Between the Familiar and the Unfamiliar: Late Qing Chinese Visual Reconstruction of Foreign News

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which the Dianshizhai huabao 點石齋畵報 (Dianshizhai Pictorial) illustrators visually reconstructed foreign news that was unfamiliar to them. When these illustrators had to visualize what was foreign, unfamiliar, and beyond their knowledge, they tended to do that by relying heavily on what was domestic, familiar, and within their knowledge. In other words, their visual reconstructions of unfamiliar foreign news were intervened and constrained by what was already familiar to them and, as a result, things unfamiliar to them were often replaced with things already familiar to them. The Dianshizhai Pictorial’s tendency to replace the unfamiliar with the familiar, or the co-existence of tradition/Chinese and Western/modern in the Dianshizhai Pictorial illustrations, provides us with an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the complicated relationship between tradition/Chinese and Western/modern. That is, the co-existence and interplay between Chinese tradition and Western modernity, as manifested in the Dianshizhai Pictorial, is clearly indicative of the fact a Chinese tradition-oriented way of thinking was not passively replaced by things Western and modern, but was actually intertwined with them.