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.
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
Taiwan, once relegated to the backwaters of international news media and viewed as a subset topic of “greater China,” is now a hot topic. Words associated with Taiwan include “invasion,” “contingency” and, on the more cheerful side, “semiconductors” and “tourism.” It is worth noting that while Taiwanese companies play important roles in the semiconductor industry, there is no such thing as a “Taiwan semiconductor” or a “Taiwan chip.” If crucial suppliers are included, the supply chain is in the thousands and spans the globe. Both of the variants of the so-called “silicon shield” are pure fantasy. There are four primary drivers
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about
The female body is a horror movie waiting to happen. From puberty and the grisly onset of menstruation, in pictures such as Brian De Palma’s Carrie and John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps, to pregnancy and childbirth — Rosemary’s Baby is the obvious example — women have provided a rich seam of inspiration for genre film-makers over the past half century. But look a little closer and two trends become apparent: the vast majority of female body-based horror deals with various aspects of the reproductive system, and it has largely been made by men (Titane and The First Omen, two recent examples
RSS