The Victorian remaking of the Celestial Empire: images of late Qing China from the illustrated London news

Abstract

This study takes a cross-cultural perspective to explore a set of visual representations on late Qing China transported to Britain through the Illustrated London News. As the first pictorial of its kind in the Victorian Age, the Illustrated London News introduced a new mode of information production and transmission between the two confronting empires, offering British readers timely and vivid illustrations on both decisive events and daily life of ordinary people in the Celestial Empire. However, a full-scale critical examination of the several hundred China-related pictures from the Illustrated London News reveals a complex image-making process that goes beyond what scholars have appreciated about the pictorial’s objectivity and factuality. These Victorian images of late Qing China interweaved value judgments, ideological interests, and ethnocentric emotions at varied degrees, thus bearing a distinctive character in between reality and imagination. Based on in-depth analysis of selected illustrations on late Qing rulership, diplomacy, the opium trade, warfare and insurrections, as well as social customs, this study aims to solve the largely unattended question on how the Victorian ways of “looking” have turned the Celestial Empire of China into a culturally and ethnically different other, no longer friendly, respectable, and exotic, within the British-led modern world order.