. Ni Hong (1829–1879) addressed a lengthy poem rhapsodizing over the costly materials in an interior that amazed him as much as the process of making a wet-plate photograph.30 Awed by what he had seen in Shanghai a few months earlier, Zhang Deyi admired a similar glass structure in exactly the same terms when he entered a Paris studio in 1866. He was impressed by how much exotica met the eye: painted backdrops of garden vistas, architecture, and multiple arrangements of genteel objects. What was décor to the ordinary Parisian Zhang translated into the normative shorthand of zithers, go boards, calligraphy and paintings, the common quartet of props in the opulent garden settings of a traditional painting genre.31 Studios appealed also to studio connoisseurship, which paid attention to the variety in the image’s dimensions, costs and functions. One of the only surviving images to show the interior of a studio records its owner’s decision to use giant photographs as the means to decorate an interior (Figure 4.3). Yaohua owner Shi Dezhi’s keenness to domesticate imagination of the studio as widely and intimately as possible perhaps motivated the creation of this rare image, published by Max Nössler as well as via other outlets. The photograph of Yaohua’s interior projected unimpeded open fellowship—a free space at the table—in order to welcome participants to an array of magnificent visual results amid social respectability and refined consumption. A framed photograph enlarged beyond the buying power of most studio clients was the pièce de résistance in this feast, but smaller formats were also on offer to the majority, once Yaohua’s staff had finished lunch. Technical expertise was located somewhere

Figure 4.3 Unknown photographer, interior of Yaohua studio, from Max Nössler, Shanghai, Shanghai, 1907. Courtesy of Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol.

128 Commerce else, unless two of its operators—one of them female—are the figures who inadvertently fell back into the scene via a reflection in the hanging mirror.32 As long as studios provided the chief venue for photographic performances, and while no certainty guaranteed that the photograph and its negative were truly terminal productions under the control of their subject, doubt was bound to undermine many studios’ reputations. Another studio (s 16) under female management, also located in Shanghai, attracted the notice of the journalist Chen Boxi, who published his observations about businesses run by women in 1924. Opened in 1914 in the Jiumudi area of Shanghai’s old city, its customers were male. Chen claimed adamantly that the studio brooked no impropriety, but, located in one of Shanghai’s most notorious vice zones, it endured constant derision before it was eventually closed down. 33 Meanwhile, the notion that women should be photographed exclusively by women was a condition upon which those with wealth and position increasingly insisted. The caption to Shen Bochen’s (1889–1920) drawing of a woman using a handheld camera to take the photograph of a mother and child, printed in a newspaper in 1913, stressed sympathetically their relaxed cooperation in a domestic scene, and augured the alternative that family life photographed at home was now as interesting as its representation in the studio. 34 Another drawing of the period showed less plausibly a woman racing across country in her car, an image that exemplified how the artist Ding Song, who later also published his own photographs, depicted women in emancipatory roles by aligning them with a common studio emplacement in motorized travel. 35 Studios in other cities attempted similarly to open both the imagination and commerce to studios run by and for women. Female society in Chengdu seems to have succeeded early on in loosening the grip of male patriarchy, since an early commercial survey of the city records two female-run studios competing for female clients. 36

Pre-empting the image Two rich veins of information reveal the extent to which the shared imagination of Chinese studio culture both reacted to and pre-empted the appearance of the images that studios produced. Studios’ names were one, advertising the other. Easily overlooked, the most compact unit of studio photography’s advance into the social imagination was the studio name. Its selection could draw upon all sorts of cultural, economic and political dimenions to fit the expectations of purchasing an image. Even foreign names, provided that they mainstreamed a familiar evocation— Hollywood (Haolaiwu) was eventually a common choice—joined this process, and a few operators adopted a purely foreign name, such as the generic “Artistic Photographer” (Figures 4.7 and 5.12). Its possible origins of import could have included Japan where it also appeared with a similar typography. However, more usually, studio owners tried to solicit names and eye-catching calligraphy from leading Chinese figures of industry or the arts. Zhang Jian wrote the name above Erwu’s doorway in Nantong (Figure 3.6), and in Yangzhou the renowned painter and calligrapher Chen Hanguang (1879–1957) consented to write the name plaque for one of the city’s last studio foundations (s 118). Whoever decided them, names appeared prominently on the photograph mounts with which studios further competed to complement images with extra layers of configurement, abstract design, or simply the use of luxury materials. The task for designers was to turn names into logos as rich as the asemblage that the Ruiji studio used (Figure 4.4). The result in this case crammed together the

Interiors of the imagination  129

Figure 4.4 Ruiji studio, Suzhou, unknown subject. Gelatin silver print on paper with pigment tints, 20.5 × 12.5 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou.

130 Commerce Republic’s new flag behind a phoenix matching its wingbeat to the speed of an aeroplane. Ruiji (Saykee) studio and its address were inscribed within an airy tumult familiarly enfolding both ancient myth and flying machines, the information all minutely condensed for its thrilling passage into the air above. Like many more, Ruiji’s name—also that of the drinks’ manufactuer—derived from its owner’s. But, studios just as often used names to emphasize sentiments, qualities and feminized aesthetics. This was not only the translation of rising female presence in studios, but also the reflection of a sensitivity increasingly shared by both sexes and nurtured by new cultural forms, such as newspapers, magazines and cinema. The number of studio names including terms for flowers and scents (hua, fang), which are synonymous with virtues, referenced the femininity of an urban courtesan culture that mixed theatre, literature and fashion. Some studio owners borrowed the most famous courtesan names, often highly literary identities in a tradition constantly subject to adjustment and perpetuation by its male patrons. 37 Subsequently, this group of references was repopulated by the names and identities of cinema actors, a few of whom like Lin Xuehuai turned their hands to running a studio (s 273), which traded under his name even after Lin had sold up to a new owner.38 This is only one example of cinema fever regenerating allusions to photography amid multiple cultural and commercial identities. An even more powerful rapture centred on butterflies. The agile entrepreneur Chen Xiaodie (Little Butterfly), son of Chen Diexian (Butterfly Immortal), a celebrated author of romances, opened his restaurant Dielai (Butterfly Future) in Hangzhou in 1930. He invited the leading female cinema stars of the day, Hu Die (Butterfly Wu) and Xu Lai, to cut the opening ribbon at an establishment that also conjoined their stage names. 39 Hu Die, who had sensationally broken off her engagement with Lin Xuehuai some years earlier, tried subsequently to protect her name through legal actions, but this did not deter those who founded the Dielai studio—the gangster Du Yuesheng was a patron40 —and the Butterfly Garden (s 28). The name Butterfly (s 96), hudie written differently from the actress’ name, remained free game. Many more examples of names thicken this perception of studios as theatrically enchanted places. Not only did figures of the theatre and film worlds move into studio management and turn this career promiscuity into an enticement, but the broader reception of studio work attests also that the separation between different locations of modern spectacle was increasingly superfluous. Wan Laiming, owner of the eponymous studio (s 249) where clients also collected silhouettes, earned his early fame as the artist of cartoon films, and one journalist claimed in an arts magazine that cinema, drama and photography formed a “trinity”.41 In Wuxi the trinity expanded to include dental hygiene when the city’s leading studio (s 134) in 1933 announced the opportunity to redeem a 24-inch portrait with twenty wrappers of the Hu Die toothpaste brand, an offer guaranteed during the Wuxi screening of Hu Die’s latest film Flower of freedom (Ziyou zhi hua, 1932).42 An increasing number of studios offered personal movie film services. Not only advertisements suggest this, but in a fictional account of setting up a new studio in Shanghai, some savvy novices offer to accompany and film comfortably under-employed clients on sightseeing trips to Hangzhou. Despite a deplorable plot, the story reflected the popular imagination of studios until the eve of their closure or disappearance in 1950s collectivization, and one of the character’s intriguing services as “filming companion” (peiyingjia) is an entirely plausible role.43 Gestures to the future were another enticement. Early studio names displayed more allusions to the cultural learning of a male elite—Luo Yuanyou’s Halted Cloud Inn

Interiors of the imagination  131 was typical—before eventually giving ground to more popular idioms, but widespread fascination for prognostication affected each end of this transition. Chang Zhanyuan, for instance, borrowed funds from a Catholic church near Nanyang in 1902 to found a studio and name it portentously Recorded in First Place (s 132). His own name—Always Foretold for the Top—declared an aim not to live in life’s shadows, and he was indeed one of a number of owners who profited from vast congregations of professional scholars during the season of triennial state examinations. Wu Ruisheng founded Suzhou’s first studio (s 209) in 1882 with funds previously earned by photographing candidates during the examinations held that year in Hangzhou.44 But, reform soon discredited Qing state academe—examinations were abolished in 1904—and anyway even broader interests in knowing the future now enlivened photography’s studio commerce. The invocation of one studio name in this period, Prophesies of True Beauty (s 18), was testament to Zhou Muqiao’s imagination of physiognomic counsel (Figure 2.13), and another in the 1920s punned between “like the image” and “like physiognomy” (s 213). A masterpiece in commercial description from the same period, crossing popular discourse with classical learning, was the Artisan of Prospects (s 311). Chemistry and optics won popular affinity in nimble turns of literary invention through which studio owners were keen to demonstrate their learning, reinvigorating terms that might have otherwise fossilized as usages belonging only to the nineteenth century. Kunming’s first studio photographer called his business the Cabinet for Watching Transformations (s 78) in a gutsy reworking of a classic Daoist trope to recall darkroom development. Optics, however, soon possessed the strongest appeal, and “light” (guang) was refashioned from a source of sober speculation to a rich variety of commercial and intellectual interests in seeing. One measure of its intensity is the title Zhou Shoujuan (1895–1968) selected for his Chinese abridgement of Jane Eyre: The light that returned (Chongguang ji, 1925). Otherwise, more everyday notions popularized light. The Gallery of Rinsed Light (s 71) was elegantly old school before more vernacular references bypassed it: Plain Light (s 4), Silver Light (s 289), Daylight (s 230–232), Lake Light (s 97), Wisdom’s Light (s 98 99) and others (s 9 92 180 308). Abstractions, such as Glory (s 64–68) and Openness (s 72–76) adapted light in analogies that matched strands of national discourse, and Light of State (s 80–81), lifted from traditional political writing, promoted the nationalism of a generation whose civic existence was now threatened by the advancing chaos of war. Regional pride within China, the new international identity surrounding her—Asia—and democratic aspirations all passed into expressions of brilliance or enlightenment (s 23 189 275). The House of Light Painting (s 69) may have been a Talbotian inspiration, while a studio owner in Fujian sought no allusion beyond established science, and named his studio Optics (s 77). While science still swayed the popular imagination, mirrors and lenses passed easily from one century into the next, carried by the metaphorical power of the one’s confusion with the other. Early names associating mirrors with romantic tropes, such as ripples, hibiscus and the moon (s 109 113 306), as well as a House of Ancient Mirrors and a studio of Mirrored Light (s 79 111), condensed centuries of romance, theatre and antiquarian connoisseurship. One of the earliest Hangzhou studios (s 112) combined mirroring with its powers of erotic predestination in an unmistakable reference to Li Ruzhen’s (d. 1830) novel Jing huayuan, whose medieval protagonists are heroic female adventurers. But, a more transitional nostalgia emerged in metropolitan modernity with names that recycled notions of heaven, light and the

132 Commerce individual reflected in mirrors (s 115–119). The Ocean Mirror (s 82)—a shorthand for Shanghai—refracted a mofussil longing to be displaced into coastal urbanity, and the Citizen’s Mirror (s 190) the aspiration to count as a unit in the new nation state. The Guangzhou studio Cast Anew (s 334) pushed this even further—and backwards—into an idea of subjectivity recast like the metal poured into an antique mirror mould.45 Legend played a vital role even to the point of hackneyed repetition. The daunting amount of poetry written about Zhen Zhen engendered a variety of names for studios determined to announce their access to one or other form of truth. Five at least operated under the name Zhen Zhen (s 318–322). One of these (s 321) started its business under a different name (s 101) in a former Shanghai dance hall, and another Shanghai studio intimated that it could invite truth—or else Zhen Zhen—onto its premises (s 329).46 Wuchang’s Tower Where Truth Appears (Figure 3.3) and another studio further north (s 260 261) established their reputation with the same stylish appeal to conjuring. The name Transmitting the Truth (s 22) was a fortuitous forerunner of a later word for the fax. Multiple associations with truth made the notion so invisible under a layer of conventional usage that a leading secret society, the Revolutionary Alliance, established its own studio—its cover in Beijing—under the name Guarded Truth (s 222). Not merely humour at the expense of law and order, the choice showed a subtle knowledge of the contemporary social imagination. At least ten studios eventually used the same or similar names to express the popular desire to retain images (s 14 155–163 223), and almost as many commandeered the name Natural Truth (s  235–243), which stood also for human nature and innocence. Behind all these variations the legend of Zhen Zhen contributed to Chinese studio culture throughout the Republican period. Zhen Zhen was the first choice of name in the aforementioned story of friends setting up a studio business. Another notion of truth furnished a name that its users excavated from the writings of Su Shi (1037–1101), venerated statesman, poet and theorist of painting, demonstrating again the tight hold that traditional education often had on the imagination of commercial photography. During his travels, Su Shi once inscribed a cliff at Lushan, a massif of spiky peaks in northern Jiangxi, with a poem that could have passed unnoticed: “If I don’t grasp the true appearance of Mount Lu, it’s only because I am physically amid its mountains”. Not only because “appearance” is also a word for the human face, studio enthusiasts repossessed it along with the solid respectability that its writer offered in the widening bounds of nineteenth-century popular culture. They developed what a seventeenth-century annotator of the poem had already proposed: “only if placed outside objects can you see the truth of objects”.47 This strikingly modern—and Buddhist—explanation of vision as a physical disentanglement towards objectivity reflects the poem’s appeal, and studio owners pressed it into service as common property, its orological awe now readdressed to grasping truth within smaller confines. At their studio (s 177) in Fuzhou, Kimura and his wife may have pioneered this unmistakably Chinese name as an introduction from Japan where intellectual discourse had long placed Su Shi high on its reading lists. One Stay at Mount Lu (Figure 4.10) is the name of the prosperous town of Huzhou’s first studio (s 283), founded in 1900, and only one among many more studios that used the same reference and its variations (s 59 108 131 169–178 197 262 263 315 316). The allusion was still obvious in studios named Love My Appearance and Mountain Truth (s 2 217). While erstwhile elite literary culture was fast becoming the commodity of unprecedented numbers, the major factor that turned studios into fashionable resorts was

Interiors of the imagination  133 their appeal to any client’s individual worth. Many categories of educational, commercial and political appeal shaped ways to ensure self-esteem as one of the unmissable diagnostics of modernity, but no other institution wove the promise of fulfilment into its own identity, posted it along the street side and publicized it so relentlessly— albeit sometimes at a level no higher than a studio’s standard issue of photograph mount. Throughout China, studios with names referencing the self formed the largest group, a majority that explains some of the portrait fashions discussed in Chapter 5. Early names foregrounding the self included the Gallery of the Self Portrayed, the Tower of the Self Seen (s 104 266). Conscious or not of the metaphysical fancy of redistributing persons—photographing them, that is—Wenzhou customers flocked to one studio named Return Me (s 94). One of its competitors was named Love Me (s 1), and others alluded overtly to opportunities to beautify the individual (s 185–187). Many allusions to uniqueness and individuality appeared (s 121 253 310), above all variants of the colloquial Invariably Me (s 123–129 221), whose usage in Hangzhou was first adopted by a Muslim owner who trained numerous co-religionists to follow him into his profession. Truth was the most clichéd resort of all. At least six studios from 1912 onwards did business under the name The True Self (s 323–328). The enthusiasm for vision, which Wu Youru early on caught in his conflation of history and studio voyeurism (Figure 4.2), emerged also in studio names such as the Similar to Me Gallery and corresponding categories (s 105 212 225 251). The studio public’s attention to the individual expanded further in imagining—and imaging—the self as a binary unit or as a subdivision of the whole. Names like My Self and One Self already emphasized this extra possession in simple terms (s 256 259 293 294). Otherwise, the most famous institutionalization of double images was the Two Selves Gallery (s 50) in Hangzhou, operational in 1910 and soon noticed by foreign travellers.48 The Two Selves studio (s 38) in the Taiwanese port of Lugang had probably existed longer, but an unquestionably large number of studios adopted the name, including one branch business at Shenjiamen on one of eastern China’s furthest island territories (s 35–56). Nantong’s studio (Figure 3.6) was the name’s more literary form (s 57). Aside from names emphasizing the aesthetics of masculine or feminine duality (s 30 31 58 272), an even larger group perpetuated the obsession for dividing the self into identical matches or else summoned the magical fancy of transforming it into a “body beyond the body” (s 6 95 137 200 218 258 282 302 303). In Chengdu, Shanghai and elsewhere, the competition to supply visions of doubled subjectivity pitted variations of The Tower Where I Care Twice and the Gallery of Again and Again against similarly seductive appeals (s 29 32–34 295–299 301–304). Chinese studio names offer a means to research the existence of studios in a nationwide perspective that yields more than the usual concentration on a few modern cities. The majority of names circulated ad infinitum photography’s implications for fashion and beauty. The visual parallels to these obsessions appear in depictions of how female clients reportedly appeared and behaved in front of the camera (Figures 4.1, 4.2, 4.4, 4.7). Remarkably, however, names demonstrate how glamour consisted also of an enduring interest in aspects of technological renewal and in the ubiquitous new terms of photographic vision, discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. Some names refamiliarized classical learning, and others offered reflections of new individual status in commercial photography’s rising vernacular aesthetics. That included the photographic subject captured as a singleton—individuality’s normal appearance—or else distributed into the illusory state of two beings, to be discussed in Chapter 5. Any of these visual expressions gained their broadest sanction from a studio culture’s rising

134 Commerce investment in extrovert performance and the names through which it called to those willing to perform. Names defined a set of personal diagnostics that photography’s clients could apply to the beauty, elegance, artificiality and psychological secrets, which they recognized in the images that studios returned to them. Names merely condensed what studios declared in more prolix terms through advertising. Newspaper advertising democratized studio life and lore beyond any limits of space and time, making the rules and courtesies of studio visits no less magnetic than the international dimensions of news and vision in the global imaginaire that Rudolf Wagner has so eloquently reconstructed on the basis of Shanghai news press, particularly the famous Shanghai News (Shenbao, 1872–1949).49 Although long under foreign ownership (until 1908), the paper owed its influence entirely to the Chinese writing that it published. It soon enlivened a Chinese “public sphere”, albeit dependent for its long survival on the immunity that it enjoyed under the special legal status of Shanghai’s foreign concession. Not unlike studios, the newspaper was a technically advanced agent of change, commercially competitive and immersed in the literariness typical of a modern commodity appealing so strongly to sentiments of the past. 50 Information concerning studios appeared as news, debates, notices, advertisements and poems. Aside from poetry, which imposed strict forms, the abbreviated style of commercial advertising aimed perennially to win custom by staking claims of their studios’ technological superiority, their strong conformity with visual taste, and their expectations of forms and content on behalf of a literate and semi-literate audience. Studio advertising excited readers with irresistible inducements, and its texts profiled sharply the common preferences for a photograph’s content and form. Shenbao had existed for only a few days when the owner of Shanghai’s Sanxing studio (later Su Sanxing) published his claim that his photographs were better than the common run of production. A few months later he started a new campaign: Our business’ photography was taught by a Westerner. Our technique is highly skilled. As for using chemicals—when adding gold and silver solutions—we do not stint on production costs. As you will want to keep the image forever, we add bright colours that will not fade in the future. Our prices are fair. 51 Sanxing’s text, one of the earliest examples of a commercial rhetoric to which legions of studios would eventually contribute, included the standard flourishes of a highly apodictic style. The conceit that the image’s technology was learned from the West did not overshadow local skills (“bright colours”). And, seductive luxuries (“gold and silver”) were obtainable in the optimistic assumption of an economy open to many with fair prices. While Sanxing advertised that photography’s Western knowledge was cardinal to gaining customers, this did not necessarily translate into Western visual tastes. The studio’s portrait of Dai Heng, made in 1874 (Figure 2.5), is an early demonstration of how a local reproduction of painting aesthetics was still sovereign. Photographs by the Sanxing studio would eventually demonstrate quite different preferences (Figure 3.5), but these advertisement claims of the 1870s and the rare survival of an image from the same era demonstrate what early expectations were. When advertisers stated that the recipients of images wished to keep them forever they responded directly to private expectations. For example, at the turn of the century, the Yaohua studio’s

Interiors of the imagination  135 portrait of Ziliang—whose full name is not recorded—is inscribed by its subject to a friend whom Ziliang had not seen for four years (Figure 4.5). Ziliang asked his friend to observe how much older he looked aged fifty-eight. Of course, his scrupulous dating and the act of autographing his image—before sending it off via the post—also implied an address to future observers. Yaohua’s management

Figure 4.5 Yaohua studio, Shanghai, Ziliang, inscribed and posted to a friend on 5 December 1902. Gelatin silver print on paper, 23 × 18 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou.

136 Commerce made effective use of its clients’ reflective attitudes towards their pictorial records. In a collection of commercial literature, Chen Wuwo (c. 1880–c. 1967), newspaper editor and later society Buddhist, included advertisements among his favourite samples of literary invention. His collection features a particularly solicitous Yaohua advertisement: One claim from antiquity says: “existence in this world is a like a great dream”; another: “the world has no person one hundred years old”. Therefore, people born in this era, be they fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, sons or brothers, should at some time or other have their portrait photographed. Suppose that, when they go abroad on business, father and son do not meet, then to have this image will relieve the pain of separation. If some disaster cuts short the life of one of them, what other means will outdo Zhuang the duke of Zheng when he dug through the earth to observe his oath?52 No reader had to be excessively educated to recognize the ancient story of the Duke of Zheng who sidestepped a former oath that he and his mother should only meet again when both were below the “earth”—in their graves, that is—by arranging their reunion in a tunnel specifically dug for the occasion. Yaohua’s impetuous message of how durably the image could defy human transience depended also on a collaboration between the studio’s confidence to deliver aesthetically high-quality content and the client’s ability eventually to enhance a visual result with a choice of words and a standard of calligraphy as high or higher than Ziliang’s. Studios relied on advertisements to retain their interior charm as the constant guarantee of their commercial success, but they appealed also to visual possibilities at venues farther afield. One of these was the public garden, already discussed, and another was the newsworthy event whose advertisement could be an invitation to public participation. In July 1876, trains had operated for over one week along the first section of the Shanghai–Wusong railway—built illegally under British contract—when Richeng studio posted an advertisement in Shenbao urging readers to witness firsthand a new mode of transport, and, above all, to participate in one of China’s earliest modern staged media events. This irresistible invitation admitted that the newspaper had commissioned a photograph of the locomotive for nationwide distribution, but it proposed that anyone willing to join Richeng’s staff at the Shanghai station the following day could “effect themselves into the photograph, and thus make appearances even more exciting”. Human excitement (renao) was invariably the quality that writers and draughtsmen (Figure 1.12) sought to inject into the publicity for new ventures. The image that Richeng made probably resembled the one reproduced here, perhaps this very scene, which is well known but unattributed (Figure 4.6). Numerous members of a large crowd did not manage to keep still; three mechanics—two probably British and one Chinese—had had more practice. The Richeng studio, which had moved its business to Shanghai from Hong Kong in 1866, had long advertised its skill in photographing buildings, boats, landscapes (meaning probably gardens), and trees. One month after creating its unprecedented image of a railway engine beside a local crowd Richeng announced that the images would be ready for sale in two days’ time. The long delay necessary for extra unspecified processes was probably for an exceptionally high level of production, since the studio was also keen to sell the railhead scene to newcomers who had not turned up to pose the previous month, announcing

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Figure 4.6 Unknown photographer, spectators at one of the Shanghai–Wusong railway’s inaugural train runs, 1876. Unknown collection. Courtesy of Institut de Recherches Asiatiques, Aix-Marseille Université, © Virtual Cities Project.

that these images’ “instant effect was as if an individual had been physically in the scene”.53 So promissory a category of referentiality depended on imaginary emplacement for any number of bodies who had not turned up for the event. Enacting recent news like this was limited to extraordinary occasions requiring special effort and extra time, but its performance contained constituents of studio work in the decades to come, notably human interactions with machines, and the realization of a visual self beside or in all the subsequently invented modes of transport. Verse and advertisements in the print media delivered imaginary emplacements, and literary fiction embroidered them even more exquisitely, until radio added a late alternative. In Wuxi in 1946 the Huguang studio’s establishment of its own broadcasting to appeal for custom was an unprecedented use of the medium in this context.54 Although nothing is known concerning these transmissions’ content, they nevertheless projected a Wuxi studio culture within reach of a constituency only rarely considered, the “listening public” (tingzhong). One decade earlier, other categories of business in Shanghai had broadcast via radio to potential consumers, creating affinity with specially crafted stories that drew on established literary forms, notably story-telling in teahouses and restaurants. Wen-hsin Yeh has pointed out that the target audience in these commercial broadcasting ventures consisted of an overwhelming majority of women.55 The Huguang studio may have also appealed to female listeners, no doubt the obvious strategy in a city with a large female labour force producing Wuxi silk for local silk retailers who in the early 1930s had also established radio stations to

138 Commerce broadcast their products. In fact, within months, the Huguang studio broadcasters merged their efforts with a radio station run by a local silk business. 56

Adventuring into interiors When clients ventured into studio interiors and decided what other bodies, objects and surroundings should accompany them, they were faced with aesthetic choices lodged at global and local levels. Studio photography belonged to a global visual economy, but local participants could import from it their minimal requirements and otherwise make indigenous adjustments that were all the more satisfying. The distinctions might be quite subjective, but observers nevertheless exploited them in arguing how and why one photograph was better than another. For example, a common prejudice was that portrait subjects were too often disfigured by a surrounding darkness. Against this negative publicity, which Roberta Wue has discussed in a comparative analysis, 57 studios had to argue all the more forcefully that the effective use of light was a question of their own competence, not a slavish imitation of Western pictorial principles. Yaohua studio ran an advertisement specifically to repudiate criticism that its portraits were too dark, and boasted that a German lighting expert had redesigned the studio. 58 Like other studios that wished to certify their import of high industrial standards, Yaohua’s assurance did not necessarily undermine its claim to create images according to local aesthetic priorities. What exactly those were in the wider context of studio practice was above all visible in the objects and surfaces that surrounded subjects’ bodies, most notably studio backdrops. Depictive scenery was the most recessed surface of a portrait composition’s scenic space, an independent layer of simulation, planned ahead of the moment of photographic capture and subsequently inseparable from it. One common early Chinese name was the “scenery base” (jingdi) plausibly suggesting its function as the deep chart datum upon which every other constituent of the image was constructed, however incongruous or illogical the constructions sometimes appeared (Figure 4.7). Means of transport, furniture, telephones, and various kinds of apparel and personal property appeared in inexhaustible combinations and forms. Studios advertising in the press implored readers to consider the rich variety of backdrops that they offered. One Shanghai studio (s 233), located above a famous restaurant, invited guests to “come upstairs and select a backdrop”. 59 Studios located in gardens, when emphasizing the range of backdrops that they provided, demonstrated no enthusiasm for the obvious alternative of outdoor surroundings. The Yuelairong studio, located at Shanghai’s Xu Garden (Xuyuan), announced that visitors could choose to pose in front of either Chinese or Western views, which referred to distinct, exchangeable landscapes. After it slid down market, Yuelairong tried to win back custom by warning that rival studios had unscrupulously copied its former success in portraying subjects as though “inserted in a painting (ruhua)”. Worse still, these competitors had thieved their market share by painting new versions of the Yuelairong’s trademark backdrops.60 An anthropological colloquium that has theorized the backdrop stresses its disruptive contribution, especially in its form as a painted surface. Arjun Appadurai suggests that the modern technique of photographic representation invites the subversion of its own visual code with an alternative, projecting a visual decolonization in favour of its users’ “experiments with modernity”, invariably a disruption at the heart

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Figure 4.7 Artistic Photographer, unknown location, unknown subject, c. 1910. Gelatin silver print on paper, 12 × 8 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou.

of the photograph’s theatricality; its parody of photography’s realist claims offered what Lucy Lippard describes as a “spatial dislocation into a magical elsewhere”.61 Strategizing practice in a way that interlocks exactly with these notions, one studio (s 110) announced that it had commissioned ten new backdrops showing diverse styles of architecture abroad, and it posted this advertisement in a daily journal devoted to fiction.62 Chinese studio owners and their backdrop painters also inserted specific messages to ensure that subjects and viewers were conscious of a photograph’s locational transcendence or even its deconfinement into a new imagination of safety. The “orchard of truth” (zhenyuan) inscribed above the garden doorway in the backdrop to a woman and boy posed in the Sanxing studio (Figure 3.5) was effectively the orchard of nowhere, but its inscription in the image’s farthest “base” summons oneiric and prognosticatory whims that were key to understanding its creation in a studio space. This image’s production dates to the same era as a Guangzhou studio named the Garden of Life’s Resemblances (s 265). Studios that adopted the same tactic as Sanxing projected a learned atmosphere in which subtly emplaced messages hit back against easy assumptions of dislocation and coloniality. When the cloth merchant Chen Yingzhong, a close friend of the founder of the Erwo studio in Taiwan’s Lugang, posed for a portrait in a Hong Kong studio, this visitor from a Japanese colony to a British one, sat

140 Commerce down in front of the backdrop of a wealthy Chinese interior inscribed: “only now am I in a place of safety” (yuan de wo suo).63 This fragment—“Happy land, happy land, only now am I in a place of safety”—from verses in the ancient Book of songs was usually interpreted as a metaphor of brave peasant endurance against exploitation.64 Significantly, the most prominent Chinese painters in early advertising art were also responsible for painting backdrops in theatres and photographic studios. Zhang Yuguang (1885–1968)—named “light of the pencil”—was by his late teens painting backdrops for the photography department of Shanghai’s Huamei Apothecary, and soon afterwards teaching how to paint advertising images at a college run by the China Youth Association. Zheng Mantuo (1888–1961), another poster artist, painted many backdrops during his early career, while his semi-nudes were snapped up by agencies selling drugs and cosmetics. Zhou Xiang (1872–1933), who travelled to Japan and Europe, returned to teach art through correspondence courses. In 1912 he renamed his college the Backdrop Training Institute (Bujinghua chuanxisuo). One of his students was Xu Beihong, a loyal disciple who shared his teacher’s enthusiasm for the nineteenth-century academy realism that European avant-gardes had now abandoned. Xu’s early paintings show a barely dissimulated debt to photographs and studio backdrops.65 None of these backdrops is known to have survived.66 Their early production was firmly tied to a global fashion that the main Japanese photography journals (Shashin shimpō [1882–1940] and Shashin geppō [1894–1940]) defined repeatedly through description and visual reproduction. The information in this trade literature, which regularly reached China and elsewhere, contributed to an international studio visuality that makes the content of coeval images sometimes difficult to attribute to studios in any particular country. Combining subjects with backdrops that etherealized their transport to elsewhere in the imagination of bicycle and car journeys, shipping and flight was a transnational phenomenon. Tan Jingtang, owner and manager of the Tongsheng in Beijing addressed his public directly with news of a “recently arrived” zeppelin backdrop one Friday afternoon in 1914, assuring them that, “like nature, you seem to travel through the clouds, your appearance as authentic as the face of Mount Lu”. The face in the grainy photograph published with this advertisement is Tan’s aiming his camera over the side of a zeppelin gondola.67 By the 1920s at least four Chinese companies in Shanghai competed to create and supply backdrops.68 Yihai Backdrops (Yihai bujing), the most successful, appealed to studios in cities all over China and abroad to order backdrops for remarkably low prices (25 cents per square foot), and invited them to submit photographs of outside views for conversion into painted scenery.69 Larger studios in the cities sent disused backdrops inland or abroad to studios far enough away to reinvigorate them as the exotic “elsewhere”. Karen Strassler notes the use of a backdrop in Java where it had been imported from Shanghai’s Zhonghua studio.70 The slow decommission of this painting genre lasted even longer. The Italian photographer Caio Maria Garrubba (1923–2015), during his visit to China in 1959, recorded villagers posing for a travelling photographer before a view of a Western-style landscape that, however ineptly it had been hung from a sagging string, still vouchsafed the studio enchantment of relocating the subject in the visuality of somewhere else.71 The irony of backdrops was that the less their stagecraft was disguised, the more they authenticated studio aura. Larger studios owned sufficient space to offer exchangeable backdrops according to clients’ wishes, and the pulleys and hoists needed

Interiors of the imagination  141 to operate scene changes often appeared in their photographs. Many subjects’ striking insouciance towards these stagecraft revelations contributed to a common visual idiom. The backdrop defined the space and moment of a photographic occasion as much as it visualized its particular content. The thrill of a photograph’s prophetic function made its way into the most avidly read works of fiction whose writers stole the backgrounds and props of studio life to create yet more sensational encounters between ordinary characters and the princes and princesses of international news headlines. Fu Caiyun, the heroine of Zeng Pu’s (1872–1935) Flowers on the sea of sin (Niehai hua), published and reworked more than once between 1905 and 1931, falls in with a mysterious companion in Berlin, and the two women celebrate their intimacy by posing for a photograph beside a fountain in a marble basin whose water shimmers like “bright pearls”—just as it did in backdrops of this era. Zeng Pu plotted this event ahead of the moment when Caiyun eventually understands that her mysterious new friend is the Kaiser’s consort, and he allowed the photograph some agency in helping her arrive at this realization. Or, in re-evoking Empress Dowager Cixi and her courtiers’ passions to be photographed as fishing folk afloat on a lake in requisite capes and hats, Cai Dongfan (1877–1945), author of the Tale of Empress Cixi (Cixi taihou yanyi), relates their intent to “shed decisively the atmosphere of the palace”.72 Even those at the top of the system yearned to figure amid the fabrications serving the fabulous imaginaire of somewhere else. The same authenticating qualities exerted an equally strong pull on the real world where photography’s private and public aspirations converged, and where new press outlets amplified them in an unprecedented visual secularity. In 1908 when Yuan Shikai decided to control the political stage better by leaving it—announcing a period of “convalescence”—he arranged for photographs to document this time at his family estate, including one that staged him as the boatman to his brother’s fisherman (Figure 4.8). Three years later, upon his return to take up the presidency, he promptly published a selection of these images in the highbrow journal Eastern Miscellany, by then the most widely circulated journal in China.73 He distributed extra copies to friends and potential allies, including the French consul Jean Rodes who secured the portrait’s publication in the popular review L’Illustration. In the accompanying dispatch, Rodes recounted his audience with Yuan, observing that the photographer had retouched the image to make the subject appear more youthful, conveniently ignoring that as long as pictorial media have served politics, the pharaoh who is old yearns to look young.74 Rodes’ indiscretion blinded him to an even bigger point, namely that Yuan had stage-directed a photograph outdoors on his estate to equate to the pose and setting of a studio creation. That anyone might embark on a boat to catch fish from a bank is only one of several inauthenticities that align Yuan’s image with the typically fictional quality of studio work. But, to suggest that real rocks and garden architecture were the make-believe of studio scenery was a gesture of remarkable cunning. It inserted Yuan into surroundings that were familiarly those of studio imagination, and it presented him physically as yet one more modest extraction from a visual economy whose fabricated realities and imagined spaces were the constant resorts of vernacular elegance. His image employed a global idiom for a political era whose international communications were now accelerating. Painters of studio backdrops used a perspectival logic that aimed to match that of the photographic image to which they contributed, and yet they preserved a fictive stylization about which studios boasted so vociferously. This was obviously easier to

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Figure 4.8 Unknown photographer, Yuan Shikai (left) during his recuperation in 1908 at his estate near Anyang (Zhangde), Henan province. Gelatin silver print on paper, 18 × 14 cm. The image was published in Dongfang zazhi, 8.4 (1911). Courtesy of Shanghai Library.

paint in invented scenes, and perhaps this explains why the majority of backdrops visible in surviving photographs are free creations unassociated with recognizable sites. Gradually, however, the awareness of travel possibilities—if not the actual opportunities—dictated demand for equally fabulous but now attestable exotic places. For instance, news in 1923 reported that during a trip to Beijing, a Shanghai studio photographer took photographs of various tourist destinations, and commissioned local painters to convert his prints into backdrops.75 Through less ambitious investments, studios in other cities and towns capitalized on adjacent monuments and sites to emplace their clients in a locally referential scene. A family standing before a painted view of the Wutingqiao (Five Turrets Bridge) on Shouxihu (Narrow West Lake), for instance, was indeed created by a studio in Yangzhou.76 Even foreign studios sometimes commissioned painters to create scenes whose imaginary power was their uniquely extraterritorial parochialism. One portrait of a Japanese youth standing before a painted backdrop of the Tianjin Japanese concession’s Yamamoto Park, featured the memorial to Japanese casualties of the allied powers’ anti-Boxer campaign in 1900.77 The range of stage props and costumes that appear in portrait photographs included in this book were the same objects that fascinated newspaper readers. A typical advertisement in the 1880s promised the convenience of loaning official robes and theatrical costumes.78 Many more listed books, clocks, water pipes, paintings and furniture. Such updating informed readers of exactly what material products

Interiors of the imagination  143 comprised a photograph’s proper visual elements. Of equal interest is the apparent need to read this unchanging and recitative list of reality effects. Acknowledging the importance of photography to nineteenth-century European literature, Roland Barthes called such effects superfluous details of narrative luxury, but argued nevertheless for their status as indispensable notations that readers could salvage as part of a structure, or what he also called tellingly the “surface of the narrative fabric”.79 Not the least of this conservative selection of objects were the clocks that occupied a central position in so many images. This public guidance to arranging smart objects around human bodies was not necessarily limited to the cities where it was published. Photographs made by itinerant photographers at the homes of those they visited along routes into the interior show their subjects’ attention to arranging the same fashionable objects—not invariably their own possessions—in a setting that was usually outdoors. These constellations of material visualized a link between urban and provincial conditions that transcended the larger environmental differences also recorded in these outdoor images’ deeper recesses. Even at remote ends of the Chinese diaspora, portrait subjects strained as far as possible to be depicted with possessions, costumes, art and furniture that set them in their private conception of a Chinese studio environment. Resettled in Georgia with a large amount of Ningbo capital, the Guangdong tea planter Liu Junzhou, known to his neighbours as John Lao (Джон Лао), posed with his family surrounded by a Chinese landscape scroll, porcelain garden furniture, a woven carpet and various ornate fans. Unwilling to expose their arrangements to the harsh Black Sea sun, and keen to obtain the evenly lit result advocated by Shenbao journalism, everyone took up position on the shady side of their house.80 The Liu family’s own visual preferences reflected how expatriate subjects imagined their displacement back to a distant yet not forgotten point of departure. But such efforts traversed the whole social spectrum. A member of Britain’s Chinese Labour Corps—a workforce recruited from Shandong villages—posed in a studio in Western Flanders in 1917 with his watch and other pocket-sized possessions arranged around him (Figure 4.9). He grasped a slate chalked with his name, army number and the date—information that the Imperial War Graves Commission, constituted the same year, had started to collect for casualty records and eventually headstones. These are enough clues to suggest that this was a visual testament, planned in the event that he might not survive his dangerous service.81 Arrangements of studio props and personal possessions imposed weight and stasis, and asserted even the most modest aspirations for wealthy living. Other priorities stressed movement and the onrush of modernity. Mechanized modes of transport were among the most overt metonyms of the future (Figure 4.10). Once more, technologies conquering space and time offered the creators of studio props unparalleled opportunities to construct aids to the imagination of millions of private journeys. The equally photogenic instrument of the telephone, clasped in the hands of many posing subjects, foretold the intimacy of private conversations. The creativity needed for backdrops and props filled a common space that historians often ignore between media that communicate through symbolic systems of representation and those that collapse distance via transport and electric current.82 The content of studio photographs shows just how interactive these dimensions were. While common language pooled the desire for emancipated movement in such expressions as the “auto-mobilized vehicle” (ziyouche), now an obsolete name for the

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Figure 4.9 Studio of René Matton, Proven, Western Flanders, Belgium, Song Xiufeng and the son of the photographer, 1917. Gelatin silver print on paper, 24 × 15 cm. Courtesy of In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres.

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Figure 4.10 Yijilu studio, Huzhou, unknown subjects, 1919. Gelatin silver print on paper, 18.5 × 23 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou.

bicycle, studio visions prophesied the subject’s new autonomy with the reality of a machine clasped in the hands (Figure 4.7). The bicycle’s description was synonymous with that other intriguing neologism “freedom”. The small step from visualizing individual emancipation to finding roles entangled within growing modes of transport appeared in re-staging the opening of the Shanghai–Wusong railway, and it was still effective when photographing a couple in front of the Wuhan bridge beneath a sky traversed by aeroplanes whose ponderous fly-pasts were also recorded in newsreel footage of the bridge’s opening in 1957 (Figure 4.11). Recognizing real sites of national importance depicted in backdrops gained even stronger visual momentum with the new politics after 1949, but depictions of the Wuhan bridge and other momentous sites show that backdrop painters still found work. Under the People’s Republic the consensus on escapist visualities was redrawn, and the concrete achievements of socialist construction and reappointed parks and national sites surged into studios irrespective of where these were located. That is, appearing as if situated beside the first bridge over the Yangzi River while posing in a studio located anywhere but in Wuhan was not eccentric. The figurative style of backdrops in early and late productions did not differ radically, and their visual rhetoric dissolved only gradually throughout the 1960s and beyond. However irresolute

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Figure 4.11 Unknown studio, unknown subjects with a backdrop of the Wuhan bridge (completed in 1957). Unknown collection. From Jin Yongquan, Hejiahuan: 20 shiji 50–80 niandai de minjian xiangpian, Beijing, 2012.

its terminal definition, the backdrop acted as the studio interior’s most recessed and impassable surface, an aid to imagination that the artist of a woodcut print (Figure 4.1) quite clearly intuited, but a material reality that defied cogent expression in freehand drawing.

Conclusion The assembly of images and texts in this chapter acknowledges the themes that early commentators in China first indicated in their own grasp of the acculturation of the photography studio to daily life, their imagination of social life and even the entertainment of fabulous alternatives. Any modern critical reading and looking must also be sympathetic, since the original reports of studios’ existence are crucial to rediscovering their early prestige, and, scrutinized beside later evidence, they reveal some of the factors that urged clients to commission the images that have both survived and perished. Upon rereading, these experiences still deliver their writers’ awe at the material realities of space and location, not least their impact when reorganized by the aura of studios’ names, the recurring rhetoric that affected the imagination of landscapes elsewhere, and the experiential and visual enjoyments derived from the fabrications of studio interiors. This amount of detail—a fraction of what is still available— distributed over the vast terrain of its usage is enough to show how commercial appeal,

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aesthetic taste and new patterns of imaginary emplacement modified universal aspects of photography for their resettlement in local patterns of behaviour as well as discrete yet powerful expectations of visual production.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

See an example at Yeh (2006): 56 Shenbao, 5 May 1884 [jiashen 4/11]: 3. Lacan ([1856] 1986): 148; cited also at Brunet (2012): 184. Strassler (2010): 74–122. Guan Sifu (d. 1860), mathematician and translator of medical works by Benjamin Hobson (1816–1873), was one of Wang Tao’s colleagues at the London Missionary Society Press; Li Shanlan (1810–1882), this period’s most famous Chinese mathematician, another LMS colleague, eventually headed the Mathematics department at the Interpreters’ School (Tongwenguan) in Beijing (Cohen [1974]: 17–18); Hua Hengfang (1833–1902) was one of the founders of the Translation Department at the Jiangnan Arsenal. Wang (1987): 93. Guo ([1921] 2003): 69; Castorina (2008): 170, 189. For Robert Morrison (1826–1911) and William Jocelyn’s (1832–1892) photographs, see Bennett (2009): 127, 131; for Jocelyn’s photographs redone in woodcut, see Oliphant (1859): 345, 347. Cunynghame ([1844] 2012]): vol. 2, 97. On the social excitements of visiting Shanghai’s Baoji studio, see Sun ([1941] 1983): 395; Gu (2017): 63. Mittler (2004): 39. Wang ([1875] 1966–1973): 6.15a–b. For more variants in another manuscript edition also held in Shanghai Library, see Wang Tao (1982): 257. Guo (1984): 966; Wu (1986): 94. Entry dated 18 August 1871 [xinwei 7/3] in Unknown author, Jiangyunguan riji (manuscript edition, Shanghai Library); see also excerpted edition by Shanghai renmin chubanshe (1982): 306. Ge ([1876] 1989): 19–20. For the story in a tenth-century collection, see Li ([978] 1961): 286.2283. Huang (1879): 2.13b; Huang ([1898] 1985): no. 175. Fraleigh (2006). Liu (1993): 19.692 (no. 21). Shenbao, 20 September 1894 [jiawu 8/21]: 6. Shenbao, 10 March 1898 [wuxu 2/18]: 11; 16 March 1898 [wuxu 2/24]: supplement, 4; 18 July 1898 [wuxu 5/30]: 11. Shibao, 4 March 1905 [yisi 1/29]: Advertisements section. See a series of advertisements beginning at Xinwen bao, 15 February 1905 [yisi 1/12]: 7. Yeh (2006): 87–89. Shenbao, 3 September 1889 [jichou 8/9]: 5. Shenbao, 20 September 1894 [jiawu 8/21]: 6. Shenbao, 5 September 1905 [yisi 8/7]: 7. Xiao shibao (Shibao supplement), 25 January 1918: 3. Xiao shibao (Shibao supplement), 22 March 1924: 2. Xinwen bao, 27 July 1929: 16; Jindai funü, 13 (1930): 13. Ni (1881): 2.21b–22a. Zhang (1981): 7, 49. For other discussions of this image, see Yeh (2006): 89; Tong (2016): 308. For a tinted postcard edition, see Fluck, Böke-Fluck & Zhu (1993): 134. Chen ([1924] 2000): 203. Laing (2004): 104, fig. 5.4. For one of Ding’s photographs of an outdoor view, see the inaugural edition of Zhonghua sheying zazhi, no. 1 (1931): 9. For his essay on taking photographs, see ibid., no. 2 (1932): 54–55. Fu ([1910] 1987): 113. For courtesan establishments whose names photography studios shared, see Hershatter (1997): 85.

148 Commerce 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

For a Xuehuai studio portrait, see Shanghai Library (2007): 232. Shi (1995): 761. See Du’s portrait at Shanghai Library (2007): 125. Yihai zhoukan, 2 (1939): 7. Renbao, 31 January 1933: 1. Wu Yue, “Opening a studio” (Kai zhaoxiangguan ji), Lunyu, 127 (1947): 28–33. Suzhou (1995): 860. This record of Wu’s exploits in Nanjing is questionable. The Taiping wars precluded running examinations in Nanjing between 1864 and 1885, and the 1882 sitting took place in Hangzhou. See also Elman (2000): 573, 636. To some of these “mirror” names are added more at Tong (2016): 99. For other examples of this category of name in Shanghai alone, see Shanghai Library (2007): 235. “Inscribed on a cliff at Xilin” (Ti Xilin bi), with commentaries at Su (1656): 7.15a. Enders (1923): 272. Wagner (2007b). Mittler (2004): 30. First advertisement at Shenbao, 31 December 1872 [renshen 12/2]: 6. Chen ([1928] 1997): 257–258. Shenbao, 15 July 1876 [bingzi intercalary 5/24]: 5; Shenbao, 17 August 1876 [bingzi 6/28]: 5. Wuxi (1995): 1748. Yeh (2007): 68–69. Wuxi (1995): 2783. Wue (2005): 267–270. Shenbao, 30 March 1896 [bingshen 2/17]: 8. Shenbao, 26 February 1894 [jiawu 1/21]: 6. Shenbao, 24 February 1893 [guisi 1/8]: 6. Appadurai (1997): 4–6; Lippard (1997): 8. Xiaoshuo ribao, 20 March 1923: 12. Lin (1995): 1, fig. 5. Shuoshu, one of the Wei airs in Shijing. On Zhang Yuguang, see Li (2004): 360, Xu et al. (2004): 413; on Zheng Mantuo, see Cochran (2006): 51–56, Xu et al. (2004): 416; on Zhou Xiang, see Wu (2006): 93–94; Xu Beihong’s painting, now located in the Shanghai Museum, is reproduced at Knight & Chan (2010): 130 (no. 53). Zhang (2011): 62. Shuntian shibao, 27 March 1914: 7. Tong (2016): 151–154. Shenbao, 11 October 1926: 8. Strassler (2010): 86. Displayed at I cinesi nel 1959, mounted during the Brescia Photo Festival by Fondazione Brescia Musei, 7 March–4 June 2017. Zeng ([1905 onwards] 1979): 97; Cai ([1916] 1980): 333. Reed (2004): 215. L’Illustration, 16 December 1911: 496. Shenbao, 23 March 1923: 17. Wang (2001): 58. Ref. no. JC-s034, viewable at Bristol University’s Historical Photographs of China at www.hpcbristol.net. Shenbao, 6 April 1882 [renwu 2/19]: 7. Barthes’ essay “L’effet de réel” (1968) at Todorov (1982): 11–17. Lao zhaopian, 24 (2002): 102. On labourers’ clothes, possessions and shopping in Belgium and France, see Xu (2011): 128, 136, 146. Briggs & Burke ([2009] 2010): 133.

PART 3

Communication

5

Categories of content

Perhaps content is overestimated. Erwin Panofsky, primarily interested in painting, remarked that cinema audiences’ initial affinity was for cinematic movement.1 The newest system of representation outshone what it showed. Although also applicable to the case of photography, an absolute disregard seems counterintuitive. Its history in China suggests that the creators and viewers of images relied heavily on content that drew upon common knowledge yet enhanced its representation as technical wonder in order to enchant what was on view and how it was made visible. Aptly enough, even the history of cinema suggests this. In recording China’s first feature film in 1905, Beijing’s Fengtai studio did not select its content arbitrarily: a rousing opera passage—voiceless gestures—featuring Beijing’s star performer Tan Xinpei (1847– 1917). Opera was probably the most broadly subscribed art form of the day, and Fengtai had by now earned a reputation as the Beijing studio best equipped to stage and direct its clients for photographs in costumes and poses appropriate to celebrated stage roles. It strategized this success through topical content that almost no one could fail to recognize. While the Panofskian emphasis on technical rapture certainly applies to photographic media generally, this modest Chinese case of a transitional passage between two of the most closely related suggests the difficulty of pretending that content was invisible. What, then, helps to make content critically interesting? The central recognition for Pierre Bourdieu, one of Panofsky’s avid readers and leader of a research team surveying photography’s uses and reception, was that photographs’ content evoked attitudes that combined esteem with familiarity. Eminently available for esteem were persons, occasions and memorable places, but nothing—one informant told them—as banal as the village street. Everyday sights did not qualify for the status that this classic investigation termed “photographable”. 2 How to reintroduce the expectations of what was photographable is the framework for discussing content in this chapter. Broadening the discussion to include attitudes offers some control over a mass of content as diverse as persons, things and environments. This chapter does not dissent radically from the arrangement of longer surveys of photography’s topical categories, most commonly the self, society, the city, landscape, artistic and documentary projects. Only less inclusive, its discussion is premised above all upon categories of content that the authors and viewers of images emphasized in attitudes, opinions and reflections—or passed over as common sense—and accepted as a means to review content through different constituencies’ definitions in successive eras. DOI: 10.4324/9781003086345-9

152 Communication Of course, commentary differed in quantity and quality in the face of different topics. It is almost axiomatic that more viewers responded empathetically to an image of the human face (Figure 5.2) than to that of a railway truck (Figure 5.19). Another challenge is that Chinese viewers of portraits and certain categories of natural scenery put their reactions into writing, creating for these image groups a living history that was barely if ever granted to others. Simply to adhere to the bias that these habits imposed would be to fail to reimagine the lives of other categories of images. So, as well as translating and contextualizing images through the relevance of their inscriptions and other commentary—often verse—an equally important level of analysis depends on working outwards from the internalities of an image, the qualities that the camera immobilized, beyond the justifications that texts provided after the event. Both approaches make content worth discussing in terms of an image’s most “familiar” contextual value, which is not invariably discernible with the passage of time, and its intertextual status in respect of contemporary photographs, other visual material and larger discursive priorities, which have sometimes assumed sharper outline with historical distance. One railway truck was a drop from the ocean of images concerning railways, industrialization, work and political renewal, but its image created in an idiom of portraiture turned studio aesthetics dramatically outwards, and lodged it in a new visual ecology demanding modern sympathy for past motives of visual production and observation. The sections of this chapter are devoted to three categories of content. “Producing individuals” considers images submitted to their subjects’ unprecedented interrogations of visual existence. Probably photography’s largest category of production attracted restless concerns with mortality, physical change, gender, and the popular effect of duplicating the self in the same image. The section “Producing worlds” looks at the rising interest in both the material environment and forms of work as the objects of a new scopic erudition. Lastly, “Producing nature” surveys visual interest in the environment, the variously nearby, remote, small or vast latency from which photography’s outdoor objects provided content recalibrated to a form sufficient to join its discussion to that of photographs’ material composition. The images supporting these discussions do not align in one developmental argument—and some images belong in two or more categories—but each illustrates intense levels of planning on behalf of visual results, the examination of which reveals how much content mattered in its dialectical relevance to both esteem and familiarity.

Producing individuals Individuals often claimed to suspect that their appearance in an image was a separate existence, and scrutinized it with a rhetoric that exaggerated this wariness. Doubt, disbelief and even horror stirred the same pool of emotions in which Roland Barthes would later consider how the self’s interrogation of its own scopic object was fascinating yet ultimately alienating.3 In China, distrust of mimetic likeness fed a style of self-deprecation that writers had long cherished in a tradition of portrait inscription reaching back to the sixteenth century.4 Even Zou Boqi was an early participant in this affected confusion of identity and alterity. Addressing a portrait that is probably now lost he remarked: My normal expression seems ancient; a set of commoner’s clothes look new. Taking my portrait was never my idea; others marvel that it seems alive. 5

Categories of content  153 Zou’s surprise that others recognize his image as “alive” suggests his assumption of the opposite, a melancholy that was not uncommon. Wu Qingdi (1848–1924), an art connoisseur whose collection included also photographs, acquired the joint portraits of a certain Wang Chuanshan and his wife, and recorded the inscription in which Wang addressed first himself: Holding a mirror and looking at me I feel no recognition, So I ask others to confirm that this is Wang Chuanshan. Turning to the image of his wife, who had predeceased him, he apostrophized his bereavement with the opposite conjecture that a photograph preserved her as a living being: Your face paint has not come off, and you are still present, So I implore heaven to be buried alive.6 Existence in a tomb was preferable to any death that would have terminated a visual deception which sustained him in this touching yet morbid contemplation. These were intense expressions, but they belonged to a common stock. Even Prince Chun, in an inscription added to the mount of his own edition of his portrait (Figure 2.10), anthropomorphized his garden deer as a sentient companion who “froze as if knowing that I will soon be buried in the infinite”.7 The anxiety that photographs evoked was also ostentatious, because respondents to their own images often published their doubts in the public forum of newspapers. In two poems on his portrait photograph, published in Shenbao, Shen Guyin, a frequent commentator on photographic images, stated his reservations about exposure in the modernity of mass culture: “My nature adapts uneasily to the vernacular, and I struggle to stay afloat”. Indeed, so out of his depth was Shen that he called into question physical existence: I plant my feet without knowing where the firm ground is, Too overwhelmed to grasp that this [image] shows my whole being.8 Such reserve, which sounded like insecurity, furnishes prime material for exploring human fears of the image in any era, but it disguised how much it also spoke to a community for whom images now anticipated new possibilities of sociality. Almost apparent while Shen tried to stand upright, vast social and political shifts would supercharge this anticipation in terms of both visual power and vocal expression. Defying constraints Doubt-ridden fascination with the image gained new force when national politics imposed upon the male body its latest regulations for a modern appearance. The most notable target was the plaited queue of Qing or ex-Qing subjects, the hybrid of both a private and public asset. A decree on 7 December 1910—two months before the Qing abdication—abolished the queue regulation. Obligatory removal was announced on 5 March 1912.9 Cutting the queue had been hitherto a seditious act, but many men committed it in the safety of the treaty ports or abroad.10 Many proceeded with an uneasy conscience. Eva Shan Chou has explored the writer Lu Xun’s dissimulations concerning an act that was by no means uncomplicated.11

154 Communication

Figure 5.1 Scene entitled “True or False?”, based on a telegraph of 22 November 1909 (jiyou 10/10) reporting Shenyang (Fengtian) school students cutting their queues, published in the Shanghai newspaper Tuhua ribao, 104.

The crisis was a broad instance of Mary Douglas’ sharp observation that “the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived”.12 Government campaigns in 1912 to cut queues included episodes of coercive violence, which foreign photographers sometimes recorded.13 However, while thoughts on a future without queues were conflicted, the prospect was nevertheless visually exciting. One newspaper’s explanation of the shocking news of school pupils performing self-mutilation and sedition feigned disbelief, even though its basis in a telegraph lent it all the more authenticity (Figure 5.1). Such reports challenged readers to prove that they were participants in a rising tide of public approval. Groups of male friends met to cut their hair together and to sit for joint portraits, usually appearing starkly shorn and defiant.14 Both men and women from now on experienced studios’ increasing sensitivity to visual identity as expressions of reform, revolution and national commitment. All offered portrait opportunities. One Shanghai studio in 1923, for instance, offered attractive rates to citizens whose altruism compelled them to be photographed on 9 May, the unofficially observed National Day of Shame—an official holiday from 1927—that commemorated the infamous twenty-one demands presented by the Japanese government in 1915.15 Analysis of national humiliation in China and elsewhere describes it aptly as the politics of “who we must be”.16 It was no negligible force behind the recruitment of visible if mostly mute participants to its politics, but their consent had enjoyed a trial run with both the queue issue and its reliance on studios’ agency. Even before the queue-cutting campaign had refined the aesthetics of identity

Categories of content  155 with new social significance—and sanctioned it with welcome price reductions—one owner of his recent photograph (Figure 5.2) inscribed it: “In the seventh month of gengxu [1910] I had this picture taken during a halt at Shanghai”. Rejecting his old

Figure 5.2 Zhizhen studio, Shanghai, Xuan Jiaou, 1910. Gelatin silver print on paper, 13 × 9 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou.

156 Communication physical appearance during a stop along the route to somewhere in the future, Xuan had even reformed his name: “Propagating Europeanness”. Because no physical body conforms instantly to revolutionary change, staff at Zhizhen penciled in extra— repoliticized—strands of Xuan’s hair. Cutting queues by edict also met a resistance of which studio businesses were equally aware. Another individual visited a Beijing studio to commission a striking photograph of his queued identity one year after the initial furore of the official campaign had subsided (Figure 5.3). This long after the event, Wang Yian wore a false queue, a once common dress item now decommissioned for its more restricted existence as a studio prop. Wang wrote on the back of his portrait: In the autumn of renzi, eighth month, about to cut my queue, I used a large mirror to show my image from the back in order to keep it as a memorial. In renzi [1912], eighth month, third day, which is the ninth month, thirteenth day in the new calendar, taken at Quanye chang, upstairs in the Lifu studio. Price for printing two photographs: one dollar and eighty cents. Recorded by Yian, aged twenty-six.17 Wang’s use of a lunar date with its solar equivalent—easy to check on the front of that day’s news—acknowledged moving perhaps resistantly from one era into another. In October the previous year the National Assembly had broached the questions of

Figure 5.3 Lifu studio, Beijing, Wang Yian, 1912. Gelatin silver print on paper. From Lao zhaopian, 12 (1999). Courtesy of Lao zhaopian.

Categories of content  157 adopting the Western calendar, stipulating a form of national dress and abolishing the queue in the same debate.18 His passage into Republican time may not have been entirely gracious, but he did concede to stand in the emphatically nationalist space of the Quanye chang, a category of bazaar instituted to stimulate national industries. Allowing only trade in Chinese manufactures—a condition that Lifu’s imported photograph mounts clearly transgressed—this new type of commercial site accommodated the added value of photography studios and other attractions.19 Wang Yian’s portrait is one of a larger mass that Wu Hung analyzes as a crucial contribution in the delivery of both a new nation and citizen self—male citizen, that is. 20 This is a fair claim, not least given that a political movement to reattach the queue has never happened. However, Wang Yian’s investment in a new physical appearance is not without a tone of reservation. Mockery of the de-queued had in recent years provided a rich vein of satire. 21 Although performed and written in retrospect, Wang’s attitude may have matched that of others who viewed queue cutting ex ante with a non-compliant conservatism that the eventual success of the campaign erased from memory. Why, for instance, Qu Yuanzhen (1842–1921), scion of one of the most influential banking families in Shanxi province, chose to repudiate the usual portrait conventions must remain obscure (Figure 5.4). It is no less remarkable, however, as a

Figure 5.4 Unknown photographer, Qixian, Qu Yuanzhen, c. 1910. Gelatin silver print on paper. From Cao Yu, Qixian lao zhaopian, Taiyuan, 2004.

158 Communication

Figure 5.5 Unknown photographer, unknown subject, 1930s. Gelatin silver print on paper. From Lao zhaopian, 25 (2002). Courtesy of Lao zhaopian.

deliberate turn away from aesthetic norms followed by any other wealthy inhabitants of Qixian, not to mention individuals elsewhere. The physical adjustment dictated by queue-cutting provoked an entirely homosocial commentary, but the production of images such as Wang Yian’s portrait borrowed unashamedly from feminine visual habits. Images of fashionable women formed a torrent of urban courtesan culture in which female poses had long featured pairs of mirrors angled behind the subject to create a maximally enveloping view. 22 More germane to Wang Yian’s portrait were those of contemporary women who commissioned photographs of themselves in analogous poses before the standard studio furnishing of a full-length mirror (Figure 5.5). Only men were the mass object of a campaign to remove the queue from national life, but feminist convictions inspired small numbers of women in several cities to emancipate themselves from what hairdressing symbolized of marital status. For these brave acts they faced social criticism on an entirely different scale. That pressure probably explains why the painter and writer Feng Zikai (1898–1975) stood beside his sister in the image that she commissioned from a Shanghai studio after she cut her hair short in 1920. In another paternalist gesture Feng Zikai inscribed the image as Feng Tingfang’s “first hair-cut portrait”, and recorded the date, the hour and the minute, a calendrical exactitude that would have been equally appropriate to mark a birth. 23

Categories of content  159 Disdaining the familiar Shen Guyin’s dread that he might not stay afloat was not traumatic enough to stop him stating it in public. He apostrophized for many a delight in the vernacularity of pastimes whose openness many combined with their conservative adherence to familiar visual symbolism and literary forms of esteem. More light-hearted habits of denigrating photographic content met other expectations of commentary also in public circulation, most commonly composed in satirical verse. Photographs were frequent targets, especially those of more conventional appearance. A couple’s joint portrait, like the example made at Baoji studio (Figure 5.6), shows a male subject who had pre-empted the national politics due to descend upon every man’s queue some ten years later—the shape of his partner’s feet would not be so easily reformed. Attached to a matrimonial red card mount, this image was the sort of daily production against which satirists weighed in. Reckoning that the quality of a studio production like this ran too far ahead of a more sober reality, a scornful observer in Chengdu wrote: A bride has not yet crossed the threshold before she has a picture taken, And lets her groom call her his Zhen [or: call this truth reality]. 24 The familiar trope of Zhen had almost reached saturation point. Some of the most interesting images of the period, however, are those whose subjects confronted directly the insecurities of a rapidly developing image economy and managed “to stay

Figure 5.6 Baoji studio, Shanghai, unknown subjects, c. 1910. Gelatin silver print on paper, 16.5 × 10.5 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou.

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Figure 5.7 Taifang studio, Beijing, Mei Lanfang (1894–1962) in the role of Yuji, first performed 1922. Gelatin silver print on paper with pigment tints, 14 × 20 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library.

afloat” most notably through their easy assumption of identities that increasingly vernacularized urban environments amalgamating entertainment, literature, performance and commerce. Studio photography’s theatricality encouraged clients to raid props, costumes and atmosphere without conscience from the entertainment industries of Chinese opera, cinema, the eclectic graphics of advertising art, and—perhaps most alluring of all—the studio portraits of theatre and film stars, which circulated through sales and on display in studio windows. A minutely tinted image of the opera star Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) shows him in the concubine role of Yuji performing a sword dance before her pathos-laden suicide in a story adapted in numerous poems, operas and films (Figure 5.7). Dressing and posing as Yuji became a photographic rage after 1922 when Mei Lanfang adopted the heroine as his most famous role in partnership with Yang Xiaolou (1878–1938), adopted son of Tan Xinpei, Chinese cinema’s first recorded performer. Mei and Yang were among the first to isolate their stage roles for a modern iconography outside the immediate confines of the theatre. One amateur performer—member of a constituency that had its own social description (piaoyou)—so indulged the confusions of art and life that he had adopted the stage name Mei Lanfang. 25 Studio management soon cashed in on this enthusiasm by hiring underpaid theatre performers to direct portrait work with professional theatre techniques. The manager of Zhenjiang’s Baoji (s 12),

Categories of content  161

Figure 5.8 Weixin studio, Shanghai, unknown subjects, 1920s. Gelatin silver print on paper with pigment tints, 20 × 13.5 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou.

Yao Junqing, had been a leading member of Dawutai, Shanghai’s first Beijing opera troupe, whose members deeply resented his departure. The image’s post-production also aimed at stage effects. Theatre and advertising’s use of colour was a competitive edge that few studios could match, but many tried. The famous advertising artist Zheng Mantuo secured his earliest job at Hangzhou’s Erwo studio where he added shade and depth to portraits with his subsequently famous use of finely ground pigments. More commonly, tinting resulted in the incongruous contrasts of overpainting (Figure 5.8). Photographic studios were sites to dress across gender, status, nationality and historical epoch. The feminist revolutionary Qiu Jin (1875–1907) undertook pictorial engagements intended to foster a biographical complexity of gender, identity, education and reform. One of thousands of Chinese students to study in Japan, Qiu Jin visited Chinese and Japanese studios to create the various heroic appearances that eventually helped to lionize her for the rest of the century following her beheading— usually a male sentence—for her involvement in an assassination plot in 1907. These ubiquitously available images show her dressed in alternatively Western and Chinese male clothes, and, most famous of all—published in the Chinese Women’s Journal (Zhongguo nübao) that she founded—in Japanese costume and holding a dagger. 26 She was highly conscious of the different kinds of cooperation to be expected in the

162 Communication studios that she visited in order to extract images whose transgressive formations nevertheless relied heavily on what each studio supplied by way of familiar visual content. Her half-brother Qiu Zongzhang (1896–1955) recalled the various moments that she began or ceased to dress in a certain persona. These recollections may not be entirely trustworthy, but in respect of a famous image of Qiu with plaited queue and leather shoes, his recollection of its creation at the Shaoxing studio of Jiang Ziliang (s 102) reveals that Qiu Jin did not pull off successive visual shocks unaided. It acknowledges—unusually—the photographer’s role in a process of biographical construction. 27 Qiu Jin’s manipulation of diverse studio emplacements was indisputably bold. But, at the mundane level of studio production Qiu Jin simply appropriated various categories of content that were all too common among male subjects. Posing as a flaneur, holding a weapon, and crossdressing were masculine tactics; so too was writing on an image. In composing the poem “Inscribed on my portrait in male dress” for one of her masculine images—exactly which remains uncertain—she adopted also a male literary persona: Sternly gazing, who is this person? The heroic stuff of earlier lives regrets that it is lodged in me. Since that past body was only ever an illusion, I suspect that only the scenery of the future is true (zhen).28 Qiu Jin grounded the effort to transcend her sex in the conventional vocabulary of a male response to a portrait, not omitting the dual trope of truth and femininity. Even a woman who styled herself with provocatively theatrical names, such as “Competing with Males” (Jingxiong) and “Cast as a female self” (Danwu), nevertheless adopted the detached tone with which educated men ironized the tension that personal visual content tautened between private satisfaction and public embarrassment. Such mimicry chaperoned visual content with the rhetoric commonly used to immerse both text and image in increasingly secular values. The theatrical constituents of studio portraits were generic commonplaces, but Qiu, like thousands of students who studied in Japan, had also learned new dramatic conventions. In particular, performances of Western drama in Japanese and Chinese provided new roles and scenes both to experiment with and to adopt as modernity’s new themes. Drama was an important dimension in the larger experience of a Japan residence, providing a formative passage in early twentieth-century Chinese men’s and women’s renewal of personal and social roles. Writers of dramas and stories even wove the event of a studio visit into their plots. One militant group of Chinese patriots in Tokyo submitted to a Shanghai journal their libretto recounting the political enlightenment of a revolutionary heroine (queued and suited) and her companions. Following a dinner that deepens everyone’s commitment to rescue China from whatever might happen next, a young man exclaims that now is the moment to engage the Yaohua studio to photograph their party. 29 Only recently has the long interest in China’s modern drama paid more attention to surviving photographic portraits of the pioneering writers, directors and actors— almost all men—who invented their careers in Japan before returning to China. 30 Even less emphasized is the link between a new theatrical form’s emotional impact and the content of studio photography (Figure 5.9). Hu Hensheng, who acted

Categories of content  163

Figure 5.9  Unknown photographer, Hu Hensheng performing a female role in modern theatre, Shanghai, c. 1913. Gelatin silver print on paper, 9 × 12 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library.

predominantly female roles, posed for a stage shot that recalled closely the interior of a studio—unless indeed it was—and belonged eventually to the New People’s drama troupe (Xinmin she) whose members included Qian Binghe, another actor as well as the scenery painter. When Zheng Zhengqiu enrolled most of the troupe members for the Asian Film Company in 1909, Qian gained a new role to paint film sets. Drama matched more explicitly than any other cultural pursuit how studios expected their visitors to respond in similar conditions. A genre named “enlightened theatre” (wenmingxi) gained its initial impetus from the Japanese “new style plays” (shinpageki) adapted from European theatre currents. What Chinese students learned in Japan they eagerly re­performed in cities back home, most notably in the form of family dramas (jiatingxi), melodramatic performances whose material drew on urban family life and its changing norms. None too varied plots dictated endless performances of a Chinese Nora, and uncontentious happy endings generally ensured that she did not get off stage as Ibsen had scripted. Correspondence between the mise-en-scène of studio photographs and popular theatre experiences was helped by the fact that the representational techniques of these plays was still substantially un-Westernized. The scope for private imaginary dramatization was not limited by the resources on offer. Qiu Jin also owed her success as a self­made spectacle to her sharp eye for fashion. Well dressed—and well

164 Communication crossdressed—she loaned the habit of representing courtesan femininity from the studios and news press that had made it so popular, and returned it as a quite differently feminized invention of fashion for other press outlets. If these did not exist, she invented them too. But, her daring fabrication of several secular identities depended foremost on a brilliant exploitation of studio production at its most conventional. Forecasting whole and divided selves One of the most remarkable outcomes of photography’s theatricality and prolonged interrogation of the visual subject as an essence of mistrust was the double image. To pose for such images was to defy the camera’s deficiencies as an invariable delivery of single perspective, and to coordinate physical presence in the image not once but twice. What David Der-Wei Wang describes as a “free circulation of subjectivities” in habits of impersonation during this period was also relevant to how visual subjects pursued doubleness in an increasingly accessible scopic regime.31 Subjectivity’s demands for multiple visualities dictated their commerce, and the earliest evidence is variously technical and literary. During his diplomatic residence in London (1877–1879), Guo Songtao posted a prism lens to the Jiangnan Ironworks. Its effect was, he wrote, to duplicate persons and scenery within the same view. 32 In 1896, Ouyang Shizhi, owner of the Baoji studio, claimed in one of his typically long newspaper essays that, aside from inventing processes to print portraits on silk handkerchiefs and porcelain vases, Baoji had provided images of the “body beyond the body” since 1890.33 Zhou Yaoguang, keen in 1917 to demonstrate above all how to talk about photography, phlegmatically described “the immortal art of dividing the self”.34 In the late nineteenth century those writing on their photographic portraits commonly acknowledged that the image existed as a perfect double to the somatic reality of the self. One writer in Hunan addressed his thoughts in a poem to Shenbao: “the arts of illusion have taught me that a body exists beyond my body”. 35 The description of a body “beyond” had long signified painted portraits. 36 A new expression to fit the purposes of photography was “dividing the body”, but it likewise first implied only the subject faced with his or her image. As yet one more poet in Shanghai put it in 1887: There was never any immortal art that could divide the body (fenshen), So how is it possible that my lone self becomes two people?37 A Guangdong apothecary in Hankou versified the same question nearly three decades later.38 The content of what this expression signified changed dramatically with the appearance of images containing the same individual visualized twice. This fashion varied from an innocuous symmetry, like the tinted double portrait of Puyi, to more histrionic role plays of domination and servility (Figures 5.10 and 5.11). The second fashion featuring a master or mistress and a servant was an “image of beseeching oneself” (qiuji tu). The term, drawn ultimately from Confucius’ sayings, had only a recent history in painting, but its most familiar usage was reserved for photographs. 39 Their composition became a rage in which even public figures participated.40 Puyi’s image may owe its carefully posed symmetry to his unique status, which precluded bowing and scraping. Whether a deposed emperor or an ordinary unit of the mob, however, each commissioner of these visual confections controlled the staging

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Figure 5.10 Donghua studio, Beijing, Puyi, c. 1917. Gelatin silver print on paper with pigment tints, 26.2 × 20.8 cm. Courtesy Palace Museum, Beijing.

Figure 5.11 Pinfang studio, Shanghai, unknown subject, c. 1920. Gelatin silver print on paper, 9.2 × 13.5 cm (image). Private collection.

166 Communication of the final result. The visitor to Pinfang probably decided that her two overcoats sublimated the poetry of dual being to an even wittier level of bourgeois mundanity. Significant, too, is how each image reveals converging visual desires in a shared commercialized image culture thriving in two cities. Although set within the palace, Puyi perfected his self-revelation with the aid of a studio located far outside it. Another print of his portrait bears the logo of Donghua, a studio in Beijing’s recently incorporated Dong’an bazaar.41 Clearly, the depiction of royal persons on sacred ground was not guaranteed solely by discreetly appointed envoys—the aristocratic Xunling is invariably cited—whose status now overdetermines a retrospective notion of palace photography.42 Chinese consumers’ plunge into illusionary duality was not exceptional. A lecturer at a Royal Photographic Society meeting in 1924 prefaced his demonstration of “composite methods” with an historical account of their usage over the last two decades, and afterwards took questions on the ethics of combining negatives to create “legitimate photography”.43 The “chariot polypose” was a completely serious invention in France in 1904, and illusionary techniques contributed directly to the distorting habits of European avant-garde surrealism.44 Marcel Duchamp, for example, publicized himself in a five-way illusion in New York in 1917, and similar manipulations exerted huge force on avant-garde art in Japan.45

Figure 5.12 Artistic Photographer, unknown location, unknown subject, c. 1910. Gelatin silver print on paper, 12 × 8 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou.

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Figure 5.13 Taiping studio, Taipei, Zeng Tongwu, the studio owner, photographed by himself. Gelatin silver print on paper, 13.5 × 9.2 cm. Collection of Zeng Bowen. Courtesy of National Taiwan University.

Many double images invoked also fantasies of transport, featuring models of cars, for instance, into which to distribute the subject as both driver and passenger. Some subjects cross-dressed between their two appearances. The legendary Beijing courtesan Jinxian released her double image as man and woman in the studio fabrication of a lake, the female partner paddling the couple’s boat.46 Mei Lanfang and one of his stage companions—probably Zhu Guifang—adopted almost exactly the same pose in theatre costume.47 Many subjects, however, did little more than adopt contrasting postures (Figure 5.12), such as one subject who had just cut his queue. Nevertheless, the image’s internalities are common to a vast number of double images, which hinted at equality without entirely allowing it. Some projected a more emancipated duality, showing subjects performing in startlingly banal conjunctions of friends at each end of a bridge or else opponents playing chess. Some rehearsed quite superficial oppositions between tradition and modernity or China and the West, expressed invariably through alternations of dress (Figure 5.13). Studio owners recognized the double image as a profitable definition of their commerce. Motives to select the name Two Selves drew often on deeply personal concepts of identity. Shi Qiang, owner of the Erwo studio in Lugang, followed a friend’s recommendation, because both shared the same philosophy concerning identity and the soul. The name also complemented Shi Qiang’s property named his Thatched Hall

168 Communication for Half of Me (Banwo caotang).48 Personal convictions counted for little if the public did not respond. It soon did. Ever an enthusiast for visual invention and its lyrical surcharge, Shen Taimou, who kept the most uninhibited records of Beijing social life, listed the functions of the human subject in photographs: to record banquet occasions, to present mementoes to friends, to organize beauty contests, and to create erotica (“occasional views of the flesh”). He also commented on portrait photography’s theatrical habits, freely admitting to the joys of dressing up in cross-gendered roles, and urging readers to pay attention to hair styles.49 The writer Lu Xun adopted a different approach. One of the leaders in the New Culture Movement by 1925 when he published an essay on photography in the eminent literary journal Threads of Talk (Yusi), he inveighed against what he saw as photography’s moral failure. He attacked superstitions—the horrific Tianjin rumours of stealing eyes—and drew on memories of Shaoxing’s first studio where as a child he had admired images of Li Hongzhang and Zeng Guofan, suppressors of the Taiping rebel state. His mischievous fancy that Taiping forces might storm back to Shaoxing declared an iconoclastic challenge to almost any studio display of the period. He impugned photography—he meant early war photography—as artless voyeurism, and alluded to gruesomely violent episodes of popular theatre to implicate everyone in their shared responsibility for a debased currency of national characteristics (guocui). Mocking drama’s incorruptible heroes also allowed him to lampoon studio visitors in a flippant reference to national characteristics—long the voguish modern topic of kokusui in Japan—upon which Lu Xun commented further in this essay and elsewhere. Indeed, the nation as much as those citizens privileged enough to visit studios was the target of his disdainful caricature of studio posing: To their side there would be a tea table; on that there would be hat stand, tea cups, water pipe, and flower vase, and beneath the table a spittoon, by which to demonstrate that the particular person’s bronchial tubes had plenty of phlegm, which they would be obliged continually to spit forth. The person? He would stand or sit; he might have a book clutched in his hand, and he might have hung a huge watch on his jacket. Were we to illumine this with a magnifying glass, we could know even now at what hour he had had the photograph taken, and, since this was a time when flash lighting was not on offer, you would not have had to wonder if it was night-time. However, has there ever been an era when big names did not set the tone? The cognoscenti have long been dissatisfied with the idiocies of this monotony, and that is why there are those in their nakedness pretending to be the men of Jin, or others in the slanting collar of a silk weave pretending to be person X, but they are not many. Lu Xun’s sarcastic description of time-keeping, whose importance is manifest in so many portraits of the period, was also an admission that this tiny biographical detail concerning a photograph’s moment of creation was a common interest. He was no more tolerant towards the behaviour that “not many” adopted in putting on costumes to resemble legendary figures, as well as posing naked. This flippant reference to the legendary eccentricities of third-century literary figures was a masked admission of the nineteenth-century rumours of high-society orgies that photographers had

Categories of content  169 apparently been summoned to record. True or not, such tales were good dirt for smearing on the main target of double images: A fairly common practice is first to take two photographs of yourself, each different in expression and costume. Then you join them together to make one photograph of two selves, which resemble host and guest, or perhaps even master and servant. This is called a “two selves” picture (erwo tu). But, supposing that one self is sitting haughtily, and the other self is kneeling in wretched self-pity before the seated self, this is known by yet another term: “a picture of beseeching oneself” (qiuji tu). This kind of picture, once developed, you would need to inscribe with some poetry or else a song to the tune of something like “The courtyard filled with scents” (Man ting fang), or “Stroking minnows” (Mo yuer). Then you would hang it up in your study. Lu Xun’s captious denunciation of double images is one of the most convincing indications available of how engrained these images had become in everyday life. Whether the classic drama melodies that Lu Xun cited ever appeared in photograph inscriptions is not evident, but it was a regular if incongruous feature in recent fiction, including the translations of Western novels. 50 This kind of imagery, he diagnosed, was a surfeit of sentimentality that literature only helped to deteriorate into narcissism. Not only invoking the expertise of a forensic analyst—who can “illumine” (zhao) details with a magnifying glass—Lu Xun affected the expertise of a clinician: Th. Lipps in his Basic Ethical Questions described the question thus. Whoever is a master turns just as easily into a slave, because if on the one hand he has permitted that he can act as master, he has on the other obviously allowed for his performance as slave. Therefore the moment his authority collapses his failed nerve crashes to earth and he cringes obsequiously before a new master. 51 Lu Xun alluded to Theodor Lipps’ (1851–1914) phenomenological treatise Die ethische Grundfragen (1899), a lengthy speculation on the interchangeable roles of masters and slaves, which he had probably first read in Abe Jirō’s (1883–1959) Japanese translation (Tokyo, 1916). Lipps commanded a considerable following before Freud and others deepened his ideas in better-known analytical landmarks, but knowledge of Lipps is not to be underestimated among readers of Chinese literary magazines. Beijing University had published Yang Changji’s translation in 1919 and a second edition the following year. Chinese students going abroad packed these books in their luggage.52 Lu Xun diagnosed the anxious victims of two selves’ fashion on the basis of Lipps’ ethical pair of egoism versus altruism and the Kantian opposition of autonomy and heteronomy. These ideas, which hardly enjoyed the status of dogma even among literary readers, were even more tenuously relevant to studio life, but they usefully accused the subjects of two selves’ photographs of their delusional surrender to a degenerate level of representation. In the final section of his essay Lu Xun rounded on male subjects impersonating female roles. This was, of course, a different visuality, but Lu Xun linked it to two selves’ photography in order to denounce both all the more effectively. Chinese opera’s star performer Mei Lanfang (Figure 5.7) was the epitome of female impersonation,

170 Communication and thereby the prime target that David Der-wei Wang has discussed at length in the context of Lu Xun’s trenchant attack on confusing gender. Crucial to traditional female impersonation in the theatre and fiction of the Republican era and earlier, gender confusion did not align with reformist ideals of realism. Lu Xun was appalled that traditionalists saw in Mei Lanfang an embodiment of China’s new “national characteristics”, and fretted that an overload of transvestite dramaturgy could derail the modern project of May Fourth enlightenment. 53 Lu Xun’s emphasis on Mei’s photographic existence was probably a unique denunciation of his numerous images in Chinese and international print media. He referred specifically to a photograph of Mei with Rabindranath Tagore during the latter’s visit to China in 1924. Unaware that actors were high on the list of those whom Tagore— another consummate actor—was most interested to meet, 54 Lu Xun interpreted this joint image as a caricature of the Indian internationalist’s hopes for a strong China spited by a female impersonator’s failure to represent the nation as unambiguously virile. The confusion of gender roles reported in a press photograph and the false projection of status in the photography of two selves appeared as one kind of degeneracy echoing another. Lu Xun could not have been unaware of Mei’s touring success in Japan where only a few months earlier he had been honoured with an invitation to perform at Hyōgo prefecture’s Takarazuka Grand Theatre (Takarazuka daigekijō), built for its all-female theatre troupe. Records of such events and Mei’s meetings with Kabuki stars who played female roles circulated on the covers of Japan’s most popular illustrated journals.55 What most vexed Lu Xun was the overt visualization of duality, not necessarily the idea of two selves. Acquaintance with Lipps’ work was, after all, not the most credible grounds on which to pretend that he was uninterested in plural selves. Practically, his dealings with studios suggest a less censorious attitude to early fashionable ideas of two selves. One photograph taken in 1909 after his return from Tokyo is the wellknown upper body portrait showing him besuited, cravatted and de-queued. The studio was Hangzhou’s famous Two Selves Gallery (s 50). Its name may have struck him as portentous, since he inscribed on the reverse of this portrait how he had abandoned medical studies at Sendai and returned to be closer to his family, a confession that in exchanging one life plan for another he had decided to be someone else. 56 How much Lu Xun influenced readers’ views is unknown, except perhaps for when he may have shared his reservations with close acquaintances. The linguistician Liu Bannong (1891–1934)—whose writing on photography is discussed in Chapter 6— changed his name soon after meeting Lu Xun in Beijing in 1917. His early preference Bannong (“Half of me”), used an archaic first-person pronoun nong, still current in popular song-writing but quite distinct from its second-person usage in the southern dialects that he and Lu Xun spoke. 57 Liu, who is credited with inventing modern Chinese’s feminine third-person pronoun taa, 58 modified his name with the homonym nong (“farmer”) soon after his first meeting with Lu Xun, and in 1918, following a New Year’s dinner party that both attended, he published a poem reassessing his existence in sober terms: “upon this earth just the one of me”. 59 Lu Xun’s criticism was in broader circles ineffective. Plays and films featuring double roles even worked against it. Fundamentally, double images in China were unfettered by the representational chronotope that Christopher Pinney analyzes as a peculiarly Western demand of the portrait, and he contextualizes this in the significant popularity that actors playing dual roles have enjoyed in Hindi cinema of a later

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period. One Chinese cinema release that owed its sensational success to a climactic scene created in parallel to the fashion for double images was Zheng Zhengqiu’s (1889–1935) Sisters (Zimei hua, 1934) whose plot’s dichotomies were representative of several films.61 Zheng, a prolific scenarist for Shanghai theatres twenty years earlier, wrote dramas based on the life of Qiu Jin whose role he even played on stage.62 In Sisters he cast Hu Die (1908–1989) to play two sisters separated in infancy and fatefully reunited in adulthood, one now rich, reactionary and married, the other poor, progressive, widowed and applying for the job of wet nurse. Zheng Zhengqiu owed his box office hit to an impeccable rendition of Hu Die’s dual performance. The action climaxed with the sisters’ recriminations and their reconciliation during which solely Hu Die’s face fills the screen as alternately one sister or the other. Zheng Zhengqiu thrust home his message of social injustice upon an audience well versed in portrait photography’s current fashions. Observers of these fashions were also connoisseurs of its techniques, which the illustrated journal Liangyou (1926–1945) and the Kodak Company’s Chinese trade journal Kodak Magazine (Keda zazhi, 1930–1937) repeatedly disseminated in the 1930s, part of the broader technical introductions that William Schaefer has discussed within the modernist tendency to seek out the “novelty and even strangeness of the mundane”63 (Figure 5.14). The enthusiasm for this category of image almost

Figure 5.14 I llustration in Yashuang’s essay “Photographic methods for transforming the individual”, published in Kodak Magazine (Keda zazhi), 4.3 (1933).

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Figure 5.15 Francis Stafford, Photoengraving Department, Commercial Press, Shanghai, c. 1915. Gelatin silver print on paper, 14.9 × 22 cm. Francis E. Stafford photographs, Hoover Institution Library & Archives, © Stanford University.

described portrait photography tout court. Countless experiences of double role play gravitated to their appropriate storage within the private retrospection of photograph albums. Performing doubleness became so banal an act that it is difficult sometimes not to overlook them. Zeng Tongwu’s image (Figure 5.13) is one of several double images of family members collected in the same private album, each apparently created again and again in this idiom as a matter of course. Zeng merged his enthusiasm directly with personal presence. His name Tongwu—a reversal of the word wutong “parasol tree”—is one that only he could have adopted, since it forms with his family name a pun consistent with the double image’s ambiguous temporality: “once accompanied me”. New conditions after 1949 turned any flippant impersonation of social class and its symbols into a risk, but the suppression of such habits was not always immediate. In Wenzhou it took the full force of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to dissuade nostalgic members of the public from visiting studios and disorganizing themselves into a now proscribed dual appearance.64

Producing worlds Even ahead of the Qing collapse in 1911 numerous modernizations and the rise of reformist institutions matched an urge to depict such projects as firmly led by their human engineers in new hierarchies and forms of work. Foreign and colonial models were useful. In 1910, for instance, the Czar’s appointed photographer Sergei

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Figure 5.16 View of Mingxing Films’ main office, Shanghai, 1920s. Gelatin silver print on paper, 30 × 14 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library.

Prokudin-Gorskii (1863–1944) documented a series of Russian industries, including not least tea cultivation and its Caucasus “king of tea”, Liu Junzhou (see Chapter 4), now sunlit among tea bushes as the personification of his industry in a different category of portrait.65 Notably, two creators of the Japanese documentary record, which included comprehensively forethought images of mining, smelting and rail construction, were the ex-samurai Sakuma Hanzō (1844–1897) and the one-time Shinto priest Mishima Tokiwa (1854–1941), who executed this work in between running portrait studios.66 More research will analyze what linked the productions envisioning these industrial environments,67 but the rising ethic to verify China’s industrial progress through visual record was indisputable. Concomitantly, documentary efforts by foreign concerns—in railways, telegraphy, banking, news and publishing—stimulated Chinese modernizers all the more to assume visual control of their own emancipated projects. Photographs that Francis Stafford (1884–1938) made of the photoengraving processes that he supervised during 1909–1915 at Shanghai’s Commercial Press demonstrate this pioneering organization’s highly reflexive vision of how photography now functioned both within and for its control of technical aims, education and public opinion (Figure 5.15). This image’s documentation of how a particular profession’s actors related to their responsibilities, their machines and tools on behalf of a modern enterprise did not depend entirely upon the image’s creator. Stafford, an American graphics expert, created images of work that reflected the priorities of his Chinese colleagues and their employer, the Commercial Press, now an influential leader in the planning, execution and dissemination of many areas of photographic content. Stafford’s photographs often showed his sympathy with depicting the self-reliance of an indigenously managed industry, and his directing of bodies—and machines—differed only slightly from how Chinese photographers and their clients approached the same task for a category of industrial and commercial content that attracts little attention in historical surveys of photography. Its authorship unknown, an image like that of staff at the Mingxing Film studios (Figure 5.16) benefitted yet again from a wide-angle view of surroundings that were

174 Communication indivisible from this group’s identity. Its visual arrangements drew again from theatre, now set to a more sophisticated agenda of documentary realism. In Mingxing’s spacious office, the agents of a thriving cinema industry—including Zheng Zhengqiu seated amid the farthest group—could summon more experience than most in posing before a camera. The image shows multiple interrelationships and levels of status within a group whose members were variously privileged to look at the camera or not to, while everyone’s contrived stasis produced the scene’s narrative of an office at work. One of the most visually arresting commissions of this documentary realism alloyed with studio enchantment was on behalf of railways, the industry that prospered eminently at the intersection of modernization and its visual record. Railway construction in China was not uncontroversial, but railways and news conformed in the expanding and shared enterprise of transport and communication media. The Shanghai–Wusong track followed the route of the telegraph cable erected by Denmark’s Great Northern Telegraph Company, a material sequence established two decades earlier when work on Melbourne harbour constructed first the telegraph and then the railway.68 The industrial emancipation of building the first railway entirely with Chinese expertise proceeded in full partnership with an exhaustive effort to visualize this breakthrough. Rather than succumb to alternatively British and Russian pressure to build—and control—the new Jing Zhang line between Beijing and Zhangjiakou (Kalgan), the Qing government appointed a modernizer from within its own ranks, the engineer Zhan Tianyou (1861–1919). The railway opened in 1909, not long before which Zhan engaged the Tongsheng studio to document the final work and the opening ceremony. Railways were fast becoming a political topic of intense patriotic interest. The Jing Zhang line represented a success story in comparison to similar efforts elsewhere. The deadly rioting that exploded in Sichuan following the financial mismanagement of the Sichuan–Hankou (Chuan-Han) railway in 1911 was one of the accelerants to the revolution soon afterwards. Selected for the first cohort of government students sent abroad in 1872, Zhan Tianyou graduated in civil engineering from Yale, but started life in southern Guangdong. So did the founder of Tongsheng studio, and so too did Chen Zhaochang, the new railway’s Director General, who only a few years before his appointment had composed—or translated—yet another practical treatise for Guangzhou’s hot market of photography guides.69 Albeit only symbolically, Chen appeared in every photograph of the stations, since the names engraved beneath their crenellated eaves are in his writing signed and dated 1906 (Figure 5.17). Calligraphy was the railway’s prediction; photography the rescript of its completion. Such meticulous planning contributed to the huge importance that railways quickly assumed in imagining China’s national revival. Tongsheng photographers created content that turned the commercial into the sublime, co-opting nature’s harsh beauty, Chinese history and patriotic symbolism for a new aesthetic insistence upon economic development. The most dramatic prop that the Tongsheng photographers deployed was the Great Wall, which the railway bisected at the legendary passes of Juyongguan and Badaling. They were probably the first to reclaim what was both a topographical and geographical trope from its frequent use in external perceptions of China—beginning with eighteenth-century engravings in Europe—and to adjust its symbolism to a previously unimaginable mixture of national majesty and modern irrelevance. The black hole of a tunnel entrance

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Figure 5.17 Tongsheng studio, Beijing branch, Guang’anmen Station, Beijing, terminus of the Beijing–Zhangjiakou railway. Gelatin silver print on paper, 27 × 21 cm. Included in the album Images of works on the Beijing Zhangjiakou line (Jing Zhang lugong cuoying), 1909. Courtesy of Shanghai Library.

in a rocky massif mounted by the Wall’s skyline crenellations reported the brutal irony that China’s own engineers had undermined the world’s most famous defence line. The photographer of an even longer view waited for the moment when the thin black line of a train mounting the Juyongguan gradient had arrived amid a luminous patch of scree probably over 1,000 metres away and visible beyond a steep section of Wall in the foreground (Figure 5.18): mobile engineering captured in its uphill haul towards the immobile. The Tongsheng images featuring the Great Wall mark the beginning of its photographic service to a succession of variously tense and benign national narratives. Some 180 photographs showed fourteen stations, numerous line branches, switchbacks, bridges, tunnel entrances, rolling stock and locomotives variously imported from Glasgow and Philadelphia. Group portraits of Zhan Tianyou and his engineering staff show them in the formal array of professional collegiality. Another pose arranged them during their inspection of a section of line, smartly dressed and flanked by perhaps one hundred labourers and foremen, who face the camera with a fascinating gesture of graphic reciprocity, holding pencils above their notepads. Such photographs promoted a re-empowerment of human presence. They advanced beyond what Andrew Jones has memorably characterized as the “neutron bomb” effect that

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Figure 5.18  Tongsheng studio, Beijing branch, train on gradient below Great Wall. Gelatin silver print on paper, 27 × 21 cm. Included in the album Images of works on the Beijing Zhangjiakou line (Jing Zhang lugong cuoying), 1909. Courtesy of Shanghai Library.

occurred when Western photographers five decades earlier exploited slow exposure times to allow Chinese bodies to walk out of consequently unpopulated and purely material views of structures.70 The railway albums were one of many examples of a scopic reordering that introduced viewers to Chinese ingenuity and labour in overt relationships between places, engineering and persons performing their métier invested with new national prestige. And, emphasizing theatrical habits that would become ever more entrenched in photographing professional work, the Tongsheng photographers and their commissioners demanded that all ranks of personnel look vocationally engaged or qualified. They were mostly successful, even co­opting goatherds and camel drivers to stand still in their fortuitous roles as passers-by beside the tracks or under bridges. Some of Tongsheng’s most compelling images are of objects entirely isolated from any human control. Single items of rolling stock were invariably posed squarely and close up. Iron rails present the horizontal logic of railways as surely as clocks, pipes and teacups confer the logic of the studio environment surrounding human subjects (Figure 5.19). In fact, a short notice by Tongsheng inside the railway album covers states: “our firm specializes in enlarging costume portraits”. Perhaps still incredulous that its staff had spent early autumn tramping the snowy foothills of Mongolia, the studio vaunted its skill at the most familiar level of its activities. Significantly, then, quite different visual aims merged. For an image of a livestock car, the photographer

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Figure 5.19 Tongsheng studio, Beijing branch, “Car for pigs”, truck marked with the railway’s Chinese name, its Western acronym (Peking Kalgan Railway), and the number 193, given also in a commercial shorthand for numbers. Gelatin silver print on paper, 27 × 21 cm. Included in the album Images of works on the Beijing Zhangjiakou line (Jing Zhang lugong cuoying), 1909. Courtesy of Shanghai Library.

awaited the sun’s optimal height to gain almost shadowless illumination. The pitiless focus on physical surface produced an intensity that features also in contemporary studio portraits—Li Hongzhang’s (Figure 6.5) is an excellent example. In winning foreground effects, the railway photographer was also indifferent to random clutter in the view’s farthest recesses. The image gained its simple but powerful efficacy from a perfect vertical alignment between one single surface of the truck and the glass plate of its reception, the paper for its printing and digital reproduction in this book. The potential disruptions of three-dimensional veracity have been minimized, and more sensibly fitted to the rectangular format of their reproduction on an album page. Besides, the truck side is in this instance a documentary medium, marked with information in two languages and two numbering systems. Studios were the primary agents of many more projects to record similar feats of railway engineering throughout the first half of the twentieth century. A studio in Jinan (s 264) took charge of photographing the new Yellow River Bridge in 1911, while, three decades later, in a more humdrum task of administration that nevertheless recalls one of Tongsheng’s emphases, a Hangzhou studio (s 192) photographed all the personnel for the Zhejiang–Jiangxi railway. The damage inflicted by war on many

Figure 5.20 Unknown photographer, Changjiang Bridge during construction, October, 1956. From Wuhan daqiao gongcheng ju, ed., The Wuhan Changjiang bridge (Wuhan Changjiang daqiao), Beijing, 1957.

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Categories of content  179 of these new structures after 1937 was appalling. Mao Yisheng’s (1896–1989) Qiantang bridge stood intact for barely three months in 1937 before the engineer himself supervised the explosions to blow it up ahead of the Japanese army’s advance—a patriotic destruction with its own poignant photographic record.71 When Mao and other engineers repaired war damage and began new projects visual documentation remained a crucial component of their execution. China’s first bridge over the Yangzi at Wuhan completed in 1957 materialized an unprecedented communication artery across the natural division between north and south China (Figure 5.20). Zhan Tianyou’s earlier involvement in its planning—when Edinburgh’s Forth Bridge was still the primary model—is a biographical continuity that also matched later efforts to create a visual record that was also aesthetically interesting. Exceeding the visions of previous engineering, that interest was open to investments from a temporal domain hitherto captured only in urban modernity: night-time. The Yangzi Bridge album featured also midnight views of floodlit piers, building yards and tugs hauling the light trails of slow exposure from midstream to shore.

Producing nature The resources for images of outdoor scenery varied across a vast spectrum. Shanghai, as William Schaefer has discussed, provided a paradigm in its mutual penetrations of urban space, photography and literary modernism.72 Poor villages and revolutionary bases were among photographers’ other important destinations, but only recently has their work started to gain attention in respect of these individuals’ careers and their contribution to a visual heritage assessed beyond only its historical and ideological worth. One indisputably dominant category was the natural—perhaps eventually the “hyper-natural”—because its symbolic value in the causes of nationalism, patriotic ideology and military defence against apparently impossible odds was inestimable, and because print media distributed these images with increasing effect. The keenness of numerous photographers to diarize their journeys to and from distant photogenic objects certainly enlivened the visual delivery of sites belonging in Chinese territory but located almost inaccessibly far away. Less arduous efforts produced nevertheless as much visual excitement in photographing the solid building investments along a commercial waterfront. “Landscape”, long used in photography history and criticism, is an imperfect description, one that geography sometimes disciplines its practitioners not to use.73 Natural scenery in China was so overloaded with expectation, long fostered by one cardinal painting theme, shanshui (“hills and streams”), that photographers capturing epochal rock formations faced little critical challenge if they proposed facile confusions between painting and photography. Chen Zhaochang, photography instructor and writer of station names, was unusual in trying to emancipate natural surroundings with the more neutral set phrase “mountains and rivers” (shanchuan), but the dominance of painting aesthetics in this category of content was otherwise powerful and enduring. Chinese photographers’ interest in “landscape” took root in means of presentation that are often disregarded. Press advertisements had long urged readers to buy images of Hangzhou’s West Lake.74 Peep-show operators soon met a popular demand that famous views should be tinted photographs, and abandoned paper, refitted their viewing boxes with framed photographs, informing photographers of the specific frame size that they required.75 Attention to the scenery around Hangzhou, Nanjing and

180 Communication Suzhou expanded after rail had reached them all by 1909, an instance of the transnational railway theme that has rewarded many photography historians studying geographical imagination.76 Studios led the promotion of this content. When the Baoji studio showcased its products (Figure 3.2), its list opened with “new style” panoramic views of Hangzhou’s West Lake and Shanghai’s waterfront, respectively the allure of deep cultural memory and international commercial modernity. Many Shanghai studios ferried staff and equipment across the Huangpu River in order to photograph the city’s changing skyline above its trade and passenger wharves. Detai’s view of 1898 (Figure 5.21) was a production that Baoji now aimed to displace. Another competitor, Gongtai (Figure 3.4), produced a view of the same range and from the same position.77 Most of this view’s buildings and ships belonged to foreign owners, but the same material stood or floated as the aesthetic capital of a wider Chinese viewing public, because chimneys, spires, water towers, watersides and their street furniture had featured regularly in illustrated journalism that relayed them as arguments for the enhancement of urban life. Photographers also returned from forays into the interior with majestic views of natural scenery in order to legitimate a baffling range of new agendas for national renewal and reform, many of them considerably more abstract than the programmes of building, for example, railways and waterfronts. One early pioneer was Huang Yanpei (1878–1965) whose contacts in politics, industry and journalism qualified him in broader efforts to reform educational programmes.78 Leading a school and college inspection tour in the Lower Yangzi region in 1914, Huang combined his responsibilities for education in the Jiangsu provincial government with loosely defined credentials as a travelling reporter on behalf of Shenbao. Crucially, keen to photograph—and to pose—he recruited the professional photographer Lü Yishou as one of his travel companions. The itinerary was only vaguely planned, and included Mount Lu and other scenic mountains not situated on the direct route from one school to the next.79 Even so, the effort to create a progressive visual record joining heterogeneous purposes through consistently repeated links to geographical spaces and their cultural referents was highly original. Imminent passage through a legendary defile on Mount Huang (Huangshan) gained depth through Huang’s inscription describing this ascent on the route to a famous religious site (Figure 5.22). The sense of arduous pilgrimage raised Huang’s role as pathfinder through high terrain and cultural heritage. When the party descended and photographed the Fuchun River upstream from Hangzhou, they framed their pedagogical inquiries within this region’s long afterglow in Eastern Han history, and incidentally heralded the popularity of this stretch of water as a hotspot for amateur photography expeditions. Published in diary form, Huang reported his mission’s aims in terms that photographers could easily emulate: “to examine the objects of nature, to investigate social conditions, to seek friendships ... to tour, to question, to lecture, to photograph”.80 Huang’s expedition was avowedly a programme of self-cultivation. The photograph in Figure 5.22 is an anomalous artefact, linked to the project that gave rise to it and yet entirely isolated as an image that Huang or his editors eventually decided not to publish. This mounted edition belonged to Huang’s private series, to each item of which he added recollections. That Huang nevertheless inscribed this one suggests the important role that inscription still played in notions of the image’s production and ontology ahead of secondary concerns of its referential interest and

Figure 5.21 Detai (Tuck Tai) studio, panorama of Bund, 1898. Gelatin silver print on paper, 222 × 20 cm. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

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Figure 5.22 Huang Yanpei (1878–1965) or Lü Yishou, view of Tianmenkan, Anhui, photographed during a fact-finding expedition through the eastern Yangzi region, May 1914. Gelatin silver print on paper, 21 × 15 cm. Courtesy of Shanghai Library.

its publicity. Rewriting the experience of crossing a defile in the Huangshan massif — Huang dramatized it as breaking into another world—exceeded visualizing it.81 Even if some of this awe in the face of nature’s transformative power remained as Huang’s private reserve, his project still intimated the positive reception that this category of content soon evoked more widely. In the same year that Huang conducted his inspection visits, the Commercial Press started publishing the highly successful series China’s scenery (Zhongguo mingsheng). Huang’s narration of his experiences on the road met exactly the requirements of the Commercial Press, which now invited him to take charge of a volume devoted to Hangzhou’s West Lake, the first of several collaborations between the Press and Huang and Lü Yishou to photograph culturally significant destinations throughout China. Nine volumes were on sale by 1915. Depictions of West Lake spoke eloquently to national dignity and reformist concerns now emerging along its shoreline in one spatial and architectural expression after another. Hangzhou’s Erwo studio was a forerunner in 1910 or sooner with its first edition of views of West Lake photographed from positions established long before as classical by customary sojourning and good or bad verse. The work was among the earliest to answer a studio’s function as the fabricant of both subject visions and local memories. It also represented a locally specific mass of imagery that inspired Huang Yanpei to create familiarity with other large natural objects in zones where no one had yet recorded them. The Lake’s sacral status was constantly enmeshed

Categories of content  183 in its successful exploitation for commerce and tourism. Liangyou readers now accepted West Lake among both the southeast region’s and the nation’s most inalienable graphic continuums. The magazine was prompt to report the outrage following a riot by disenfranchised rickshaw pullers who heaved parked motor cars into the water.82 Commercial exploitation added lustre to projects devoted to making China’s scenery familiar and meaningful, but paradoxically it also inspired efforts to make visual creativity resistant to powerful publishing interests. For example, Liu Bannong’s unpublished image of West Lake floats ethereally below a surface more sharply defined by his inscription and his personal seal (Figure 5.23). Inscribing photographs fixed their status irreversibly on graphical, cultural and social circuits that were manifestly Chinese; it also reserved for the image the appearance of a unique status distinct from that expected for one of multiple editions. Liu’s inscription recalls the distant stand that he usually adopted towards commercial publishing and journalism, which by contrast comprised for Huang Yanpei a way of life. Liu’s reflexive commentary emphasized that trial and error and all sorts of adversity were forceful contingencies in assuring visual content’s actual result: Morning Mist on West Lake: Capturing a misty scene is hard; capturing a misty scene on West Lake is even harder. I wasted fifteen exposures before managing to obtain this scroll. Bannong; Liu. The signature and the seal in the style of a painter was a form adopted by many photographers, but Liu’s material references are the most original. “Exposures” (jiaopian) are undeniably the filmic wastage of photographic effort, but a “scroll” (zheng) is from the lexicon of painting. This was a rare confession of technical competence on the surface of a photograph, and, even though it followed the common urge to evoke the aesthetic terms of painting, it more aptly fitted Liu’s usual advocacy to practice photography without attempting to obscure the medium in imitation of others. The most prolific exponent of a practice that did make photography coterminous with painting was Liu’s contemporary Lang Jingshan (1892–1995). His long career and systematic recycling of separate outdoor views into larger combinations granted him a dominant reputation for a morphological creative style that became as definitive as his photographs’ content. The most recognizable of these featured mountains whose successive processes of visual manufacture—collecting images during long upland expeditions and intricate darkroom techniques—were no less important than the symbolic content of a new orographical patriotism. Lang Jingshan’s own favourite image of a composite view of Huangshan appears most frequently with his and the painter Ma Gongyu’s inscriptions (Figure 5.24). Other editions he submitted to numerous competitions beginning in 1934, the year that he began to build his reputation on his trademark technique of assembling and printing images from separate negatives.83 He included the Huangshan photograph, now titled Tree shadow and mountain light (Shuying shanguang), in an exhibition publication to celebrate the Daguerrean centenary in 1939. However frequently he changed them, his dualistic titles gestured invariably to his combinatory darkroom technique, and perhaps this small rhetorical structure was also important in his creative thinking. Not one haptic report, the view of Huangshan assembled qualities whose referents in the natural world of this massif were ectopic isolates. In an English preface to his selection, Lang stressed his aim to convert mechanical processes to artistic results, and admitted to borrowing the structures of his images from paintings.84

Figure 5.23 Liu Bannong (1891–1934), West Lake, inscribed by the photographer, probably 1931. Gelatin silver print on paper, 43 x 16 cm. Shanyin Museum. Courtesy of China Photographers Association, Beijing.

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Categories of content  185

Figure 5.24 Lang Jingshan (1892–1995), Huangshan peaks and trees, dated 1936, with later inscription (1937) by Ma Gongyu (1890–1969). Gelatin silver print on paper. ­Unknown collection. Courtesy of China Photographers Association, Beijing.

186 Communication Critics and historians identify numerous correspondences between Lang Jingshan’s photography and China’s vast painting canon.85 Lang was invariably delighted to be cast as a painter—the signature to his Huangshan image uses a common painter’s expression to mark its status as authorially “produced” (zhi)—but he was entirely honest in admitting that he had drawn his major inspiration to pursue composite methods from photography, notably the “figural photographs made from 1848 onwards by the Swedish [sic]”. The reference indicated convincingly Oscar Rejlander (Swedish-born, 1813–1875) and Henry Peach Robinson (1830–1901), Britain’s two most prolific exponents of this often controversial art in the 1850s. Lang cited them to legitimate his own technique, which he defined with the textile analogy of “assembled brocades” (jijin), posting an English description to Britain’s Royal Photographic Society.86 Beside other visual material discussed in this chapter Lang’s methods paralleled the assiduity with which studios and amateur photographers pursued visualizations of duality. Lang’s majestic views were similarly fictional, and, in another notable parallel with two selves’ photography, he devoted considerable effort to popularize his techniques to those among his public who wished also to practice them. His elevation to the century’s deanship of “assembled brocades” was perhaps not his true aspiration, but he certainly earned this authority to the extent that this category of photograph commanded so much attention that anyone else’s production of similar material is overlooked. When China’s worst national emergency of the twentieth century finally broke out in 1937 the editors of Liangyou pressed into service once more—and not

Figure 5.25 Unattributed, composite image of aeroplanes and Great Wall, Liangyou, 131 (November 1937).

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187

for the last time—the Great Wall’s symbolic function as the frontier of patriotic resistance. They did so with a composite image of biplanes traversing its ancient stonework (Figure 5.25).

Conclusion So much that was photographable confirms at least that each kind of image drew its meaning from the exchange between familiarity and esteem. Reactions, however, were not uniform. Unassuming folk inserted their double portrait year after year in family albums, while one critic called this category of image rubbish. Lu Xun’s exceptional critique was an antagonistic diagnosis of the degrees to which photographers and clients interfered in order to pre-empt jointly the photographic result. Liu Bannong’s confession that he wasted a roll of film before serendipity and patience revealed a satisfactory outcome was also an admission that camera technology and not human intelligence was in charge. Different categories of content exerted a gravitational pull upon their commissioners and creators, and its effect was invariably to insert meaning through levels of intervention varying between rescriptive commentary on the portrait, performative rehearsal for views of social cohesion, technical expertise to extract one image from multiple moments of capture and graphical overlays. Attitudes expected and confirmed that images were the result of any of these gestures or their combinations. Familiarity and esteem greeted individual and group worth, breakthroughs in the advent of modernity, mountains and lakes that almost everyone could name. And, not as any uniquely Chinese outcome, photography’s machinic function compressed light, distance and sensuous surfaces into results whose evocations were never dismissible as absolutely predictable editions of the familiar. The tension between these opposites sustained critical interest in photographic content. If there were factors differentiating China from anywhere else, they were the interventions that surviving samples of material from China provide, but, in an inescapable return to an opening point, their results only confirmed a tension noticed elsewhere too.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Panofsky ([1936, 1947] 1995): 93. Bourdieu et al. ([1965] 2007): 24, 57. Barthes (1980): 18, 87 (nos 2 & 22). Nakatani (2010): 91. Cited at Chen et al. (1987): 24. Wu (1990): 7.207–208. ningli ruyou zhi xuan biyi yu ao, inscribed on the edition located in the Palace Museum, Beijing (no. 00008449), viewed on 16 November 2018. “Two verses autographed on my portrait taken with the Western method” (Zi ti xifa suozhao xiaoying er jueju), Shenbao, 6 April 1889 [jichou 3/7]: 9. Godley (1994); Wang (1997): 49–80. Wang (1997): 68. Chou (2007): 423. Douglas ([1970] 1996): 72–91. Gerth (2003): 69; Wu (2016): 92–99; Cheng (1998): 128–142. Zeng (2000): 114. Shenbao, 9 May 1923: 1. Callahan (2006a): 181; on humiliation in English and American history, see Callahan (2006b).

188 Communication 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Lao zhaopian, 12 (1999): 94–95. Godley (1994); Wang (1997); Wang (1999); Gerth (2003): 68–121. Lynn (1928): 92; Chen (1985): 31. Wu (2016): 85–123. See Yian zhuren, “Students abroad return in a changed appearance” (Liuxuesheng gaizhuang guilai), in the collection Hujiang shangye shijing ci, at Gu (1996): 109. See numerous examples in Yeh (2006). Feng (1990–1992): vol. 1, 2. From a verse series by Feng Jiaji, an academy instructor at Huayang in the 1890s, at Lin (1986): 90. Shanghai meigui, 22 March 1928: 2. Judge (2008): 217–219. “My journey since sixth month, sixth day” (Liu liu sicheng), first published in 1934 in Wu Yue chunqiu, supplement to the Hangzhou newspaper Dongnan ribao, at Guo (1987): 119. “Inscribed on my portrait in male dress” (Zi ti xiaozhao nanzhuang), at Nagata & Wen (2007): 58. Dongxuejie zhi yijun guomin, “Tale of a Patriotic Daughter” (Aiguo nüer chuanqi), in Xinmin congbao (huibian), 1904: 771–772. For female exceptions, see Judge (2008): 187–229. For a study exploring Chinese actors’ and dramatists’ photographic adventures in Japan, see Chen (2013). Wang (2003): 144. Guo (1984): 157. Shenbao, 4 April 1896 [bingshen 2/22]: 4. Zhou (1907): 75–77. Shenbao, 6 April 1889 [jichou 3/7]: 9. See Shen Zhou’s (1427–1509) inscription at Clunas (1997a): 96. From Chen Qiao’s series Shenjiang baiyong, published in 1887, at Gu (1996): 83. From Luo Han’s series, published in 1915 by Hankou zhongxi bao, at Lei (1997): 2671. See the portrait attributed to Hu Xigui (1858–1890), dated 1879 and entitled Yunfeng qiuji tu, at Zhongguo gudai shuhua jiandingzu (1986–2001): vol. 23, jing series 1-6546. For the foot-binding abolitionist Xie Changda’s (1848–1934) image, see Suzhou (2001): vol. 1, 20. For this print, also tinted, and now located in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, see Roberts (2013): 68; the NPM also holds an untinted edition; on Dong’an, see Lynn (1928): 83–88; Chen (1985): 31. Chen et al. (1987): 63–65; Chen & Xu (2011): 116–121. Wickison (1924): 122. Chéroux (1998). Bajac (2005): 72–73; Omuka (2001); Weisenfeld (2002). Wu (1986): 139. Reproduced and displayed at Mei Lanfang Memorial Hall, Beijing, viewed on 16 November 2018. Lin (1995): 4, note 4. Shen ([1928] 1995): 190–191. See Mo yuer opening a translation (from Japanese) of Jules Verne’s Deux ans de Vacances (1888), published by Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and Luo Pu (1876–1949) in 1902, at Xinmin congbao (huibian), 1904: 772. “On Types of Photographs” (Lun zhaoxiang zhi lei), first published 1925, reissued in the collection The Tomb (Fen, 1927), at Lu ([1925] 1981): vol. 1, 183–184. Boully (1995): nos 1191–1192. Wang (2003): 133–135. Dutta & Robinson (1995): 249. For example, the weekly Asahigraph, 3.20 (12 November 1924). For the image and its mount, see Zhou (2005): 17; inscription reproduced at Beijing Lu Xun Bowuguan (1976): no. 16. This first-person usage occurs in the opening song of Street angel (Malu tianshi, dir. Yuan Muzhi, 1937).

Categories of content 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

189

Liu (1995): 36–38. “New Years Eve” (Chuxi), at Xin qingnian/La jeunesse, 4.3 (1918): 48–49; Xu (1989): 45. Pinney (1997). Bao (2015): 186; Shen (2005): 94–100. Xia (2009). Keda zazhi, 4.3 (1933): 17–18; 6.2 (1935): 17–18; 6.6 (1935): 14; Liangyou, 90 (15 July 1934): 11; Schaefer (2017): 42–44. Wenzhou (1998): 1747. Tea factory in Chakvi (Chainaia fabrika v Chakvie); Library of Congress edition accessible at https://www.loc.gov. Tucker (2003): 350, 358, pls 46–48, 52; Ozawa (1997): 328–329. For an important beginning in the Netherlands East Indies, see Pemberton (2009). Baark (1997): 81–84; Briggs & Burke ([2009] 2010): 133–134. Twenty-five essays on photography techniques (Sheying shu ershiwu zhang), cited in Chen’s preface to Wu (1907). Jones (2010): 608. https://historicbridges.org, visited 29 January 2021. Schaefer (2017). Hirsch & O’Hanlon (1995): 13. Shenbao, 14 August 1880 [gengchen 7/9]: 5; Shenbao, 2 May 1886 [bingxu 3/29]: 4; Shenbao, 1 September 1891 [xinmao 7/28]: 4; Shenbao, 6 March 1894 [jiawu 1/29]: 8. A Ying (1957). Schwartz & Ryan (2003): esp. Introduction. Shanghai Library (2007): 213–216. Chuansha (1990): 964–965; Shanghai Library (2007): 310; Roberts (2013): 60–61. Shanghai Library (2007): 101, 161, 310–323. Huang (1914): 2. Huang (1914): 157. Liangyou, 36 (March 1929): 14. Hsiao (2004): 133–143; Liu (2015): 8–13; Wu (2016): 176–187. Lang (1939b). Shea (2013): 65; Wu (2016): 161–187. Brief explanation for assembling brocades (Jijin jianshuo), cited at Hsiao (2004): 135– 136; Lang (1942); also at Birnie Danzker et al. (2004): 154–158; On Lang’s methods, see also Schaefer (2017): 170–176.

6

Circuits of communication

Photography realigned objects from private viewing within increasingly public scopic regimes of circulation. The image of a woman, framed inside extra hand-painted patterns, presents her as an object of consumption but also as a discerning consumer of fashion (Figure 6.1). It existed at the shifting intersection of entertainment, romance, prostitution, and gender, subjects that have recently stimulated full-length studies.1 Its function determined its presentation in a frame whose reverse moulding still holds a glass mirror. This individual’s visitors encountered first this image at her doorway. If she was available, her image was visible; if not, the viewer met only the mirror. Reflection was a complimentary gesture. Framed mirrors in large dimensions were by now fashionable gifts in business dealings.2 Photographs’ increasingly public roles drove practitioners, theorists and ordinary users’ considerations of where to distribute them. New visual investments generated new agency for individuals, photography associations and photographic societies whose varied publications, exhibitions and other publicity defined their status and identity through particular habits and ambitions of communication. Content was one issue, but how, where and why its originators communicated it was another. The photograph of this unknown female subject shows a visualization that popular publishing also circulated, sometimes in reproductions showing similar fetishes of overpainting. This chapter looks first at gifts of the image between agents whose obligations in sentimental and political spheres of communication often shared common patterns. The following section considers the presentation of documentary reports, other ostentatious forms of communication that the modernization of print media gradually absorbed. Two sections explore what group associations implied for communicating the aims of photography and magnifying the enthusiasm to view and discuss photographs at unprecedented levels of visibility. Discussion itself generated circuits, and these channelled the contentions over “art photography” and what some deemed its compromised status in either trade literature or the newsprint of mass consumption. Finally, the dominant Shanghai “mediasphere” of Alexander Des Forges’ characterization communicated a circular obsession with lifestyle within which photography was yet another field to be knowledgeably updated, yet also turned into the core reference defining and defined by lifestyle. Observant moderns were those entrepreneurs who owned—or hired—cameras with which to promote both urban life and experiences of China’s interior for unabating scrutiny. Communication was not a principle that constellated the various concerns of this chapter into a pattern of mutual relevance, but it was the factor that accounts for their different roles in what constitutes photography’s living history. DOI: 10.4324/9781003086345-10

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Figure 6.1 Unknown photographer, unknown subject. Gelatin silver print on paper with paper mount, pigment tints, glass and wood frame, mirror mounted on reverse, 27.6 × 20.3 cm. Private collection.

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Gift objects Early gifts of photograph portraits followed the international conventions of cartes de visite, albeit adjusted to local habits. Many clients secured images in a card format that they did not necessarily give away. Even if—or because—they presented the image to themselves, they added extra adornment and ceremony. According to a fictional diary of 1900, one man and his fiancée posed for a joint portrait at the Yaohua studio—literature’s favourite predestinatory site—and, upon delivery, one member of this future partnership hung his edition over his bed and above a lavish presentation of flowers and fruit.3 Sensitive to photographs’ gift purposes, the studio industry stressed material aspects of the image and its presentation. The Shitai studio was not unusual in stressing that it produced images on stone, ivory and silk.4 New frames, embroidery and colour tints added further welcome complexity. Some twenty 1930s Beijing businesses employed two hundred craftsmen to make mirror- and picture-frames.5 Appealing as far as possible across the entire human sensorium, some studios sprinkled mounts with scent.6 One particularly lavish mount provided by Suzhou’s Ruiji studio references is instead saturated with symbols of longevity and resilience (Figure 6.2). The many mounts imported from Japan account for the description taizhi (“table card”, Japanese daishi). Among five manufacturers of mounts in Tokyo, the oldest, Matsumoto, dated to 1912.7 Also exploiting global fashions, the Kodak Company’s bilingual catalogues, issued from its sales branch in Shanghai, urged the studio trade to use mount cards and folders whose barely contingent descriptions—the Guildford (geertefu), the Epsom (yibusheng)—must have been familiar only to ardent enthusiasts. The mount surrounding a woman photographed in Suzhou (Figure 4.4) resembles the Reynaldo (lainaerdu).8 The impulse to inscribe photographs probably determined the general preference for plain mounts. The possessors of the earlier Ruiji image chose a mount featuring traditional auspicious motifs and the pseudo-individual touch of the studio owner’s seal, and then truly individualized these layers of production by gluing on the roundel image of a senior matriarch. This process of homemade adjustment is one indication of how the possessors of an image exploited a studio’s services to re-present themselves in the developing hierarchy of family regeneration. Shown on the cover of this book is another instance of this recycled referentiality in a family portrait that included an image of the previous generation executed in the same pose, deliberately emphasizing how the patriarch of now was the infant of then. In the context of adjustments made or planned at home, the apparent rarity of using albums to store images of family and friends may be significant. The diplomat Zeng Jize (1839–1890) is one of the first to mention albums, but his usage of them was far from personal. His diary of his stay in London during 1879–1886 refers repeatedly to sorting photographs into albums—in between perusing others containing, for instance, the sights of Siam and the political elites of Britain and Japan.9 The emergence of dedicated photography journals in the 1920s enabled the display of domestic intimacy, which included significantly acts of reading and looking. One example, which is another expression of the illusory “two selves” theme (Figure 6.3), attests how albums were now valid objects of social exchange and comment. The retrieval of quite remarkable personal albums documenting individual Chinese life journeys is the result of only recent efforts.10 Otherwise, despite growing recognition of the album’s

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Figure 6.2  Ruiji Studio, Suzhou, unknown subjects. Gelatin silver print on paper with pigment additions, 20 x 15.5 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou.

images’ custodianship in China must pay at least equal attention to merging old and new images in the transgenerational combinations discussed above. Beyond whatever conventions reigned at home, distribution of a subject’s representation sprang from two major impulses: sentiment and politics. Masses of female portraits made in the first fifty years of photography emerged on a frantic market

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Figure 6.3 Shen Jiahe, Single body, double presence (Er wei yiti). From Huachang yingkan, 21 (June 1937).

Beyond whatever conventions reigned at home, distribution of a subject’s representation sprang from two major impulses: sentiment and politics. Masses of female portraits made in the first fifty years of photography emerged on a frantic market where individual fantasies fed the demand not only for female presence but also for its images. Not all the subjects in images of women working in the broadest definition of entertainment were courtesans, but prostitution was, as Gail Hershatter puts it, an almost inexhaustible metaphor with which urban and suburban constituencies engaged over a long period, variously fixing and destabilizing the female image in an endless courtship of passions, fears and suspicions. Central to any of these perceptions were the ways in which female images’ distributors made them available. Courtesans commonly left the negative of their photograph at the studio, and their control over its reproduction, display and retail was largely passive. Nevertheless, the possibility existed for a courtesan to present her photograph to a suitor of her own choice (Figure 6.4), and perhaps these gifts comprised images distinct from those available on the common market. This newspaper report of such a gift shows a telling emotional climax: the photographic image obsessively gazed upon rather than the subject herself. However, the charm of personal gifts had to contend with images of women in all sorts of press reports, a major function of which was to set fashion standards; another, Hershatter points out, was to showcase dress in ways that displayed knowledge

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Figure 6.4 Scene entitled “Visions of Shanghai society: The Courtesan grants control of her portrait to a client”, published in 1909 in the Shanghai newspaper Tuhua ribao, 138.

of the modern.12 The best-selling album of five hundred celebrity beauties, which caught women’s depictions in the transition from old to new régimes is a good example.13 Published probably in 1911, Portraits of graces from Shanghai was one of several similar productions by the Youzheng Bookstore (Youzheng shuju), founded in 1904 and one of the first companies to adopt the collotype process for successful commercial printing. Collotype arrived during the 1870s, another introduction by those indefatigable suppliers of European reprographic technologies, the Jesuit priests at Tushanwan, who used it principally to make images of the Holy Mother.14 No photograph in Portraits of graces recalls directly Jesus’ mother, but an implication of her form was not superfluous. The number of women posing with small infants is striking, and it may have reflected recognition of the high circulation rates that religious imagery enjoyed. Women also posed in more emancipated arrangements, such as ensconced in an aeroplane or multiplied as a “two selves” portrait.15 One stands on an ocean esplanade dictating a letter to her literate double seated at a desk. Letters enclosing photographs were another rising medium whose volume boomed with the lucrative publication of prescriptive guides to love letters (qingshu zhinan), slim volumes that featured more photographs of fashionable women on their covers.16 Images reproduced in the press functioned in the anonymized strategies of publicity that courtesans adopted throughout the Republican period. The rarer survival

196 Communication of a “lover’s pennant” (yanzhi, Figure 6.1), shows remediation on the lesser scale of overpainting. Yet even these distinctive marks did not differ from the common handmade embellishments that publishers reproduced with the photographs that film and theatre stars submitted to the illustrated press. For example, the inexpensive Third Day Pictorial (Sanri huabao, 1926–1927), a single fold of four pages, carried dozens of black and white reproductions of actors and actresses reworked with similarly individual additions of craft. Sharing and exchanging photographs were social transactions within which political representation was a key driving factor. Numerous Chinese diplomats and exiles travelling predominantly to Europe, America and Japan kept diaries in which they recorded portrait exchanges with ministers, presidents, royalty and other public figures. The portrait photograph was no minimal token of presence. During a sojourn to Woolwich, when Guo Songtao visited Charles Gordon, erstwhile leader of Chinese troops against the Taiping armies, he insisted during tea on also inspecting photographs of Gordon attired in his Chinese military costume.17 The etiquette of presenting images also de-escalated tensions. A maharajah whose servants vexed the visitor Kang Youwei (1858–1927) by insisting that he sit on the floor, later mollified him with a request for his photograph.18 The political and erotic were confused. The exterior of studios, discussed in Chapter 3, often featured political leaders beside female celebrities. A more easily exchangeable category of communication was the cabinet card whose early distribution was coeval with the rise of Western-style statuary. One commentator recalled the commercially distributed photograph as a reformist modification to the cult dedicated to the military modernizer Zuo Zongtang (1812–1885): A Westerner made a sculpted image of Wen Xiang [Zuo Zongtang]. Today this is worshipped at his shrine in Changsha; its eyes are as bright as a living person’s, and their stare is most disconcerting. But its moustache is slightly short, unlike in the photographs of Wen Xiang, which are now sold on the market. Until recently, throughout the year they redressed the sculpture in top-quality clothes for the season. Thus, in winter a zibeline jacket or one in dark fox. Later, a thief stole these, so they shifted to using less pricey items.19 The up-to-date reader of this gossip grasped that good citizens paid for photographs distributed by studio outlets. A plastic representation of the subject in his ancestral setting was by definition limited to one location—stuck in tradition—as well as ignominiously dressed in the “less pricey items” that no figure of high status would consent to wear for a portrait photograph. One example corresponding to this description is an image of Li Hongzhang created by the Baoji studio (Figure 6.5). Li’s portraits made in China and abroad exemplify as many varied codes of representation as the studios that he visited. For example, a portrait made at the studio of Eugène Pirou is a fashionable Parisian product within the many keepsakes that Li distributed during his journeys. Apparently, the arms manufacturer Friedrich Alfred Krupp hung his above his bed. 20 The Baoji image confronts the viewer with the millimetric detail of an undulating pelt below Li’s piercing stare. Exquisitely illuminated, this is probably one of the most arresting photographs of a fur garment that most of us have ever seen. Although an object of private exchange, a photograph like this was also for the open market. Its standard of execution indicates unequivocally the importance that government figures and their audiences attached to a degree of quality that only the best operators in the modern visual economy could provide. Zhang Jian, chief patron

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Figure 6.5 Baoji Studio, portrait of Li Hongzhang. Gelatin silver print on paper, 16.5 × 10.5 cm. Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen—Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden (RV-A166-36).

198 Communication of the Erwu Studio in Nantong, was a Baoji client, and the diarist Sun Baoxuan, Li Hongzhang’s nephew-in-law, who exalted the relentless social hum from Baoji’s waiting room, counted its owner Ouyang Shizhi among his friends. 21 The intimate quality of Li Hongzhang’s pose was consistent with the work that the studio later did for the stars of Chinese cinema. Even the highest power-brokers responded to the enthusiastic scrutiny of their images in a newly forming public domain. In 1904, the empress dowager Cixi undertook a visual launch quite without precedent. She possessed by now her own capital of imperial imagery, created mostly by the young Manchu grandee Xunling, an amateur photographer in her close court circle. The previous year he had completed a series of portraits of Cixi: enthroned; surrounded by retainers; embarked on lakes; born again in a karmic vision of Buddhism’s Western Paradise. Cixi presented one of the more formal poses to the queen of Prussia, and its deliverers bore the holy object to the Tianjin dockside in its own yellow-roofed palanquin. Even more radically, the palace instructed the Youzheng Bookstore in Shanghai and its branch in Beijing— the same company that would later publish Portraits of graces from Shanghai—to release Cixi’s photographs for commercial sale. The newspaper Shibao—co-owned with Youzheng—ran an advertisement campaign from October 1904 to December of the following year to encourage potential purchasers. All these organs—newspapers, bookshops and publishing houses—were in business before the final collapse of Qing power in 1911, and Youzheng’s collotype reproduction was run by Japanese experts whom the palace negotiators approached first. Not content to exploit only one medium, Cixi also commissioned an easel portrait (based on photographs) and sent it to the St Louis exhibition of 1904. 22 One photograph taken in the United States (Figure 0.1) shows the painting’s official escort en route to St Louis during a rest to discuss whether everyone understood what a camera was. Government figures such as Li Hongzhang pioneered a constant resort to studios to ensure that photographic presence was its political equivalent, and new press outlets distributed images even more rapidly. The example of Yuan Shikai (Figure 4.8) shows how he and the photographer stage-directed photographs to make his garden recall a studio setting, and variously donated these to chosen recipients and supplied them to publishers. Yet, the notion of the gift still held powerful sway. When Cao Kun (1862–1938), one of Yuan Shikai’s protégés, beat off his competitors to become briefly president of the Republic in 1923, the authorities celebrated his controversial inauguration with a medal bearing a transfer of his photograph (Figure 6.6). Yuan had been treated to the same honour ten years earlier. 23 These were early uses of the portrait medal, an iconological unit that stored its power in the presupposition that the wearer had gained it by merit. It was furthermore precedent to the more famous rise of the “Mao badge” whose frenzied manufacture—likewise based on photographs—and distribution in the 1960s swamped a later political gift economy in a scale of excess never previously experienced. 24

Presentation objects The portrait outstripped in number and variety any other category of photographic object, but another growing circulation was that of albums recording new processes of China’s modernization. Sometimes these categories converged. To celebrate his birthday each year, Liang Dingfen (1859–1920), Hubei provincial commissioner for

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Figure 6.6  Commemorative medal for presidential inauguration of Cao Kun, 1923. Enamel on copper alloy, D. 4.6 cm. Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen—Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden (7053-3).

agriculture, military affairs and education, requested his ex-students and disciples to visit specifically the Xianzhen Studio (Figure 3.3) to commission portraits to present to him. Liang also ordered schools and colleges to produce graduation albums. 25 This mandarin interference marked a stage before newsprint and other publishing rendered the production of albums increasingly redundant and extravagant. Many albums were reports transmitted from province to capital, assembled in forms appropriate to their status: stiff page mounts covered in silk, inserted inside fussily embossed gold- or silver-plated covers, sometimes further encased in high-grade wooden chests. The albums’ commissioners declared their documentary status in the highly traditional terms of a submission to court: “respectfully presented for the imperial gaze” (gongcheng yulan). Some were the bulky appendices to a memorial “presented for the emperor’s reference” (chengshang cankao). This unreformed bureaucratic language belonged to an era when officials used a widening telegraph network in which to announce their contributions with the startling neologism of the “electric memorial” (dianzou). The Imperial Telegraph System, established in 1882, transmitted Zhang Zhidong’s request in 1893 to fix the “imperial gaze” on his album of fifty-six photographs illustrating the completion of the Hanyang Ironworks (Hanyang gangtiechang), which predated the Japanese state production of iron. Zhang’s report was, he claimed, visual “in accordance with Western methods”. The photographs are lost,

200 Communication but Zhang states that the process of taking and printing them was completed three weeks ahead of submitting his memorial. 26 A survey of albums held in Beijing archives, conducted some decades ago, reported that their contents ranged from armaments factories to military exercises, the government mint, gain transport to its government storage, Beijing’s water supply, an agricultural testing farm, and railway construction. 27 Sometimes the submission of this material was controlled from the centre. Four albums detailing operations at armaments factories and arsenals in Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Tianjin were all presented to the throne by the same official, Zhu Enfu, who in his capacity as a touring inspector began late in 1909 to coordinate a short-lived central policy of collecting visual reports from regional military commands. The epitome of a new and more commercially minded administrator, Zhu was the son of Zhu Changlin, Changsha’s most prominent industrial investor. Projects like this characterized a phase of close cooperation between studios, industrialists and political stakeholders. The circulation conditions even of those albums that no longer participated in a dying imperial system of upward report remain imprecise. The destinations of Zhan Tianyou’s railway albums are not recorded. Contemporary events, however, show that the systematic image series that albums ordered had made their mark in administration and commerce. The Erwo Gallery’s album of forty-eight views of West Lake was singled out for a top prize at the Nanyang Trade Exhibition, the first event of this kind that the new Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce organized in Nanjing in 1910. Brisk sales of the album followed in response to the newspaper advertising that Erwo then organized. Studios produced many more images through similarly serial efforts, and archived them effectively enough to prolong their circulation both in China and abroad. The image of the Lihua studio (Figure 3.1) shows a reference—number 58 at bottom left—which keyed it to reprint orders and eventually guaranteed its long survival. 28

Group objects Photography associations and societies were vocational groups whose priorities did not differ absolutely from professional bodies more disciplined by studio competition. They often claimed otherwise, however, mostly because their organization did most to emancipate new patterns of circulation in periodical publications and exhibitions. Wherever foreign and national communities co-existed, the consequence was a segregated foreign presence that behaved colonially in all but name. Darwent’s city guide (1905) recorded that Shanghai’s Photography Society counted ninety members who assembled every two weeks in the Union Church as a self-sufficient community, not open to Chinese participation. It could not have differed more from the first Chinese institution of its kind, namely the Shanghai Association of Martial Sports (Shanghai jingwu tiyu zonghui) whose name and Shanghai headquarters did not reflect its large Zhejiang membership. Founded in 1910, the Association never stressed an exclusive engagement with photography, but enfolded it within a broad front of cultural modernization, including mental and physical sports, new forms of leisure and Western music. Martial arts were also “national arts” (guoshu), a description that allied them with other reformist national projects, such as the “national language” (guoyu) and “national painting” (guohua). In 1913 the Association established a photography department. Members

Circuits of communication  201 could follow photography courses, gain diplomas, and loan a collapsible dark room for expeditions. 29 The gender mix in courses and activities was unusual, but not according to an anarchic equality long inherent to martial arts movements in China. The Association published forty-three journals and publications over the next three decades.30 These joined fighting and photography in a military ethos of self-reliance. The Photography Department’s instructor Chen Gongzhe posed often on their pages in leopard-skin leotards as the muscular epitome of a fighter. 31 Women covered themselves more completely and posed in less threatening stances. Before they appeared utterly outdated—Shanghai’s Asian Games in 1921 promoted a new visual idiom for athleticism—the new publishing presses enthusiastically publicized these idealistic visions, and even internalized them. The Commercial Press (founded in 1897) formed their own martial arts club and requested instruction from the Association’s teachers; the Association’s photographers recorded the lessons, and the Press published them in several editions of one of its flagship publications, the Student’s Magazine (Xuesheng zazhi) in 1916. An even more vocationally oriented association was the Guangzhou Photography Workers’ Association (Guangzhou sheying gonghui), established in 1919. Its publication Photography Magazine (Sheying zazhi), edited by Zhang Yucang who had studied in Japan, published some fascinating material on Guangzhou conditions, but lasted no more than four issues. The association organized also a night school of remedial education for studio workers, but this it also abandoned in 1927. 32 One apt comparison to these early photography associations and to the photography societies that rose in their wake is Kerry Ross’ gripping account of the rise of the camera club in Japan after 1912. This unit of organization, exclusively mapped to male sociability, transfixed its members with the novelty of pledging their loyalty to a “mini-republic”. 33 Neither the Guangzhou association nor its predecessor in Shanghai paid as much attention to photographic images as the photography societies that largely eclipsed them from view. The dominant characteristic of photography societies was their members’ genuine or professed claims to practice photography as amateurs. Understanding how they defined their common role explains also what they photographed and how they made it visible. Lang Jingshan provided a useful retrospective on these questions in 1939 when he published yet another of his elegantly stitch-bound photograph collections with an English preface that adopted the society as the organizational default of photographic practice: The Peking [Beijing] Amateur Photographic Society [Light Society (Guangshe)] is the first one of its kind established in China. Then came the Huashe [China Society] which was organized by a few enthusiasts, including myself, and the first photographic exhibition was held in Spring of the 17th Year of the Chinese Republic (A.D. 1928) at the premises of the “Eastern Times” newspaper [Shibao]. At about the same time another photographic society named Jingshe [Scene Society] came into existence in Guangdong. Then followed the photographic clubs of various schools, formed one after the other, which made further strides towards advancement and popularity. 34 “Society” (sheb) also evoked a sense of community whose organizational origins photographers’ peers in art and literature had already refashioned in scores of enthralling names. Its description was available also to women aiming to regroup themselves in

202 Communication vocational alliances.35 Besides, reviewing artistic achievements through the rise and fall of societies was a broad convention. Mao Dun (1896–1981) had argued only recently that in preparing a three-volume collection of May Fourth fiction, the editors should group writers according to their society allegiance.36 By a margin of only months could Lang Jingshan claim that Beijing’s Light Society (Guangshe), whose founding members worked at Beijing University, was the first society foundation. He was probably unaware of a society founded by Suzhou college teachers in 1924, and further ignored amateur photography societies in Changshu, Nanjing, Zhenjiang, Songjiang, Huzhou, Wuxi and Fuzhou. 37 If modern urbanization and leisure spending drove the tendency to form societies, their most fertile setting was southern Jiangsu, then the zone with the highest percentage of urban population. Truly setting Beijing’s Light Society apart, however, was that it convoked the first lengthily sustained discussion on how its members should conform to an amateur outlook. In its first annual, published in 1928, Chen Wanli recalled the efforts of early members to mount exhibitions at Beijing University and to name themselves first the Association of Comrades in Photography (Zhaoxiang tongzhi hui), later the Beijing Research Association for Art Photography (Beijing meishu xiezhen yanjiuhui), and finally the Light Society. Until “Light” eventually hid the differences, not even a common term for “photography”—zhaoxiang then xiezhen—gained consensus. Chen was also adamant that the society should contract publishing houses to circulate its work, aware no doubt that only a few years earlier Ouyang Huiqiang had achieved the daytime sell-out of his Guide to photography by retailing it from successively his studio Baoji, the Yongan (Wing On) Department Store, and both the Commercial and Zhonghua presses.38 The beneficiary of profiling the Light Society in the news would be the “citizen” (guoren), whose exact identity no one specified, but the intention fitted the prevailing hopes for nation-building and cultural democracy. The 1928 exhibition of the society’s photography in Beijing’s Central Park had caught the attention of the Shanghai newspaper Shibao, and, while this portended greater press interest in future activities, Chen insisted that the launch of the Society’s illustrated annual journal was already, in one of the most symbolic phrases of the decade, a “call to arms” (nahan). The linguistician Liu Bannong, recently returned from London and Paris and a member since 1927, had different views. In an essay placed next to Chen’s, he dismissed the need for press involvement, and without the least irony apologized to readers for Chen’s misguided thinking. Technical mastery and aesthetic achievement were their own rewards, effective justifications of individual fortitude and self-sufficiency; creativity should not imply remuneration; no photography display should be organized as a competition, since that contradicted the spirit of amateurism. Liu begged readers to observe also the superiority of the Light Society’s journal above those of foreign photography associations. 39 He returned to these themes in another essay, advocating not to submit photographs to foreign subscriptions, and expressing surprise at an almost complete sell-out of the Light Society’s one thousand catalogues the previous year—rare evidence of how large a public one society at this date (in Beijing) expected to reach.40 The international insecurity in Liu’s imprecation was not unfounded. Numerous Chinese studio owners and amateur photographers became members of photography societies abroad and subscribed to their journals. In recalling his acquaintanceship with the photographer Zhang Yinquan (1900–1971), the painter Liu Lingcang (1907– 1989) stated that in the 1920s Zhang’s home was littered with foreign journals. An

Circuits of communication  203 employee at a government printing office in Beijing, Zhang earned enough to subscribe to the British Journal of Photography (founded in Liverpool in 1854), Asahi kamera (Tokyo, 1926), and one journal published in Germany. When the British journal allegedly published one of Zhang’s photographs, Liu ensured that the Tianjin newspaper Dagongbao announced this achievement.41 Chinese photographers also joined societies abroad, predominantly Britain’s Royal Photographic Society (founded 1853). A certain Zhang Dingfang—later employed by Zhang Zhidong in Wuchang— joined during his diplomatic service in London as early as 1889.42 Seventeen more had appeared in the annual membership lists by 1940, providing addresses in Beijing, Changzhou, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tianjin and Wuchang. Several of these figures, including Lang Jingshan, published photographs in Chinese journals, newspapers and exhibition catalogues with the acronym RPS after their names. Guo Shuliang, RPS ran Shanghai’s Zhonghua Studio, which exported its backdrops to Java, and was prominent as a judge in Shanghai’s photographic competitions.43 No Chinese name appears in the lists of the Société de la Photographie française (founded 1855), which imposed stricter admission requirements. Liu’s position compromised wider knowledge of his work. The fact that his image of West Lake (Figure 5.23) and other photographs have only recently emerged may be plausibly because he resolved not to publish frequently. If so, it typified a position that others shared even far afield. Liu’s contemporary Peng Ruilin in Taiwan, then a Japanese colony, adopted even more creative strategies to set a distance between his art and commercial commitments, including his studio Apollo (s 3), upon which he depended for a living. A graduate of Tokyo’s Photography College in 1931, he brought to Taiwan a technique of printing photographs on wood (Figure 6.7). Known variously in Japanese as “lacquer photography” and in Chinese as “gold photography”, its use of a convex hardwood surface sensitized with a solution that included gold was laborious and expensive. The possibility of circulating editions of the image extra to the one hung in an exhibition was almost nihil. The distinction remained that Liu did not set himself material challenges, resorting instead to write about the difficulties of photography on the surface of an image, but both photographers produced work with an aura of its terminal uniqueness. Liu’s ascetic directives to fellow society members were consonant with what he had written earlier in his book on photography, Bannong’s talks on images (Bannong tan ying). The work’s popularity owed much to the reputation that he had established as a translator and writer of romantic literature during his early career in Shanghai, and to his participation in May Fourth publishing, strands of a past that qualified him disproportionately to speak for the Light Society. Appealing to deepen the indigenous agency of photography’s distribution via circulation patterns defined by vocational groups, he wrote on amateur practice with a lyrical sensitivity and a level of urbanity that no one had yet tested in prose. His book gained cult status, but not without compromising the autonomy of photography criticism. Liu joined many others in inserting their writings and photographs into the publications that they edited, and the possibility of separating practice and criticism never fully emerged. Prominent society spokesmen did, however, gain the attention of journalists to identify who the photography societies were, what images they produced and how they were distributed. They contributed to a story of photography societies that is almost inseparable from that of press publishing. The prime reason that Lang Jingshan and others chose to emphasize the beginnings of photography societies’ history in Beijing

204 Communication

Figure 6.7  Peng Ruilin (1904–1984), Passers-by in Tsugitaka Taroko National Park, Taiwan, late 1930s. Gold and lacquer print on wood, 29 × 21 cm. Courtesy of Peng Liangmin.

inseparable from that of press publishing. The prime reason that Lang Jingshan and others chose to emphasize the beginnings of photography societies’ history in Beijing was the ex-capital’s ascendancy in the May Fourth heritage of cultural creativity and iconoclasm. These qualities were desirable when the overriding practical concern was to find outlets for photography as a category of exhibition and a topic of art.

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Exhibition objects The following that societies won through their rhetorical champions was pointless if they could not mount exhibitions. New urban functions ushered photography into reappointed public spaces, themselves adapted by the early revolutionary politics of broadening access to education and culture. The Light Society held its exhibitions at Beijing University, but mounted the fifth in 1928 at Central Park (Zhongyang gongyuan) where members hung up prints of their work and sold extra copies. In other cities, too, open-air spaces served a wide range of educational activities, even if they attracted as many visitors as they repelled—usually through oppressive moralizing.44 The enormous success of many photography exhibitions also relied on the intimacy that newspaper journalists helped societies to foster with their public. The Shenbao journalist who attended Shanghai’s China Society (Huashe) exhibition opening in 1928 explained to readers who the society founders were, what they did and where they were from.45 Rapid coverage was essential. Nanjing’s Beaux Arts Society (Meishe) had existed for only a few months in 1928 when it organized its first exhibition of over 160 members’ photographs at Nanjing’s Popular Education Institute (Tongsu jiaoyuguan). The society’s even more ambitious exhibition one year later toured from the boardroom of the Shibao newspaper in Shanghai to Zhenjiang’s Jiangyuan, a private garden now reappointed for public leisure, and returned to Nanjing’s Central University.46 The Shanghai publishers Culture and Arts (Wenhua meishu tushu yinshua gongsi) produced a catalogue in three days for the Arts Society, and in 1931 the company sponsored a photography competition and exhibition. The Beaux Arts’ secretary and chief funder, the journalist Zhang Pengzhou (1904–1991), prefaced the exhibition catalogue with claims that an “ancient” age of photography was receding while a progressive community of image-makers now demonstrated new achievements. Sure proof of recent advances, Zhang added, was the repeated establishment of photography societies and their production of illustrated photography publications. His argument that magazine publication proved incontrovertibly that photography was art was unconvincing, but still an accurate reflection of art photography’s debts to the print media that gained it so much public interest. Zhang was adamant that photography exhibitions raised national consciousness; and, from this higher ground, he rained fire on domestic manufacturing’s failure to produce adequate photographic equipment.47 The organization of photography exhibitions enthused participants on a scale conceived—if not exactly practised—as national, sometimes even international. Those submitting photographs did so through interregional circuits, and news concerning exhibitions was equally widely broadcast. Members of the main societies in Beijing, Guangzhou, Changshu and Songjiang all submitted work for the China Society’s second exhibition in 1928. Their organization also cultivated international contacts, early on exhibiting with a group of Japanese photographers in Shanghai, expatriates assembled under the Fox-Talbotian name of the Light Painting Research Association (Kōga kenkyūkai).48 During preparations for the China Society’s first exhibition in Hangzhou in 1928, the organizers added Robert Fitch (1873–1954), principal of the Hangzhou Christian College, to the membership. Apparently not otherwise engaged on an Easter Sunday, Hangzhou’s entire Presbyterian congregation turned up for the closing ceremony. The minister of education Cai Yuanpei, present in Hangzhou that

206 Communication weekend for the opening of China’s first National Academy of Art, did not manage to arrive on time.49 This accident was not consistent, however, with the strong interest that some in government entertained towards photography events. The China Society’s fourth exhibition included central and far-flung venues in Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou and Shenyang.50 But, soon aware that too much press publicity can be self-defeating, the organizers at the Nanjing venue encountered an ominous request from the city government’s propaganda committee to include photographs by members of the government. 51 No longer content to be either photography’s ubiquitous subjects or the viewers and commentators at its exhibition events, politicians craved also to be its practitioners. Many society exhibitions enjoyed the patronage of Shanghai’s Eastern Times (Shibao). Aside from reporting exhibitions, it offered its premises as a venue. All the China Society exhibitions opened in the Times building. So did the Nanjing Beaux Arts’ last two exhibitions in 1929 and 1933, and the Black and White Society’s inaugural exhibition in 1932. Newspapers turned exhibitions into sensational events, thrilling even to the space-conquering technologies that delivered distinguished visitors to an opening. Determined not to miss the China Society’s fourth exhibition in Shanghai, the photographer Wu Zhongxing caught the night train at Changzhou; the cartoonist Huang Wennong had got on at Nanjing; the artist Pan Yuliang rushed to an airport somewhere and boarded a plane. 52 The rising success of photography exhibitions during these years was a factor that persuaded the organizers of China’s first national art exhibition to include a photography section. Important models for the exhibition, which opened in Shanghai in 1929, included the annual fine arts exhibition organized by Japan’s ministry of culture in Tokyo since 1907, as well as the first island-wide art exhibition in Taiwan, organized under Japanese government control in 1927. However, mainland China’s exhibition, which comprised ancient and modern sections, was the first to accommodate photography.53 Photographs selected for the modern section did not differ in content and style from what their authors regularly submitted to contemporary photography journals. Their reception was less warm than the exhibitors might have hoped. In his opening remarks in the magazine Art Exhibition (Meizhan), published throughout the exhibition, Xu Zhimo, the acclaimed poet and one of the exhibition’s leading organizers, apostrophized the growing national consciousness of art that appreciated painting, sculpture, and the applied arts as cognates in an unprecedented whole, but he omitted—or refused—to mention photography. He caught the mood of most visitors, however, since admission figures later showed that they gravitated fastest towards the exhibition’s ancient section. 54 The advantages of Shanghai, including those that qualified it as host of the first national art exhibition, are easily exaggerated. Hitherto less studied, Tianjin, which boasted a City Art Museum, established in 1930, and press agencies founded even earlier, staged photography exhibitions just as enthusiastically amid equally hot circuits of publicity. The museum had hosted ten photography exhibitions by 1937, including a travelling exhibition of Shanghai’s Black and White Society (Heibai yingshe), an exhibition by the Japanese Light Society (Kōyōsha), probably a group based in Tianjin, and a Contax Photography Exhibition (Kangtai sheying yingzhan), organized in 1936, the year that the Dresden manufacturer Zeiss Ikon released the Contax models II and III.55 Tianjin was also home to North China’s most influential newspapers, all of which followed photography closely, but none more so than the Northeastern

Circuits of communication  207 Illustrated Journal (Beiyang huabao), founded in 1926. Its flamboyant editor Feng Wuyue, the “Duke of the Pen” (Bigong), controlled the journal and the Northeastern Association of Photography Studies (Beiyang sheying xuehui) as organs that supplied each other with respectively images and publicity. 56 Looking back from 1939, then, Lang Jingshan’s optimistic remarks were not highly original, but they did pinpoint the importance of the society and the exhibition as interlocking gears in a rising public consciousness of photography as both an art form and an exhibition practice usually reliant on news agencies. His account described authentically an internationalist approach that presupposed photographs’ existence in formally independent categories of publication, such as the specialist photography journal and the sort of album that his remarks prefaced. Perceptions of photographs as art grew primarily from the enthusiasm for these publications’ sense of vitality and adventure.

Art objects Photographers who represented the new amateur societies in the 1920–30s also displayed much of their work within the afterglow of international pictorialist photography. With the publication of his book, an impressionist-inspired discussion of largely technical challenges, Liu Bannong most successfully domesticated the consensus that “art photography” was the only category of practice worth discussing. Others, such as Zhang Pengzhou, continued to dismiss the professional world with scant acknowledgement of how it made amateur productions visible to a public also willing to purchase them. Other pronouncements were even harsher. Liu Yizhen, writing in 1933 in the Chinese Photography Magazine (Zhonghua sheying zazhi), which published much of the work of its editors Zhu Shouren (Figure 6.8) and Hu Boxiang (Figure 6.12), excoriated studio portraiture as “crippled (canfei) photography”, only to be redeemed if it could deliver more “dimensional beauty” (kongjian mei), a demand upon which he did not elaborate. Liu stripped these reductions from an essay on “Art photography” (Meishu de zhaoxiang) by artist and educator Feng Zikai, published six years earlier in the Ordinary Magazine (Yiban zazhi). Similarly vituperative, Feng attacked studio workers as “not even artisans” (jiangren dou chengbushang). 57 This disparagement was typical during a febrile era of mass consumption in which photography studios also now outsourced their activities. As early as its pre-opening press announcement in 1923, Shanghai’s Yiwu Studio promised that it would loan cameras for modest fees, 58 not a remarkable demystification in an urban economy where a wide array of material goods—cars at the high end—competed to be rented. The conflicted tone of Chinese discussions was not unusual. Ulrich Keller has argued that sustaining the public presence of pictorial photography as both art movement and exhibition function relied on a fundamental paradox: leading pictorialists insisted on hanging their work in special sections separate from other exhibits that betrayed their association with an industry geared to mass consumption. This disassociation required, of course, submitting to a status that was mythical. Western pictorialism, Keller judges, was a movement compromised by its imposture within a “prestige-oriented pseudo art world”. During the St Louis world fair in 1904, Stieglitz and his associates, for example, had insisted upon art photography and photography’s consumer products in isolated displays, as if the latter were irrelevant to the images created with them. 59 The strict demand of this instance characterizes a phenomenon

208 Communication that was inherent to the pictorialism that interested many photographers in China— and during their travels abroad—and translated easily into a practice that derived many of its technical norms from global industries, and sought prestige in international circuits, provided by the Royal Photographic Society, for example. No one addressed pictorialism in China with the fluent ripostes of an exasperated MoholyNagy,60 but they rarely did so anywhere else either. Other claims that an amateur ideal forced an adjustment of photography studios’ status and prestige downwards oversimplifies how individual agents in fact steered a skilful course between such polarized structures as the vocational club and the open market without grounding on the dangers of compromise.61 Both their writings and their photographs show how much some were conscious of the possibilities to deepen the meaning of their work not only through open acknowledgement of their relationship with commercial print media but in explicit references to the practicalities that photography demanded. The purpose of writing in journals was often to exchange knowledge on both how to take photographs and how to reach places to do so. Ignoring—but no doubt aware—that Huang Yanpei had already passed through this terrain (see Chapter 5), Cai Zhonghe’s account of his sojourn along the Fuchun River near Hangzhou in 1934, published in Dawn Wind (hereafter Chenfeng, 1933–1935), provides clear guidance on train times, fares, boat availability, accommodation, and suggests what luggage to bring.62 Madeleine Yue Dong’s study of early Chinese tourism includes reminiscences of travelling over exactly the same ground some years earlier, as does an essay by a contributor to the Chinese Kodak Magazine (1930–1937), following in Cai Zhonghe’s trail.63 Attempts to appropriate secular jaunts in the name of more highbrow pursuits delivered images whose power owed much to the irony of such an exercise. Zhu Shouren’s photograph “Selecting a View” (Figure 6.8), published in Zhonghua sheying zazhi,64 is an image made during just such a category of trip beginning at the Shanghai railhead, and it quite plausibly records a point along the itinerary that Cai Zhonghe had described in his own account. The distant high ground and its pagoda features in several more images published by the same journal. Certainly, the image’s narrative of travel—craft moored before or after their use by travellers who are also photographers—placed this image in the journal readers’ consciousness of photography as an exercise in travel along the waterways of northern Zhejiang. William Schaefer’s sharp intuition of the affects of Zhu Shouren’s image also identifies its crucial position within a political logic of reclaiming a landscape.65 The title also acknowledged the broad demand for information that photography journals often included as detailed explanation of a photograph’s execution. “Selecting a view” was a stage in a commonly described process, as well as the description of a piece of equipment—the viewfinder. Like Liu Bannong’s statement of the difficulties of making an image of West Lake, Zhu admitted to photographic skill with detachment, but added further irony in mimicking the prosaic pedagogy of handbook guidance. Such mimicry was a submission to and a release from the secular poetics of modern travel, sightseeing and operating a camera, and perhaps “selecting” also acknowledged how many other photographers had captured and circulated the same scenery. Acknowledging that photography and travel were culturally interlocked, the elegantly penned reminiscence above which Weng Shouyi mounted his photograph of a waterfall, taken during a sojourn in Fenghua in Zhejiang in early 1948 (Figure 6.9), is a private celebration of the public opportunities to which amateur photographers

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Figure 6.8 Zhu Shouren, Selecting a view (Qujing). From Zhonghua sheying zazhi, 2 (1932).

aspired in publishing their work. The crowd of visitors just visible in the distance confirms that Weng participated in a social event as well as surveyed Fenghua’s famous waterfall and nearby wonders. Weng acknowledged also Lang Jingshan’s encouragement to submit this image to Zhongguo sheying, which eventually published it.66 He eulogized this success by means of a rescript within the private aura of an edition framed and displayed for home consumption in the last year that it was still possible outside China’s war zones to travel and photograph with relative ease.

Lifestyle objects Some four hundred photography journals appeared during the Republican period.67 Those most prominently in the public eye mirrored closely the lifestyle emphasis that so defined the popular press of their era, and many of them were distributed from leading department stores. Lifestyle observance was often synonymous with photographic skill. The first editorial of the journal Giant Roc (Tianpeng huabao, 1927–1929) explained its purpose to show male and female fashions, feminine beauty and “photographic masterpieces” (sheying jiezuo)—a novel description adapted from poetic discourse. Like Lang Jingshan and other members of the China Society (Huashe), the editors Wang Dafo

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Figure 6.9 Weng Shouyi, photograph taken during expedition to Ningbo and surroundings, 1948. Gelatin silver print on paper, 26 × 20 cm. Courtesy of Tan Jintu Archive, Suzhou.

and Lin Zhipeng—their names parented that of their journal—were fully involved with the publishing industry. Giant Roc folded soon after a hubristic advertisement claimed that it was the “nation’s only photography journal”.68 Wang Fanqing, formerly a student in France and the editor of Shanghai’s Photographic Studies Monthly (Sheying xue yuebao, 1924–1927), professed a patriotic mission to reverse China’s reliance on Western imports of photographic material,69 but warmly discussed photographing shop window displays.70 Zhu Shouren and Hu Boxiang (Figures 6.8 and

Circuits of communication  211 6.12), however, founders of Shanghai’s Chinese Journal of Photography (Zhonghua sheying zazhi, 1931–1936), used their own savings to emancipate it from commercial reliance, even though Hu’s was a celebrated name among the advertisement painters who worked for British American Tobacco.71 Industries, anyway, seldom held back. Photographic equipment sales, for instance, funded journals. Jin Shisheng, editor of Flying Eagle (Feiying, 1936–1937), was still an engineering student when he gained the backing of Shanghai’s Guanlong Photography Supply Company, and rapidly achieved welcome renown for refusing to advertise Japanese products.72 The Huachang Photography Supplies Company (Huachang zhaoxiang cailiaohang) underwrote Shanghai’s Dawn Wind (Chenfeng), which regularly championed Chinese photographic manufacturing, but in 1935 devoted its entire twelfth issue to Zeiss Contax products. In the same year, the company opened a branch at Hankou where its managers founded their own journal Huachang Photography Monthly (Huachang sheying yuekan). This westward relocation did not imply a severance. Its publication of Urban Style by fashion photographer Qin Tailai (Figure 6.10) linked viewers not only to Shanghai—the title’s fengguang was distinct Shanghainese vocabulary—but also to the iconic heights of the city’s waterfront from a position under the awning of the bund’s embarkation sheds. This was a view familiar to any who had made landfall here or boarded ships to somewhere else.

Figure 6.10 Qin Tailai, Urban style (Dushi fengguang). From Huachang yingkan, 21 (June 1937).

212 Communication Some photographers made their practice public only after they had established themselves as proficient editor-publishers. Lin Zecang, who helped to form Shanghai’s Black and White Society (Heibaishe) in 1929, had already devoted four years to publishing the Pictorial Weekly (Sheying huabao). While negotiating other contracts for journals on cinema and radio, Lin’s company Sanhe distributed both Pictorial Weekly and the more glamorous but cheaper pocket-sized women’s weekly Linloon (Linglong, 1931–1937), a catchy title meaning “dainty”. He advertised each journal in the other, and eventually ran both under one editor, Peng Zhaoliang (1901–1963), whose own publishing and writing on psychology and sex landed him in court. Married couples and the affianced read Peng’s essays on faultlessly practised photographic techniques translating into monogamous felicity.73 One distinct group of publications included health journals that loaned respectability to the controversial subject of the nude. Its arrival in China lagged decades behind the first Chinese travellers’ views of its regular display in Western and Japanese academies and galleries. Not until the 1930s did up-market publications such as Shenbao’s pictorial supplement include photographs of female models.74 Photographers for whom Chinese models consented to pose nude included Lang Jingshan, Lin Zecang, Qin Tailai and other members of Shanghai’s Black and White Society whose exhibitions made the nude’s display one of their causes.75 While these photographers sometimes proclaimed their debt to European and Orientalist paradigms of the nude—Lang Jingshan aligned himself with Ingres, for example—stronger arguments sprang from journals such as Healthy Beauty (Jianmei) and Physical Beauty (Renti mei), which justified their existence with reference to European publications of nudity in the rising ecology of health and nature.76 Lang published the volume Photographs of the human form (Renti sheyingji) in 1930, and emboldened others to produce similar visions of intimacy.77 The outbreak of war in 1937 put paid to these experiments, and the anti-rightist campaign beginning in 1957 exposed some photographers to fatal attack for creating nude content two decades earlier or since.78 Discussion of the topic did not re-open until the 1980s.79 None of the aforementioned journals could match the circulation and editorial variety of the biweekly journal Liangyou (1926–1949), published in Shanghai. Liangyou was not a dedicated photography journal, even if many of its pages were barely distinguishable from the journals already discussed. But, to exploit as successfully as it did the popular glamour of photography, Liangyou relied heavily on the success of forerunners. For instance, one considerably less lavish and generally overlooked publication was the aforementioned Third Day Pictorial (Sanri huabao), which trialled similar material—including nudes—by photographers and writers for whom Liangyou was their subsequent and higher-rated platform. Liangyou checkmated the progress of all its competitors—notably in Tianjin—with the use of colour. Liangyou coordinated; it provided a national focus; it restated what Liu Bannong and others had popularized for photography’s communal dimensions, and it articulated photography as one of a cluster of visual arts, a point that Xu Zhimo omitted in his commentaries on the national exhibition in 1929. The journal domesticated the photographic exhibition as an exhilarating item of regular news. Women were central to a sales strategy that personalized the publication on their behalf with fashion, branding and constant attention to themes of domestic life.80 Women were also inseparable from an ideal of the nuclear family, around which, Wen-hsin Yeh points out, Liangyou successfully presented all its journalism and advertising.81 At least eight

Circuits of communication  213 photography studios had adopted the name Liangyou by 1949, most of them in the more prosperous southeast, but others in Xi’an, Lanzhou and Wulumuqi (s 138–148). The magazine’s other massive draw was its visual appeal. Liangyou, recalled one of its editorial staff (recruited straight from college), was seen as the most elegant illustrated production of its time.82 Freighted with all available categories of illustrative material, such as photographs, including film stills, paintings, drawings and cartoons, the pages deliberately indulged the eye’s tendency to flit haptically between items and page openings. The editors told readers to cut out what they liked and reframe it or trap it under the glass top of their living-room table. The journal could hardly personalize the act of giving, but it could fabricate the intimacy that the gift of an image betokened. This visual education depended also on well-controlled design. Even the most crowded Liangyou page layouts never nonsensed images below an easily legible level of juxtaposition. With its photographs set off at jaunty angles, one frequently cited page from 1934, entitled “Intoxicated Shanghai” and dissimilarly in Chinese Duhui de ciji (“Urban Stimulants”), combined Làszlò Hudek’s Park Hotel, Spence, Robinson and Partners’ Racing Club, both erected that year, with a billboard for RKO’s King Kong (1933), flat racing, a jazz band, and a fashionable woman, dressed and posed not dissimilarly to the woman in Figure 6.1 (Figure 6.11).83 The assembly constellated the themes of architectural mass and height, speed and sport with jazz and feminine allure. The Park Hotel could not compete with the recently heightened New York

Figure 6.11 Unattributed, Intoxicated Shanghai / Duhui de ciji. From Liangyou, 85 (February 1934).

214 Communication skyline, but the Racing Club’s grandstand was thought to be the longest in the world. These photographs were configured with an emphasis on modernity brought home. Hierarchically dominant is the woman, enlarged to claim a reigning Chinese position for modern fashion, as well as to trivialize modernity as a variety of imports: music, cinema, clubs, architecture and Arab thoroughbreds. These themes suggested also the modernist desire to find transposed material realities—China possessed an Art Deco skyscraper that King Kong could have climbed—and also an equivalence in page design. Although considerably less left-wing, this Liangyou page’s disconcerting visual effect of “Sichtagitation” was one that early Weimar artists and designers had relentlessly pioneered.84 Liangyou page designs were exciting partly because they followed these trends abroad, but they stopped short of wholesale import from the latest techniques of German and Soviet photomontage, which developed an idiom of extracting the morphemes of humans, machines and buildings from their original photographic enclosure and recombining them in new compositions. Soviet exponents of the best work often insisted on the equal role of typography—in productions called not insignificantly “photo-slogan-montage” (фото-лозунго-монтаж)—but even in a creative era of modern Chinese type’s development, Chinese designers disregarded what that offered, instead mixing in larger areas of drawing and painting. Or, if they restricted their compositions to solely photographic resources, they drew meanings less from the repair of broken bits into new visual complexities, but more from collages of discontinuous isolates. Preserving boundaries in this way need not imply that the example of “Intoxicated Shanghai” was parochial, for it fitted another global tendency to adopt juxtaposition as a principle of page design. Paul Ricketts’ discussion of Liangyou’s debt to avant-garde design and its print media demonstrates how much its editors drew from the international press exhibition Pressa, staged in Cologne in 1928 and featuring El Lissitzky’s radically immersive montage design for the Soviet pavilion. They were by no means averse to recycling, for example, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova’s photographs of parachuting, and using their collage style to present this latest performance in the expanding repertoire of modernity’s risk culture.85 That editors of Liangyou and other journals did not borrow more from European avant-garde modernism was perhaps because their familiarity made them wary of extolling collective art beyond what most readers of Chinese journals might yet accept.86 When a contributor sent his translation of Mayakovsky’s poem “Our March” (Наш марш / Women de jinxingqu, 1918) to the photography journal Chenfeng, he admitted that he had adjusted as well as translated the text—towards a considerably more genteel result.87 The rough edges of collective agendas in Japanese avant-gardism seemed similarly uninviting.88 Instead, Liangyou generated deep expectancy through the reliability of the photograph’s visual report, still evident if tossed awry in the ludic arrangement of collage design. It did not matter in “Intoxicated Shanghai” that the lower floors of Hudek’s hotel were still unbuilt, since progress to date was enough for the editors to prove its skyscraper existence without further delay. The same expectant effect in the latest news of upcoming photography exhibitions was one of relentless anticipation. Liangyou’s reports of photography societies’ exhibitions spread awareness of the same institutions’ journals, quite aside from fuelling generic interest in the existence of photography journals as such. Certain images became familiar on the pages of Liangyou as well as in reprints by the more specialized photography press. Hu

Circuits of communication  215 Boxiang, for instance, published his photograph Returning by nightfall in Liangyou in 1931 (Figure 6.12), and republished it later in the Chinese Photography Magazine (Zhonghua sheying zazhi), now manipulated to include a rising moon.89 Lang Jingshan also adjusted the content of his composite images at similarly minute levels, and retitled them. Editions of his image of Huangshan (Figure 5.24) appeared with

Figure 6.12 Hu Boxiang (1896–1989), Returning by nightfall (Shicheng wangui). From Liangyou, 55 (March 1931).

216 Communication at least three titles.90 This mutability was still evident four decades later in a period when photographers were the least able to control the titles under which their work appeared. These patterns of re-use exemplify how photography journals both drew from and contributed to the biweekly Liangyou’s prestige. Photography’s journal circulation and its various social activities capitalized constantly on Liangyou’s high international circulation and its unparalleled page size. Historians’ debt to Liangyou is huge, since photographs’ publication in the journal ensured that at least some of the work in photography exhibitions, whose duration was invariably short, was not consigned to rapid oblivion. Liangyou effectively assumed the function of the photography society to multiply the availability of its members’ work and assign it to the guardianship of their audience. In 1933 Liangyou announced its intention to publish henceforth every year—and to gift to every regular subscriber—an annual collection of art photography, selected from the work of each year’s most prominent practitioners.91 No evidence shows that the editors managed to keep this promise.

Patterns of communication Operating through different patterns of communication, photography’s users fetishized the image as a gift, as the latest addition to society events, and as a single or serial appearance in the illustrated press. One pattern of circulation could function for another. The cults of love and politics fashioned forms of image in patterns of presentation and distribution that sometimes converged. Other communication patterns increased their reach and status by simple rises in scale. Presentations of the photographic album as a report were among the government hierarchy’s supremely visualized communications of upward management. Decreases in scale, such as the badge whose true heyday lay some way off in the future, were also possible in the conditions where images flowed downwards. These forms of the image and their exploitation made photography in China a history of communication that both matched histories of photography elsewhere and differed from them. Perhaps the photography society is the level at which to identify a particularly Chinese dimension in photography’s communication power. Societies attracted members not only to join in practical efforts but also to voice their opinions on publicizing the results and creating their medium’s profile. Functioning in quite a different field of operations, yet enforcing no obvious break from the habits of a previous era, photographers in Yan’an and other Communist base areas likewise foregathered to create their group portraits as brothers in a shared vocation.92 Any society’s organization and efficiency followed a pattern that all manner of professional groups adopted in the early twentieth century. If, as Anthony Giddens suggests, one of the social conditions enforced by modernity is that of “finding oneself” in a post-traditional order, 93 photography’s practices in China as part of a grouping order provided multiple spaces where that was possible, not least in respect of either joining or resisting the print media that displayed their visual productions. The task was not straightforward, and those who executed it sometimes shared their anxieties in respect of international publishing as a treacherous communication device in photography’s most global systems of organization—even if that global efficiency was often exaggerated; they adopted nationalist rhetoric from the most common areas of economic discussion to propose robust and self-sufficient Chinese

Circuits of communication  217 structures of image production, circulation and industrial support; paradoxically, they confessed patriotic pride in displays of Chinese photographers’ work in exhibitions and journals abroad. In further contrast, however, they were also aware of their groups’ achievements closer to home, foremost in forging the high status of photography as a vocational calling, and making photography exhibitions and journals worthy objects of aesthetic consideration. Liangyou, the biggest success story of a busy publishing era, did not achieve its towering international success without photography societies’ news, exhibitions and publications acting as its satellite supports. Fuller recognition is still overdue, but this glamorous league of publishing, whose specialist photography journals are still in a state of haphazard organization, provided the People’s Republic’s publishers with a model no less significant than the Communist wartime publications and Soviet photojournalism upon which they made first call.

Epilogue: Continuities None of the developments presented in this chapter directly determined visual practices and their communicative power during the warfare of the 1930–40s and the subsequent establishment of mainland and island regimes. Nevertheless, a few continuities are now apparent. Scholarship on the visual practices of the wartime Communist base areas is well established.94 Investigation of photography, however, has waited much longer in order to show the role it assumed among other graphic media in depicting war, revolution and reform.95 Particularly intriguing was the fluent continuation that many photographers in the wartime bases managed to contribute to building up strong communicative taskforces even in remote and often rudimentary conditions. Several of them had experienced working in Shanghai, China’s headquarters of print capitalism, and they had gained awareness of the long reach from which photographs published in Chinese and international print media could benefit. Their new bosses were likewise no novices. Soon after its armies reached Yan’an, the Communist government declared that one of its strategies for victory must be to influence Western books, newspapers and films.96 Among legion examples, Sha Fei, like other photographers who made their way to the Communist base areas, had previously signed up to a photography society— Shanghai’s Black and White Society—before deciding that he would rather photograph war. This commitment was not unique, while the illustrated journals and newspapers that he and others founded and illustrated were almost as many as the regional centres where the Communist armies operated.97 Emigrating from the Shanghai news industry, Sha Fei proved not only skilled at capturing remarkable events throughout the course of the anti-Japanese war and the civil war that followed, but also at using these images in unprecedented publication formats. He was among several photographers who contributed to the Jin Cha Ji Pictorial (Jin Cha Ji huabao), the most memorable of the various illustrated newpapers that depicted life near or along rapidly changing battle fronts—most of the photographs in its early editions were by Sha Fei.98 His and others’ work was by no means isolated, for a lot was republished outside the war zones; traffic in the opposite direction was less usual. One of Sha Fei’s war images shows soldiers ready for action (Figure 6.13). It was not the first photograph to dramatize the Great Wall (Figures 5.18 and 5.25), but it became ultimately one of the most iconic depictions of national struggle, crafting an

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Figure 6.13 Sha Fei (1912–1950), The Eight Route Army fighting on the ridges of the Great Wall (Balujun zhandou zai changchengling), 1942. Print obtained from original negative. Courtesy of China Photographers Association, Beijing.

unprecedented role for the Wall as a site of attack and defence and as the backdrop to state-of-the-art weaponry—perhaps the only truly military visualization that this massive engineering had so far ever attracted. Significant to the photographic theatricality emphasized throughout this book is the fact that Sha Fei’s photograph has been subject to intense arguments concerning its authenticity.99 Not even its date is agreed.100 Doubts might undermine a common journalistic ideal, but they never jeopardized the status of this particular image. Not even the fate of Sha Fei—executed in 1950 and rehabilitated as a party member in 1986—obscured its celebrity. Even more striking than the direct relevance of content is that photography’s history in its rural revolutionary context contains so many images of its production, including scenes of setting up photography exhibitions, printing images in the open air of a village, and cranking out the pages of an illustrated journal with a hand press.101 Shana Brown’s emphasis on Sha Fei and his colleagues’ penchant for photographing subjects “doing concrete productive things” can be adjusted with hindsight for its relevance to some of the images discussed in Chapter 5.102 One war front image of the work of military propaganda shows photographers washing prints in a well, a testament to the task of multiplying visual reports as urgent as fighting the nearby battle. Printing photographs in freezing cold with shells flying overhead struck to the heart of what communication implied in bringing its technology from a rapidly modernized image economy to new conditions at the central meeting point of village life in wartime. Such contingent circumstances were not absolutely continuous with an image of operating the Commercial Press’ machines (Figure 5.15) two decades earlier, but they disrupt any assumption that only in the big city did photographic technology

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purr effortlessly ahead amid the convenience of urban supply chains and warfare happening somewhere else. Photographers who joined the Communist bases during the long decade of war until 1949 embodied the highest chances of continuing in later years the Republican period’s best successes of photography’s communication strategies. What they owed the Republican period was enormous, even if largely unacknowledged. Photographers who had photographed events now justly repackaged as world-changing gained authority to speak as incontrovertible witnesses to the ascendance of the People’s Republic over its Nationalist opponent and the disastrous invasion by Japan. This conservative political entrustment depended on photographers with experience of how revolutionary content with its aesthetics of authenticity and moral suasion worked in approved terms of exhibition, circulation and publication. Several became the People’s Republic’s first historians of photography and the authors of manuals that devoted unprecedented attention to showing work—say smashing living rock to make way for a railway—in the habitually heavenward gaze of revolutionary heroism. The photographer who made film stills during the shooting of Doctor Bethune (Bai Qiuen daifu, 1964), the story of the Canadian doctor’s selfless devotion to the Chinese war effort, was none other than Wu Yinxian, whose famous photograph of Norman Bethune performing surgery near the battlefront in 1939 appeared as the first illustration in his 1961 guide to photography, an utterly dry technical description by an author who surely had much more to divulge.103 More photographers with similar veteran status acted as consultants to other cultural productions, such as the revolutionary model operas and their film adaptations, as late as the 1970s. Less felicitously, of course, the old problem of photography’s practitioners acting also as its critics was not reformed. Photography in the current era is almost entirely digital, but its digital reorganization by no means proceeds without strong reference to what is now its prehistory. However profoundly technical changes have marked a turning point, photography remains a set of practices with an energetic dimension of creativity eminently worth exploring in the context of China. Regional relationships in China’s interior—including the spaces occupied by megalopolises—and within adjacent Pacific and Inner Asian zones have developed dramatically, but they still count as exciting units of analysis. What they offer further discussion requires another framing.

Notes 1 Henriot (1997); Hershatter (1997); Judge (2008); Yeh (2006). 2 The China Printing (Zhonghua yinshua) Museum in Shanghai’s Qingpu district holds several mirrors presented to senior staff at the Commercial Press in the 1920–30s. Visited 7 December 2018. 3 Xiaozao, “Confessions of a French gallant” (Faguo xiake tan), Xinxin xiaoshuo, 2.6 (1905): 1–19, see 12. 4 Advertisements at Shenbao, 29 May 1876 [bingzi 5/7]: 6; until Shenbao, 5 June 1876 [bingzi 5/14]: 7. 5 Wu Tingxie (1998): vol. 3, 489. 6 Dikötter (2006): 241–249. 7 Tōkyō shi yakusho shōkōka (1922): 198. 8 Kodak (1923): 29, 37 & 40. 9 Zeng (1985): 49, 56–57, 140, 145, 340, 424, 499, 883, 949. 10 Tong (2010); Tong (2012); on the second album, see also Roberts (2013): 77–79.

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11 Hudgins (2010). 12 Hershatter (1997): 83. 13 Haishang jinghong ying: yiming wubai meiren zhaoxiang. See several images discussed at Yeh (2006): figs 1.28, 1.29, 3.1a–b, 3.5; on the collection’s advertising, see Judge (2013): 142. 14 Reed (2004): 62–64. 15 On female pilots, see Judge (2013): 160–168. 16 Not a volume for the open shelf, Guide to amorous love letters (Xiangyan qingshu zhinan), probably a Shanghai imprint, appeared in 1922. Scholarship to date focuses on letters by literary figures, but for other normative guides in the 1930s, see Findeisen (1999): 108. 17 Guo (1984): 172. 18 Kang (2007): 518. 19 By the unknown author of Qingdai zhi zhutou muxie, collected in Ba Shu shushe (1987– 1988): vol. 7, 319. 20 Lum (2003): 323; Waley-Cohen (1999): 185. 21 Gu (2017): 63; Sun ([1941] 1983): 395. 22 Wang (2012a); Wang (2012b). 23 One of Yuan Shikai’s inauguration medals of 1913, the year of his promotion from the provisional presidency, is located in Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden (collection no. 7053-2). 24 Wang (2008): ix; Dutton (2004): 181. 25 Zhang (1983): 21. 26 Dated 29 November 1893 [GX guisi, 10/22], Zhang ([1928] 1963): 34.3b. 27 Wu (1986): 155–165. 28 Collection of Lambert van der Aalsvoort; Tan Jintu (2004): 158; Grands Faits, 15 December–15 January 1912: 27. 29 Chen et al. (1987): 65–68. 30 Shi (2008): vol. 31, 1–24. 31 Roberts (2013): 80. 32 Guangzhou (1996): 634–635. 33 Ross (2013): 449. 34 Lang (1939b): foreword (spellings amended). 35 Andrews & Shen (1999). 36 Liu (1995): 227, and more on Mao Dun’s attachment to societies at 229–230. 37 Wuxian (1994): 947; Changshu (1990): 782; Jiang (1989): 2; Zhenjiang (1993): 1339; Songjiang (1991): 817; Huzhou (1999): 1885; Wuxi (1995): 2708; Gulou (2001): 1058. 38 Shenbao, 24 April 1923: 17. 39 Liu Bannong’s preface, Chen Wanli’s introduction, Liu’s apology and Wang Mengshu’s history head the society yearbook Guangshe nianjian (Beijing, 1928). Edition consulted in Shanghai Library. 40 Liu (1935): 138–141. 41 Xuan (1984): 29–37. 42 Given as Chang, S. Tingfan. See also Moore (2013): 128, 132–133. 43 On some of Guo’s activities, see Tong (2016): 44; He appeared as Kuo Cheng-chih in Photographic Journal membership lists issued from 1924 onwards. 44 Dong (2000): 127–130. 45 Shenbao, 8 March 1928: 15. 46 Chen et al. (1987): 171. 47 Wenhua yingzhan (Shanghai, 1931). Edition consulted in Shanghai Library. 48 Shenbao, 8 March 1928: 15. These Shanghai residents may have been related to a group in Tokyo, including the eminent photographer Nojima Yasuzō, who edited their journal Kōga during 1932–1933. 49 Shenbao, 9 April 1928: 15. 50 Shenbao, 25 December 1930: 11. 51 Shenbao, 15 January 1931: 15. 52 Shenbao, 25 December 1930: 11.

Circuits of communication 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

221

Yen (2002). On admissions, see Guo (2010): 142. Ai (2014). Wu (1992). Yiban zazhi, 2.3 (1927); reproduced at Feng (1990–1992): vol. 1, 63–74; Long (1988): 156–165. See also Barmé (2002): 98–101. Shenbao, 20 August 1923: 17. Keller (1984): 262, 273. Keller (1985): 26. For a more sympathetic view that Lang Jingshan’s painterly photographs did converge with the Bauhaus teacher’s aims, see Schaefer (2017): 37. Gu (2017): 68–74. Chenfeng, 3 (February 1934): no page nos. Dong (2006): 210; Keda zazhi, 6.6 (1935): 7–9. Zhonghua sheying zazhi, 2 (1932): 73. Schaefer (2010): 560. Zhongguo sheying, 17 (June 1948): 6. No comprehensive survey exists, aside from an overview of titles by Jiang (1989). See advertisements at Shenbao, 22 October 1927: 1, and 26 December 1929: 1. For the first of several advertisements, see Shenbao, 1 July 1924: 1. For a less commercial description of the journal, see also “publishing news” at Shenbao, 5 July 1924: 23. Shenbao, 27 December 1926: 1. Laing (2004): 37–39. See advertisements at Shenbao, 20 November 1932: 2; 3 February 1937: 1. See the first appearance of a regular page on photography, titled “There is no other entertainment” (Meiyou biege yule) at Linglong, 1 (18 March 1931): 26. On 1 January 1932, according to Zhao (2001): 198. Published in Black and White Pictorialist (Heibai yingji), 3 (April 1937). Liu (2015): 3–4. Chen & Xu (2011): 201. Wu (1958). Zhong (1989); Chen (1999). Lee (2000): 45–49. Yeh (2007): 137–140. Liu (1995): 221. Liangyou, 85 (February 1934): 15. See also Thorp & Vinograd (2001): 407, fig. 10.41; Schaefer (2017): 145. Klotz (2004): 29. Ricketts (2013). For an overview, see Willett (1978): 105–111. Chenfeng, 4 (March 1934): no page numbers. On Japanese developments, see Weisenfeld (2002): 217–261. Liangyou, 55 (March 1931): 26; Zhonghua sheying zazhi, 3 (1932): 98. See also Hu Boxiang’s multiple publication of Bright slopes (Qinglu), at both Liangyou, 41 (November 1929): 32; Zhonghua sheying zazhi, 5 (1932): 205. For the 1941 title Spring trees and marvellous peaks (Chunshu qifeng), and earlier titles, see Hsiao (2004): 137. Liangyou, 83 (December 1933): back cover. Bellinetti (2018): 2, fig. 4. Giddens (1991): 3. Sullivan (1959); Andrews (1994); Andrews & Shen (1998); Hung (1994); Kikuchi (2007). Ho (2009); Bellinetti (2018). Iriye (1992): 87. Two major Chinese surveys of this period are Gu & Fang (1989) and Jiang, Shu & Gu (1998). Jin Cha Ji described a base area straddling Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Hebei; see Ho (2009): 46–53; Brown (2012): 75–80; Bellinetti (2018): 1–15. Ho (2009): 57; Brown (2012): 57, 80.

222

Communication

100 For the year 1942, see Gu & Fang (1989): 45. 101 Gu & Fang (1989): front matter, 2, 4–5, 8–9, 21–23; Ho (2009): 74; Brown (2012): 73; Bellinetti (2018): 5–6. 102 Brown (2012): 75. 103 Wu (1961): illus. 1; see also Roberts (2013): 96, illus. 72; one colour still from Doctor Bethune (1964), produced by August First Film Studio (Beijing) and Haiyan Studio (Shanghai) appeared in Wu’s later technical guide at Wu (1979): illus. 33.

Appendix

Studios cited in Chapters 1–6

This alphabetical list of studio names is keyed to the finding numbers used in Chapters 1–6. The list includes studio names in use at the moment that their sources reveal their existence. Years of foundation and operation are taken from first and last citable advertisements in press sources or from recollections collected in local gazetteers. They are seldom definite indications of foundation and closure. The City/Province column locates cities and towns in provincial spaces that administrative changes have sometimes redefined—until Shanghai enveloped the towns of Changning and Songjiang, they lay within the larger confines of Jiangsu. An increasing number of Qing and Republican press sources and periodical literature can only be consulted online, and this includes broadsheet newspapers with discontinuous pagination determined by discrete sections. If indicating sections and pages is not feasible, the reference follows the system of the National Press Index (Quanguo baokan suoyin: www.cnbksy.com). This adopts sequential pagination for all sections of a single edition—for example, the reference to 15 stands for the fifteenth page, not necessarily page 15. Unless they show page numbers, each side of single-sheet newspapers is indicated recto/verso.

Baoji 寶記 Precious Record Yao Junqing 姚俊卿 Baotai 寶泰 Precious Prodigy Xu Dianjia 胥殿甲 Baozhen 保真 Protected Truth Binlun 繽綸 Gorgeous Warps Wen Dinan 溫棣南

Bixiao lou 畢肖樓 House of Absolute Resemblances Biyuntian 碧雲天 Azure Cloud Heaven Bu Zhenmei 卜真美 Prophesies of True Beauty Chang Qingru [studio of]

Chang Runlin [studio of]

11

12 13 14 15

16

19

20

18

17

Changzhou

Yangzhou

Shanghai

Zhenjiang Liaocheng Taishan Guangzhou

Shanghai

Shanghai Beijing Wulumuqi Nanjing

Jiashan

Taipei Xiaoxi Changzhou

Wenzhou Shanghai

Location

Chang Runlin 常潤林

Jingmen

Chang Qingru 常清如 Chifeng

Liang Mosheng 梁墨生

Ouyang Shizhi 歐陽石芝 Ouyang Huiqiang 歐陽慧鏘

Baoji 寶記 Precious Record

7 8 9 10

6

3 4 5

Aiwu 愛吾 Love Me Aiwu Lu 愛吾廬 Love My Appearance [Mount Lu] Aporo アポロ Apollo Peng Ruilin 彭瑞麟 Baiguang 白光 Plain Light Bailemen 百樂門 Gate of All Pleasures Ban’ge 半閣 Cabinet of One Half Baode 寶德 Precious Virtue Baofeng 寶豐 Precious Harvest Baoguang 寶光 Precious Light Baoji 寶記 Precious Record

1 2

Founder, Owner or Manager

Studio Name

No.

Inner Mongolia Hubei

Jiangsu

Jiangsu

Shanghai

Jiangsu Shandong Guangdong Guangdong

Shanghai

Shanghai Beijing Xinjiang Jiangsu

Zhejiang

Taiwan Fujian Jiangsu

Zhejiang Shanghai

1912

1916

1907–1909

1911

1914

1928 fo. 1900 1922 1860s

1889 and 1891

1928 c. 1900 1935–1940 1887

1923

1931 1948 1937

1920 1926

Jingmen (1994): 383.

Chifeng (1996): 1422

Yangzhou (1997): 2543; Mu & Zhang (2011) Changzhou (1995): v. 2, 904

Xinwen bao, 4 Feb. 1929: 15 Chen (1985): fig. 3 Wulumuqi (1994–1998): v. 4, 298 Shenbao, 27 June 1886 [bingxu 5/26]: 5 Shenbao, 3 Sept. 1889 [jichou 8/9]:5 Shenbao, 5 July 1891 [xinmao 5/29]: 8 Shenbao, 5 Aug. 1923: 19 (re: “glass house”) Luo Binhan, 26 Apr. 1928: 2 Shandong (1995): 383 Sheying zazhi, 3 (1922): 91 Deng (1922): 97; Wu (1986): 5; Guangzhou (1996): 632 Chen ([1924] 2000): 203

Hsiao (1994): 11 Pinghe (1994): 421 Changzhou (1995): v. 2, 904; Jiangsu (1999): 311 Jiashan (1995): 505

Wenzhou (1998): 1746 Sanri huabao, 18 Apr. 1926: verso

City / Province Foundation / Sources Operation

224  Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6

Dieyuan 蝶園 Butterfly Garden Duiwoxuan 對我軒 Gallery of the Matched Self Ermiao 二妙 Two Miracles Ermiao 二妙 Two Miracles Erwei 二惟 Where I Care Twice Erweilou 二惟樓 House Where I Care Twice Erweilou 二 惟樓 House Where I Care Twice Erwo 二我 Two Selves Erwo 二我 Two Selves Erwo 二我 Two Selves Erwo 二我 Two Selves Shi Qiang 施 強 Erwo 二我 Two Selves Erwo 二我 Two Selves Erwo 二我 Two Selves Erwo 二我 Two Selves Erwo 二我 Two Selves Erwo 二我 Two Selves Erwo 二我 Two Selves Xie Zhongying 謝鐘英 Erwo 二我樓 House of The Two Selves Erwo xuan 二我軒 Two Selves Gallery

28 29

47

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

34

33

30 31 32

27

23 24 25 26

Chen Jiying 陳濟英

Chen Jiying [studio of] Chuanzhen 傳真 Truth’s Transmission Chuguang 楚光 Light of Chu Damei 大美 Great Beauty Detai 德泰 Bounteous Peace Deyuan 得園 Garden of Success Dielai 蝶來 Butterfly Future

21 22

Changsha

Beijing Chaozhou Huaiyang Lugang Nanjing Shenjiamen Taishan Taizhou Wenzhou Xiangyang Yunxiao Taishan

Shanghai

Shanghai

Fuzhou Pingtan Chengdu

Shanghai Shanghai

Shanghai

Hankou Songjiang Shanghai Chongqing

Yunxiao Macao

Hunan

Beijing Guangdong Henan Taiwan Jiangsu Zhejiang Guangdong Jiangsu Zhejiang Hubei Fujian Guangdong

Shanghai

Shanghai

Fujian Fujian Sichuan

Shanghai Shanghai

Shanghai

Hubei Jiangsu Shanghai Sichuan

Fujian Guangdong

1912–1949

1912–1949 1912–1949 1912–1949 c. 1895 1912–1949 1937 1922 1912–1949 1912–1949 1912–1949 1935 1922

fo. 1924

1892–1911

1920s 1952 1910

1935 or earlier 1938 1916

1934 1937 1882–1910 1932

1930 1922

Tong (2016): 98 (Continued)

Shenbao, 1 July 1892 [renchen 6/8]: 6; Tong (1916): 375 Xiao shibao (Shibao supplement), 22 Mar. 1924: 2 Tong (2016): 98 Tong (2016): 98 Huaiyang (1991): 570 Hsiao (1995): 1 Tong (2016): 98 Putuo (1991): 665 Sheying zazhi, 3 (1922): 91 Tong (2016): 98 Tong (2016): 98 Tong (2016): 98 Yunxiao (1999): 427 Sheying zazhi, 3 (1922): 91

Wang Du (1982): 10 Pingtan (2000): 303 Fu ([1910] 1987): 113

Shibao, 15 Dec. 1938: 4 Shangwu yinshuguan (1916): 6.29a

Tong (2016): 384.

Ping Han xin shenghuo, 1 (1934): 3 Che & Gong (1990): 252 Tong (2016): 374. Chongqing (1997): 219

Yunxiao (1999): 427 Sheying zazhi, 3 (1922): 91

Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6  225

64 65

63

62

61

60

57 58 59

56

55

54

53

52

51

50

Guanghua 光華 Glory Guanghua 光華 Glory

Furong 芙蓉鏡 Hibiscus Mirror Gongsang Nuoerbu [studio of] Gongtai 公泰 Great Impartiality

Erwo xuan 二我軒 Two Selves Gallery Erwo xuan 二我軒 Two Selves Gallery Erwo xuan 二我軒 Two Selves Gallery Erwo xuan 二我軒 Two Selves Gallery Erwo xuan 二我軒 Two Selves Gallery Erwo xuan 二我軒 Two Selves Gallery Erwo xuan 二我軒 Two Selves Gallery Erwo xuan 二我軒 Two Selves Gallery Erwo xuan 二我軒 Two Selves Gallery Erwu 二吾 Two Selves Eryou 二友 Two Friends Fang Lushan 仿廬山 Imitations of Mount Lu Fengtai 豐泰 Great Harvest

48

49

Studio Name

No.

Guiyang

Guilin

Location

Gongsang Nuoerbu 貢桑諾尔布

Liang Haichu 梁海初

Ren Jingfeng 任景豐 or Jinfeng 覲風

Zhang Jian 張謇

Jiang Xuan 蔣楦

Anqing Bengbu

Harqin Banner Shanghai

Guangzhou

Beijing

Nantong Yizhang Songxi

Zunyi

Shanghai

Shangrao

Ningbo

Nanjing

Kunming

Wu Xingxuan 吳杏軒 Hangzhou

Founder, Owner or Manager

Anhui Anhui

Inner Mongolia Shanghai

Guangdong

Beijing

Jiangsu Hunan Fujian

Guizhou

Shanghai

Jiangxi

Zhejiang

Jiangsu

Yunnan

Zhejiang

Guizhou

Guangxi

1911–1949 1937–1945

1889–1899

1903

c. 1870

1892

1923 1929 1943

1912–1949

1933

1938

after 1920

1912–1949

1904

before1900

1912–1949

1920s

Shenbao, 26 Jan. 1889 [wuzi 12/25]: 9; 27 Sept. 1899 [jihai 8/23]: 3 Anqing (1995): 812 Bengbu (1995): 479

Xin Beiping bao – shehui ban, 18 Mar. 1938; Chen (1985): 30; Chen et al. (1987): 51 Wu (1986): 6; Chen et al. (1987): 46 Kalaqinqi (1998): 571.

Nantong Erwu (1923) Yizhang (1995): 529 Songxi (1994): 293

Shenbao, 17 Dec. 1933: 15; Xinwen bao, 18 Dec. 1933: 9 Tong (2016): 98

Yinxian (1996): 1605; Ningbo (1995): 2377; Tong (2016): 98 Shangrao (1993): 155

Hangzhou (1999): v. 7, 270; Shanghai Library (2007): 240 Kunming (1983–1984): v. 6, 435; Tong (2016): 98 Tong (2016): 98

Guilin (1997): 2080; Tong (2016): 98 Tong (2016): 98

City / Province Foundation / Sources Operation

226  Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6

Guangji xuan 光霽軒 Gallery of Rinsed Light; formerly s 199 & 250 Guangji xuan 光霽軒 Gallery of Rinsed Light Guangming 光明 Openness Guangming 光明 Openness Guangming 光明 Openness Guangming 光明 Openness Guangming 光明 Openness Guangxue 光學 Optics Guanhua ge 觀化閣 Cabinet for Watching Transformations Gujing lou 古鏡廔 House of Ancient Mirrors Guoguang 國光 Light of State Guoguang 國光 Light of State Haijing 海鏡 Ocean Mirror He Xiru [studio of] Hengchang 恆昌 Ever Flourishing Hengda 恆大 Ever Great Hengsheng 恆昇 Ever Rising Hexing 和興 Harmony Ascendant Hong Yucheng [studio of] Honge xuan 紅萼軒 Red Calyx Gallery (Kong family mansion) Hongji 鴻記 Wild Goose

70

90

88 89

85 86 87

80 81 82 83 84

79

72 73 74 75 76 77 78

71

Guanghua 光華 Glory Guanghua 光華 Glory Guanghua 光華 Glory Guanghui lou 光繪樓 House of Light Painting

66 67 68 69

Yang Yuanshan 楊遠山

Beijing

Hong Yucheng 洪玉成 Pujiang Qufu

Hechuan Wenzhou Anyang Qufu Tianjin

Suzhou

Haerbin Lishui Putuo Xinxiang Zhenjiang Shaxian Kunming

Changshu

Shanghai

He Xiru 河席儒 Huang Guohua 黃國華 Wu Xitang 吳錫堂 Haerbin Gu Hengsheng 古恆昇 Tengxian Shanghai

Pan Kangbo 潘康伯

Wu Pucheng 吳樸誠

Tong Wentao 童文濤

Chengdu Jinan Shangrao Shanghai

Beijing

Zhejiang Shandong

Heilongjiang Shandong Shanghai

Sichuan Zhejiang Henan Shandong Hebei

Jiangsu

Heilongjiang Zhejiang Zhejiang Henan Jiangsu Fujian Yunnan

Jiangsu

Shanghai

Sichuan Shandong Jiangxi Shanghai

1898

1910 1920s

c. 1912 1908 1911

1937 1937 1919–1937 1910s 1875

1890

1908 or earlier 1937 1937 1949 1915–1937 1937 1911–1949 c. 1894

1888

1937 early 1930s 1939 1890–1899

(Continued)

Chongyi ([1862] 1982): 39; Chen (1985): 30

Hechuan (1995): 492 Wenzhou (1998): 1747 Anyang (1998): v. 3, 1348 Qufu (1993): 279 Tianjin (1996): 267; Tong (2012): 11 Haerbin (1991): 487 Zaozhuang (1993): 1524 Shenbao, 15 Apr. 1911 [xinhai 3/17]: supp. 4 Pujiang (1990): 312 Shandong (1995): 383

Suzhou (1995): 860

Haerbin (1991): 488 Lishui (1994): 245 Putuo (1991): 665 Xinxiang (1994): 469 Zhenjiang (1993): 1071 Li (1992): 272 Kunming (1983–1984): v. 6, 410

Changshu (1990): 782

Sichuan (1996): 178 Jinan (1997): v. 4, 223 Shangrao (1993): 155 Shenbao, 3 Oct. 1890 [gengyin 8/20]: 8; 5 July 1899 [jihai 5/28]: supp. 3 Shenbao, 26 Dec. 1888 [wuzi 9/22]: 5

Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6  227

111

107 108 109 110

106

105

104

103

102

100 101

99

94 95 96 97 98

93

Founder, Owner or Manager

Huanwo 還我 Return me Huawo 化我 Transform Me Hudie 蝴蝶 Butterfly Huguang 湖光 Lake Light Huiguang 慧光 Wisdom’s Light Huiguang 慧光 Wisdom’s Light Huofo 活佛 Living Buddha Hushan 湖山 Lakes and Mountains Jiang Liutang 蔣柳堂 Jiang Jiang Ziliang 蔣子良 Liutang studio Jiantianzhen 見天真 Seeing Natural Truth Jianwo lou 見我樓 House of the Self Seen Jianzhenwo 見真我 The Self Truly Seen Jiechun yuan 介春園 Garden Lodged in Spring Jieyuan 捷元 Victorious First Liang Jiechen 梁傑臣 Jilu 寄廬 Staying at Mount Lu Jingbo 鏡波 Mirror Ripples Jingfang 競芳 Competing Xi Shaoshan 席少珊 Exemplars Jingguang 鏡光 Mirrored Light

Huafang baoji 華芳寶記 Glorious Exemplars and Precious Records Huaguang 華光 Glorious Light Huanghou 皇后 Empress

91

92

Studio Name

No.

Guangzhou

Guangdong

Henan Zhejiang Anhui Shanghai

Hebei

Zhangjiakou Kaifeng Hangzhou Anqing Shanghai

Jiangxi

Anhui

Zhejiang

Zhejiang

Zhejiang Shanghai

Zhejiang

Zhejiang Zhejiang Shanghai Jiangsu Zhejiang

Shanghai

Hunan

Shanghai

1922

1896 c. 1900 1939 1919–1930

1924

1948

1897

1937

1905

c. 1925 1931

c. 1925

1930 or earlier 1920 1912–1949 1932 1939 1947

1915–1927

1914

Sheying zazhi, 1 (1922): 68

Wu (1986): 6 Hangzhou (1999): v. 7, 270 Anqing (1995): 879 Tong (2016): 378–379

Zhangjiakou (1998): 742

Shangrao (1993): 155

Wuhu (1993): 698

Yongkang (1991): 252

Shaoxing (1996): 1215; 2107

Hangzhou (1999): v. 7, 270 Hubao, 25 Apr. 1931: 2

Hangzhou (1999): v. 7, 270

Wenzhou (1998): 1746 Haining (1995): 562 Zhengqi bao, 22 June 1932: 3 Wuxi (1995): 1748 Zhuji (1992): 400

Tong (2016): 382

Yueyang (1997): 243

Shanghai Library (2007): 102

City / Province Foundation / Sources Operation

Shangrao

Wuhu

Yongkang

Shaoxing

Hangzhou Shanghai

Hangzhou

Wenzhou Haining Shanghai Wuxi Zhuji

Shanghai

Yueyang

Shanghai

Location

228  Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6

Jingrong zhai 鏡蓉齋 Mirrored Lotus Library Jingyi 精一 Refined Uniqueness Jingzhongren 鏡中人 The Ma Futian 馬福田 One in the Mirror Jingzhongtian 鏡中天 Heaven in the Mirror Jingzhongtian 鏡中天 Heaven in the Mirror Jingzhongtian 鏡中天 Heaven in the Mirror Jingzhongwu 鏡中吾 The Self in the Mirror Jinshizhai 金石齋 Epigraphy Library Jinwu 今吾 Today’s Self Wen Caizhen 溫才真 Jiufangzhai wenjudian 九芳 齋文具店 Stationers at the Library of All Exemplars Jiushiwo 就是我 Invariably Sun Songting 孫松庭 Me Jiushiwo 就是我 Invariably Me Jiushiwo 就是我 Invariably Me

113

Jiushiwo 就是我 Invariably Me

Jiushiwo 就是我 Invariably Me

126

127

125

124

123

121 122

120

119

118

117

116

115

114

Jing huayuan 鏡花緣 Mirror of Comely Predestinations

112

Zhejiang

Zhejiang

Hunan Zhejiang

Shanghai

Jiangsu

Jiangsu

Shanghai

Yunnan

Zhejiang

Shandong

Fujian

Zhejiang

Shanghai Shanghai (Guizhou Road) Shanghai Shanghai (Changshou Road) Shaodong Hunan

Jiashan

Hangzhou

Xintian Fenghua

Shanghai

Changning

Yangzhou

Shanghai

Gejiu

Dongyang

Jinan

Xianyou

Hangzhou

1930s

1948

1936–1949

1923

1924

1952 1900

1887

1938

1945

c. 1908

1949

1902

fo. 1914

1917

c. 1900

Shaodong (1993): 249 (Continued)

Heping ribao, 24 Oct. 1948: 4

Tong (2016): 388

Jiashan (1995): 505

Shenbao, 4 Mar. 1924: 21

Xintian (1995): 217 Fenghua (1994): 348

Tong (2016): 374

Changning (1993): 233

Yangzhou (1997): 2543

Tong (2016): 103

Gejiu (1998): 683

Dongyang (1993): 469

Jinan (1997): v. 4, 222

Advertisement preserved in Walter Clennell coll., Historical Photographs of China, Bristol Univ., CF01-145. Xianyou (1995): 440

Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6  229

Liangru 兩如 Both Alike Liangyou 良友 Young Companion Liangyou 良友 Young Companion Liangyou 良友 Young Companion Liangyou 良友 Young Companion Liangyou 良友 Young Companion Liangyou 良友 Young Companion

Liangyou 良友 Young Companion Liangyou 良友 Young Companion

137 138

144

145

143

142

141

140

139

Liang [studio of] Liang Meichun [studio of]

135 136

133 134

132

131

130

129

Lanzhou

Haining

Dongtai

Changzhou

Huzhou Anxi

Shangrao Changzhou

Jinan Wuxi

Nanyang

Suzhou

Jiaxing

Wusong

Wenzhou

Location

Songjiang

Wang Hongzhang Shanghai 汪鴻章 & Chen Zhengxiang 陳徵祥 Tang Xusheng 唐旭昇 Shanghai

Liang 梁 Liang Meichun 梁梅春

Jiushiwo 就是我 Invariably Me Jiushiwo 就是我 Invariably Me Jiyuan 寄園 Garden of Shen Shisun 沈石蓀 Emplacement Kuang Lushan 匡廬山 Corrections to Mount Lu Kuiji 魁記 Recorded in First Chang Zhanyuan Place 常占元 Lanting 蘭亭 Orchid Pavilion Lao Baohua 老寶華 The Original Your Honour

128

Founder, Owner or Manager

Studio Name

No.

Jiangsu

Shanghai

Shanghai

Gansu

Zhejiang

Jiangsu

Jiangsu

Zhejiang Fujian

Jiangxi Jiangsu

Shandong Jiangsu

Henan

Jiangsu

Zhejiang

Jiangsu

Zhejiang

1930s

1946

fo. 1938

1945

1912–1949

1933

c. 1949

1932 1900 or 1903 1920s 1946

1915 1899

1902

early 1920s

1884

fo. 1921

1937

Che & Gong (1990): 252

Tong (2016): 382

Tong (2016): 181, 382

Gansu (1993): 363

Haining (1995): 562

Changzhou (1995): v. 2, 904; Tong (2016): 278 Dongtai (1994): 499

Jinan (1997): v. 4, 222 Renbao, 31 Jan. 1933: 1; for Baohua, the same business or a branch founded in Shanghai in 1899, see Tong (2016): 376. Shangrao (1993): 155 Changzhou (1995): v. 2, 904; v. 3, 438 Huzhou (1999): 1108 Anxi (1994): 433

Nanyang (1989): 551

Suzhou (1995): 860

Jiaxing (1997): 1393

Xinwen bao, 21 Nov. 1929: 16

Wenzhou (1998): 1747

City / Province Foundation / Sources Operation

230  Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6

162

161

160

159

158

157

156

155

154

153

152

150 151

149

148

147

146

Liufeng ge 柳風閣 Willow Breeze Cabinet Liuzhen 留真 Keeping the Truth Liuzhen 留真 Keeping the Truth Liuzhen 留真 Keeping the Truth Liuzhen 留真 Keeping the Truth Liuzhen 留真 Keeping the Truth Liuzhen 留真 Keeping the Truth Liuzhen 留真 Keeping the Truth Liuzhen 留真 Keeping the Truth

Liangyou 良友 Young Companion Liangyou 良友 Young Companion Liangyou 良友 Young Companion Liangyuan 梁園 Liang Liang Xiaoting Garden 梁筱庭 Lifu 麗芙 Dual Hibiscus Lihua zhaoxiang fangda gongsi 麗華照相放大公司 Magnificent Photography and Enlargement Co. Liufang 留芳 Retained Exemplars Liufang ge 留芳閣 Cabinet of Retained Exemplars

Longhai

Laohekou

Lanzhou

Hefei

Chongqing

Chengdu

Changzhou

Anqing

Shanghai

Shanghai

Hangzhou

Beijing Shanghai

Yangzhou

Xi’an

Wulumuqi

Wenzhou

Fujian

Hubei

Gansu

Anhui

Sichuan

Sichuan

Jiangsu

Anhui

Shanghai

Shanghai

Zhejiang

Beijing Shanghai

Jiangsu

Shaanxi

Xinjiang

Zhejiang

c. 1920

1912–1937

1920s

1911–1949

1930s

1937

c. 1907

1911–1949

1891

1889–1903

1926

1909 early 1880s

1930s

1939

1935–1940

1947

Longhai (1993): 375

Laohekou (1992): 301

Gansu (1993): 363

Hefei (1999): 1267

Chongqing (1997): 219

(Continued)

Changzhou (1995): v. 2, 904; Jiangsu (1999): 311 Sichuan (1996): 178

Tong (2016): 374; Shenbao, 15 Jan. 1903 [renyin 12/17]: 9 Shenbao, 13 Oct. 1891 [xinmao 9/11]: 9 Anqing (1995): 812

Xiao shibao, 1 Apr. 1926: 1

Yangzhou (1997): 2543; Mu & Zhang (2011) Chen (1985): 31 See Chapter 3, note 2

Zhonghua, 78 (June 1939): 22

Wulumuqi (1994–1998): v. 4, 298

Wenzhou (1998): 1746

Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6  231

185

183 184

182

179 180 181

178

167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177

166

164 165

Lizhu 麗珠 Dual Pearls Luo Qingyun [studio of] Lushan 廬山 Mount Lu Lushan 盧山 [sic] Mount Lu Lushan 廬山 Mount Lu Lushan 廬山 Mount Lu Lushan 廬山 Mount Lu Lushan 廬山 Mount Lu Lushan 廬山 Mount Lu Lushan 廬山 Mount Lu Lushan xuan 廬山軒 Mount Lu Gallery Lushan xuan 廬山軒 Mount Lu Gallery Lü [studio of] Meiguang 美光 Beauty’s Light Meihua 美華 Beauty’s Splendour Meihua 美華 Beauty’s Splendour Meirong 美容 Beauty’s Face Meisheng 美昇 Beauty’s Apotheosis Meiwo 美我 Beautify Me Nanping Yueyang Jinan

Xianyou

Guangzhou Xi’an Changshu Changzhou Chengdu Lanzhou Nanjing Shanghai Wenzhou Yantai Fuzhou

Shanghai

Guangzhou Guangzhou

Yueyang

Location

Li 李

Shengxian

Laohekou Quanzhou

Weng Yaoqing 翁耀卿 Wuchang

Lü 呂

Kimura 木村

Luo Qingyun 羅慶雲 Li Yi 李怡

Liuzhen 留真 Keeping the Truth Li Yong 黎鏞 [personal name] Lizhen 麗真 Dual Truth Yang Guanghan 楊光漢 Lizhu 麗珠 Dual Pearls Liang Jiechen 梁傑臣

163

Founder, Owner or Manager

Studio Name

No.

Zhejiang

Hubei Fujian

Hubei

Fujian Hunan Shandong

Fujian

Guangdong Shaanxi Jiangsu Jiangsu Sichuan Gansu Jiangsu Shanghai Zhejiang Shandong Fujian

Shanghai

Guangdong Guangdong

Hunan

1925

1903 1885

1882

1908 1915–1927 fo. 1911

1950

1922 fo. 1909 1908 1907–1909 1937 1940–1941 1911–1949 1924 1922 1920s 1860

1899–1911

c. 1910 1911

1915–1927

Shengxian (1989): 227

Laohekou (1992): 301 Quanzhou (2000): 1368

Wu (1987): 35; Wuhan (1989): 798

Nanping (1994): 749 Yueyang (1997): 243 Jinan (1997): v. 4, 222

Shenbao, 14 July 1910 [gengxu 6/8]: supp. 6; Shenbao, 6 Apr. 1911 [xinhai 3/8]: 1 Sheying zazhi, 1 (1922): 68 Shaanxi (1999): 234 Changshu (1990): 782 Changzhou (1995): 904 Sichuan (1996): 178 Gansu (1993): 363 Shanghai Library (2007): 120 Shenbao, 27 May 1924: supp. 1 Wenzhou (1998): 1746 Yantai (1994): v. 2, 1096 Wang Du (1982): 10; Xu (2007): 26 Xianyou (1995): 440

Sheying zazhi, 1 (1922): 68 Wu (1986): 11

Yueyang (1997): 243

City / Province Foundation / Sources Operation

232  Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6

203 204

202

201

200

199

198

197

196

195

194

192 193

191

190

189

187 188

186

Nianci 念慈 Tender Thoughts Pinfang 品芳 Judging Exemplars Qi Zhaoyuan [photography stall of] Qiaozhen 巧真 Truth through Skill Qilin ge 麒麟閣 Cabinet of Prodigies Qingfeng zhi Lu 青峰之廬 Mount Lu in Green Peaks Qiyun 棲雲館 Halted Cloud Inn Qunxian ge 群賢閣 Cabinet of Gatherered Immortals – forerunner of s 250 Renchuan 人舛 Persons in Parallel Renxian 人仙 Human Immortals Richeng 日成 Done in One Day Rongchang 榮昌 Glorious Rongfang 容芳 Expressions Exemplary

Meiwomei 美吾美 Beautify My Beauty Meiyu 美余 Beautify Me Mingjianxuan 明鑑軒 Bright Mirror Gallery Minguang 民光 Light of the People Minjing 民鏡 Citizen’s Mirror Modeng 摩登 Modern

Li Baizhen 李白貞

Luo Yuanyou 羅元佑/祐

Qi Zhaoyuan 祁兆元

Lu Ziwen 陆子文

Hankou Jinan

Shanghai

Shanghai

Shanghai

Shanghai

Shanghai

Danyang

Nanchang

Guangzhou

Anyang

Hangzhou Shanghai

Shanghai

Guangzhou

Shanghai

Changzhou Liancheng

Ninghua

Hubei Shandong

Shanghai

Shanghai

Shanghai

Shanghai

Shanghai

Jiangsu

Jiangxi

Guangdong

Henan

Zhejiang Shanghai

Shanghai

Guangdong

Shanghai

Jiangsu Fujian

Fujian

1911 1870–1886

1866

1924–1942

1920

1887

1859

1918

1875

1911

1918

1948 1915–1940

1931–1934

1934

1931–1934

1948 1855

1948

(Continued)

Xinwen bao, 4 Nov. 1924: 11; Tong (2016): 380 Shanghai xinbao, 8 Feb. 1866 [yichou 12/23]: 2 Wu (1986): 11 Shandong (1995): 383; Jinan (1997): v. 4, 222

Xu (1920): 138

Shenbao, 7 June 1887 [dinghai 4+/16]: 5

Wang Tao (1987): 93

Shenbao, 30 Apr. 1875 [yihai 3/25]: 6 Jiangsu (1999): 311

See Fig. 3.9

Anyang (1998): 1348

Tong (2016): 383; Shanghai shangbao, 15 Jan. 1934: 4 Sheying zazhi, 1 (1922): 68; Guangzhou (1996): 632 Tong (2016): 383; Hubao, 2 Oct. 1931: 2 Zhe Gan lu xun, 220 (1948): 2 Tong (2016): 187, 378

Changzhou (1995): 904 Liancheng (1993): 374

Ninghua (1992): 387

Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6  233

Ronghua 榮華 Resplendent

Ronghua 榮華 Resplendent

Rongjing xuan 蓉鏡軒 Hibiscus Mirror Gallery Ruichang 瑞昌 Propitious

205

206

207

Shitai 時泰 [personal name]

219

220

218

217

Liang Shitai 梁時泰

Liang Shitai 梁時泰

Wang Zizhen 王子貞

Shangyou 尚友 Esteeming Friendship Shanzhen 山真 Mountain Truth Shenwaishen 身外身 Body Beyond the Body Shitai 時泰 [personal name]

216

215

213 214

212

Ruichang 瑞昌 Propitious Ruiji 瑞記 Propitious Record Ruixing meishu fenguan 瑞星美術分館 Propitious Star Artistic Studio (branch) Ruwo xuan 如我軒 Similar to Me Gallery Ruxiang 如相 Prophetic Sanmin 三民 Three People’s Principles Sanxing – early name of Su Sanxing (q.v.) Sentai 森泰 Saunders William Saunders (initially)

Zeng Ruitian 曾瑞田 et alia Wu Ruisheng 吳瑞生 Wu Ruisheng 吳瑞生

Huang Hanmin 黃漢民 et alia

Founder, Owner or Manager

209 210 211

208

Studio Name

No.

Tianjin

Shanghai

Shanghang

Yuyao

Beijing

Shanghai

Taishan Shanghai

Shiping

Suzhou Suzhou Jinyuan

Shanghai

Quzhou

Shanghai

Hankou

Location

Hebei

Shanghai

Fujian

Zhejiang

Beijing

Shanghai

Guangdong Shanghai

Yunnan

Jiangsu Jiangsu Shanxi

Shanghai

Zhejiang

Shanghai

Hubei

1887

1876

1930

c. 1949

1900

1863–1891

1922 1927

1921

1892 or earlier 1892 1909 1933

1918

1927–1937

1872

Shenbao, 29 May 1876 [bingzi 5/7]: 6; 5 June 1876 [bingzi 5/14]: 7 Tianjin (1996): 267

Shanghang (1993): 370

Yuyao (1993): 389

Shanghai xinbao, 5 Mar. 1863 [guihai 1/16]: 1; Shenbao, 20 May 1891 [xinmao 4/13]: 5 Chen (1985): 30

Sheying zazhi, 3 (1922): 91 Shenbao, 26 Sept., 1927: 1

Shiping (1990): 283

Shenbao, 5 Aug. 1893 [guisi 6/24]: 6 Suzhou (1995): 860 Suzhou (1995): 860 Tong (2016): 72

Zhang (1983): 20; Wu (1987): 35; Wuhan (1989): 798 Shenbao, 6 Nov. 1927: 1; Tong (2016): 381 Quzhou (1994): 623

City / Province Foundation / Sources Operation

234  Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6

235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243

234

229 230 231 232 233

228

227

226

225

Tiansheng 天勝 Heaven Supreme Tianzhen 天真 Natural Truth Tianzhen 天真 Natural Truth Tianzhen 天真 Natural Truth Tianzhen 天真 Natural Truth Tianzhen 天真 Natural Truth Tianzhen 天真 Natural Truth Liu Yaosheng 劉耀生 Tianzhen 天真 Natural Truth Tianzhen 天真 Natural Truth Tianzhen 天真 Natural Truth

Taifang 太芳 Supreme Wen Zhangwen Exemplars 溫章文 Taiping 太平寫真館 Peace Zeng Tongwu 曾桐梧 Studio Taoyuan 桃園 Peach Orchard Tianguang 天光 Daylight Tianguang 天光 Daylight Tianguang 天光 Daylight Tianran 天然 Natural

Shouzhen 守真 Guarded Truth Shuihua xuan 水華軒 Gallery Zheng Yaoting 鄭耀亭 of Water Glory Siwo 似我 Resemblances with the Self Su Sanxing 蘇三興 [personal name]

223 224

Yu Peilun 喻培倫 & Huang Fusheng 黃復生

Shiwo 是我 This Is Me Shouzhen 守真 Guarded Truth

221 222

Bengbu Changzhou Guangzhou Jinan Nanyang Tongan Wuxi Xiangfan Xianyou

Ningbo

Jinan Bengbu Linqing Tianjin Shanghai

Taipei

Beijing

Shanghai

Chaling

Dongguan Suqian

Yongkang Beijing

Anhui Jiangsu Guangdong Shandong Henan Jiangxi Jiangsu Hubei Fujian

Zhejiang

Shandong Anhui Shandong Hebei Shanghai

Taiwan

Beijing

Shanghai

Hunan

Guangdong Jiangsu

Zhejiang Beijing

1937 1907–1909 1923 1915 c. 1921 1918 c. 1900 1917 before 1949

1924

1915 before 1937 before 1949 before 1937 1888–1894

1920s

1900

1872–1908

1937

1923 1906

1937 1909

(Continued)

Bengbu (1995): 479 Jiangsu (1999): 904 Sheying zazhi, 1 (1922): 68 Jinan (1997): v. 4, 222 Nanyang (1989): 551 Tongan (2000): 609 Jiangsu (1999): 311 Xiangfan (1994): 359 Xianyou (1995): 440

Jinan (1997): v. 4, 222 Bengbu (1995): 479 Linqing (1997): 311 Tianjin (1996): 267 Shenbao, 29 Oct. 1888 (wuzi 9/25): 5; Shenbao, 26 Feb. 1894 (jiawu 1/21): 6 Ningbo (1995): 1453

Shenbao, 1–13 Jan. 1873 [renshen 12/3–15]: 6; 19 July 1908 [wushen 6/21]: 26: Tong (2016): 372 Shenbao, 17 Jan. 1900 (jihai 12/17): 7; Tong (2016): 199 Zhang (1988): 6

Chaling (1993): 256

Sheying zazhi, 4 (1923): 107 Suqian (1996): 518

Yongkang (1991): 252 Wu (1986): 11

Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6  235

Tongsheng 同生 Thompson

Tongsheng 同生 Thompson

Tsūtenrō 通天樓 Tower To Heaven

Wan Laiming [studio of]

Weichunyuan 味蒓園 Watershield Tasting Garden – forerunner of s 70 Weiwo 惟我 Only the Self

Weixin 維新 Reform Weiyi 唯一Unique Wen Taifang 溫太芳 [personal name] Wenhua 文化 Civilization Wowo 我我 My Self Wu Zhuofu [studio of]

Wuerye 吾貳也 I Am Another Wuwu 吾吾 My Self Xianzhen lou 顯真樓 Tower Where Truth Appears Xianzhen lou 顯真樓 Tower Yan Tiancheng 嚴添承 Where Truth Appears

246

247

248

249

250

252 253 254

258 259 260

261

255 256 257

251

Tongsheng 同生 Life Together Liang Jiechen 梁傑臣

245

Wu Zhuofu 吳焯夫

Bao Junxuan 鲍俊軒

Cheng Hongbin 程鴻彬

Yokoyama Matsusaburō 橫山松三郎 Wan Laiming 萬籟鳴

Tan Jingtang 譚景棠 Tan Cunzhao 譚存照

Tan Jingtang 譚景棠

Tong Yuejiang 童月江

Tong Yuejiang [studio of]

244

Founder, Owner or Manager

Studio Name

No.

Wuchang

Yichun Wenzhou Laohekou

Wuchang Shengxian Chengdu

Shanghai Yueyang Jinan

Shanghai

Shanghai

Shanghai

Tokyo

Shanghai

Beijing

Guangzhou

Chongqing

Location

Hubei

Zhejiang Hubei

Hubei Zhejiang Sichuan

Shanghai Hunan Shandong

Shanghai

Shanghai

Shanghai

Shanghai

Beijing

Guangdong

Sichuan

1881

1949 1947 1911–1937

1878 1925 1883

1909–1948 1945–1949 fo. 1911

1925

1887

1939–1944

1868

1908–1915

1910–1929

1880s

early 1870s

Zhang (1983): 20; Wu (1987): 35

Wu (1987): 35; Wuhan (1989): 798 Shengxian (1989): 227 Fu ([1910] 1987): 96, 112–113; Wang & Wang (1999): 47–48 Yichun (1990): 342 Wenzhou (1998): 1746 Laohekou (1992): 301

Tong (2016): 377 Yueyang (1997): 243 Jinan (1997): v. 4, 222

Lin (1925): 175

Shenbao, 2 Dec. 1939: 10; Tong (2016): 385 Shenbao, 7 June 1887 [dinghai, 4+/16]: 5

Little (1898): 211–212; Chen et al. (1987): 52 Wu (1986): 6; Chen et al. (1987): 46 Shuntian shibao, 13 Jan. 1925: 5; Tong (2016): 377 Shenbao, 16 Aug. 1910 [gengxu 7/12]: 8; 23 Dec. 1915: 11; Tong (2016): 343, 347, 377 Kinoshita (1996): 81; Ozawa (1997): 229–236

City / Province Foundation / Sources Operation

236  Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6

279

277 278

275 276

272 273 274

271

270

269

267 268

266

264 265

263

262

Liang Jiechen 梁傑臣

Jiang Yaolou 蔣瑤樓 Liang Jiechen 梁傑臣

Xie Shiqin 謝石琴

Zhang Yiqin 張一琴

Wuxi Jinan

Taizhou Shanghai Shanghai

Shanghai (Pudong) Shanghai

Wuxi

Xintian Suzhou

Guiyang

Jinan Guangzhou

Ninghua

Changting

Yaohua 耀華 Glorious China Shi Dezhi 施德之 Shanghai Yichang 宜昌 Concordant Xie Fen 謝芬 Fuzhou Brightness Yichang 宜昌 Concordant Zhang Laoqiu 張老秋 Guangzhou Brightness

Xinxin 心心 Shared Xu Xiaolin 徐小麟 Intentions Xiongdi 兄弟 Brothers Xuehuai [studio of] Lin Xuehuai 林雪懷 Xuyuan Yuelairong 徐園悅來容 Expressions Gladdened by Your Arrival, Xu Garden Yaguang 亞光 Light of Asia Yaohua 耀華 Glorious China

Xiao Lushan 小廬山 Little Mount Lu Xiao Lushan 肖廬山 Portraits of Mount Lu Xiao Peng 小朋 Young Peng Xiaosheng yuan 俏生園 Garden of Life’s Resemblances Xiaowo xuan 肖我軒 Gallery of the Self Portrayed Xiezhen 寫真 Portraiture Xingchang 興昌 Rising Brightness Xingchang 興昌 Rising Brightness Xinhua 新華 New Republic

Guangdong

Shanghai Fujian

Jiangsu Shandong

Jiangsu Shanghai Shanghai

Shanghai

Shanghai

Jiangsu

Hunan Jiangsu

Guizhou

Shandong Guangdong

Fujian

Fujian

1862

1892–1931 1862

1933 1870–1886

1912–1949 1931–1947 1887

1922–1929

1925

1896

late 1920s 1896

1902

1911 1922

1911–1949

1915

(Continued)

Renbao, 31 Jan. 1933: 3 Shandong (1995): 383; Jinan (1997): v. 4, 222 Tong (2016): 375 Deng (1922): 97; Wu (1986): 5; Chen et al. (1987): 18 Deng (1922): 97; Wu (1986): 5; Chen et al. (1987): 18; Guangzhou (1996): 632

Tong (2016): 379; Shibao, 10 Oct. 1923: 10 (reopening) Taizhou (1998): 355 Tong (2016): 383 Shenbao, 4 Dec. 1887 [dinghai 10/20]: 6

Xinwen bao, 27 Sept. 1925: 11

Wu (1986): 6

Xintian (1995): 217 Wu (1986): 6; Suzhou (1995): 860

Guizhou (1990): 405

Xiehe bao, 39 (1911): 9 Sheying zazhi, 2 (1922): 97

Ninghua (1992): 387

Changting (1993): 341

Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6  237

Yierer 一而二 Two From One Yiji Lu 一寄廬 One Stay at Mount Lu Yilin 藝林 Forest of Arts Yin Jinyi [studio of] Yingfang 迎芳 Welcome the Exemplary Yingmei 英美 Heroic Beauty Yingming 英明 Brilliant

Yinguang 銀光 Silver Light

Yingyue xuan 映月軒 Gallery Liang Mosheng of the Reflected Moon 梁墨生

Yinxing 銀星 Silver Planet

Yiru 一如 One Likeness Yiwo 一我 One Self Yiwo 一我 One Self Yiwo 亦我 Self Again Yiwoxuan 亦我軒 Gallery of the Self Again Yiwoxuan 亦我軒 Gallery of the Self Again Yiwu 亦吾 Self Again Yiwu 亦吾 Self Again

282 283

284 285 286

289

290

291

292 293 294 295 296

298 299

297

287 288

281

Kang Da 康達 Zhao Fuchen 趙甫臣

Yu Tongchang 俞同昌

Tu Yiru 屠一如

Hu 胡 Wang Zhizhong 王秩忠

Yin Jinyi 尹金晹 Lu Tingjian 魯庭建

Zhou Senfeng 周森峰

Yichang 宜昌 Concordant Brightness Yichang 宜昌 Concordant Brightness

280

Founder, Owner or Manager

Studio Name

No.

Wusong Shanghai

Lishui

Shanghai Changning Liancheng Guilin Jingning

Yueyang

Yangzhou

Yueyang

Xi’an Shanghai

Quanzhou Xiangtan Shanghai

Wugang Huzhou

Shanghai

Hong Kong

Location

Jiangsu Shanghai

Zhejiang

Shanghai Jiangsu Jiangsu Guangxi Zhejiang

Hunan

Jiangsu

Hunan

Shaanxi Shanghai

Fujian Hunan Shanghai

Hunan Zhejiang

Hong Kong

1920–1928 1923–1927

1920s

1945 or earlier 1933–1942 1931 1913 1945–1949 1937

1945 or earlier c. 1911

fo. 1909 1919–1947

1885 fo. 1875 fo. 1925

1946 1900

1864–1891

1862

Tong (2016): 379 Lin (1925): 174; Shenbao, 20 Aug. 1923: 17; Shenbao, 24 Oct. 1923: 17; Tong (2016): 379

Lishui (1994): 245

Tong (2016): 383 Changning (1993): 233 Lianshui (1997): 472 Guilin (1997): 2080 Jingning (1995): 280

Yangzhou (1997): 2543; Wang (2001): 157; Mu & Zhang (2011). Yueyang (1997): 243

Quanzhou (2000): 1368 Xiangtan (1995): 551 Shibao, 26 Dec. 1925: 7; Xinwen bao, 26 Jan. 1926: 11 Shaanxi (1999): 234 Tong (2016): 379; Shenbao, 2 Oct. 1923: 17 (branch opening with “glasshouse”) Yueyang (1997): 243

Deng (1922): 97; Wu (1986): 5; Chen et al. (1987): 18 Shanghai xinbao, 21 May 1864 [jiazi 4/16]: 2; Shenbao, 22 Nov. 1891 [xinmao 10/21]: 5 Wugang (1997): 447 Huzhou (1999): 1108

City / Province Foundation / Sources Operation

238  Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6

322

321

320

319

318

317

316

315

314

313

312

307 308 309 310 311

305 306

303 304

302

300 301

Yixuan 藝軒 Gallery of Arts Yiyixuan 亦亦軒 Gallery of Again and Again Youshencang 又身藏 Another Body Retained Youwo 又我 Repeated Self Youwozhai 又我齋 Library of the Repeated Self Yu Songtao [studio of] Yuejing xuan 月鏡軒 Moon Mirror Gallery Yueyang 岳陽 Studio Yunguang 雲光 Cloud Light Yunting 雲亭 Cloud Pavilion Yuye 予也 It Is I Zaohua gong 造化工 Artisan of Prospects Zeng Hongtai 曾鴻太 [personal name] Zenrakudō 全樂堂 Hall of Entire Pleasure Zhangping 漳平 [studio located in] Zhen Mianmu 真面目 True Appearance Zhen Mianmu 真面目 True Appearance Zhen Wanran 真宛然 Truly Similar Zhen Zhen 真真 [mythical female figure Zhen Zhen 真真 [mythical female figure] Zhen Zhen 真真 [mythical female figure] Zhen Zhen 真真 [mythical female figure] Zhen Zhen 真真 [mythical female figure] Huang Guodong 黃國棟

Shimooka Renjō 下罔蓮杖

Zeng Zeting 曾澤廷

Wang Jizhen 汪繼真

Yu Songtao 于松濤

Zhuji

Shanghai

Shanghai

Hankou

Guangzhou

Quanzhou

Wenzhou

Longquan

Zhangping

Yokohama

Jinan

Yueyang Wulumuqi Jinan Dongtai Shunde

Haerbin Haiyan

Macao Yizhang

Pingjiang

Quanzhou Shanghai

Zhejiang

Shanghai

Shanghai

Hubei

Guangdong

Fujian

Zhejiang

Zhejiang

Fujian

Shandong

Hunan Xinjiang Shandong Jiangsu Guangdong

Heilongjiang Zhejiang

Guangdong Hunan

Hunan

Fujian Shanghai

1947

1931–1934

1930

1922

1885

Zhuji (1992): 400

Tong (2016): 383

(Continued)

Xiao ribao, 28 Apr. 1930: 2

Su (2009): 19

Sheying zazhi, 1 (1922): 68

Quanzhou (2000): 1368

Wenzhou (1998): 1746

Longquan (1994): 293

c. 1937 1933

Zhangping (1995): 309

Kinoshita (1996): 33

Jinan (1997): v. 4, 222

Yueyang (1997): 243 Wulumuqi (1994–1998): v. 4, 298 Jinan (1997): v. 4, 222 Dongtai (1994): 499 Sheying zazhi, 4 (1923): 107

Haerbin (1991): 487. Haiyan (1992): 440

Sheying zazhi, 3 (1922): 90 Yizhang (1995): 529

Pingjiang (1994): 359

Quanzhou (2000): 1368 Shangwu yinshuguan (1916): 6. 29a

1930s

1867

1911

1891 before 1944 1915 1933 1923

1923 1922

1922 1929

1949

1885 1916

Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6  239

334

331 332 333

330

329

Zhenwu 真吾 True Self Zhenwu 真吾 True Self Zhenwu 真吾 True Self Zhenwu 真吾 True Self Zhenwu 真吾 True Self Zhenwu shi 真吾室 House of the True Self Zhizhen 致真 Summoning Truth Zhonghua 中華 China Guo Shuliang 郭叔良 (aka Kuo Cheng-chih) Zhonghua 中華 China Li Yaoting 李耀庭 Zhongyang 中央 Central Zhu jia zuofang 朱家作坊 Zhu 朱 Zhu Family Atelier Zhuxin 鑄新 Cast Anew

323 324 325 326 327 328

Founder, Owner or Manager

Studio Name

No.

Guangzhou

Tianjin Shanghai Jinzhuang

Shanghai

Shanghai

Chaling Linying Lishui Pucheng Songjiang Shengxian

Location

Guangdong

Hebei Shanghai Shandong

Shanghai

Shanghai

Hunan Henan Zhejiang Fujian Jiangsu Zhejiang

1922

1933 1929 1908

1891 or earlier 1912–1940s

1937 1911–1949 late 1920s 1944 c. 1912 1925

Sheying zazhi, 1 (1922): 68

Shenbao, 22 Aug. 1891 [xinmao 7/18]: 5 Tong (2016): 378; Photographic Journal (1924, 1926, 1927): membership lists Tong (2016): 367 Xinwen bao, 23 Aug. 1929: 20 Zaozhuang (1993): 1524

Chaling (1993): 256 Linying (1996): 410 Lishui (1994): 245 Pucheng (1994): 501 Che & Gong (1990): 251 Shengxian (1989): 227

City / Province Foundation / Sources Operation

240  Appendix: Studios cited in Chapters 1–6

Select glossary of names, titles and terms

This list of transcriptions includes: names of persons, organizations and places (except provinces, major cities and towns); titles or descriptions of photographs, paintings, illustrations, verse, prose, documents and any works not in the “List of cited works”; selected expressions in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, including words from Chinese dialects converted to Standard Modern Chinese transcription. Abe Jirō 阿部次郎 Aiguo nüer chuanqi 愛國女兒傳奇 an ying hui zhi 按影繪之 anshi 暗室 Asahi kamera アサヒカメラ Asahigraph アサヒグラフ Badaling 八達嶺 Bai Qiuen daifu 白求恩大夫 baiji 白芨 baimei ying 百美影 Balujun zhandou zai changchengling 八路軍戰鬥在長城嶺 Banwo caotang 半我草堂 Beijing meishu xiezhen yanjiuhui 北京美術寫真研究會 Beiyang huabao 北洋畫報 Beiyang sheying xuehui 北洋攝影學會 Bieqin zhuzhici 別琴竹枝詞 Bigong 筆公 bofang 玻房 boli shi 玻璃室 boli zhaopeng 玻璃照棚 Bowu xinbian 博物新編 Boxie cheng feng 渤澥乘風 bu jin yizao 不盡臆造 bujing 補景 Bujinghua chuanxisuo 佈景畫傳習所 buwei 部位 buye zhi cheng 不夜之城 buzhuo 捕捉 Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 Cai Zhonghe 蔡中和 canfei 殘廢

242  Select glossary of names, titles and terms Cao Kun 曹錕 Changdian 廠甸 Chen Diexian 陳蝶仙 Chen Hanguang 陳含光 Chen Huageng 陳華庚 Chen Jinshi 陳謹詩 Chen Qiao 辰橋 Chen Qiyuan 陳其元 Chen Wanli 陳萬里 Chen Xiaodie 陳小蝶 Chen Yingzhong 陳應中 Chen Zhaochang 陳昭常 Chenfeng 晨風 chengshang cankao 呈上參考 choku 直 chuanshen 傳神 chuanzhen shi 傳真室 Chun (Prince Chun) 醇 Chunshu qifeng 春樹奇峰 Chuxi 除夕 Cixi 慈溪 Dagongbao 大公報 Dai Heng 戴恆 Dajing bao 大晶報 Danwu 旦吾 daotai 道台 Datsuei yawa 脱影夜話 Dawutai 大舞台 Daying yiyuan 大英醫院 Dianshizhai huabao 點石齋畫報 dianzou 電奏 Ding Wenwei 丁文蔚 Dong Wenhuan 董文渙 Dongan 東安 Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 Donghua 東華 Dongnan ribao 東南日報 Dongxuejie zhi yijun guomin 東學界之一軍國民 Doujiying 鬥級營 Du Jiutian 杜就田 Du Yaquan 杜亜泉 Du Yuesheng 杜月笙 Duhui de ciji 都會的刺激 Duji 妒記 Dushi fengguang 都市風光 ei 影 eizō 影像 erwo tu 二我圖

Select glossary of names, titles and terms  243 Faguo xiake tan 法國俠客談 fang 芳 Feiying 飛鷹 Feiyingge jishi huace 飛影閣記士畫冊 Fen 墳 Feng Jiaji 馮家吉 Feng Wuyue 馮武越 Feng Zikai 豐子愷 fengguang 風光 fenshen 分身 Fotogurafii フォトグラフィー Fu Caiyun 傅彩雲 Fuju 負局 Fukasawa Yōkitsu 深澤要橘 Funü zazhi 婦女雜誌 futuogelaifu 福托葛來夫 Fuzhoulu 福州路 gazō 畫像 ge 閣 geertefu 格爾特福 Geshu bu 格術補 Gezhi huibian 格致彙編 gongcheng yulan 恭呈御覽 Gongjinhui 共進會 gongsi 公司 Gongyuan 公园 Gu Songquan 顧松泉 gua 呱 guan 倌 Guan Sifu 管嗣復 Guangfangyan guan 廣方言館 Guangshe 光社 Guangshe nianjian 光社年鑑 Guangxue 光學 Guangzhou sheying gonghui 廣州攝影工會 Guiliang 桂良 Guo Liancheng 郭連城 Guo Shuliang 郭叔良 guocui 國粹 guohua 國畫 guoren 國人 guoshu 國術 guoyu 國語 Haishang baiyan tu 海上百豔圖 Haishang jinghong ying: yiming wubai meiren zhaoxiang 海上驚鴻影 一名五百美人照相 Hankou zhongxi bao 漢口中西報 Hanyang gangtiechang 漢陽鋼鐵廠 Haolaiwu 好萊塢

244 Glossary of names, titles and terms Hashimoto Kyokuransai 橋本玉蘭斎 Heibai yingji 黑白影集 Heibaishe 黑白社 helanshui 荷蘭水 Horie Kuwajirō 堀江鍬次郎 Hu Boxiang 胡伯翔 Hu Die 胡蝶 Hu Hensheng 胡恨生 Hu Xigui 胡錫珪 hua 花 Hua Guan 華冠 Hua Hengfang 華蘅芳 hua xiaozhao 畫小照 Huachang sheying yuekan 華昌攝影月刊 Huachang zhaoxiang cailiaohang 華昌照相材料行 huagong 畫工 Huamei yaofang 華美藥房 Huang Chao 黃超 Huang Jinrong 黃金榮 Huang Lü黃履 Huang Wennong 黃文農 Huang Yanpei 黃焱培 Huanghelou 黃鶴樓 huapu 畫譜 Huashana 花沙納 Huashe 華社 huashi 畫師 Huayang 華陽 huaying 畫影 Hubao 滬報 hudie 蝴蝶 huixiangsuo 繪像所 Hujiang shangye shijing ci 滬江商業市景詞 jasagh 札薩克 / засаг Jeong Yak-yong 丁若鏞 Jiang Ziliang 蒋子良 Jiangnan jiqi zhizao zongju 江南機器製造總局 jiangren dou chengbushang 匠人都稱不上 Jiangyuan 蔣園 Jiankang 建康 Jianmei 健美 jiaopian 膠片 jiatingxi 家庭戲 Jie Xuan 揭暄 Jijin jianshuo 集錦簡說 jijin 集錦 Jin Cha Ji huabao 晉察冀畫報 Jin Shisheng 金石聲

Glossary of names, titles and terms  245 Jinci 晉祠 Jindai funü 近代婦女 jing 鏡 Jing huayuan 鏡花緣 jing xiezhen 鏡寫真 jingdi 景底 Jingshi 鏡史 Jingxiong 兢雄 Jinlong 金龍 Jiumudi 九畝地 Juyongguan 居庸關 Kai zhaoxiangguan ji 開照相館記 Kang Youwei 康有為 Kangtai shi sheying zhan 康泰時攝影展 Keda zazhi 可達雜誌 Kōga 光畫 Kōga kenkyūkai 光畫研究會 kokusui 國粹 kongjian mei 空間美 Kōyōsha 光陽社 lainaerdu 來納爾渡 Lang Jingshan 郎靜山 Langfang toutiao 廊坊頭條 Laodong zhi ku 勞動之窟 Lewen 樂聞 Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 Li Ruzhen 李汝珍 Li Shanlan 李善蘭 Liang Dingfen 梁鼎芬 Liang Jiechen 梁傑臣 Liang Qichao 梁啟超 Liang Shiqiu 梁實秋 Liang Shitai 梁時泰 Liangyou huabao 良友畫報 lianyao 煉藥 Lianyunyi congshu 連筠簃叢書 Ligelang 李閣朗 Lin Biao 林彪 Lin Gua (Lamqua) 啉呱 Lin Xuehuai 林雪懷 Lin Zecang 林澤蒼 Linglong 玲瓏 lingyao 靈藥 Linji 臨記 Liu Bannong 劉半農 Liu E 劉鶚 Liu Junzhou 劉峻周 Liu Lingcang 劉凌滄

246 Glossary of names, titles and terms Liu liu sicheng 六六私乘 Liu Yizhen 劉義振 Liulichang 琉璃廠 Liuxuesheng gaizhuang guilai 留學生改裝歸來 Longbao 龍報 Longfusi 隆福寺 lou 樓 Lu Xun 魯迅 Lü Yishou 呂頤壽 Lugang 鹿港 Lun zhaoxiang zhi lei 論照相之類 Lundun zhuzhici 倫敦竹枝詞 Lunyu 論語 Luo Binhan 羅賓漢 Luo Han 羅漢 Luo Pu 羅普 Luo Yuanyou 羅元祐 Ma’ge (Ma Kok) 媽閣 Ma Xiangbo 馬相伯 maibao 賣報 Malu tianshi 馬路天使 Man ting fang 滿庭芳 Mao Dun 矛盾 Mao Yisheng 茅以昇 mashine マシネ Mei Lanfang 梅蘭芳 Meishe 美社 Meishu de zhaoxiang 美術的照相 Meiyou biege yule 沒有別個娛樂 Meizhan 美展 Michong 泌沖 Mingxing 明星 Mishima Tokiwa 三島常盤 mo 模 Mo yuer 摸魚兒 Mojing tu 磨鏡圖 moliu 末流 Mozi 墨子 muwanzi 木挽子 nahan 吶喊 nalaizhuyi 拿來主義 Ni Tian 倪田 Nie Guangdi 聶光地 nie xiaoxiang 捏小相 ningli ruyou zhi xuan biyi yu ao 凝立如有知旋斃瘞於奧 Nojima Yasuzō 野島康三 nong 儂 / 農 Ōsumi Gensuke 大隅源助

Glossary of names, titles and terms  247 Ouyang Shizhi 歐陽石芝 pai xiaozhao 拍小照 paixiang 拍像 paizhao 拍照 Pan Yuliang 潘玉良 pao 匏 peiyingjia 陪影家 Peng Ruilin 彭瑞麟 Peng Zhaoliang 彭兆良 Perii torai ezu hari mazebyōbu ペリー渡来絵図貼交屏風 piaoyou 票友 Ping Han xin shenghuo 平漢新生活 Pingjiang 平江 pingtan 評彈 pipa 琵琶 Pu Gua 蒲呱 Puyi 溥儀 Qi Baishi 齊白石 Qian Binghe 錢病鶴 Qian Shouzhi 錢受之 qianbi zhaohuadian 鉛筆照畫店 Qianzi jing 千字經 Qin Tailai 秦泰來 Qingdai zhi zhutou muxie 清代之竹頭木屑 Qinglu 晴麓 Qingshousi 慶壽寺 Qingshu zhinan 情書指南 Qiu Jin 秋瑾 Qiu Weixuan 邱煒萱 Qiu Zongzhang 秋宗章 qiuji tu 求己圖 Qu Ya’ang 屈亞昂 Qu Yuanzhen 渠源湞 Quanti xinlun 全體新論 Quanye chang 勸業場 qujing 取景 Ren Bonian 任伯年 Ren Jinshu 任堇叔 Ren Xiong 任熊 renao 熱鬧 Renbao 人報 Renmin gongyuan 人民公園 Renshu 任叔 Renti sheyingji 人體攝影集 ri yingxiang 日影像 Ruan Yuan 阮元 ruhua 入畫 ruieikyō 縲影鏡

248 Glossary of names, titles and terms Ruoting 若汀 sajin 寫真 Sakuma Hanzō 佐久間範造 Sakuma Shōzan 佐久間象山 Sanada hōmotsukan 真田宝物館 Sanri huabao 三日畫報 Sanxing 三興 Sanyūtai Enchō 三游亭円朝 satsu 攝 / 撮 satsuei 攝影 satsuei kyōki 撮影鏡器 satsukei 撮形 seobyeonggyeong 攝影鏡 Sexiang liuzhen 色相留真 Sha Fei 沙飛 shanchuan 山川 Shanghai bao 上海報 Shanghai huabao 上海畫報 Shanghai jingwu tiyu zonghui 上海精武體育總會 Shanghai meigui 上海玫瑰 Shanghai shangbao 上海商報 Shanghai xinbao 上海新報 shangyou jiangbao 尚友講報 shanshui 山水 shanshui xiaozhao 山水小照 shanxiang 山相 shaofo 少佛 shashin abura’e 寫真油繪 Shashin geppō 寫真月報 Shashin shimpō 寫真新報 Shashin zasshi 写真雑誌 shashinkyō 寫真鏡 shashinya 寫真屋 shea 攝 sheb 社 Shen Baozhen 沈葆楨 Shen Bochen 沈泊塵 Shen Guyin 沈穀蔭 Shen Jiahe 沈嘉禾 Shen Zhou 沈周 Shenbao 申報 Shenjiang baiyong 申江百詠 shenjing 神鏡 shenwairen 身外人 shexiang 攝相 sheying 攝影 Sheying chufan 攝影初範 Sheying huabao 攝影畫報

Glossary of names, titles and terms  249 sheying jiezuo 攝影傑作 Sheying jiuhua 攝影舊話 Sheying shu ershiwu zhang 攝影術二十五章 Sheying shu guwen 攝影術顧問 Sheying xue yuebao 攝影學月報 Sheying zhi qi ji 攝影之器記 Sheying zhinan 攝影指南 Shi Qiang 施強 Shibafu 十八甫 Shibao 時報 Shibao tuhua zhoukan 時報圖畫周刊 Shibaoguan xinwu luocheng jiniankan 時報新屋落成紀念刊 Shicheng wangui 石城晚歸 Shijing 詩經 Shimooka Renjō 下岡蓮杖 shinpageki 新派劇 Shiyiyuan 施醫院 Shōmyōji 稱名寺 Shouxihu 瘦西湖 shu 述 Shū shichijūni ka sōsho 集七十二家相書 Shu Xincheng 舒新城 Shuangmendi 雙門底 Shuangtasi 雙塔寺 shuimoshi 水磨石 Shuntian shibao 順天時報 Shuoshu 碩鼠 shuying shanguang 樹影山光 Sōeirō 相影樓 Su Shi 蘇軾 Sun Jianming 孫鑒明 Sun Rong 孫瀜 Sun Yixian (Yat-sen) 孫逸仙 Sun Yunqiu 孫雲求 taa 她 tab 拓 taben 拓本 taizhi 台紙 Takarazuka daigekijō 寶塚大劇場 takuhon 拓本 Tan Xinpei 譚鑫培 Tanaka Keitarō 田中慶太郎 Tang Hualong 湯化龍 Ti Xilin bi 題西林壁 Tianpeng huabao 天鵬畫報 tingzhong 聽眾 Tongmenghui 同盟會 Tongsu jiaoyuguan 通俗教育館

250 Glossary of names, titles and terms Tongwenguan 同文館 Tongxing 同興 touxi 偷袭 Tsugitaka Taroko kokuritsu kōen 次高タロコ国立公園 Tuhua ribao 圖畫日報 tuo 脫 tuoying 脫影 Tuoying qiguan 脫影奇觀 Tushanwan 土山灣 Ueno Hikoma 上野彥馬 Wang Chuanshan 王船山 Wang Dafo 王大佛 Wang Fanqing 王凡青 Wang Yangming 王陽明 Wang Yi 王繹 Wang Yian 王益盦 Wanyan Chonghou 完顏崇厚 Wanyan Chongshi 完顏崇實 Wei 魏 Weichunyuan 味蒓園 Wen Dinan 溫棣南 Wen Xiang 文襄 Weng Shouyi 翁受宜 Weng Tonghe 翁同龢 Wenhua meishu tushu yinshua gongsi 文化美術圖書印刷公司 Wenhua yingzhan 文華影展 wenmingxi 文明戲 Wenxiao zaishi 文蕭再世 Women de jinxingqu 我們的進行曲 Wu Changshuo 吳昌碩 Wu Jianzhang 吳健彰 wu xiang xiang wu 物像像物 Wu Yinxian 吳印咸 Wu Youru 吳友如 Wu Yue chunqiu 吳越春秋 Wu Zhongxing 吳中行 Wutingqiao 五亭橋 wutong 梧桐 xianga 像 xiangb 相 Xiangchang 香廠 xiangpian 相片 Xiangyan qingshu zhinan 香艷情書指南 Xiao shibao 小時報 (Shibao supplement) Xiaobao 笑報 Xiaoshuo ribao 小說日報 Xiaoshuo yuebao 小說月報 Xiaoyi 小異

Glossary of names, titles and terms  251 xiaoying 小影 Xiaozao 小造 xiaozhao 小照 xie 寫 Xie Changda 謝長達 Xiehe bao 協和報 Xiexiang mijue 寫像秘訣 xieying fa 寫影法 xiezhen 寫真 Xihu baijing 西湖百景 Xin Beiping bao – shehui ban 新北平報 – 社會版 Xin qingnian 新青年 Xinbao 新報 Xinbian sheyingshu 新編攝影書 xing 形 Xinghuacun 杏花邨 Xinmin congbao (huibian) 新民叢報(匯編) Xinmin she 新民社 Xinwen bao 新聞報 Xinwen yebao 新聞夜報 Xinxin xiaoshuo 新新小說 xinxue 新學 xishe 吸攝 xixue 西學 xixue zhi zu 西學之祖 Xu Beihong 徐悲鴻 Xu Ke 徐珂 Xu Lai 徐來 Xu Shou 徐壽 Xu Zhi 徐稚 Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 xuan 軒 Xuan Jiaou 宣駕歐 Xue Chengji 薛承基 Xuehai tang 學海堂 Xuesheng zazhi 學生雜誌 Xunling 勳齡 xuxu 栩栩 Xuyuan 徐園 Yamamoto kōen 山本公園 Yan Huiqing 顏惠慶 Yang Changji 楊昌濟 Yang Fang 楊昉 Yang Shangwen 楊尚文 Yang Xiaolou 楊小樓 Yang Xun 楊勲 Yangjing zashi shi 洋涇雜事詩 yanzhi 艷幟

252 Glossary of names, titles and terms Yao Junqing 姚俊卿 Yashuang 厓霜 yi 譯 Yi Gyu-gyeong 李圭景 Yian zhuren 頤安主人 Yiban zazhi 一般雑志 yibusheng 衣布生 Yihai bujing (gongsi) 藝海布景(公司) Yihai zhoukan 藝海周刊 yinga 影 yingb 映 Yingshe 鷹社 yingxianga 影像 yingxiangb 映相 Yingye xiezhen 營業寫真 Yokoyama Matsusaburō 橫山松三郎 Yongan (Wing On) 永安 Youzheng shuju 有正書局 Yu Ming 俞明 Yu Suk 劉淑 yuan de wo suo 爰得我所 Yuan Mei 袁枚 Yuan Muzhi 袁牧之 Yuan Shikai 袁世凱 yuanjing zhaoxiang 園景照相 Yuanmenqiao 轅門橋 Yuji 虞姬 Yunfeng qiuji tu 雲峰求己圖 Yusi 語絲 Yuyuan (east Shanghai) 豫園 Yuyuan (west Shanghai) 愚園 Yuyuan yaji tu 愚園雅集圖 Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 Zeng Tongwu 曾桐梧 Zenrakudō 全樂堂 Zenshōan 全生庵 Zhan Tianyou 詹天佑 Zhang Jian 張謇 Zhang Mu 張穆 Zhang Pengzhou 張篷舟 Zhang Ruogu 張若谷 Zhang Shuhe 張叔和 Zhang Yinquan 張印泉 Zhang Yuanji 張元濟 Zhang Yucang 張雨蒼 Zhang Yuguang 張聿光 Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 Zhang Zhiwan 張之萬

Select glossary of names, titles and terms  253 Zhang Zuyi 張祖翼 Zhangyuan 張園 zhao 照 zhao xiaozhao 照小照 Zhao Youqin 趙友欽 Zhao Yuanyi 趙元益 zhao zhaoxiang 照照相 zhaohua 照畫 zhaojing jing 照景鏡 zhaopian 照片 zhaoxiang 照相 zhaoxiang lou 照相樓 Zhaoxiang lüefa 照像略法 Zhaoxiang qi 照像器 Zhaoxiang tongzhi hui 照相同志會 Zhaoxiang xinbian 照相新編 Zhe Gan lu xun 浙贛路訊 zhen 真 Zhen Zhen 真真 zheng 帧 Zheng Mantuo 鄭曼陀 Zheng Zhengqiu 鄭正秋 Zhengqi bao 正氣報 Zhenhailou 鎮海樓 zhenyuan 真苑 zhi 製 Zhong Ziyuan 鍾紫垣 Zhong Xi da yaofang 中西大藥房 Zhongguo mingsheng 中國名勝 Zhongguo nübao 中國女報 Zhongguo sheying 中國攝影 Zhonghua sheying zazhi 中華攝影雜誌 Zhongyang gongyuan 中央公園 Zhou Gua 周呱 Zhou Muqiao 周慕橋 Zhou Shoujuan 周瘦鵑 Zhou Xiang 周湘 Zhu Changlin 朱昌琳 Zhu Enfu 朱恩紱 Zhu Guifang 朱桂芳 Zhu Naifang 諸乃方 Zhu Shouren 朱壽仁 Zhuang Zi 莊子 zhuangyuan shiyejia 狀元實業家 zhuzhici 竹子詞 Zi ti xiaozhao nanzhuang 自題小照男裝 Zi ti xifa suozhao xiaoying er jueju 自題西法所照小影二絕句 Ziliang 子良

254 Glossary of names, titles and terms Zimei hua 姊妹花 Ziyou zhihua 自由之花 ziyouche 自由車 Zou Boqi 鄒伯奇 Zuo Zongtang 左宗棠

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Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abe Jirō 169 Abney, Sir William 44 Académie des Sciences 60 advertisements 6, 7, 11, 42, 43, 66, 116–117, 120, 126, 130, 134, 136–140, 142; apothecary 42; foldout 40; hubristic 210; press 179; series of vii, 42, 147; Yaohua 136 aeroplanes 130, 145, 186, 195 albumen silver print on paper 31, 65, 69, 70, 73, 88, 99 albums 87, 175, 177, 192, 199–200, 207 alchemy 12, 43, 57 antiquity 26, 29–30, 76, 136 Anyang 100, 142 apothecaries 40, 42–43, 48, 102, 107, 109 Appadurai, Arjun 138 appearances 52, 55–56, 72, 78–82, 128, 132, 136, 140, 159, 161, 164, 167, 239; changed 188; lens-projected 55; modern 153; normal 133; photographs 81; proscribed dual 172; single or serial 216; studio’s 118; traditional 112 Arago, François 60 Archer, Frederick Scott 31 art 35, 37, 58, 60, 64, 66, 72–73, 76, 80, 125, 128, 201, 203–207; extolling collective 214; historians 3; immortal 164; in late nineteenth-century Beijing 64; objects 207; photography 190, 202, 205, 207, 216, 264, 271; production 95 Art Exhibition (Meizhan) 206 Artistic Photographer studio 128, 139, 166 artists 42, 48, 58, 61, 64, 72, 74, 79–80, 124, 130, 269, 273, 275; celebrated 66; Chinese 31, 60; early Weimar 214; famous 60; poster 140; redrawing the same scene 125 Asanuma Shōkai, Tokyo 7 Association of Comrades in Photography (Zhaoxiang tongzhi hui) 202 Austen, Jane 82n

authenticity 52, 55, 60, 62, 154, 218–219; aesthetics of 219; lens for transcribing 57; photograph’s 62, 73; transcribing 52, 55, 57–60, 64, 73–74; visual 72 backdrops 52, 121, 138–143, 145–146, 203, 218; in Java 140, 203; new 139; painted 125, 127, 139, 142, 145; supply 140; zeppelin 140 Bajac, Quentin 73 ballad recital pingtan 44 Balzac, Honoré de 80 Bao, Weihong 107 Baofeng studio 108 Baoji studio 45, 68, 72, 92, 96, 126, 159, 164, 196, 197, 198 Barthes, Roland 1, 56–57, 82, 143, 152 Batchen, Geoffrey 20–21, 54 Beato, Felice 8 beauty contests 168 Beijing 36–38, 100–101, 103–104, 106–107, 110, 146–147, 165–166, 174–175, 184–185, 187–188, 201–203, 224–227, 231, 234–236, 255–279; book quarter of Liulichang 104, 109; businesses 192; and China’s first feature film 151; early collectors of photographs in 36; late nineteenth-century 64; opera 13, 123; and the railway line to Zhangjiakou 174, 175; seventeenth-century 32, 79; studios 107, 122, 151, 156; water supply 200 Beijing Central Park 202 Beijing Research Association for Art Photography (Beijing meishu xiezhen yanjiuhui) 202 Beijing Summer Palace 37 Beijing University 169, 202, 205 Beijing Zoological Gardens 114 Belting, Hans 4 Benjamin, Walter 53 Bethune, Norman 219

282 Index Bickers, Robert 6 Birmingham 40, 42–44; photographic exports 44; photographic machinery 40 Blanquart-Evrard, Louis 60 bodies 13, 20, 23, 62, 68, 71, 77, 137–138, 162, 164, 265, 268, 275; dead 8; human 39, 56, 77, 103, 143; male 153; physical 102, 154, 156; professional 200 books 1, 3–4, 6, 8–11, 13, 140, 142, 168, 177, 203, 207; and the book quarter of Liulichang 104, 109; collectors in Beijing 33; on photography 203 Boswell, James 60 Bourdieu, Pierre 151 Bowker, Geof 12 box cameras 31–32 bridges 167, 175–176, 178–179 Britain 21, 31, 36, 40, 113, 186, 192, 269; Chinese Labour Corps 143; Royal Photographic Society 186, 203 British Journal of Photography 203, 208 Brown, Shana 73, 218 Brunet, François 20 Buddha (images) 63 Bunyan, John 39 businesses 13–14, 89, 92–93, 95–96, 100, 102, 105, 108–109, 111, 114, 121–122, 126, 128, 131–134, 136; bankrupt 91; in Beijing 39, 114, 192; Chinese 103, 109; in Guangdong 97; in Guangzhou 108; Japanese 89; long hours worked 94; medical 90, 109; owners 107; premises 91; registers 89; in Shanghai 59, 136–137; studio 89, 132, 156; urban 95 Cai Zhonghe 208 Cailleux, Alphonse de 76 Calcutta 21–22 cameras 32–35, 38, 40, 43, 45, 48, 56–57, 60, 62, 64, 74–78, 82, 174–175, 262, 268–269; clubs 201; daguerreotype 21, 76–77; deficiencies 164; demonstration 8; first 121; and fittings 91; handheld 128; and the irrelevance to human portraiture 56; “Ladies’” 43; loan 207; machinic 24; obscura viewer 20, 24, 30–32, 34, 37–39, 42, 44, 53, 55–57, 74, 76; shashinkyō 62; technology 187; vision 20, 31, 33–35, 39; wooden box 87 Cao Kun 198, 199 carbonated drinks 103–104 Chang Runlin 94 Chang Zhanyuan 131, 230 Changjiang Bridge during construction 178 Changzhou 95, 114, 203, 206 Chats comparing old and new (Shangxia gujin tan) 46

chemistry 5, 8, 37, 45, 57, 103, 131 chemists 44 Chen Boxi 128 Chen Diexian 130 Chen Gongzhe 201 Chen Hanguang 128 Chen Huageng 92 Chen Qiyuan 33 Chen Shen 110 Chen Shilin 82 Chen Wanli 202 Chen Wenshu 34 Chen Wuwo 136 Chen Yingzhong 139 Chen Zhaochang 44, 174, 179 Chengdu 11, 89–90, 95, 128, 133, 159, 200 China 1, 3–6, 8–12, 19–21, 23–24, 26–27, 29–37, 48–49, 54–60, 72–74, 94–97, 106–107, 110, 114–115, 122–124, 140– 141, 170, 173–175, 186–187, 200–201; architecture 9; art treasures 74; dialect continuum 79; first feature film 151; inland provinces 123; and Japan’s intercultural existence 10; late twentieth-century 4; mainland and Taiwan 14; modernization 198; northern ports 71; and railways in the national revival of 174 China Mail 91 China Society (Huashe) 201, 205–206, 209 China Youth Association 140 China’s scenery (Zhongguo mingsheng) 182–183 Chinese Journal of Photography 211 Chinese Labour Corps 143 Chinese opera 13, 90, 93, 123, 151, 160, 169; first Beijing opera 161; revolutionary model 219; star performer Mei Lanfang 160, 167, 169–170; see also opera Chinese Western Apothecary 40, 42, 107 Chongqing 43, 90, 95, 113, 203 Chou, Eva Shan 153 Chun, Prince 70–71, 112, 153 cinema 13, 90, 130, 151, 160, 212, 214; actors 130; architecture 107; audiences 151; contemporary 3; foreign 3; Hindi 170; history 107, 151; industry 174; Western theatre and 90 cinematographers 89, 109 cities 10–12, 87–90, 95–97, 102–103, 107– 110, 112, 114–115, 117, 121, 128, 140, 142–143, 223–224, 226–238, 274; Chinese 24, 88, 93; eastern 90; host 96; inland canal-based 11; Japanese 89; modern 133; port 11, 89–90; railway 95 Citizen’s Mirror 132 City Art Museum, Tianjin 206 classical learning 13, 33, 56, 58, 59, 131, 133

Index  283 clientele 26, 40, 104, 120 clients 13, 81–82, 100–101, 103, 130, 133, 136, 138, 140, 142, 146, 192, 195; delivering 109; encouraging 160; for photographs in costumes 151; photography’s 134; preferences for size and content 66; soliciting 91 cloth business 96, 139 Coca-Cola 103, 267 clubs 208, 214; camera 201; martial arts 201; photographic 201; poetry 124; racing 213–214 collectors 36, 73 colleges 105, 199, 213 colours 32, 79–80, 134, 161, 212, 222 commemorative medal 199 commentaries 27, 122, 148, 152, 159, 212 commerce 1, 5, 9–10, 13, 20, 85, 88–148, 160, 164, 167, 200; and communication 1, 5, 10; fears of 126; modern 97 commercial medicine 109; see also medicine Commercial Press 45, 72, 89, 102, 112–113, 172–173, 182, 201, 218–219, 260 communication 1, 3–5, 10, 13–14, 48–50, 149, 152–222; media 174; patterns of 13, 216; scientific 49; transnational 20 courtesans 119, 123–124, 126, 194–195, 277 craft work 60 Crary, Jonathan 39 Cunynghame, Arthur 122 Cutting, James Ambrose 31 Dadley, John 26 Daguerre, Louis 21, 44, 46, 52, 57, 76, 80 daguerreotype 47, 55, 72, 91; cameras 21, 76–77; equipment 91 Dai Heng 65, 66, 134 Darwent, Reverend C. E. 93 Daston, Lorraine 39, 60 Dawn Wind (Chenfeng) 208, 211, 214, 221, 242 Dawutai (opera troupe) 161 demonstrations 45, 76–77, 103, 166 dental surgery 100–101 department stores 110, 202, 209 Detai (Tuck Tai) studio 181 devices 30–32, 37–38; for capturing images 30; optical 31, 42; photographic 40–41 Dong, Madeleine Yue 208 Dong Wenhuan 29 Donghua studio 165 double images 133, 164, 167, 169–172 Douglas, Mary 154 dramas 130, 162–163, 171 drawing shop 66

drawings 26, 32, 34, 35, 40, 52–53, 55, 59–68, 71, 74, 76–77, 79, 124–125, 128, 213–214 Du Jiutian 46 Dual Truth studio 104 Duchamp, Marcel 166 Dudgeon, John 37, 38, 39, 46, 58, 105–107 Eastern Times Newspaper (Shibao) 92, 126, 198, 201, 202, 205–206 economies 9, 11, 93, 134; developing image 159; medical 73; modernized image 218; new image 93; political 9, 198; shared 101; urban 77, 107, 207 Eder, Josef Maria 46 electricity 36, 76–78, 103, 107, 143, 199 electrotherapy 77 Elman, Benjamin 12, 29, 50 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 60 engineers 175, 179 engravings 26, 174 Erwo gallery 110 Erwo studio 96, 139, 167 Erwu studio 100, 101, 198 essays 15, 147, 168, 202, 207–208, 267–269, 272, 274–275; historical 49; long 72; Lu Xun 169; Notes on a device for capturing images (Sheying zhi qi ji) 30, 32, 52–53, 55, 57, 78; Photographic methods for transforming the individual 171; on photography 168; Science updates (Geshu bu) 30; Threads of Talk (Yusi) 168 Este, Henri 91 Europe 9, 20–21, 31, 36, 45–46, 80, 82, 114, 120, 124, 140; avant-garde modernism 214; priests 31; reprographic technologies 195; teleology 57; vision 9 Evening Chats on Cast Images (Datsuei yawa) 58 Evening News (Xinwen yebao) 19 events 78, 95, 97, 110, 112–113, 136, 170, 200, 206, 216–217, 219; depicting sensational Shanghai 97; earliest modern staged media 136; large commercial 110; photographing outdoor 112, 219 exchange 31, 62, 64, 91, 97, 187; backdrops 140; early scientific 82; global 5; knowledge 208; private 196; social 192 exhibitions 5, 190, 200, 202–207, 212, 214, 217, 219, 265; catalogues 203, 205; China Society 206; China’s first national art 206; international press 214; national 212; photography 201, 205–206, 212, 214, 216–218; society 206 expeditions 210

284 Index Explanation of the lens for transcribing authenticity 57 eye 20, 35, 36–39, 38, 44, 168 family portraits 192 Fang Yizhi 55–57, 60 fashion photographers 211 Fei Danxu 26 female clients 126, 128, 133 Feng Zikai 100, 158, 207 Fengtai studio 94, 103, 107 Fitch, Robert 205 Florence, Hercules 21 Flying Eagle (Feiying) 211 foreign visitors 20, 23, 90, 93, 96, 98 Forges, Alexander Des 11, 14, 190 Forth Bridge, Edinburgh 179 Freund, Gisèle 59 Fryer, John 39–40, 41, 44, 46, 48, 81 Fu Chongju 89 Fuge (Manchu official) 63–64, 72–73, 83, 90, 115, 260 Fukasawa Yōkitsu 58 Fukuoka, Maki 58, 60, 73 functions 14, 54–55, 63–64, 73, 75–76, 102, 105, 107, 115, 120–121, 190, 194, 216; advocated 34; analogical 73; camera obscura’s 35; modern 105; new urban 205; photographic portraiture’s 77, 141; photography 66, 80, 187; political 122; science’s 54; studios 182; symbolic 187 Galison, Peter 39, 60 Gallery of Again and Again 133 Gallery of Rinsed Light 131, 227 Gallery of the Self Portrayed 133 gardens 52, 110–112, 114, 136, 138 Garrubba, Caio Maria 140 Ge Yuanxu 79, 103, 123 Geertz, Clifford 9 genders 43, 152, 161, 170, 190 Genghis Khan 94 Giddens, Anthony 216 gifts 13–14, 59, 190, 192, 194, 198, 213, 216 glamour 54, 133, 212; established scientific 120; popular 212; science and scientistic 12; scientistic 5, 12; Shanghai 89 glass 30–32, 55, 70, 77, 79, 91, 105, 213 “glass house” 105, 106–107, 106, 127 gold 101, 134, 199, 204 Gongsang Nuoerbu 94 Gongtai studio 98 Goodman, Walter 64, 83n Gordon, Charles 196 Great Wall 174, 176, 186, 187, 217–218 group portraits 113, 175, 216

Guangdong 11, 76, 95, 97, 121–123, 201, 224–225; adventurers 97; apothecary in Hankou 164; business leaders and politicians 95; dialect 76, 93, 120; entrepreneurs 95, 104; immigrants 97; innovators 97; migrants 11; operators of Yichang 109; photographers 96, 98; region 97, 109; residents 32; tea planter Liu Junzhou 143; workmanship 98 Guangzhou 21, 23–24, 29–31, 36–37, 44–45, 60, 63, 95–98, 103–106, 115–116, 205–206, 224, 232–233, 235–237, 239–240; art 96; cloth merchants 58; painters 24; residents 87 Guide to photography 202 Guo Liancheng 121–122 Guo Moruo 74–75 Guo Songtao (ambassador) 36, 45, 64, 70, 122, 164, 196 habits 152, 164, 172, 190, 216; distorting 166; enforced modern 110; gendered 126; light-hearted 159; local 192; perpetual 121; portrait 29; studio 125; theatrical 168, 176; visual 158 Haerbin 11, 95 hair 63 hair cutting 154, 158 hairdressing 100, 102, 104, 109, 158 Halted Cloud Inn 121–122, 130 Hangzhou 34, 89, 96, 101, 104, 123, 130–131, 133, 179–180, 205, 208; Erwo Gallery 110; Erwo studio 161, 182; studio 177; West Lake 105, 179–180, 182–184, 200, 203, 208 Hangzhou Christian College 205 Hankou 11, 43, 78, 95, 97, 104, 126, 164, 174, 211 Harmant, Pierre 21 Helmholtz, Hermann 38 Herschel, John 21, 35, 46, 54, 122 Hershatter, Gail 194 Hevia, James 8 Hillenbrand, Margaret 4 Hindi cinema 170 History of lenses 33 Hobson, Benjamin 36–37 “Holland water” see carbonated drinks Hong Kong 36, 90–91, 94–96, 100, 136, 139, 203; studios 139; Yichang painting business in 96 House of Ancient Mirrors 131 House of Light Painting 131 Hu Boxiang 207, 210, 215 Hu Die 130, 171 Hu Hensheng 162, 163 Hua Guan 25, 26, 52 Huachang Photography Monthly 211

Index  285 Huachang Photography Supplies Company 211 Huafang Baoji studio 111–112, 113 Huang Chao 34 Huang Lü 34 Huang Wennong 206 Huang Yanpei 180, 182, 183, 208 Huangshan 180, 183, 186, 215 Huashe (China Society) 201, 205, 209, 244 Hudek, Làszlò 213 Huguang studio 137–138 Husband, Herman 91 Huzhou 79, 132, 145, 202 illustrations 24, 38, 40, 42, 46, 74, 78, 80, 120, 124, 171, 219, 241, 273 images 3–4, 13–14, 31–32, 54–60, 62–64, 70–72, 74–80, 109–111, 119–123, 125–126, 134–138, 141–143, 151–153, 158–159, 164–166, 187–188, 192–196, 203, 207–209, 213–218; advertising 140; composite 166, 183, 186–187, 215; daguerreotype 19, 21–23; double 133, 164, 167, 169–172; female 123–124, 194; groups 45, 112, 152, 154, 174–175, 216; lens device for grasping 57; markets 93; masculine 162; retinal 39; sculpted 196 imagination 4–5, 11, 24, 34, 49, 76, 119–147; of bicycle 140; and commerce 128; of commercial photography 132; geographical 180, 270; and performance 120; of photographic processes 76; popular 35, 130–131; shared 121, 128; social 4, 48, 87, 128, 132; of social life 146; of studios 130; Zhou Muqiao 131 immigrants 95, 97, 122 Intoxicated Shanghai / Duhui de ciji 213 inventions 12, 19–51, 54, 74, 166, 256, 260; in China 20; divergent 21; in France 166; literary 131, 136; of photography 74; visual 168 Itier, Alphonse Eugène Jules 21, 22, 23 Jane Eyre: The light that returned (Chongguang ji) 131 Japan 6, 9–10, 14, 32–33, 48–49, 52, 54–55, 57–60, 62, 79, 89, 93–94, 96, 104–105, 113–114, 161–163, 170, 201, 260; avant-gardism 166, 214; businesses 42, 89; Chinese texts preserved in 79; earliest writers on photography 33; intellectual approach to photography 10, 49, 52, 57–58, 62, 73–75 Japanese photographers 6, 93, 104; Kimura and his wife 94; recording the funeral processions of Emperor Guangxu and the empress dowager Cixi 104; Ueno Hikoma 93 Jenks, Chris 38

Jiangnan Machine Manufacturing Works (Jiangnan Arsenal) 36, 39 Jiangsu 11, 43, 100, 115–116, 180, 202, 223–235, 237–240, 250 Jiaxing 95, 112, 230 Jinan 95, 97, 113, 116–117, 227, 229–230, 232–233, 235–237, 239, 262, 266, 270 Jing Zhang Railway line 174–177 Jingmen Hubei 198 Jingshe (Scene Society) 201 Johnston, Reginald 114 Jones, Andrew 9, 175 journalism 80, 97, 122, 143, 180, 183, 212 journalists 48, 130, 203, 205; Chen Boxi 128; Wang Tao 121; Zhang Pengzhou 205 journals 5, 6, 11, 39–40, 44–46, 113, 170, 201–203, 207–214, 216–217; Beiyang huabao 207; Dianshizhai huabao 40, 42, 97; Feiyingge jishi huace 81; Gezhi huibian 39, 41; Jin Cha Ji huabao 217; Liangyou huabao 39, 46, 47, 48, 76, 171, 183, 186, 212–217; Linglong 212; Sanri huabao 196, 213; Zhongguo nübao 161; see also magazines; photography journals and photography magazines Junzhou, Liu 143 Kang Youwei 45, 196 Keller, Ulrich 207 Kent, Richard 5 King Kong 213–214 Kodak Magazine (Keda zazhi) 171, 208 Krupp, Friedrich Alfred 196 Lacan, Ernest 120 “ladies’ cameras” 43 landlords 90–91, 109 Lancaster, John 40, 42–43, 46 landscapes 66, 68, 76, 109, 136, 138, 140, 143, 146, 151, 179, 208 Lang, Fritz 109 Lang Jingshan 183, 185, 186, 201–203, 207, 209, 212, 215 Lanzhou 90, 213 Lao, John 143 Laohekou 97 Latour, Bruno 8, 12, 49 learning 11–12, 49, 131; classical 13, 131, 133; cultural 130; elite 4; prestigious 49; scientific 49; traditional 124 lectures 36, 44, 60, 166, 180 Legrand, Louis 91, 109, 121 lenses 26, 30, 33–35, 54–55, 57, 62, 75–76, 81, 83, 123, 125, 131; for cameras 30, 33; concave 79; manufactured 26; and mirrors 26; new 57; prism 164

286 Index Li Hongzhang 43, 69, 70, 97, 168, 177, 196, 197, 198 Liang Jiechen 93, 96, 237 Liang Shiqiu 103 Liang Shitai 69, 70, 71, 96–97, 103, 107, 112–113, 117, 199 Liang Sicheng 9 Liangyou 39, 46–48, 76, 171, 183, 186, 189, 212–217, 221, 230 Lifu studio 156 light 31–32, 35–36, 55–56, 59, 63, 71, 77, 105, 107, 131, 138; comparative 35; compressed 187; and darkness 63; exposure 78; natural 107; popularized 131; rays 33–35; rays passing through a pinhole 34; refraction 33; saturation 63; and shade 56; studies 36; sun’s 76; trails 179 Lihua (Lai Wah) Portraiture and Enlargement studio 87, 88, 94, 115, 200 Lin Xuehuai 77, 130 Lin Zhen 76 Linji (goods store) 103 Lippard, Lucy 139 Lithography 3, 40, 42, 71, 80, 113 Liu Bannong 170, 183, 184, 187, 202–203, 207–208, 212 Liu E 73, 78, 112 Liulichang, (Beijing book quarter) 104, 109 Lizhu studio 93, 96 London 45, 122, 164, 202–203; colleges 44; electrification of studios in 107; obsession with “peep show” machines 24; and the photographic interests of diplomat Zeng Jize in 192; portraitist 70 London Missionary Society 36–37, 78, 121 Long Xizu 6 Love My Appearance studio 132 Lu Xun 9, 103, 153, 168–170, 187 Lü Yishou 180, 182 Luo Sen 58, 96 Luo Yuanyou 121–123, 130 Lushan Gallery 94 Lynn, Jermyn 110, 114 Macao 21–23, 122 machines 39, 42–43, 60, 77–78, 84, 137, 145, 173, 214, 269; flying 130; modern optical 37; peep show 24; tools 42 Mackay, Hugh 91, 265 magazines 5–6, 46, 126, 130, 205; Dongfang zazhi 46, 142; Funü zazhi 46; literary 169; Meizhan 206; student 201; Yiban zazhi 207; see also journals; photography journals and photography magazines Ma’ge (Ma Kok), Macao 21, 22, 23 Major, Ernest 92 manuals 40, 44, 57

manufacturers 104, 120, 130, 183, 192, 198 Mao Dun 202 Mao Xianglin 39, 55, 57, 124 Mao Yisheng 179 Mao Zedong 82 markets 66, 69, 93, 97–98, 100, 103, 109, 111, 126, 138, 194, 196, 208; emerging Chinese 66; image 93; late Qing Beijing art 98; operators 66 Mason, Maj. George 24, 26, 60 mass consumption 190, 207 mathematicians 27, 33, 56, 147n mathematics 37, 44, 122 Matton, René 144 May Fourth movement 35, 45, 54, 170, 202–204 media 3, 5, 9, 13–14, 136–137, 141, 143, 170, 174, 179, 190, 205, 208, 214, 216–217; graphic 217; history 3; pictorial 59–60, 64, 72, 141; representational 63, 74; studies 3 medicine 13, 20, 24, 37, 40, 43, 78, 80, 109 Mei Lanfang (opera star) 160, 167, 169–170 military propaganda 218 Miller, Daniel 103 Mingxing Films 172–174, 173 Minhu ribao tuhua 111 The miracle of cast images (Tuoying qiguan 37, 38, 58, 72, 106 mirrors 26–27, 54–55, 72, 76–77, 81, 83–84, 128, 131–132, 153, 158, 190–192, 226, 229; in Chinese 75; full-length 158; large 156; and lenses 131; magic 76; oxidized bronze 24 Mitchell, W. J. T. 4 Mittler, Barbara 5 modern science 19, 29, 32–33 modern theatre 163 modernism 6, 11, 179, 214 modernists 13, 214 modernity 10, 46, 109, 114, 133, 143, 153, 162, 167, 214, 216; experiments with 138; global 103; international commercial 180; maritime 36; metropolitan 49, 131; scientific 12; technological 46, 78; urban 11, 26, 179–180 modernization 54, 71, 89, 110, 121–122, 174, 190; Chengdu 89; China 198; cultural 200; Japan 32, 94, 124; pharmacological 12; Shanghai 121; urban 80 Montabone, Luigi 122 Morris, Rosalind 9 moulding 72–74, 76; antique mirror 132; and photography 73 Mount Huang (Huangshan) 183, 186, 215 Mount Lu 132, 140

Index  287 Mountain Truth studio 132 Mumford, Lewis 48 names 43, 45–46, 90–93, 96, 103–104, 110– 113, 121–122, 128, 130–135, 146, 167–168, 170, 200, 202–203, 241–255; adopted Western 93; celebrated and enthralling 201, 211; famous courtesan 130; foreign 93, 128; garden 111; household 91; new 36; obsolete 143; opportunistic 111; personal 232, 234– 236, 239; photography’s 21; theatrical 162 Nanjing 1, 3, 6, 66, 90, 108, 124, 148, 200, 202, 206; Beaux Arts Society 205; Central University 205; economy 89; painter Qian Shouzhi 66 Nanjing Beaux Arts Exhibitions (1929, 1933) 206–207 Nantong 100, 128, 198 Nantong Erwu studio 101, 133 Nanyang 131 Nanyang Trade Exhibition 200 New York 36, 88, 115, 166, 213, 258, 274; and avant-garde surrealism 166; two hundred studios open and operating in 1858 88 New York Daily Tribune 36 newspapers 5, 11, 63–64, 114, 128, 130, 134, 136, 198, 200, 203, 205–206, 217; Beijing 122; broadsheet 223; China Mail 91; Dagongbao 203; Eastern Times Shibao 126, 198, 201–202, 205–206; Evening News 19; and exhibition catalogues 203; and films 217; foreign-owned Chineselanguage 92; and illustrated journals 217; journalists 205; Minhu ribao tuhua 111; new 124; New York Daily Tribune 36; public forum of 153; in Shanghai 205; Shanghai New Journal (Shanghai xinbao) 92; Shanghai News (Shenbao 92, 126, 136, 143, 153, 164, 180, 205, 212; Shibao 126, 202; single-sheet 223; Tuhua ribao 53, 63, 154, 195; Xinbao 80 Ni Hong 127 Ni Tian 67, 68–69 Niépce, Nicéphore 21, 46, 51 Ningbo 77, 90, 96, 210 Nössler, Maximilian 109, 127 Notes on a device for capturing images (Sheying zhi qi ji) 30, 32, 52–53, 55, 57, 78 nude photography 212 objectivity 54, 75, 132, 259; mechanical 39; modern scientific 60; and truth 54 oil paintings 63–64, 94 opera 13, 123, 151, 160, 219 opium wars 21, 32, 91, 122 optical devices 31, 42

optics 5, 20, 24, 31, 33, 35–37, 40, 48, 55–56, 131; glamour 49; photography’s 27, 45; science of 55; solar 45; Tyndall’s construction of 48; Western 36, 59 Optics studio 131 Osaka 14, 89, 94 Ōsumi Gensuke (Tokyo stationer) 42 Outline of methods of photography 39 Ouyang Huiqiang 45, 202 Ouyang Shizhi 164, 198 painters 46, 52, 56, 64, 68, 70, 72, 75, 79, 80, 89, 97, 112, 113, 123, 127, 139–142, 145, 211; Cheng Hanguang 129; Du Jiutian 46; Fei Danxu 26; Feng Zikai 100, 158, 207; Goodman, Walter 64, 83n; Hu Boxing 207, 210, 215; Lin Gua 123; Liu Lingcang 202; Ma Gongyu 183, 185; Ni Tuian 68–69; Prinsep, William 22, 23; Pu Gua 24, 26; Qian Binghe 163; Qian Shouzhi 66; Ren Bonian 123, 126; Ren Xiong 26, 27, 64; Yu Ming 84n; Yu Suk 60, 61, 79; Yuan Mei 80; Zhang Yuguang 140 paintings 3, 26, 33, 52–53, 55–58, 60, 64, 68–70, 72–74, 76–77, 79–80, 98, 112, 123, 138, 183, 213–214; aesthetics 134, 179; backdrops 140; materials 100; national 200; and photography 3, 64, 72–73, 179; shadow 83; techniques 56; zoological 60 Panofsky, Erwin 151 panoramas 181; of Fuzhou 23; of Shanghai 181 Paris 1, 9, 46, 59, 81–82, 88, 101, 127, 196, 202; photography’s world announcement 21 parks 52, 110, 114, 126, 142, 145, 202, 204, 205 passbooks 90, 116n patterns 3, 5, 20, 107, 190, 193, 216; of communication 13, 216; extra handpainted 190; indigenous 95; interior 123; investment 114; local 93, 147; new 110, 147, 200; of re-use 216; shared common 190; of sociality 5 Pei Xibin (bookseller) 48 Peking see Beijing Peking Amateur Photographic Society 201 Peking Kalgan Railway 177 Peng Ruilin 109, 203, 204 People’s Republic of China 3, 145, 217, 219 performances 20, 49, 82, 120, 137, 160, 162–163, 169; dual 171; emancipated women’s 126; extrovert 134; imagined 125; latest 214; melodramatic 163; musical 123; photographic 114, 128; popular 44; public 45; teahouse 78 Perry, Commodore Matthew 58, 60, 62, 96

288 Index Peterson, Nicholas 9 pharmacology 12, 43 philosophers 33, 45, 56 philosophy 49, 58, 167 photograph mounts 98, 110, 128, 157, 192, 199 photographers 13–14, 44, 46, 70–72, 89, 100–101, 109–112, 125–126, 144, 175–176, 179–180, 183–184, 207–208, 212, 216–217, 219; amateur 5, 186, 198, 202, 208; artistic 128, 139, 166; Chen Jinshi 115n; Chen Wanli 202; Du Jiutian 46; fashion 211; foreign 8, 93, 154; Garrubba, Caio Maria 140; Guangdong 96, 98; home visits 111; Hu Boxiang 207, 210, 215; Huang Yanpei 182, 183, 208; independent 5; informing 179; itinerant 100, 143; Jiang Ziliang 162; Jin Shisheng 211; Lang Jingshan 183, 185, 186, 201–203, 207, 209, 212; Liang Jiechen 93, 96; Liang Shitai 69, 70, 96–97, 107, 112; Legrand, Louis 91, 109, 112; Lin Zecang 212; Liu Bannong 183, 184, 187, 202, 207–208, 212; Lü Yishou 180, 182–183; Luo Yuanyou 121–123, 130; Mishima Tokiwa 173; Nojima Yasuzō 220n; novice 81; Ouyang Shizhi 164, 198; Peng Ruilin 109, 203, 204; professional Shanghai 46; Qin Tailai 211, 212; Sha Fei 217–218; Ueno Hikoma 29, 30, 49, 93; washing prints in a well 218; Wen Dinan 96; Weng Shouyi 208, 210; Wu Yinxian 219; Wu Zhongxing 206; Xunling 166, 198; Yan’an 216; Yang Fang 27–28, 33, 48; Yokoyama Matsusaburō 94, 105; Zeng Tongwu 167, 172; Zhang Yinquan 202; Zhong Ziyuan 2, 44; Zhu Shouren 207, 209–210; Zou Boqi 28–29, 32, 36–37, 39, 45, 48–49, 55–56, 59, 71–72, 152 photographic 53, 72, 75, 80, 101, 138, 198; activities 90, 95; albums 216; archives 6, 74; cameras 31–35, 38, 40, 43, 45, 48, 56–57, 60, 62, 64, 74–78, 82, 174–175, 262, 268–269; clubs 201; content 3, 159, 173, 187; departments 140; devices 40–41; documentation 120; equipment 40; experiments 21; factory-produced paper 91; images 4, 6, 21, 27, 80, 141, 153, 194, 201; journals 5; knowledge 43–45, 49; masterpieces 209; media 151; oil paintings 94; operations 59, 110; performances 114, 128; plates 21, 29–33, 72, 93; portraits 162, 164, 256; practices 3, 201; processes 31, 57, 76; productions 115; resources 214; science 40, 49; skills 208–209; societies 9, 190, 200–203, 205, 207, 214, 216–217; supplies 40; technology 21, 24, 36, 218; vision 8, 133

“Photographic devices” (“Zhaoxiang qi”) 40, 41 photographic equipment 39–40, 109, 205; sales 211; stockpiling 102 Photographic methods for transforming the individual 171 Photographic Studies Monthly (Sheying xue yuebao) 210 photographic studios see studios photographs 1, 3–6, 8–10, 23, 45–46, 63–64, 68–71, 73–79, 108–111, 119–121, 125–128, 140–143, 151–153, 168–170, 173–175, 180, 194–196, 198–199, 205–210, 212–217; albums 172; of China’s architecture 9; commissioned 158; distributed 196; exchanging 196; framed 127, 179; giant 127; grainy 140; inscriptions 169; inspecting 87, 196; and lithographic supplies firm 7; mounts 98, 128, 133, 157; outdoors 141; passbook 90, 116n; person’s 77; portraits 192; published 203; redeveloping 82; resembled 73; sorting 192; stage-directed 198; submitting 205; tinted 179; transcribed 68; of war 217; wet-plate 127; women’s 126 photography 1, 3–6, 8–16, 19–21, 23–24, 33–39, 43–46, 48–49, 51–52, 54–60, 62–64, 72–82, 87–91, 95–98, 120–124, 200–208, 216–217, 255–258, 260–265, 267–272; acknowledged perception of 44; acquired skills of 49; art 190, 202, 205, 207, 216, 264, 271; associations 190, 200–202; autonomy of criticism 203; in China 4–5, 20–21, 35, 54, 60, 82, 216; combination of 100; commerce 5, 12, 120; commercial 132–133; competitions 205; demonstration 2; early 78, 87, 258, 260; exhibitions 201, 205–206, 212, 214, 216–218; historians of 34, 89, 180, 219; histories of 23, 261; history 3, 11, 19–20, 45–46, 218; history of 4–5, 10–11, 20–21, 24, 35, 45, 48, 179; houses of 105; inventing 44, 73; inventions 19–20, 35, 51; journals 49, 192, 206–209, 212, 214, 216–217 (see also journals); manuals 20, 45; and medicine 43; nude 212; portraits 103, 171–172; societies 201–203, 205, 214, 216–217; studies 4, 44, 207, 268, 271; techniques 46; wet-plate 72, 96 photography journals 192, 202, 206, 208, 210–211, 216–217; Asahi kamera 203; British Journal of Photography 203; Chenfeng 208, 211, 214; Heibai yingji 115n, 221n; Huachang sheying yuekan 211; Shashin geppō 49, 140; Shashin shimpō 7; Sheying huabao 212; Sheyingxue yuebao 210; Tianpeng huabao 209;

Index  289 Zhongguo sheying 209; see also journals; magazines and photography magazines photography magazines 58, 201, 207, 215; Asahigraph 188n; Datsuei yawa 58; Fotogurafii 58; Keda zazhi 171; Shashin zasshi 58; Zhonghua sheying zazhi 207, 208; see also journals; magazines and photography journals photography studios see studios physics 12, 78 physiognomy 57, 63, 78, 79–81, 108, 131 pigment tints 80, 129, 160–161, 165, 191 Pilgrim’s Progress 39 Pinfang studio 165 pingtan (ballad recital) 44 Pinney, Christopher 9, 170 Pirou, Eugène 196 plaited queue 153, 162 plate photography 72–73, 96 poems 37, 123–124, 127, 132, 134, 153, 162, 164, 170, 214 polishing mirrors 24, 26, 27 politics 100, 103–104, 121, 154, 180, 194, 216 Poole, Deborah 9–10 porcelain 46, 72 portraits 24, 25, 26–27, 53, 58, 64, 68, 70–73, 76–81, 101–104, 126, 138–139, 152–153, 161–162, 170, 187–188, 195–196, 198; contemporary 29; costume 176; daguerreotype 19; of Dai Heng 65; drawing 63; easel 198; facial 64; female 194; framed 101; group 113, 175, 216; inscription 152; joint 153–154, 159, 192; landscape 66; of Li Hongzhang 69, 70, 197; in male dress 162, 188; painting 56, 59, 76, 79, 89; panoptic street-level 109; photographing 63; photographs 63, 66, 79, 81, 107, 142, 153, 196; posed 100; remediated 72; services 66, 126; on silk handkerchiefs and porcelain vases 164; studio’s 134; subjects 138, 143; tinted double 164; Wang Yian 156, 157–158; Wu Changshuo 67, 68; Ziliang 135 Portraits and biographies of Qing scholars 71 portraiture 29, 56, 60, 63–64, 97, 152; of Eastern Yue 63; excoriated studio 207; facial 64; female 125; human 56; irrelevance of 63; two selves 13 Potonniée, Georges 46 premises 58, 63, 96, 105, 109, 126, 132, 201, 206; commercial 43; studio’s 110 presentations 179, 190, 192, 216 press advertisements 179 Prince Chun 70, 71, 112 Prinsep, William 22, 23 printing 46, 100, 156, 177, 200; blocks 32, 37; commercial 195; images 183,

218; modern 50; photographs 203, 218; portraits 68; technology 71 process 36–37, 48, 54, 57, 72–74, 76, 78, 120, 122, 127–128, 162, 164; analogue 56; homologous 73; mechanical 183; optical 52; organic 55; photoengraving 172, 173; transmedial 72; wet-plate 31, 33, 72, 96, 127 production 4, 8, 13–14, 60, 63–64, 79–80, 87–117, 120, 134, 136, 192, 195, 199; of albums 199; amateur 207; costs 134; creative 98; daily 159; illustrated 213; of illustrated photography publications 205; image’s 180; lithographic 113; photography’s 87 propaganda, military 218 Pu Gua (Pu-Quà) 24, 26 Qian Shouzhi 66 Qiaozhen studio 105, 106 Qin Tailai 211, 212 Qiu Jin 161–163, 171 Qiu Zongzhang 162 Qu Yuanzhen 157, 158 Quanzhou 95 queue 153–154, 156–159, 162, 167; false 156 railways 10, 48, 95, 97, 152, 173–174, 176, 180, 219; Beijing–Zhangjiakou 175, 177; Shanghai–Wusong track 137, 145, 174; Zhejiang–Jiangxi line 177 recollections 48, 78, 123, 126, 162, 180, 223; collections of lyrical 34, 71; diary 11; of early photography 87 Recorded in First Place (studio) 131 Rejlander, Oscar 186 Rémi, Dominique 91 Ren Jinshu 126 Ren Xiong 26, 27 reproductions 40, 46, 72–73, 76, 87, 177, 190, 194; digital 177; local 134; multiple 31; new 126; postcard 87, 115; visual 140; white 196 Republican period 45, 90, 132, 195, 209, 219 retinal images 39 Returning by nightfall (Shicheng wangui) 215 Ricketts, Paul 214 Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden 197 Roberts, Claire 5 Robinson: Henry Peach 186; and Partners 213 Ross, Kerry 201 Royal Academy, London 60 Royal Photographic Society 36–37, 208 Ruan Yuan 27 rubbings 3, 72–75; “composite” 73; and photographs 74; publications in China 74

290 Index Ruiji studio 128, 129, 193 Said, Edward 6 Sakuma Shōzan 57, 77 Salzwedel, Herman 91–92 Sanmin studio 102, 104, 109 Sanxing studio 65, 94, 98, 99, 109, 134, 139, 234–235 Saunders, William 93 scenery 68, 91, 162, 164, 179, 208; base 138; natural 152, 179–180; painted 140; painters 163 scenes 24, 52–53, 61, 64, 111, 125, 128, 136– 137, 142, 154, 162; climactic 171; cultural 6; domestic 128; entitled “Professional portraiture: Timing an exposure and drawing a portrait” 53; indoor studio 79, 124; invented 142; puported studio 124; railhead 136; voyeuristic 119 Schaefer, William 5–6, 11, 171, 179, 208 schools 131, 180, 201 Schwartz, Hillel 35 science 1, 4, 12, 17, 19–22, 24–84, 131; applying 49; and art 76; commerce and communication 49; education 36–37; established 131; faculties 36; modern 19, 29, 32–33; natural 37; optical 35, 58; of photography 63; photography’s 10; popular 43, 80; teaching 36; updates 30; Western 12, 19, 29, 33, 35, 45, 54 Science Compendium (Gezhi huibian) 39–40, 41 Science updates (Geshu bu) 30 scientific articles 36 scientific demonstrations 45 scientific instruments 76 scientific self 20, 27, 29, 39, 49 Screech, Timon 59 Secker, Fritz 109 Selecting a view (Qujing) 209 self 10, 13, 62, 133, 137, 151–152; deprecation 152; esteem 133; mutilation 154; revelation 166; scientific 20, 27, 29, 39, 49; sufficiency 202 self-portrait 28 Serres, Michel 12 Sha Fei 217–218 “shadow” 32, 58–59, 83, 110; see also image Shandong 97, 100, 232–233 Shanghai 6, 10–11, 15, 19, 36–37, 39–41, 48–49, 87–105, 107, 109–113, 115–116, 121–123, 125–128, 132–137, 163–165, 172–174, 205–206, 210–212, 222–240, 257–279; Baoji studio 45, 96, 147; categories of business in 137; China Western Apothecary in 107; earliest studio culture in 97; early conditions in 93;

Fuzhoulu 109; guides to 10, 123; Japanese photographers in 205; journals and magazines 6, 162; newspapers 53, 80, 104, 111, 126, 154, 195, 202; photographic competitions 203; publishing 12, 117; studio owners 90; studio photographers 142; studios 59, 64, 87, 90, 92, 96, 104, 132, 138, 154, 158; theatres 171; and Tianjin 10, 200; where photographic activities first happened 95; Yiwu studio 207; and Yokohama 109; Zhonghua studio 140, 203 Shanghai New Journal (Shanghai xinbao) 92 Shanghai News (Shenbao) 92, 126, 136, 143, 153, 164, 180, 205, 212 Shanghai–Wusong railway 136, 137, 145, 174 Shangrao 95 Shaoxing 46, 168, 228 shashin 57–58, 60, 62, 73–74, 80 Sheehi, Stephen 10 Shen Baozhen 43 Shen Bochen 128 Shen Gua 32–33, 35, 37 Shen Jiahe 194 Shen Taimou 36, 64, 66, 168 Shenbao 92, 126, 136, 143, 153, 164, 180, 205, 212 Shenjiang mingsheng tushuo 119 Shen’s 64 Shenyang (Fengtian) school students 154 Shibao 126, 202 Shinobazu Lake 105 Shuangtasi (Qingshousi) 108 Sichuan 19, 174 silhouette 59 silver 69–70, 112–113, 129, 131, 134–135, 142, 144–145, 155–167, 172–173, 175– 177, 181–182, 184–185, 191, 193, 197; albumen 70, 88, 99; light-sensitized 31 Similar to Me Gallery 133 Sino-Japanese War 268 skills 31, 34, 56, 59–60, 68, 72, 98, 136, 176, 233; acquired 49; learning photographic 31, 98 Slater, Don 54, 78, 84 social imagination 4, 48, 87, 128, 132 societies 6, 9, 11, 93, 151, 200–203, 205, 207, 216, 220, 265; exhibitions 206; Huashe (China Society) 201, 205, 209, 244; Jingshe (Scene Society) 201; Light Society 201–203, 205; Peking [Beijing] Amateur Photographic Society [Light Society (Guangshe)] 201; political 108; see also photographic clubs Some rash opinions on observing with lenses (Jingjing lingchi) 34

Index  291 Song Zuanyou 95 Songjiang 202, 205, 223 Songjiang studio 102 Sontag, Susan 56 St Louis World Fair 45, 198, 207 Stafford, Francis E. 172–173 Strachey, Lytton 11 Strassler, Karen 120, 140 studies 1–6, 10–12, 14, 36, 44, 96, 161, 169, 188; abandoned medical 170; dedicated 15; European photography 193; interdisciplinary 4; media 3; photography 4, 44, 207, 268, 271; pioneering 49; popular culture 4; recent 11, 35; stimulated full-length 190; Western 5 studios 1, 5, 10–11, 13, 45–46, 68, 70, 80, 87–98, 100–105, 107–111, 112, 113–115, 120–128, 130–134, 136, 138–143, 145–146, 161–164, 166, 176–177, 196, 223–227, 235–239; advertising 92; aesthetics 152; Apollo 203; backdrops 138, 140–141; Baofeng 108; Baoji 45, 68, 72, 92, 96, 126, 147, 159, 164, 196, 197, 198, 202; behaviour 124; business hours 107; businesses 89, 132, 156; Cast Anew 132; clients 127; commercial painting 122; competition 200; connoisseurship 127; culture 97, 114, 133; Detai (Tuck Tai) 181; Donghua 165; Dual Truth 104; in Duchang 101; earliest Hangzhou 131; early credits 98; electrification of 107; enchantment 140, 174; environment 176; eponymous 91, 130; Erwo 96, 139, 161, 167, 182; of Eugène Pirou 196; Fengtai 94, 103, 107; first 94–97, 101, 105, 112–113, 131–132, 168; first Chinese 23; foreign-owned 93, 126, 142; foundations 90, 128; in Fuzhou 95; Gongtai 98; Guangzhou 139; in Guangzhou 95; history 89, 95, 114, 121; Huafang Baoji 111–112, 113; Huguang 137–138; identity 111; industry 192; interiors 104, 121, 138, 146; life 13, 87, 121, 134, 141, 169; Lifu 156; lights 77; Lihua 87, 115, 200; Lihua (Lai Wah) Portraiture and Enlargement studio viii, 87, 88, 94, 115, 200; Lizhu 93, 96; Love My Appearance 132; luxurious 122; management 108, 126, 130, 160; of Mirrored Light 131; names 13, 91, 128, 130–131, 133, 223–224; Nantong Erwu 101, 133; numbers 87–90; Optics 131; origins 96; owners x, 13, 72, 89, 91, 94, 103–105, 128, 130–132, 167; photographers 24, 78, 101; photography 87, 103, 124, 128, 131, 138, 143, 160, 162–163; Pinfang 165; portraits 27, 160, 162, 177; premises 94, 105, 121, 126; production 123, 159, 164; production Qiu

Jin 162; props 143, 156; Qiaozhen 105, 106; of René Matton 144; Richeng 136; rival 138; Ruiji 128, 129, 193; Sanmin 102, 104, 109; Sanxing 65, 94, 98–99, 109, 134, 139, 234–235; in Shanghai 104; Songjiang 102; southern Fujian 100; spaces 13, 105, 139; staff 93; Taifang 100, 160; Taiping 167; Taiyuan 108; Tengxian 95; Tongsheng 96, 101, 104, 114, 175, 176, 177; trade 29, 95, 192; True Self 133; venues 120; visitors 120, 122; voyeurism 133; Wan Laiming 59; Weixin 161; in Western Flanders 143; work 13, 137, 141; workers 201, 207; workspace 119; Xianzhen 94, 97, 118, 199; Yangzhou 82, 113, 142; Yangzi city 94; Yaohua 91, 126, 127, 134, 135, 138, 162, 192; Yichang 19, 96; Yijilu ix, 145; Yingming 107; Yiwu 207; Yokohama 93; Yuelairong 111, 126, 138; Zhizhen 155; Zhonghua 140, 203 Su Shi 132 Sun Baoxuan 198 Sun Dianqi 98 Sun Rong 122–124 Suzhou 44, 46, 48, 96, 99, 129, 145, 159, 161, 192–193, 227, 230, 234, 237; dialect 44; founding of 131; physicians 24, 39; residents 46 Tagg, John 14n Taifang studio 100, 160 Taipei 68, 83, 167 Taiping studio 167 Taiwan 14, 109, 203–204, 206 Taiyuan studio 108 Takarazuka Grand Theatre (Takarazuka daigekijō) 170 Talbot, William Fox 12, 14, 21, 46, 52, 54 Tan Xinpei 151, 160 Tang Xiaobing 78 Tao Zongyi 32 techniques 6, 11, 21, 60, 63, 68, 71–74, 76, 78, 82, 186; analogical 73; darkroom 183; hybridized 66; illusionary 166; invoking painting’s 70; modern 138; photographer’s portrait 63; professional theatre 160; surface-to-surface 74; wet-plate 33 technology 1, 6, 9, 19–20, 24, 45, 107, 218 temples 21–23, 107, 110 theatres 9, 13, 63, 105, 123, 130–131, 140, 160–161, 163, 170, 174 theatrical habits 168, 176 Thomson, John 29, 37 Threads of Talk (Yusi) 168 Tianjin 10–11, 43, 93, 95, 97, 112, 122, 200, 203, 206, 212; and Beijing 70; British concession 97; magistrates 37; massacre 37 Tianmenkan, Anhui 182

292 Index Tōdō Ryōshun 80 Tokyo 7, 14, 30, 75, 80, 89, 94, 162, 169–170, 203, 206; Chinese poetry clubs 124; Japan’s ministry of culture in 206; photographer Fukasawa Yōkitsu 58; Photography College 203; stationer Ōsumi Gensuke 42; studio 94 Tongsheng 96, 140, 176; images 175; photographers 174, 176; studio 101, 104, 114, 175, 176, 177 Touchstone Cabinet Illustrated Journal (Dianshizhai huabao) 40, 42, 97 Towler, John 40, 48 Trachtenberg, Alan 24 “transcribing authenticity” 52, 55, 57–60, 64, 73–74 translation 19–20, 35–36, 39–40, 48, 54, 130, 169, 188, 214; Chinese 40; Japanese 169; mature 97; new 44, 52; scientific 39; of Western literature 36, 169 Tretiakov, Sergei 103 True Self studio 133 Tsugitaka Taroko National Park, Taiwan 204 Tuhua ribao 53, 63, 154, 195 Tuoying qiguan 106 Two Selves gallery 133, 170, 225–226 Tyndall, John 36, 48, 272 typographers 21 typography 128, 214 Ueno Hikoma 29, 30, 49, 57, 93 Union Church, Shanghai 200 United Alliance (Tongmenghui) secret society 104 United States 1, 31, 40, 76, 114, 120, 198, 270 Urban style (Dushi fengguang) 211 Verschuur, Gerrit 115 Vinograd, Richard 66 vision 3–4, 6, 8–9, 20, 31–32, 34–35, 38–39, 60, 75, 132–134, 179; embodied 35; human 38, 45; idealistic 201; imperialist 8; karmic 198; objective 20; ocular 37; reflexive 173; subjective 39 “Visions of Shanghai society: The Courtesan grants control of her portrait to a client” 195 visitors 19, 22, 24, 94, 97, 101, 104–105, 110, 121, 123, 138–139, 163, 166, 205–206, 209; to China 24; female 126; international 110; Kang Youwei 196; to Shanghai 103 visual culture 3, 5, 9, 14, 72, 97 Wagner, Rudolf 5, 134 Wan Laiming studio 59

Wang, David Der-wei 164, 170 Wang Chuanshan 153 Wang Dafo 209 Wang Fangqing 210 Wang Hui 35, 54 Wang Tao 121–123, 147n Wang Yangming 56 Wang Yian 156, 157–158 war 3, 8, 31, 33, 37, 90, 109, 131, 212, 217, 219; photographs of 217; see also opium wars wars, First Opium War 21 Wathen, James 96 waxworks 71 Weixin studio 161 Wen Xiang 196 Weng Shouyi 208, 209, 210 Weng Tonghe 43 Wenzhou 172 West Lake 182–183, 184, 200, 203 “Western Learning” 36, 40, 269 Wo Zhihui 45 women 34, 52–53, 119, 123, 126, 128, 154, 158, 194–195, 201, 212, 214; beautiful 103; contemporary 158; famous Hangzhou 34; and fashion 9; in professional roles 126; young 46 Women’s Magazine (Funü zazhi) 46 woodcuts 3, 74–75, 119, 146–147 Wright, Joseph 58 Wu Changshuo 67–68 Wu Hung 5, 157 Wu Jianzhang 121 Wu Qingdi 153 Wu Ruisheng 103, 131, 234 Wu Yangzeng 44 Wu Yinxian 219 Wu Youru 124, 125, 133 Wu Zhongxing 206 Wuchang 94–95, 97, 104, 108, 110, 132, 203 Wue, Roberta 43, 51, 138 Wuhan 90 Wuhan Changjiang bridge (Wuhan Changjiang daqiao) 145, 146, 178, 179 Wulumuqi 213 Xianzhen lou, Wuchang 94 Xianzhen Studio 94, 97, 118, 199 Xie Juzeng 90 Xinbao 80 Xu Beihong 140, 148 Xu Lai 130 Xu Shou 39, 41 Xu Weize 39, 44 Xu Zhi 26–27 Xue Chengji 24, 25, 26–27 Xue Fucheng 45

Index  293 Yanagawa Shunsan 33, 57, 74 Yang Fang 27–29, 33, 48 Yang Shangwen 28, 33, 34 Yang Xiaolou 160 Yangzhou 11, 66, 68, 84, 89, 101, 105, 112, 116, 128 Yangzhou studio 82, 113 Yangzi region 182 Yao Junqing 161 Yaohua studio 91, 126, 127, 134, 135, 138, 162, 192 Yashuang 171 Ye Gongchuo 71, 72 Yeh, Catherine 15 Yeh, Wen-hsin 11, 13, 137, 212 Yichang studio 96 Yijilu studio 145 Yingming studio 107 Yokohama 10, 60–62, 80, 89, 93, 105, 109 Yongan (Wing On) Department Store 202 Yu Garden 112 Yu Suk (Korean painter) 60, 61, 79 Yuan Shikai 142, 198 Yuanmenqiao, Yangzhou 66 Yue, Meng 12 Yuelairong studio 111, 126, 138 Yueyang 97, 228 Zeng Jize 107 Zeng Pu 141 Zeng Tongwu 167, 172 Zhang Ailing 4, 264 Zhang Deyi 81, 105, 113, 127

Zhang Dingfang 203 Zhang Garden (Zhangyuan) 110–112 Zhang Jian 101, 117, 128, 196, 226 Zhang Pengzhou 205, 207 Zhang Shuhe 110 Zhang Yinquan 202 Zhang Yuanji 45 Zhang Yucang 201 Zhang Yuguang 140, 148 Zhang Zhidong 199–200, 203 Zhang Zhiwan 43 Zhangjiakou 113, 174, 228 Zhangyuan 111, 112 Zhaoxiang lüefa 39 Zhejiang 11, 43, 63, 115, 177, 208, 224–227 Zhejiang-Jiangxi railway 177 Zhen Zhen (figure in a medieval story) 123–124, 132 Zheng Fuguang 33, 34, 74 Zheng Zhengqiu 163, 171, 174 Zhenjiang 202, 220, 224, 227 Zhizhen studio 155 Zhong Ziyuan 2 Zhonghua sheying zazhi 207–208, 209, 211, 215 Zhou Muqiao 81 Zhou Shouchang 76–77, 103 Zhou Shoujuan 131 Zhou Yaoguang 44, 164 Zhu Shouren 208, 209, 210 Ziliang 135–136 Zou Boqi 28, 29, 32, 35–37, 45, 48–49, 55–56, 71, 72, 152