Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present Read online

  Lithographic New Year’s Pictures

  Mechanized lithograph printing started in Europe in the mid nineteenth century and was first introduced into China in the 1870s, with most of the early establishments located in Shanghai. The technology was initially applied to re-printing existing materials, such as texts required for preparation for the civil service examination, dictionaries, and large projects such as the enormous, 800,000-page Tushu jicheng (Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Current Times) for the imperial library. It was also adopted to print pictorial magazines such as Dianshizhai and Feiyingge, which became popular among urban residents and provided them access to news about current events (for an example of such pictorial prints see Figure 9.7 in book; also Figure 4.8, website). The heyday of lithography in Shanghai was from the 1870s to the end of the nineteenth century, when it was replaced by letterpress printing and offset printing. Lithography arrived in Tianjin, however, several decades later than in Shanghai. It was only after 1912, when the technology had already become out of date in Shanghai, that most of the modern printings factories, including Huazhong, Fuhua, Xiecheng, Yuanhe, and Yongxing, were established in Tianjin. All were initially very small establishments that started with the printing of business cards.29

  Within a couple of decades of lithography developing in Tianjin, the woodblock pictures of Yangliuqing and its neighboring villages entered a serious decline. A Yangliuqing gazetteer written in 1938 observed that “Recently, lithograph printing has developed, and the production of Yangliuqing New Year’s pictures declined. Only the printing of Stove Gods and door gods still survives. Chaomidian hires people to write couplets, paying one copper coin for each couplet, and the couplets then are sold in the Northwest.”30

  According to Zhang Fangtian, who owned one of the oldest wholesale shops of New Year’s pictures in Tianjin, all the New Year’s pictures in the Tianjin market were woodblock-printed when he first started his business in 1909. At this time the designs of the pictures, as well as the painters and engravers at picture shops in Tianjin all came from Yangliuqing and Chaomidian. In other words, urban production was drawing all its inspiration and artists from the countryside. Later, Japanese-produced lithographs featuring pictures of children began to be sold in the concessions. Zhang Fangtian bought some to test the market, and was encouraged by his success. By 1912 he was already selling about 500,000 of these prints made by Japanese studios every year. A printing company, Linji, recognized the market for the lithographs and decided to secretly print some of the Japanese pictures, using the names of printing factories in Shanghai. These practices started the lithograph printing of New Year’s pictures in Tianjin. As companies saw the profitability in printing New Year’s paintings, they adopted Linji’s method, making lithographic copies of Yangliuqing woodblock prints and printing them with machines. After 1917, these businesses thrived, the most prosperous of which was Fuhua.31 Established in 1925, its manager, Zhang Jue, purchased modern machines from Japan, used imported paper, and copied many Yangliuqing designs. By increasing the variety of the prints, he was able to take advantage of the market established by Yangliuqing in the North, Northwest, Northeast, Shandong, and Henan. In the early 1930s, Fuhua’s pictures occupied the markets in the whole of north China. In 1939 when Tianjin was flooded by an overflow of the Hai River, Fuhua’s factories, machines, and papers were all submerged for a month. It never recovered from the loss, nor did lithograph New Year’s pictures.

  What this historical process tells us is that woodblock New Year’s pictures were not losing ground to lithographic ones because of their traditional content or format. Lithograph factories in Tianjin were copying Yangliuqing pictures, and as a matter of fact, the Tianjin prints were obviously of much lower quality compared to those produced in Yangliuqing: the lines were not as clean, the colors less subtle, and the figures not as vivid. What was winning the war for the Tianjin printers was their higher efficiency, lower cost of production, and more convenient transportation.

  The production of the pictures in Yangliuqing and its surrounding towns and villages was typically handicraft.32 A picture was first drafted by a painter with incense sticks and then sent to the painting shop for evaluation and comments. After revision, it was painted in ink lines. Usually a painter had to make seven drafts for each painting: one black and white; five with the colors of black, yellow, red, blue, green; and one with all the colors to show the finished effects. Each painting needed six engravings, taking about 20 days to complete.33

  The engraving was done manually. Lines within the painting had to be even between the top and the bottom layers so that they would remain consistent after many pressings. The lines were divided into three levels according to their difficulty. The most difficult were the lines for faces and hands which had to be extremely refined and could not tolerate fault. The second-rank lines were those for folds of clothes, and the third were for scenery and landscape.34 When the engraving was done, it was placed on top of the printing table. The drafts with the ink lines were printed page by page, and then they were placed on the other engravings for the colors. By this point, when the five colors were all printed, the pictures were still considered half-finished. The faces of figures and other more refined areas had to be colored manually at various family shops in the Yangliuqing region. There was division of labor in the coloring process, with each person taking charge of one color.35

  This production process clearly took a lot of time. Ink drafts were done in the spring, and in the summer they were given to villagers to paint in the faces and fill in the colors. The investment would only return through sales at the end of the year. In addition, filling in the colors manually was very costly. According to interviews, the cost of color addition was about ten yuan for every thousand pages, or 20–30 percent higher than for the same number of pictures printed by lithograph, which cost about seven to eight yuan. Each lithograph machine, if run day and night, could print 16,000 prints. The Zengxing Picture Shop at Chaomidian had three electric machines, which could produce 48,000 pages daily. Some small shops, without electricity, used manual labor to pull their machines. But even so, a print machine could still be worked two shifts day and night, turning out 1,500 pages, several times that of the handicraft production. While a woodblock would be worn out after several thousand printings, a lithograph stone could print 100,000 copies. At first, print machines had been imported from Germany, then from Japan, but later they were made in Shanghai and Tianjin, making the purchasing of the equipment much easier and competition severe. As a result, the old-style production of woodblock print New Year’s pictures, which was conducted by shops with much less capital, could not survive. The 1927 survey observed that only the shops that had been in business for a long time, had an excellent reputation, and were well-managed could barely sustain themselves, and that only a very small market was left for the old-style woodblock-printed, manually colored pictures.36

  The challenge of lithography to woodblock New Year’s pictures was, thus, primarily one of technology. The Tianjin picture production, however, suffered from “malnutrition.” Tianjin lithograph New Year’s pictures never surpassed Yangliuqing in quality or creativity, the new factories reprinting pictures that had already been produced as woodblock prints. In other words, Tianjin lithograph printers relied on Yangliuqing for creativity. But under this new competition, as under the one with Chaomidian and Dongfengtai, Yangliuqing again lost an important share of its market; it was unable to sustain its production by simply relying on the costly refined pictures and doing without the mass market. As the 1927 survey shows and Zhang Cixi’s 1940 gazetteer confirmed, after production of the more refined New Year’s pictures stopped in Yangliuqing, it was only the most primitive and rough kinds of door gods and other images of popular religion produced in Chaomidian and Dongfengtai that survived, until the war with Japan and the flood in the late 1930s further doomed production.

  It appears that this new technology of li
thography did not directly extinguish the genre of traditional New Year’s pictures. The Tianjin production established its foothold in the web of synergy between the elite and commoner market: the Tianjin pictures were successful because they further fulfilled the needs of the rural market. The lower cost and higher efficiency of production of lithograph New Year’s pictures fit the needs of the farmers, who could not afford to be so picky about the quality of their pictures. In the long run, however, one might argue that because of its lowering the quality of New Year’s pictures and lacking the creativity of rural production, eventually the technology, and the urban production system in which it was embedded, imperiled of the genre. The high efficiency of mechanized production also demanded that artists turn out drafts at higher speed, constraining the creativity that could go into each effort.

  The oldest picture shop in Tianjin, Zhengxing zhai, closed its doors around the late 1930s. At the end of the 1940s, most of the lithograph New Year’s picture shops in Tianjin were also out of business, including the largest factory with the longest history, Fuhua. In the 1950s, only one factory, Xiecheng, was left.37 Although lithograph New Year’s pictures in Tianjin did not last long, they nonetheless started a trend of urban cultural production replacing that of the countryside.

  [See website (Figure 4.9) for images and discussion of the CCP state-led attempt to revive Yangliuqing New Year’s paintings in the Mao era.]

  Notes

  1. Li Guangting , “Xinnian shi shi” (Ten things to do for the New Year’s celebration) in Xiangyan jieyi (1849) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982). Also see Cai Xingwu, “Yanshi huosheng,” in Zhang Jiangcai (ed.), Jing Jin fengtu congshu (Beijing: Zhonghua fengtu xuehui, 1938), 5.

  2. Po Sung-Nien and David Johnson, Domesticated Deities and Auspicious Emblems: The Iconography of Everyday Life in Village China (Berkeley: Publications of the Chinese Popular Culture Project, 1992).

  3. A Ying, Zhongguo nianhua fazhan shilue (Beijing: Zhaohua meishu chubanshe, 1954), 8–9.

  4. Gongshang bu, Jingji taolun chu, Jingji banyue kan (Economics bimonthly), vol. 1, no. 3, December 1927, p. 30.

  5. Zhang Jiangcai, “Tianjin Yangliuqing xiao zhi,” in Jing Jin fengtu congshu, p. 1.

  6. Ming Shi in Er shi si shi, vol. 19, p. 559.

  7. As Endymion Wilkinson explains, “Under the Sui, hundreds of thousands of people were mobilized to repair old canals and to dig new ones. The resultant system linked the North to the South using the five river systems of the Haihe, Huanghe, Huaihe, Changjiang and Qiantangjiang. The canal was 40 paces wide, willow trees were planted on both sides, and granaries were built along the routes as well as 40 imperial rest houses. From the Song the entire system was called the Grand Canal (Da yunhe). In the Yuan, a 1,000-mile canal was cut from the existing canal at Xuzhou north across Shandong via Jizhou, Linqing and Haijin to Beijing.” Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual (Cambridge: Harvard University Asian Center, 2000), 640–641.

  8. Yangliuqing xiaozhi, pp. 2–3.

  9. Yangliuqing xiaozhi, p. 9.

  10. Bo Songnian, Zhongguo nianhua shi. Shenyang: Liaoning meishu chubanshe, 1986, p. 26.

  11. Ah Ying, pp. 7–8.

  12. Bo Songnian, 1986, p. 67.

  13. Cao Xueqin, Gao E, Hongloumeng. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chuban she, 1998, p. 532.

  14. Jin Ye, “Yangliuqing he Tianjin de nianhua diaocha” in Wenwu Kaogu zhuankan: Zhongguo gedi nianhua yanjiu. Xianggang: Shenzhou tushu gongsi, 1976, p. 52.

  15. Bo Songnian, “Ji Yangliuqing nianhua de zhizuo ji qita” in Wenwu Kaogu zhuankan: Zhongguo gedi nianhua yanjiu. Xianggang: Shenzhou tushu gongsi, 1976, p. 2.

  16. Jingji banyue kan, p. 30.

  17. A Ying, pp. 24–25.

  18. Yu Fei’an, Zhongguo hua yanse de yanjiu. Jiulong: Nantong tushu gongsi, [n.d], p. 43.

  19. Jingji banyue kan, p. 30.

  20. Jin Ye, p. 52.

  21. Jin Ye, p. 54.

  22. Jin Ye, p. 53. Jingji banyue kan, p. 32.

  23. Jin Ye, p. 53.

  24. Bo Songnian, 1986, p. 159.

  25. Jingji banyue kan, p. 30.

  26. Jinghua ribao, a vernacular, reformist newspaper, was established in 1904 by Peng Yizhong. It was closed down by the government in 1906, and Peng was exiled to Xinjiang. The publication was resumed when Peng returned to Beijing in 1913. It was shut down again soon, and was published again after Yuan Shikai died. The publication continued until 1922, although the paper in its later years became quite different from its early period.

  27. These probably refer to the Japanese-printed pictures, which will be discussed in the following section.

  28. Nilü guoke, Dushi congtan (1940). Taibei: Jinxue shuju, 1969 [reprint],pp. 58–59.

  29. Jin Ye, p. 54.

  30. Yangliuqing xiaozhi, p. 3.

  31. Jin Ye, p. 54.

  32. Bo Songnian, 1976, p. 2.

  33. Bo Songnian, 1976, p. 2.

  34. Bo Songnian, 1976, p. 3.

  35. Bo Songnian, 1976, p. 3.

  36. Jingji banyue kan, p. 32.

  37. Jin Ye, pp. 54–55.

  Chapter 5

  Monumentality in Nationalist Nanjing

  Purple Mountain’s Changing Views

  Charles D. Musgrove

  An important element in the construction of a new visual modernity in early-twentieth-century China was the transformation of concrete representations of the state, embodied in architectural forms that were designed to define a seemingly new set of roles between that state and its subjects. During the decade from 1927 to 1937, when the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, or GMD) nominally ruled China, monumental architecture in the form of public buildings, statues, and tombs formed part of a concerted effort to construct a new symbolic template for unifying the Chinese people around the GMD state. This template was inherently visual, as monumental architecture was meant to be seen in order to convey larger messages. Some messages were explicit in the inscriptions of the monuments; others were implicit in the more subtle meanings to be gleaned from the constructions themselves—the orientation, the materials, and the forms of the buildings that spoke to older symbolic systems while tapping into new ones. While the state certainly wished to express particular meanings through monuments, those who were supposed to absorb the messages often applied their own interpretations to the structures in both subtle and spectacular ways—either through the mundane contemplations of personal experiences or through dramatic deviant behavior purposely designed to challenge the prescribed readings of the imagery.

  This chapter focuses on the changing nature of monumentality reflected in the transformations effected on Purple Mountain, just outside the city walls of Nanjing. Purple Mountain was the location of the GMD’s most important monument, the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum (Figure 5.1). Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) was a professional revolutionary who in his early career sought to overthrow the Qing dynasty, which was accomplished during the 1911 Revolution. In early 1912, Sun briefly served as provisional president of the newly established Republic of China only to resign in favor of General Yuan Shikai in February 1912. When the republic collapsed into warlordism shortly afterward, Sun spent the rest of his life advocating the establishment of a “revolutionary” Nationalist government led by the party he had founded, the GMD. Sun had famously proclaimed the necessity for transforming the Chinese people from what he described as “loose sand” into a unified body of citizens under the leadership of the GMD, and in some respects the monument in his honor was built with similar intentions. But Sun’s was not the only monumental tomb on Purple Mountain; one mountain slope already served as the final resting place of the founder of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398).

  The term monumentality refers to the characteristics that cause an object to be considered a monument. Monuments today are thought of as big, impressive structures erected in public places designed to keep alive the memory of important persons and events. But sometimes objects become monuments even if they were not intention
ally constructed to commemorate; for instance, many ruins of what had been inconsequential buildings have become monuments simply because they are remnants of something that is particularly old.1 Thus, any object can become a monument if it serves a broader commemorative function—a document (such as the Declaration of Independence), a book (a Gutenberg Bible), or even a work of art (Michelangelo’s David) might be considered a monument. Naturally, what is considered worthy of monumental status changes over time, as certain objects are erected to be important, then becomes significantly less important (such as Grant’s Tomb), and maybe important once more.

  Figure 5.1 Photograph of Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum from the bottom of the magnificent staircase that visitors must summit in order to enter. This perspective highlights many of the most distinctively modern attributes of monumentality that this complex symbol conveyed, including it grand and visibility from a great distance, its domination of the surrounding landscape, and its imposing feeling of permanence. From: Wikimedia Commons (accessed December 20, 2013).

  Monumental conventions are not uniform, and vary considerably in different times and places. The paintings of Qianlong on his southern tours described by Michael Chang in Chapter 1 would indeed have been considered monuments at their conception, even though they were not created for widespread public consumption, since they clearly commemorated that event in a manner designed to impress select viewers with the importance of the man and the imperium he represented. But when those paintings are hung in a modern museum, the nature of their monumentality changes. Now these paintings mean something new to average viewers who are perhaps more interested in their artistic style than in their projection of imperial power.