井底之蛙

Historical sources of various kinds are making it online all the time. I recently came across a digital collection of Chinese newspapers from Canada available at the Multicultural Canada website.

Chinese Canadian Community News 加華僑報 (1970s-80s)
Chinese Express 快報 (1970s-80s)
Chinese Times 大漢公報 (1910s-1990s)
Hung Chung She Po 洪鐘時報 (1950s)
Ottawa Chinese Community Newsletter 加京華報 (1970s-80s)

There is also some issues of a Korean newspaper:

Minchung Sinmun

We can read, for example, the report of opening of hostilities in July 1937 on the day after the firing began in the July 8th issue, where the news (中日戰爭爆發) reached page 2. Also of concern that day, was the treatment of Chinese within Japan, which also gets reported on.

Though some years and months are listed, I had trouble finding issues in many of them. It would be nice if they had a list of available issues at the home page for each newspaper. The pages, when opened, are embedded into the site, but are simple JPG files which can be made to open in a new window using contextual menus.

Also, via their collection of links, I noticed there are some interesting materials related to the Chinese in Canada on this site:

Historical Chinese Language Materials in British Columbia: An Electronic Inventory

The site includes access to historical photographs, lists of organizations, and links to other Canadian sites containing historical materials.

Although the revival of Confucius in China naturally tends to emphasize a timeless vision of an unchanging Sage and set of teachings, the 儒家 have actually changed a lot over time. Thomas Wilson has put up a nice site that gives a clear introduction to the development of the Confucian cult and is well worth looking at, especially for the details on the development of the cannon. Plus you can find out that among his titles he was declared “Dark Sage and Exalted King of Culture” in 1008. Assuming  Dark Sage is 玄聖that is a really cool title and gives us all something to aim for.

China Gateway has some pictures, with translation, from The Dianshizhai Pictorial the famous late 19th century Shanghai illustrated paper. I say famous because it is rapidly becoming one of the most reproduced and re-packaged parts of Chinese culture. WorldCat shows 69 hits for the keywords 點石齋畫報 which includes full editions, selections (stories about Suzhou or whatever) translations into baihua, and some of the scholarly studies. I assume there is a lot more about it that you could dig up with other keywords.  Googleing yields lots of pictures like the above and even more commentary. It is a very Web-friendly sort of souce, since it is in short chunks, has pictures and a bit of text and above all is out of copyright.  In time the public image of the Late Qing may come to be tied as specifically to this bit of art as the T’ang is to poets or the European middle ages are to the Arthur stories.

Via China Beat

I just read on H-Asia that Harvard has announced last week that, in cooperation with the National Library of China, it will be scanning its 51,500 volumes of Chinese rare books. Early next year it will begin with its collection of Song to Ming dynasty works, and then move on to its collection of Qing dynasty works in 2013.

They also noted, importantly, that after digitization they will continue to allow scholars access to the works.

Read more about the announcement here.

BibliOddyssey has a nice post up with cool pictures from the World Digital Library. The site has images from all over the world, and a really neat interface.

This is an image from a Qing dynasty edition of the Shanhaijing. They have a good bit of Chinese stuff, including a zoom-able 1900 map of Beijing for those interested in the Boxers. Also a lot of stuff for those interested in the rest of East Asia.

Speechwars.com lets you see how many times American presidents have used various words in their State of the Union addresses. This is not a perfect representation of American interests, since some Presidents are more prolix than others and just from my own perusal of the site the SOTU seems to be getting more vague over the years. Still China turns up a lot (353 times) and it is sort of interesting to look at why. The handful of early references use ‘China’ to mean the ends of the earth or are brief mentions about foreign relations. Grant mentions China a lot in 1870 and 71, usually coupled with Japan (only 222 total mentions! hah!) and the “nations to our South” as the solution to American economic problems. China Market stuff seems to take precedence in the late 19th Century, although the theme of Chinese as barbarians seems common as well.¹ The biggest spike of interest comes from 1900 to about 1912, when China got more individual mentions than it would in the 1940’s as our wartime ally or than it gets today as the sugar daddy who buys all our paper.

The big jump came in 1900, when McKinley gave a long recounting of the Boxer uprising, which was of course America’s first major act of cooperative imperialism, just as the Spanish-American war² was the first³ unilateral act. I got the impression he was trying to justify his “soft” policy on indemnities to an American public who were going to have to learn that there with other ways of dealing with non-whites besides killing 90% of them and putting the other 10% on reservations.

Teddy Roosevelt seems quite the Friend of China. In 1905 he promised to keep out Chinese laborers but insisted that “we must treat the Chinese student, traveler, and business man in a spirit of the broadest justice and courtesy if we expect similar treatment to be accorded to our own people of similar rank who go to China.” (What, gunboats are not enough?) In 1908 Roosevelt uses China as an example of the perils of deforestation, implicitly saying that China was part of the human community and that we could learn lessons (even cautionary ones) from them.

Fortunately Taft comes along right after that to get us back on the dollar diplomacy track. He spends a lot of words in 1910 assuring us that American capital is right there building railways and exploiting China along with the best of them. He gives the fall of the Qing a brief notice in 1912, but only to assure us that the loans will keep on coming.

After Taft China flatlines for a good decade, however. Not much chance of making a buck in warlord China, and it was not a good example of how American policy was civilizing the globe. So 1900-1912 looks like a time when America and China were both coming out into an international world at the same time.

Via Fallows

1. I just sampled the speeches rather than reading them all line by line [↩]
2. Cuba got a spike of mentions just before 1900 [↩]
3. Yes, not the first. It’s a blog post [↩]

How is “common knowledge” different in China than elsewhere? At present of course things are increasingly the same, but that is due in part to years of education and government propaganda, but it is hard to figure out how the propaganda connects to the later popular knowledge

Ethan Persoff has posted a nice set of Chinese anti-American cartoons, which he dates to 1958-60.

I think a lot of these are coming from Russian models, since while they have a few on the Japanese as America’s evil allies there is a lot more on Germany, as above. And, there are a lot of atom bombs and H bombs. Making sense of the atom bomb took a while in the West (Orwell, for one, never seems to have gotten his head around them) but here they are everywhere and seem to be the ultimate marker of American depravity and power. Mao of course famous for valuing the power of peasant militias over modern technology, and even atomic weapons did not change this calculus for him, as the many militia pictures during the Cultural Revolution show. These cartoons were intended to convince Russians and other Europeans that the atom bomb had ushered in a new age, but they do not seem to have had that effect in China at all.

Some of these cartoons do show Russian positions that will be picked up on by later Chinese propaganda, like the importance (and existence of) the toilers of other lands

Has anyone done anything on Chinese popular understanding of the nuclear era? I’m drawing a blank.
Via Mutant Palm, which has a nice set of links to Chinese image sites.

A whole website full of picture of Sleeping Chinese I found it via Fallows, who adds a caveat  (specifically for Chinese readers) that he is not trying to call Chinese people lazy by posting these. Oddly enough, I think that the perpetually indignant Chinese of the internet might not be as offended by these shots as Fallows (and the site owner) seem to think. Fallows presents these pictures as a counterbalance to the western image of a relentlessly rising army of Chinese worker-automatons. Obviously they can’t be working that hard if they fall asleep in public. Nobody in the West ever falls asleep in public unless they are under 1 year old or really drunk.

Of course these Chinese people are not sleeping. They are xiu xi-ing (休息). One of the many ways Chinese culture is superior to many others is that taking a quick nap is always considered a good idea, especially right after lunch. So while these pictures may not tell you much about the rise of China, they are a nice slice of Chinese life.

The December History Carnival is up, and it includes a few China bits. Even a few from elsewhere! Also lots of other neat stuff.

I found a couple of cool language tools. Both are hosted by the Russian site Tower of Babel, which appears to be run by some serious linguists who have complied a huge number of etymologies.

One site will give you the pronuciation of Chinese words in any of the archaic pronuciations. Want to know how to pronounce a word in Eastern Han Chinese, or what the Shuowen gloss is, this site is for you. It only has about 4000 entries, but a lot of the basic words seem to be there.

They also have a dialect version, so if you want to know how to say something in Fuzhou or Jinan dialect this is the place to go.

For both of these you need to know the wierd linguist romanizations, [UPDATE I think it is IPA] and I’m not sure I have any practical uses for this, but it is still pretty cool