Panel 5
Wen-hsin Yeh, chair

Constructing the Database of Pre-1945 East Asian Picture Postcards
Toshihiko Kishi, Shimane University
t-kishi@u-shimane.ac.jp

Representing Robert Hart and other statues on the Shanghai Bund
Robert Bickers, University of Bristol
robert.bickers@bristol.ac.uk

Abstracts

Constructing the Database of Pre-1945 East Asian Picture Postcards
Toshihiko Kishi, Shimane University

Picture postcards that portray sceneries, people, and events of pre-war East Asia are valuable image resources to examine how Imperial Japan understood and portrayed East Asia."

Representing Robert Hart and other statues on the Shanghai Bund
Robert Bickers, University of Bristol

The Shanghai Bund was formerly decorated with a series of statues and memorials that represented different facets of the foreign engagement with China from the 1840s onwards. Each memorial was the product of a discrete initiative marking a specific individual or event – such as Briton Sir Harry Parkes, or the German crew of the S.M.S. Iltis. A look at these now removed symbols can tell us something about the foreign presence and its self-perception, about intra-imperialist rivalries, and about the saliency of symbol in the treaty port arena. Postcards of the Bund statues circulate today, through Ebay, for example, while photographs are often published in collections of images of ‘Old Shanghai’. The paper takes a close look at various issues surrounding the circulation of an image of one of these statues. Specifically it looks at the circulation and content of Chinese Maritime Customs Inspectorate-General Circular 3901 of 1929, a brochure which marked the removal of the statue of Sir Robert Hart which had been installed on the Shanghai Bund in 1914, to a spot opposite the new Shanghai Customs House in 1928. Unusually for an IG Circular this was an illustrated pamphlet, which contained photographs of models of the statue, as well as of its accompanying memorial plaques. The paper explores the development of the statue itself, and its meanings, and the use it was put to – and the image of it was put to -- by the Customs Service, by the foreign commercial community at Shanghai, and by Sir Robert Hart’s nephew, Sir Frederick Maze, when he became Inspector-General in 1929.