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Some Corner of a Chinese Field: The politics of remembering foreign veterans of the Taiping civil war

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2018

JONATHAN CHAPPELL
JONATHAN CHAPPELL*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The memory of the foreign involvement in the Taiping war lasted long after the fall of the Taiping capital at Nanjing in 1864. The events were commemorated by various actors, Chinese and foreign, from the end of the war until the end of the treaty-port century in 1943 when the right to extraterritoriality was abrogated. This article explores the commemorations of the foreign role through three media: the issuing of medals to foreign fighters, the building of memorials to the foreign dead, and the writing of histories of the events. Across these media, different interest groups used the foreign interventions as a proxy for continuing debates about the role of foreigners in China and about China's place in the world. More broadly, the commemorations of the role of foreign fighters in the Taiping war is a case study in the transnational politics of memory. The memories of the war were contested or commemorated not just by states, but also by individuals and groups whose views often diverged from those of their government. By tracing how memories of the war were remembered and forgotten, we can trace the insecurities of different interest groups over time and their perceived power relative to each other.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , July 2018 , pp. 1134 - 1171
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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144 Erh-kang, Lo, [A Draft History of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom], Shangwu Yinshu Guan, Shanghai, 1936, p. 1Google Scholar. Lo took up a directorship in the People's Republic of China (PRC)'s Institute of Modern History in 1949.

145 Assmann, ‘Transformations between history and memory’, p. 52.

146 For an account of the British community's departure from treaty-port China, see Bickers, R., Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900–49, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999, pp. 236–40Google Scholar.

147 See Spence, God's Chinese Son; Reilly, T. H., The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2004Google Scholar; Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom; and Meyer-Fong, What Remains. In addition to this, there have been a couple of biographies of key figures, including Carr, The Devil Soldier; and Pollock, J., Gordon: The Man Behind the Legend, Constable, London, 1993Google Scholar.

148 Tingyi, Guo, [A Day by Day History of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom], Taiwan Shangwu Yinshuguan, Taipei, 1957, p. 1Google Scholar. The foreword to the original 1946 edition was dated 1940.

149 See, for example, Feuerwerker, A., ‘China's modern economic history in communist Chinese historiography’, in History in Communist China, Feuerwerker, A. (ed.), M.I.T. Press, Massachussets Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 1968, pp. 219–20Google Scholar.

150 Meyer-Fong, T., ‘Civil war, revolutionary heritage and the Chinese garden’, Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, vol. 13, 2014, pp. 90–1Google Scholar.

151 Yongzhi, Xu, ‘ (1949–1990)’ [‘A brief discussion of historical research on the Taiping heavenly kingdom in Taiwan and Hong Kong (1949–1990)]’, [Anhui Historical Research], vol. 4, 1991Google Scholar.

152 Yang Yitang, Research on the Taiping, p. 4.

153 Aleida Assmann has noted this function of political memory. Assmann, ‘Transformations between history and memory’, p. 52.