Victory Pictures in a Time of Defeat

This paper is a study of Chinese sheet prints depicting wars in the late Qing period. The survival of such works has been rare, as they were considered ephemera not worthy of preservation, and they are largely unstudied. Here, an analytical framework has been established by bringing together hitherto isolated bodies of material located in different institutions in several countries. The focus on depictions of the Sino-French War (1884-85), the Sino-Japanese War (1895) and the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), locates the sheet print at a critical time that saw technological changes in the conduct of war and the emergence of the modern mass media in China. When these prints have been studied, they have been read at face value, and subordinated to news reportage or official histories. However, interpretation based on pictorial analysis and on the understanding of the print as a commodity reveals a complex web of relationships that draws together areas of visual, print and popular culture within a society polarized by regionalism, modernization and urbanization. This contradicts long-held suppositions of popular print production in this period. Drawing on their graphic lineage and on notions of seriality, I argue that these renditions belong to the genre of ‘victory pictures’ (desheng tu and zhanggong tu) and explore how a genre associated with court production was disseminated, and its responses to modernity, differing audiences and print technologies.