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Abstract
This paper proposes a photographic archaeology in order to explore the material, visual and social impact of outdoor advertising in early twentieth-century Shanghai. Combining statistical analysis with photographic series and multimedia sourcing, the archaeological approach helps excavate the multilayered texture of advertisements. As material artifacts, advertisements are interwoven with urban spaces and municipal policies, closely tied to the social life of commodities and the companies’ strategies. Although outdoor advertisers played a significant role in reshaping commercial cultures and urban society in early twentieth-century Shanghai, photographic evidence complicates the picture of the growing commercialization of the city, the increased commodification of residents’ everyday life and the rise of a “consumer society” in modern China. The photo-archaeological method offers a fresh perspective on modernity, consumption, urban culture and visuality in modern Chinese history.
Notes
* This paper was originally prepared for the “New Lenses on China” Colloquium held in Belfast in 2017, supported by the Wiles Trust, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Universities’ China Committee in London, and Queen's University Belfast.
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8 Mittler, “Imagined Communities Divided,” 267–378.
9 Ibid., 270.
10 S. Cochran, “Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945: Imported or Invented? Cut Short or Sustained?,” in Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945, ed. Sherman Cochran (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2002), 3–18. Wu and Lien, “From Viewing to Reading,” 258–64.
11 Except in a recent work not yet published: C. Armand, “Placing the History of Advertising”.
12 R. Sassatelli, Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics (Los Angeles and London: SAGE, 2007).
13 Wu and Lien, “From Viewing to Reading,” 264.
14 Christian Henriot and Wen-Hsin Yeh, Visualising China, 1845-1965: Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013). See also: Christian Henriot and Wen-Hsin Yeh, History in Images: Pictures and Public Space in Modern China (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2012).
15 J. Kuo, Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2007).
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20 Henriot and Yeh, Visualising China, 1845–1965.
21 The term billboard (or hoarding or bulletin) refers to a specifically built and leased space (usually a panel) on which to advertise and to construct special boards on which to do so. The idea emerged in the United States in the 1860s and marked a decisive step in the billposting industry. See: C. Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2004), 18. I located the first instance of a billboard erected in Shanghai in the International Settlement in 1905, but I found no visual record of it [SMA (SMC), U1-14-3256].
22 C.A. Bacon, “Advertising in China,” Chinese Economic Journal and Bulletin 5, no. 3 (September 1929): 754–67. C. Crow, “Advertising and Merchandising,” in China. A Commercial and Industrial Handbook, ed. Julean Herbert Arnold (Washington: Govt. Print. Off., 1926), 191–200. Carl Crow was an American newspaperman and a pioneer in outdoor advertising in Shanghai. He opened the first advertising agency in 1919 and was very active in Shanghai until 1941. Julean Arnold served as the American commercial attaché in Shanghai from 1918 to 1945. Bacon was an American reporter in Shanghai in the late 1920s. These authors expressed an American point of view on the China market and addressed an American audience (American advertisers willing to enter the China market). But their testimonies are the first and the only professional sources we have on outdoor advertising in China. The first Chinese handbooks (not translated from American models) were published only after WWII.
23 Crow, “Advertising and Merchandising,” 199.
24 SMA (SMC), U1-4-3817.
25 Bacon, “Advertising in China,” 754–67.
26 SMA (SMC), U1-3-584.
27 Letter from Millington, Ltd. to the Secretary of Shanghai Municipal Council, Shanghai, January 18, 1930. Source: SMA (SMC), U1-3-584.
28 Crow, “Advertising and Merchandising,” 199.
29 J. Taylor, “James ‘Written in the Skies: Advertising, Technology, and Modernity in Britain since 1885’,” Journal of British Studies 55, no. 4 (2016): 750–80.
30 Cronin, Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban, 120–60.
31 See also: C. Henriot, “August 1937: War and the Death En Masse of Civilians',” in War in History and Memory, ed. Lü Fangshang (Taipei: Academia Historica, 2015), 492–568.
32 S. Cochran, “Marketing Medicine and Advertising Dreams in China, 1900-1950,” in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Wen-Hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 62–97. S. Cochran, “Marketing Medicine Across Enemy Lines. Chinese ‘Fixers' and Shanghai's Wartime Centrality,” in In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation, ed. Christian Henriot and Wen-Hsin Yeh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 66–89. Susan L. Glosser, “Milk for Health, Milk for Profit: Shanghai's Chinese Dairy Industry under Japanese Occupation,” in Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945, ed. Sherman Cochran (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 207–336.
33 Crow, “Advertising and Merchandising,” 199.
34 Ibid., 198–99.
35 Letter from the Automobile Club of China to the SMC Secretary. Shanghai, May 27, 1924. SMA (SMC), U1-3-583.
36 Letter to the SMC from the Shanghai First Special District Citizens' Federation. March 13, 1937. “Objectionable Advertisement,” Shanghai, March 13, 1937 [SMA (SMC), U1-4-3821].
37 The poster in this case advertised the first Chinese horror film “A Singing Voice at Midnight”, which was also known to foreigners as “The Chinese Dracula”. It is interesting to notice that this story echoes a similar episode in Mao Dun's famous novel Midnight, in which an old man from the countryside suddenly died after visiting children in Shanghai. Mittler is certainly right when she observes that his death was probably caused by the visual shock created by the profusion of displays, light and colors in the city. However, the case of Ch’iu Chia-liang's daughter invites us to be more cautious about the generational divide in consumer experiences. Children too could be victims of “modernity” (Mittler, “Imagined Communities Divided,” 267–68).
38 Gudis, Buyways, 163–230.
39 M.E. Chessel, La publicité: naissance d’une profession, 1900-1940 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1998). P. Readman, “Landscape Preservation, ‘Advertising Disfigurement’ and English National Identity, c. 1890-1914,” Rural History 12 (2001): 61–84.
40 “Rural Beauties Marred by Ugly Hoardings. Auto Club’'s Protest. Should the Council Prohibit Erection Boards Around Rubicon?,” Shanghai Sunday Times (July 13, 1924) [SMA (SMC), U1-14-5775].
41 G. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Urban Place and Process: Readings in the Anthropology of Cities, ed. Irwin Press and M. Estelle Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 19–30.
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44 Bacon, “Advertising in China,” 757.
45 Ibid., 757.
46 Letter from Oriental Advertising Agency to Commissioner of Public Works. Shanghai, November 17, 1923 [SMA (SMC), U1-14-3258].
47 “Monster Neon Sign Reveals Faith in City. ‘Beehive’ Light Display Said Second Largest Structure in World,” China Press, September 4, 1938, 7.
48 Wu Tiesheng and Zhu Shengyu, Guanggao xue (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1946), 288.
49 Bacon, “Advertising in China,” 765.
50 Ibid, 756.
51 Ibid., 756. Crow, “Advertising and Merchandising,” 198.
52 Bacon, “Advertising in China,” 757.
53 Crow, “Advertising and Merchandising,” 196.
54 S. Cochran, Big Business in China: Sino-Foreign Rivalry in the Cigarette Industry 1890-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
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59 Armand, “Placing the History of Advertising,” 170–293.
60 V. De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
61 “Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions (ROAD).” Duke Digital Collections, accessed August 4, 2018, https://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/outdooradvertising/.
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Additional information
Notes on contributors
Cécile Armand
Cécile Armand is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of History, Stanford University.