Creators of Modern China: 100 Lives from Empire to Republic 1796–1912

‘History is made, and made memorable, by individuals’, claims Jessica Harrison-hall in the introduction to this 367-page tome. If we can hardly disagree with one aspect of the sentence – that history is always subjectively written – the suggestion that individuals (as opposed to networks or societies) are what history is about sounds like a more simplistic and romantic proposition. Nevertheless, this book gathers the biographies of a hundred ‘creators’ – among them courtiers, religious and military figures, artists, writers, businesspeople, states- and craftspeople – to ‘characterize and humanize a century of Chinese experience that for decades was dismissed… as an epoch of stagnation, decline and failure’ – in other words to find something extraordinary amid what’s often considered the waning mediocrity of the late-qing empire. Released alongside the British Museum’s signature series of publications (and exhibitions) that define nations via the objects they produced, this collective portrait carries the implicit suggestion that objects somehow fail to give the full picture.

This book coincides with the museum’s current exhibition China’s Hidden Century, which celebrates the creativity that emerged from the late-qing, and has made a considerable effort to mine the curious lives of creative cosmopolitans who lived outside the common narratives of dynastic failure and nationalist triumph: from female pirate Shi Yang, whose over-300-ship fleet ruled the South China Sea, won battles against the Qing navy and kidnapped British sailors; to Yusuf ma Dexin, a Muslim pilgrim who travelled extensively to Damascus, Jerusalem and Cairo, where he attended the Al-azhar University; to the dandy imperial ambassador Chen Jitong, who roamed the streets of Paris like a flaneur. These inclusions form the more reflective aspect of the project, which takes the imagination of China proper beyond its eastern heartland to its frontiers and overseas diasporas.

The rest of the book, though, is less exciting. This encyclopaedic text portrays not so much legends of individual creativity, but the contours of their collective fate. Imperial exams, official careers, social networks and choices made during the Taiping Revolution (1850–64), an anti-qing rebellion that swept the vast southeastern landscape, shaped the trajectories of most of the people featured here, giving an impression of Qing’s historical conditions and bureaucratic structure. The anti-manchu Taiping Revolution, in particular, had profound impacts on each individual, fragmenting their social networks and expected career paths. In the artistic realm, some, such as painter Tang Yifen, had to give up their careers and join the Qing military (eventually dying by suicide to demonstrate his loyalty to the court); others such as Ren Bonian and Wu Youru fled to Shanghai because of its political remove from the Jiangnan region and relative safety once it had been conceded as a British and, later, international settlement. With these individuals it’s hard to ignore the parallels and repetitions in their life stories. If they are creators of modern China, they are just as much the product of the social change and colonial encounters that created them.

But the problems here remain a matter of the book’s larger conceptual framework. Its focus on extraordinary individuals means that it never probes the everyday reality of China’s common people, nor does it account for the vast, anonymous labour of porcelain makers, or the creators of export prints and photographs, farmers or railway builders. Which, in turn, leads to the conclusion that such people were not the ‘creators’ of modern China. But what is this modern China anyway? When and where was China made modern, if modernity itself is not a fiction? Did China become modern because of European contact, emerging national consciousness or the development of various technologies and capitalist industries? The product of numerous contributors, looking at their subjects through a variety of lenses – postcolonial critique, retrospective celebrations of globalisation or at times a straightforward teleological progression – this book offers only conflicting accounts of ‘modern China’, which in turn becomes an increasingly confounding idea. Yuwen Jiang