![]() To depict the swirling smoke, artist Ma Ziming draws on the undulating “clouds” most often seen in Chinese religious sculpture, bas-reliefs, and prints, heightening the emotion and atmosphere of a scene already full of the frisson of male firefighters pulling prone, unconscious young women from their bedroom. Offering a commentary on urban crowding, predatory landlords, and tenement conditions as the context for disaster, the text relates how nonetheless the advanced equipment of New York City firefighters allowed them to “fly” to the rescue of women overcome in a burning high-rise. ![]() The piece “Escape from Danger,” from the first year of the Dianshizhai’s 14-year run (1884 to 1898), offers a striking example of the marriage of foreign subject matter, new technology, and local artistic sensibility in the service of high drama. Such skills only heightened the dramatic effects for the viewer (which, in deference to the visual as well as verbal primacy of these documents, is how we will refer to the Dianshizhai audience). Similarly, though early issues contained copies of illustrations from publications such as Harper’s Weekly or The Illustrated London News, the house style most frequently melded the kind of technical renderings that lithography allowed with illustrative flourishes adopted from woodblock prints, ink painting, and other older techniques in which the stable of artists were trained. It flourished, however, feeding an appetite for renderings and explanations of the influx of new technologies and customs from outside China, as well as the equally bewildering domestic shifts in mores, politics, and customs. Like many of the American and European illustrated newspapers that served as the Dianshizhai’s early inspiration, the periodical was born in a serendipitous mixture of commerce and exploitation of a public’s hunger for wartime news (in this case, that of the 1884–1885 Sino-French War). Eventually, the power and authority of the illustrations even superseded that of the original news items on which they were based, and the textual descriptions that accompanied them (authored separately from the hand of the artist). The novelty that the Dianshizhai offered was a combination of lithographic illustration and on-site reporting (or the illusion of such), which together packed a potent one-two punch of detailed verisimilitude and high drama. In fact, he held in his hand the physical manifestation of this new world, a publication that did not just depict novelties in “China” and “the West” but in its very way of showing and seeing argued for a different way of approaching the times. When a reader delved into an issue of the Dianshizhai huabao (The Illustrated News of the Dianshizhai Lithograph Studio, or as we will call it Dianshizhai Pictorial, or simply Dianshizhai), he or she was not merely gazing into a window onto the enormous cultural and technological changes visible in the periodical’s home, the treaty port of Shanghai. The images in this unit unless otherwise noted are illustrations from the 1898 edition of the Dianshizhai huabao, generously provided by the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. ![]() Were generously digitized at the request of MIT Visualizing Cultures by the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University.įor anyone interested in late-Qing society and culture as Chinese of the time literally depicted and viewed it, the Daishizhai Pictorial can be seen as a fascinating counterpart to such famous Anglophone weeklies as England’s Illustrated London News (1842–2003) and, in the United States, Harper’s Weekly Journal of Civilization (1857–1916) and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (1855–1891). ![]() Part 3 provides access to over 1000 black-and-white illustrations that appeared in the pictorial over the course of its decade-and-a-half run. Part 2 complements this with a full set of images from the first six issues, including Chinese texts and English translations. ![]() Image-driven commentary by Rebecca Nedostup and Jeffrey Wasserstrom follows here in Part 1. In its format, illustrations, and textual commentary, the Daishizhai Pictorial was itself a dramatic example of what was deemed both new and/or newsworthy in the closing decades of the Qing dynasty. Between 18, Chinese readers were treated to a revolutionary publishing undertaking aimed at a mass audience: the Dianshizhai huabao-literally “Illustrated News of the Dianshizhai Lithographic Studio,” and more concisely rendered as “Dianshizhai Pictorial.” Published three times a month in Shanghai, imperial China’s most cosmopolitan metropolis, this periodical offered more than just a graphic window on contemporary Western as well as Chinese happenings and developments. ![]()
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