The provocatively titled The Lost Frontier: Treaty Maps That Changed Qing’s Northwestern Boundaries (失落的疆域—清季西北邊界變遷條約輿圖特展), currently on display at the National Palace Museum, offers a glimpse of a neglected but important part of China’s late imperial history through maps, joint surveys and treaties concerning today’s Xinjiang (新疆 — New Territory), so-named by the Qianlong Emperor (乾隆帝).
The exhibition’s literature piques the viewer’s interest by stating that the maps were stamped “strictly confidential” by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and only released to the National Palace Museum in 2001 for safekeeping, and only declassified in 2007. It is anyone’s guess as to why these “sensitive, controversial ... documents” were kept from public view for so long — though it probably has something to do with the anachronistic claim that the Republic of China (ROC) is the legitimate government of China.
The Lost Frontier brings to mind the 19th-century imperial struggles between Britain and Russia for supremacy in Central Asia, exhaustively portrayed in Peter Hopkins’ book The Great Game. Similar to that great game, Russia had been skirmishing with China for control over Xinjiang. Situated along the Silk Road, Xinjiang occupied a strategic position and was — and to a certain extent remains — a major hub for trade.
The National Palace Museum picks up the story at the end of the second Opium War, when foreign powers were forcing China to open up to international trade, and moves up to the early Republican period. As Britain seized territory in the southeast, Russia took advantage of China’s weak position and pressured the Son of Heaven to cede lands along the country’s northwestern (as well as northeastern) borders in the Treaty of Peking in 1860, setting the stage for further land grabs.
This is made readily apparent in the exhibit’s most comprehensive section, Demarcating and Signposting. The weaker China became, the further east Russia penetrated. The section breaks the region down into three parts — north, middle and south — and shows how joint surveys followed the signing of treaties and protocols, some of which are also on display.
The Russian maps, as illustrated for example by the Map of Sino-Russian Border Demarcation in Kashgar, are notable for their modern cartographic techniques that mark the topography of the land. They are less aesthetically pleasing than the Chinese maps, which are more figurative representations that resemble Chinese landscape paintings. (The Chinese maps came to resemble the Russian maps as time passed, a subject that is beyond the scope of The Lost Frontier but which would make for a fascinating exhibit in its own right.)
One gets the feeling that the entire exhibit is there to underscore the thesis that foreign aggression during the 19th century resulted in China’s humiliation, while glossing over the fact that the region had historically been home to a diverse array of nomadic tribes and other cultures and had only recently been brought under Chinese control once and for all by the Qing, the Manchu dynasty that conquered China in the middle of the 18th century.
In the “middle section” of Demarcating and Signposting, we learn that the early ROC government signed the Protocol Regarding the Khorgos River, which ceded that body of water to Russia.
“Even the shoals that had so far belonged to the Chinese side were given over to Russia. It was such a pity that even the shoals ... had to be parted with,” the exhibition literature states.
Simply placing the maps on display along with protocols and treaties (whose significance is limited to regions that are obscure and thus require more explanation than is given) raises more questions than it answers. This reviewer left thinking that the show serves a need for those in Taiwan who harbor illusions that Xinjiang is a part of the ROC, while appealing to the nationalistic sentiments of the busloads of Chinese tourists who increasingly make up a large proportion of the museum’s audience.
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