Doing History in Public

Tag: China

  • 17. Praying the Rosary in 17th-Century China

    17. Praying the Rosary in 17th-Century China

    By Weiao Xing (@WeiaoX) Basking in the sacred light, the Virgin Mary is greeted by Gabriel in an oriental wooden house ornamented with delicate lines and patterns (fig. 1). This unique Annunciation, as one of the fifteen hybridised images, appeared in a seventeenth-century print for Chinese rosary prayers. Its source version was Evangelicae historiae imagines,…

  • 7. A Film Slide from the Cultural Revolution

    7. A Film Slide from the Cultural Revolution

    By Ivi Fung Many will recognise immediately what is in the middle of the film slide – a portrait of the first Chairman of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Mao Zedong. The photograph was a material representation of Mao’s cult of personality at its height.

  • Michael Boym’s Illustrated Magna Cathay and Gushi Huapu, the Chinese Source of the Images

    Michael Boym’s Illustrated Magna Cathay and Gushi Huapu, the Chinese Source of the Images

    By Eszter Csillag Held at the Vatican Library, Magna Cathay (Borg. Cin. 531) is a never-printed map of China illustrated by the Polish Jesuit Michael Boym (1612–1659) when he returned to Europe from China. This map was part of a larger cartographical enterprise of the Jesuit order in the seventeenth century, when mapmaking was seen as one of the…

  • British Chineseness in the mind of Susie Wong

    British Chineseness in the mind of Susie Wong

    By Charmaine Au-Yeung It’s mid-March, and my eyes are glazing over he-said-she-said bickering between Home Office officials. Unfortunately, it’s all relevant to my dissertation – I study the Hong Kong Chinese diaspora and their emigration to Britain. I desperately need another coffee but cannot bring myself to buy one (it’s London). Stretching my limbs, I…