Objects of Interest: John Thomson's Images of Taiwan, 1871

University of Washington's East Asia Center hosts a talk with Douglas Fix.

Over the last decade, scholarship on the early history of photography in China has grown dramatically, and John Thomson's "illustrations of China and its people" have often been a centerpiece of that research.  Nowhere has this been more important than in Taiwan, where multiple exhibitions and publications have been devoted solely to Thomson's images of Taiwan.  In his own times, Thomson's photographs of Taiwan appeared not only in Thomson's multiple publications, but were also featured in private tourist albums, East Asian journals, intelligence reports and exhibitions in Europe.  In his lecture, Douglas Fix will examine Thomson's images of Taiwan by first comparing them briefly with photographs Thomson took in Fuzhou.  The focus of Fix's analysis will then turn to the networks that enabled Thomson's visit to Formosa in 1871, the discourses that framed his photographs of Taiwan's peoples, the collaborative roles that Taiwanese played in constructing those photographs, and the impact those iconic images had for understanding Formosa in Thomson's own era, as well as for us today in our attempts to comprehend Taiwan's history.

Douglas Fix (費德廉) offers a broad range of seminars on the history of China and Japan and is part of the Chinese studies faculty who teach Reed's unique multidisciplinary course on Chinese humanities (focusing on the Qin-Han and Song periods). Current seminars explore topics in the history of Qing and Japanese colonialisms, early modern maritime China, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese urban history, the early development of photography in East Asia, and the complexities of social and cultural modernity in China and Japan. With the help of staff, students and colleagues around the world, Fix created and now manages a digital collection entitled Formosa: Nineteenth century images. In collaboration with LO Hsiao-teh, his first book, 看見十九世紀台灣：十四 位西方旅行者的福爾摩沙故事 [Curious investigations: 19th-century American and European impressions of Taiwan], translated twenty-some texts from this website into Chinese for use by students, professors and researchers in East Asia.

His most recent book, in collaboration with John Shufelt, was a critical and annotated edition of Charles William Le Gendre's <Notes of travel in Formosa (1875)>, a travelogue, ethnography, and intelligence brief that is essential to understanding the complex diplomatic relations between the U.S., Japan, and the Qing dynasty during the 1860s and 1870s. British maritime surveying of Formosan coastal waters and nineteenth-century EuroAmerican photographic images of Taiwanese aborigines have been the focus of recent articles and papers. However, Fix is currently researching the history of the multi-national community in the southern Chinese treaty-port of Xiamen and that city's regional and global networks.