Abstract
The Great Wall(s) of China have been imagined, re-imagined, analysed and re-visited through a variety of media, including written records, visual materials, and literature. The various myths and cultural attachments to the Wall have even coalesced in an interest-based field referred to as Great Wall studies (Waldron 1995, Luo Zhewen 2006, Cheng Dalin 2006, Barmé 2005, Lindesay 2008). A backward-looking gaze at the history of the wall has compelled historians, writers, architects, geographers, and photographers to take on the construction, deterioration, and preservation of it to create a definition of China that serves both Chinese national and foreign interests. The recently recovered archive of the American Great Wall enthusiast William Edgar Geil (1865-1924), housed in a local historical society in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, USA, contains many photographs that add to our understanding of the role of the Wall as artefact, image, and even fetish. Geil's archive captures contemporary Great Wall tensions among amateur/scholar, photographer/preservationist, and national/international identities.
Keywords: conservation, preservation, Great Wall of China, rephotography, William Edgar Geil, William Lindesay
By 1908 many explorers and travellers could think that most of the great relics of the world had indeed been placed under glass in museums around the world. Notorious archaeologists, tomb robbers and even botanists had collected artefacts from China and other parts of the world and removed them to museum collections in their home countries. Here we take the very familiar, solid, and permanent-seeming Great Wall to examine how it was not removed, but nonetheless taken possession of, by people who ultimately used it to translate China for their own cultural purposes. Great Wall enthusiasts consumed and reimagined the Great Wall in ways that currently influence contemporary meanings of it. Foreigners seeking to distinguish themselves through their association with the Wall used it as a marker of China, the Chinese population, and their own accomplishments, most prominently through writing about and photographing the Wall. Foreign attention to the Great Wall often also included an erasure or minimisation of the Chinese themselves.