Photography in China
Dr. Claire Roberts, Professor in Art History and Curatorship, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
Photography in China AHIS30025, a new subject introduced in 2022, uses key items from the University Library’s extensive East Asian and related special collections material for object-based learning, drawing attention to their significance for ongoing research. Photography in China explores the history of photography in greater China, from its introduction in the nineteenth century and its use by Chinese and non-Chinese practitioners, through to its diverse applications in the present. Photography is examined as a visual, social and technological phenomenon, including its role in colonial and ethnographic projects, modernisation, identity formation, revolution, cultural politics, and the everyday.
Recent acquisitions of important primary materials have augmented the existing collection. They include Album Chinois (Chinese Album, c. 1857), a rare early photobook designed to promote the missionary work of the Society of Jesus in China to French audiences, and Zuihou de huangchao: Gugong zhencang shiji jiuying (The Last Dynasty: The Palace Museum Collection, Century Old Photo, 2011, vols. 1-7), which reproduces over 1,200 photographs from the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing.
Album Chinois uses imagery to convey to French readers something of the history of the Jesuit Mission in China and missionary work undertaken there. It is a work of visual propaganda. Each illustrated leaf contains an image with a brief descriptive caption. The images are albumen prints, many of them photographs of earlier artworks, with captions lithographed on slips, both pasted onto the page. With its black morocco-grained cloth-covered boards, the title and page edges in gilt, the album may have been produced to raise funds for the Jesuit cause in China. It is one of a small number of related albums known to exist.1 The Jesuit mission was attacked by Taiping rebels in the late 1850s prompting it to move from Caijiawan, 18 kilometres west of Shanghai, to Dongjiadu in 1860 and thereafter to Tushanwan in 1864-5. The Taiping Rebellion, a devastating civil war during which tens of millions of people were killed, sought to overthrow the ruling Manchu-Qing dynasty.
The Melbourne album is inscribed with the name ‘Augustin Aubert’ indicating that it may have been owned by the French artist Augustin Raymond Aubert (1781-1857). A single page of French text introduces 41 pages of captioned images thus:
This small album aims to bring to light the real customs of the people of the Celestial Empire. Attention was placed on selecting one specimen from each of society's social classes, from Emperor to mere labourers. Also inserted are portraits of Jesuit Missionaries, dressed as they used to in the early times of their evangelisation of China, as well as their current fashion. The various dresses and portraits included in this album were photographed from earlier specimens, or recently sent from China by the very Missionaries.2
The album opens with an engraved portrait by a Jesuit artist of the Kangxi Emperor (r.1661-1722) under whose reign members of the Society of Jesus were employed by the Qing court, serving the Emperor in fields such as mathematics, astronomy, cartography and art. It is followed by artistic representations of Chinese officials. The album continues with engraved portraits of Jesuits who played key roles in the establishment and development of the Jesuit Mission in China from 1583, including Matteo Ricci (1555-1610) and Adam Schall (1592-1666); genre paintings relating to Jesuit life in China; photographic portraits of later Jesuits, many of whom were active in the Jiangnan Mission and at Zi-ka-wei (Xujiahui) in Shanghai; as well as images of ‘teachers’ and ‘Chinese students’, ‘thieves’ and ‘workers’, and engravings of battles that took place during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (1736-1796) made by Jesuit artists working in the imperial court, perhaps alluding to the terror of the ongoing Taiping War. The material is not arranged in a chronological order and a variety of different media were used in the creation of the original images (that have then been photographed), including engraving, pith painting, oil painting, watercolour and photography. A similar album in the collection of the Getty Research Institute, dated c. 1860 notably includes a painting of the French arriving in Shanghai and a sculpture of the Virgin Mary on a donkey by the Spanish Jesuit artist Juan Ferrer (1817-1856), images that are not present in the Melbourne album.3
By comparison, Zuihou de huangchao (The Last Dynasty) is a multi-volume compilation, the largest collection of photographs ever published from the archives of the Palace Museum, Beijing. The photographs were predominantly taken by Chinese photographers and date from the late Manchu-Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and the early Republican period. After its introduction to China in the 1840s photography quickly became an influential medium for documentation, portraiture and personal expression, including for members of the imperial family.
The photographs have been assembled according to themes: Palaces, Tombs and Gardens, Emperors and Empresses, Imperial Court, Industry and Military Affairs. Some photographs were taken as single images whereas others were originally made for presentation albums documenting projects and events. Details of exactly when and where the photographs were taken and by whom is not always known.
In addition to photographs documenting imperial court architecture within the grounds of the Forbidden City (Zijin cheng) in Beijing, there are many others that record imperial sites further afield, including temples, gardens and tombs. And enlivening the array of formal portraits of emperor’s and empresses, is the series of staged and role-play portraits of Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) taken by Yu Xunling, as well as later candid portraits of the Xuantong Emperor, the last emperor Puyi (1906-1967), and his wife Wanrong (1906-1946), who were both keen photographers, as well as portraits of imperial pets and palace animals including cats, dog, monkeys and deer. Also fascinating is the volume relating to Industry which documents the development of key industrial and military infrastructure in the late 1800s and early 1900s, part of China’s policy of reform and ‘self-strengthening’, including the Sichuan Arsenal, Guangdong Armaments Factory, the Beiyang and Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureaus, Mint, and the Zhangjiakou railway.
These two additions to the University Library’s special collections provide alternative perspectives on the history of photography in China. Album Chinois, assembled in France and incorporating materials sent from the Jesuit missions in China shows how the new technology of photography was used to reproduce earlier artworks by Jesuit artists and create a limited edition of photobooks that could be circulated internationally to promote the Jesuit cause. The Society of Jesus had played a key role in introducing lithography and photography to China. Here, photography can be understood as an effective medium for the dissemination of religious propaganda, and a key technology used to serve imperialistic interests in the non-Western world. In contrast, Zuihou de huangchao demonstrates how photography was actively adapted to local conditions and in the hands of Chinese practitioners quickly became a medium of agency, used for cultural expression and to create images of documentary evidence, national progress and power.
Endnotes
[1] Other volumes of Album Chinois have been located in collections of the University of London Library; Terry Bennett Collection, London; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
[2] With thanks to Régine Thiriez for her advice on translation. For more information about Western photographers in China see Régine Thiriez, Barbarian Lens: Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor’s European Palace,Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013.
[3] See Album Chinois, https://archive.org/details/albumchinoiscepe00fran accessed 3 October 2022.