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The Representation and the Meaning of the Images in Guizhou Miao Albums in the Qing Dynasty

Sookyung Choi 1

1고려대학교 중국학연구소

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ABSTRACT

This paper is written to explore how the non-Han community was recreated and its meaning in the Miao Album which was popular in the late 18th century to the early 20th century in the southwestern Chinese region. The Miao Album was initially made for the Qing administration to directly govern and supervise the Guizhou and Yunnan region natives but later became a well-known reading genre. The Miao albums that are currently available have 100 different copies which are mostly manuscripts and consisted of pictures and writings. The non-Han communities have been independently classified and expressed in paintings in a previous research published by the Qing government but the Miao Albums are much more detailed and descriptive. The Qing government asserted that civilization and barbarism are not determined by race or region but culturally. However as seen in Miao Albums, the Miao men were portrayed as having dark skin tone as well as large eyes and excessive body exposure which are distinctively different from how the Han men were described. It is common to negatively distort the social other. This is also related to the China’s painting tradition. Whereas in most Miao Albums women were depicted as relatively more attractive than men. They have white skin, bright facial expressions and were also expressed as overpowering the men in production activity. But the Miao women were often depicted as having overwhelming sexual energy which definitely did not coincide with Chinese traditional gender norms. This is related to the traditional fantasy people had toward the Southern region of China. In the traditional category of exoticism of the South, women were described as hypersexual. The Qing Empire demanded that the non-Han people living in the frontiers be absolutely assimilated into the mainland. They asserted that they should leave behind their inferior and retrogress situation and be transitioned into civilized people like the Chinese. Nevertheless there are some clues and signs that depict that some ethnic groups had gone through a process of transculturation and not one-sided assimilation. These Miao Albums can in fact be a museum that collected and exhibited the non-Han in the Guizhou region. The museum of this tribe is made up of patterns in which the observers constitute the dominant group, but inside it is full of mutual clashes between symbols and values that can be interpreted variously. It also implies ‘hybridity’, which can lead to cracks in spite of the dominance of strong cabinet discourse.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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