Visuality and Frontier Travel in Qing China

My talk will examine the role of visuality in late-imperial Chinese frontier travel, focusing on “tu” (pictures/maps) produced by Chinese travelers to Taiwan during the time the island was a Chinese colony (1683-1895). I argue that topographical pictures of the frontiers were key to the production of a new imagined geography of the expansionist Qing empire. Between the 1680s and the 1760s, the Qing pursued numerous campaigns of conquest on China’s frontiers, doubling the size of the empire’s territory, and bringing various non-Chinese peoples under their rule. The Qing thus not only redefined the territorial boundaries of China, but also redefined China as a multi-ethnic realm.

Qing frontier travelers produced both written accounts of their journeys, as well as various kinds of tu as visual records of their observations. These tu (or “pictures”) included pictorial maps, ethnographic illustrations, illustrations of flora and fauna, architectural illustrations, and diagrams of ritual practice. Travelers’ accounts and their pictures became an important source of geographic knowledge about the newly acquired regions of the empire, knowledge that was crucial for strategic and administrative purposes. Travel writing and pictures also served an important ideological function. In representing the distant geographies and the ethnically diverse peoples of the frontiers to audiences in the Chinese heartland, pictures and texts transformed places once considered beyond the pale into familiar parts of the imperial domain, and thereby helped to naturalize and legitimate Qing expansionism.

Although travel literature has gained recognition in the field of East Asian studies as of late, scholars have generally limited their analysis to texts. Yet, visual materials were central to the practice of travel in late-imperial China. Travelers relied on visual materials, such as maps, to orient themselves in unfamiliar terrain. They also recorded their observations in visual form, or had pictures painted for them as souvenirs of their exotic experiences. Armchair travelers, for their part, valued pictures as they enhanced the pleasures of reading travel literature. Thus, travel accounts and topographical pictures were originally produced and consumed within the same context. However, these materials came to suffer very different fates in terms of circulation and reproduction.

Whereas much late-imperial travel writing has been preserved through reprinting in anthologies, due to the difficulties of reproduction, pictorial materials were often not included in such reprintings. Subsequently, many pictures have been lost, or exist only in rare manuscript editions in museums or private collections. Thus, while text and pictures originally circulated within the same milieu, the modern reader of Qing travel anthologies generally reads as though texts existed in isolation from pictures – a practice reinforced by the academic distinction between literary studies and art history.

I argue that we must read pictures in conjunction with travel literature because visual materials, which allow for a different way of comprehending space and place than words, represent an important complement to written texts in the production of geographic knowledge. An examination of visual materials brings to the fore issues or perspectives that do not emerge from an analysis of travel writing alone. For example, the conception of “race” as physical difference plays a relatively small role in the discourse of Qing ethnographic description. In contrast, in the realm of pictures, “racial difference” is clearly visualized. In order to understand fully Qing conceptualizations of race, then, we must analyze the visual record in addition to the textual record.

My talk will present a general survey of the visual representation of frontier Taiwan. I examine various types of tu – pictorial maps, ethnographic illustrations, illustrations of flora and fauna, and tribute illustrations – in order to elucidate the role of pictures in producing ideas about the frontier. Like travel writing, tu served a wide range of practical, social and aesthetic functions, and again like travel writing, tu are a highly mediated form of representation. Thus, tu reveal a great deal about how Qing travelers (often through the professional illustrators they hired) “saw” the frontier. I argue that a more complete understanding of the cultural meanings that the frontier had for the Qing can be gained by examining tu in conjunction with texts such as travel accounts and gazetteers. If we wish to understand Qing colonial discourse and imperial practice, we must take visual representations seriously. A reading of topographical pictures in conjunction with travel writing will help us to recover the material context in which travel writing was originally produced and consumed, and further will demonstrate the importance of visual knowledge for Qing travelers and readers.