On The Image Of The Chinese In The Late Qing Dynasty In The Illustrated London News,1842—1876

The Illustrated London News(hearafter,the ILN),founded in London on 14 May 1842,was the first weekly newspaper in the world that combined news and pictures successfully as an unprecedented 'marriage' between literature and art.Since it was launched,it has paid great attention to the image of China and the Chinese.On 4 June 1842,a special report on Taou Kwang,the Emperor of China was published.By 1876,the image of the Chinese people it reported had almost covered all social classes and professions of Chinese society in the late Qing Dynasty,which were so diverse and typical that had a great impact on the cognition of English middle-class readers and subjects of the British Empire about the image of the Chinese in the late Qing Dynasty.Among images of the Chinese in the ILN,emperors and mandarins who occupied the dominant position in the late Qing Dynasty gained the most attention.As far as emperors were concerned,the newspaper reported Taou Kwang,Hsian Fou and Tung-che by placing them against the social background of continuous wars and unrest in the late Qing Dynasty.It demonstrated the difficulty of Taou Kwang in going through the crisis,the struggle of Hsian Fou in maintaining the dynasty,and the helplessness of Tung-che as a mere symbol.Cocerning mandarins,the ILN represented images of senior officers such as Keying,Pin-Ta-Chun,Commissioner Yeh(Yeh Ming-chen),the Hong merchants of Canton by depicting the changeable imagery of Keying in diplomatic activities,the openness and inclusiveness of Pin-Ta-Chun as 'the First Chinese to the West',and by heavily stigmatizing Yeh Ming-chen.Although especially focused on emperors and mandarins,the ILN also covered the Chinese people of the lower social classes,among which the images of soldiers and common people were typical.It depicted different types of soldiers as running away from the enemies,or as brave and tenacious,or as seeking profit exclusively and being extremely cruel.It also represented different characteristics of the Chinese people,such as depravity,numbness,courtesy,friendliness and industriousness.Images of the Chinese in the late Qing Dynasty in the ILN were rich and vivid,owing not only to the image-text combination,but also to the superb artistic expression.First of all,the mutual explanation,supplement and contradiction of the image-text collaboration enhanced the immediacy,the sensibility and the tension of personalities.Second,through the perspective of multiple narrators such as the narration of the news observer,the narration of the first person in the news,and the editors-the news stories were told authentically and completely,in which the images were real and vivid.Third,correspondents and artists skilfully combined the background with the facts of news,using the background to clarify the facts,or serving the background as a foil to the facts,which completed stories and images of the Chinese so that made them easier for readers to understand.As the Other in Western vision,the image of the Chinese in the ILN is neither an undistorted representation of the Chinese in real life,nor a pure imagination by the West.It is the impression that Special Artists and Correspondents gained by travelling through battlefields in China and among Chinese people while under the hearsay influence.It is also the prolonged version of collective imagination about China by the West,both Utopian and Ideological.It embodies the combination of ideology of the Britih Empire and media mission,mixing contradictory factors of the supremacy of commercial interests and the objectivity of news,the superiority of the British nation and the neutrality of news,and the middle-class orientation and the realism of news.The image of the Chinese in the late Qing Dynasty in the ILN is of great value and significance.First,it has an important historical significance for having influenced the West's understanding of the Chinese,called attention for other pictorials to the Chinese,and provided a new reference for studies on the image of the Chinese.Second,its aesthetic significance is embodied by openning up the aesthetic space in which images and texts are attached equal importance to,extending the scope of expression and levelling up the artistic taste of pictorial newspaper.Last but not least,it's high contemporary value lies in three dimensions:for the contemporary society,it provides the vision to observe and evaluate the image of the Chinese in foreign media.For the Chinese media,it gives rise to inspiration for the way of representing the image of foreigners.For Chinese pictorial newspapers,it can be referred to for improving the artistic demonstration of the image-text collaboration.