The Face of China: Photography's Role in Shaping Image, 1860—1920

After the Opium and Arrow Wars, European, Japanese, and American governments nego tiated unequal concessions from the Qing imperial court. Companies and individuals established residential and commercial bases along the coast from Hong Kong to the Korean peninsula and Manchuria, creating a semicolonial environment that was inten sified by clashes with foreign troops. In these spheres, commercial and military, pho tography greatly facilitated the construction of identities. This essay is concerned with photography's role in the assignment of "Chinese" character and with the international consumption of this constructed "China" during the period from i860 to 1920. This was the period of photography's great growth internationally, when the new technology was a partner to vast colonial operations, imperial contests, and commercial experiments. Companies such as the American firm Underwood & Underwood pack aged and distributed sets of stereographic prints taken in foreign locations, expanding the viewership of images worldwide; these professionally printed photographic sets served a significant role in the construction of modern China.1 Photographic encounters between destitute workers along China's coast and foreign traders, officials, and business repre sentatives were recorded by Japanese, American, and European wartime photographers. "China" became an object of spectatorship—an extremely popular one—but its popu larity was imbedded in a foreign, negative image framed through violence and submission. The elaborate captions that accompany these photographs define "China" vis avis the larger domain of production and consumption, whose international dimensions are evident in the range of languages used: French, German, Italian, Russian, and English.2 Captions for the racialized images taken by professionals such as British portraitist Wil liam Saunders (fl. ca. 1862-88), American James Ricalton (1844-1929), and French patron of photography G. Prat (fl. 1878-96) routinely describe the people in Hong Kong, Guang zhou (Canton), Shanghai, Tianjin, and Beijing as "people of the Yellow Race."3 The cap tions note class and racial qualities, and the images are often explicitly violent. While it is beyond the length and scope of this article to determine the extent of colonial photog raphy's impact on Chinese identity, it is nonetheless critical to understand that colonial photography enjoyed an afterlife in the nationalizing construction of the Chinese self during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.4 Early photography was used effectively in treaty ports