Notes on the Nantong Museum “Hall of the Adventuring Eye”

In May, 1920, a formal group portrait photograph was taken at the Nantong Museum. The photograph documents the inaugural meeting of the Jiangsu local self-government association, the Su She, formed of representatives from sixty counties in Jiangsu and headed by Zhang Jian (1853-1926), famous industrial entrepreneur and social reformer. Behind European-style pruned shrubbery and geometrically plotted and labeled plant specimens, members of the association crowd the steps, entryway, and windows of the museum’s clearly identifiable Central Building, in which epigraphy collected from sites in Jiangsu is on display. The glossy black and white photograph becomes yet another print surface, like the rubbings, on which memories linked to the province were developed. Yet the photograph captures more than a moment in shifting political discourse and cultural memory: it raises questions about the meaning of the museum, the uses to which it and the national patrimony defined and protected within it were put, and, most importantly, the place of the visual--in this case, the photograph as a material and visual object itself, as well as the brick building, surrounding grounds, and event it depicts--in configuring a reformed, “modern” China. The photograph points to the ways that the physical space of the museum worked to position visitors--not all necessarily as politically invested as Zhang Jian and the Su She members--by guiding and shaping their collective eye, and thereby, their identity.

The Nantong Museum was the first natively conceived, managed and developed museum in China. The museum was constructed in 1905 by Zhang Jian in his adopted native place of Nantong, Jiangsu province, a city approximately sixty miles northwest of Shanghai. The building complex was not publicly identified as a museum, however, until the following year. Rather, it was not called any of the terms in Chinese that are translated with some transparency then and now into English as museum: bowuguan (literally, hall for study of things) meishuguan (fine arts hall), bowuyuan (academy for study of things). Even in 1906, it was given the more literary name of bowuyuan, yuan meaning “garden” rather than the word with the same pronunciation, used at that time by local British and Jesuits in the compound for “museum,” and in modern Chinese as well, meaning “academy.” Significantly, until that year it was also referred to as a bolan’guan. It was precisely this kind of space, the bolan’guan, that Zhang had unsuccessfully petitioned the Qing court twice to build first in the capital Beijing and then in each province. And it was this sort of space, a space for bolan—a special, “modern” kind of vision--that the Shanghai Self-Strengthening Society (Shanghai qiangxue hui) had first proposed to build in 1895 [1].

In this paper I would like to suggest a way of interpreting the museum which takes seriously the complex tensions identifiable in the photograph, reflected as well in the instability and significance of the language used to denote “museum.” My concern is to situate the Nantong Museum within a discourse on national identity, while keeping an eye to the museum as a forum also embodying the vision a particular group of elite had of itself; to see the museum as a site of cultural production that revolved around Chinese elite collecting practice, yet which depended on the model of the colonial museum available in Shanghai; to understand how, in their attempts to define what modern China looked like, Zhang Jian and his colleagues also made demands on how to look. By walking through the museum, visitors could begin to literally see and participate in this new vision of China.

1. The relevant section of the qiangxue hui proposal reads: “Each kind of new thing (xin qi): ancient or modern, Chinese or foreign, military, agricultural, artisanal, and commerical, [from things] such as the new style of iron-sided naval vessels, wheeled vehicles, water bombs, firearms, to diagrams and things [qi] electrical, chemical, mechanical, astronomical, geographical, medical, and having to do with physics, and every kind of mineral and plant life, all that can be purchased, studied carefully (bolan) and collected, for the purpose of aiding the deepening and concentration of knowledge.”