Picturing Men and Women in the Chinese 1911 Revolution

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century many Han Chinese, under the leadership of Sun Yatsen (1866-1925) and others sought to overthrow the Manchu Qing dynasty. This movement culminated in the Revolution which began in October 1911 and ultimately deposed the Qing imperial household, permitting the establishment of a republican government. As the Revolution progressed, the commercial popular print business, through inexpensive lithographs and woodblock prints, provided citizens with illustrations of important events in the Revolution, as well as portraits of male and female participants. Modern commentary on these prints identifies the subjects depicted, but neglects the artistic elements. To fill this gap, this study examines the artistic aspects of these prints and reveals that the source of the compositional formats lies in well-established formulae, some of which go back to the eighteenth century. For specific portraits of male participants in particular, print designers often relied on current photographs, thus melding old and new. For representations of female military participants, print designers, mostly eschewing photographs of them, provided imaginary portraits, some of which are based on depictions of anonymous women, again, already a part of the print legacy. The prints frequently feature two military women famous at the time, one real (Cao Daoxin) and one fictional (Xu Wuying); this essay explains how and why images of them were so widespread in the popular print media.