“If the door speaks where the wall is mute, the bridge speaks louder than both. It is more prone to symbolization.” –Harrison[1]

 

In his essay on the “Bridge and Door”, Simmel argues that bridges, roads, doors and windows all perform the function of both connecting spaces and keeping them separate.[2] Of these, the bridge, in its ability to contain multitudes of meanings and functions, is the most symbolically rich. Inspired by Simmel’s writings, Harrison argues that not only does a bridge connect a ‘place of origin to a destination’, as a road does; but that a bridge is even more psychologically impressive- it emphasizes human victory over nature, space and time.[3] Harrison writes about bridges as spaces of living and of commerce; of execution, suicide and war; as transitional spaces, and also as ‘third spaces of union’.[4] Because of its liminality, Harrison argues, the bridge makes it impossible to ‘achieve the appurtenances of social identity’ – in other words, the identity one creates on a bridge is only ever transient, temporary.[5]

However, the opposite can be seen in the example of Hong Kong’s Little Manila. Little Manila is a social gathering that appears every Sunday, spanning a large area beneath the arches and in the overhead walkways of Norman Foster’s HSBC building, as well as in Statue Square and Chater Garden.[6] Just like the bridges discussed in Harrison’s chapter, Little Manila transforms the office buildings, walkways, and squares it occupies into spaces of separation, and of difference between the office workers who use the space during the week, and the domestic workers who occupy it on Sundays. As seen from Tomas Laurenzo’s photograph, the cardboard walls and the blankets that transform the walkway from a transient space to one filled with activity are only temporary. However, Little Manila also represents a wish for transition and bridging, for creating a more permanent identity of the migrant domestic worker from the Philippines in Hong Kong.

Daisy Tam summarizes that from the 1970s onwards, when Hong Kong shifted from an industry based economy to one that was service based, the demand for domestic workers increased.[7] As of 2016, the time of Tam’s article publication, 300,000 migrant workers from the Philippines worked in Hong Kong as domestic helpers.[8] As Tam argues, Little Manila represents a space of resistance where Filipina women can re-appropriate the very architecture that represents the capitalist system by which they are oppressed.[9]

Little Manila becomes a space where women can reinforce their Philippine identities through sharing conversation, food, magazines, and time, as seen in the photo above. These identities are not liminal, even if the space they are practiced in is temporary, occurring only every Sunday. In creating this space of resistance, the women who use the space in this way also create a bridge. Little Manila becomes a third space: not Manila, not Hong Kong. Though it spans various types of physical spaces, from walkways to squares, Little Manila in itself becomes a bridge –a symbol of Philippine identity in Hong Kong.

 

Bibliography

Harrison, Thomas. 2021. Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Laurenzo, Tomás. “Foreign Helpers.” Tomás Laurenzo: New Media Art & Research (blog), 2015. https://laurenzo.net/foreign-helpers.

Simmel, Georg, David Frisby, and Mike Featherstone. 1997. Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. California: SAGE.

Tam, Daisy. 2016. “Little Manila: The Other Central of Hong Kong.” In Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia, by Manish Chalana. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

 

[1] Thomas Harrison, Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021), 7.

[2] Georg Simmel, David Frisby, and Mike Featherstone, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings (California: SAGE, 1997), 171.

[3] Harrison, Of Bridges, 5.

[4] Ibid, 1.

[5] Ibid, 58.

[6] Daisy Tam, “Little Manila: The Other Central of Hong Kong,” in Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia, by Manish Chalana (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016), 1.

[7] Ibid, 119.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 124.

‘Then, a golden mystery upheaved itself on the horizon – a beautiful winking wonder that blazed in the sun, of a shape that was neither Muslim dome nor Hindu temple spire… Under what new god, thought I, are we irrepressible English sitting now?’[1]

 

These words and their following remarks, written by Rudyard Kipling regarding his three-day visit to Rangoon, emphasise the role which the Shwedagon Pagoda played in the mind of the European in defining the Burmese and their landscape. Such a defining role is reflected in the prominence which the pagoda tends to take in the town’s postcards which I have seen, but the importance of the pagoda in defining Rangoon was not just a European construction but was also held by the Burmese themselves. For instance, it was at the Shwedagon that the rebellious students at Rangoon University set up a counter higher educational institution, simultaneously protesting the attempts by the British colonial government to impose imperialist ideas onto Burmese education and also their military occupation of this prominent Burmese symbol.[2]

 

However, reading Arthur Waldron’s “The Problem of the Great Wall of China”, his use of alternative historical narratives to question both the European construction and nationalist adoption of such architectural symbols influenced me to take another look at the history of the Shwedagon.[3] It is the South Entrance to the complex that intrigued me because it undertook such vast changes in appearance over the course of British rule, transforming from a traditional gate structure in the 1850s to a much more expressive representation of Mount Neru with a tower covered by a façade of nat figures and flanked either side by chinthes in the 1890s.[4] In the modern day, this sense of movement and life in the structure has been replaced by a more ordered and geometric representation of the pagoda’s mandala.[5] My readings following up on this matter have suggested that the dramatic changes to this entrance over its lifetime reflects more than just the changing nature of Burmese architecture or the political impact of British colonial rule.

 

Instead, an alternative explanation for this evolution was the introduction of the Shwedagon into a wider transnational culture of Buddhist architecture under British rule as more pilgrims from South and East Asia were able to travel, and donate, to the pagoda. It is this transnational nature that has granted the pagoda UNESCO World Heritage status, but the development of the South Entrance is a physical manifestation of this.[6] As Elizabeth Howard-Moore argues, the architecture of the south entrance, as well as the rest of the pagoda, diverged from the original traditional Burmese style as it began to reflect wider Buddhist architectural styles, the introduction of the chinthes and the Bengali roofing between the 1850s-1890s being a part of this new artistic input.[7] Such a narrative of this site cannot be found in Burmese or British sources at the time, as both of them claim that the Shwedagon represented the Burmese people in one way or another, but it is only through analysing the photographs of structures such as the south entrance that allows us to see that a more complicated history of cultural input is at play here, and by identifying the transnational nature of the site’s architecture we can start to look at other transnational connections between Burma and the rest of the Buddhist world.

[1] Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel (New York, 1899; 2010), <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32977/32977-h/32977-h.htm> [accessed: 27/02/22], 203.

[2] Carol Ann Boshier, Mapping Cultural Nationalism: The Scholars of the Burma Research Society, 1910-1935 (Copenhagen, 2018), 233-234.

[3] Arthur N. Waldron, “The Problem of the Great Wall of China”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 43: 2 (1983), 643-663.

[4] “Shwedagon, South Entrance”, Yangon Time Machine, <https://www.yangontimemachine.com/en/index?id=6&art=shwe_south> [accessed: 27/02/22].

[5] Ibid.

[6] “Shwedagon Pagoda on Singuttara Hill”, UNESCO, <https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6367/> [accessed: 27/02/22].

[7] Elizabeth Howard-Moore, “Patronage and Place: The Shwedagon in Times of Change”, Buddhism Across Asia: Networks of Material, Intellectual and Cultural Exchange, Vol. 1, ed. Tansen Sen (Singapore, 2014), 386.

A dish that bears little resemblance to many of the Hakka dishes found throughout East and South East Asia. A symbol of cultural fusion. The Hakka Noodle. This dish is commonly found throughout India as representative of Indo-Chinese and indeed Chinese cuisine. Despite its name, Hakka Noodles don’t actually exist anywhere else outside of India. Recipes for Hakka Noodle are also strangely devoid of any particular “Hakka” characteristic. Featuring soy sauce, rice vinegar, garlic and ginger; this dish appears more to be a facsimile of what people thought was Chinese food.

The namesake of the dish “Hakka” (Kè Jiā, 客家), refers to a linguistic and cultural diasporic group that internally migrated throughout China in 5 major migrational waves from the 5th Century AD to the second half of the 19th Century. [1] The Hakka mostly settled throughout Southern China, most notably in Guangdong and Fujian. The history of Hakka is inherently tied to that of migration and movement. Large numbers of Hakka migrants emigrated from mainland China to South East Asia, Taiwan. India, especially Kolkota, saw smaller waves of Chinese Immigrants that arrived in smaller numbers compared to the SEA region, to curious effect. [2] The Chinese in Kolkata are most commonly found in two areas, Tiretta Bazaar and Tangra. “Chinatowns” are typically formed as giant, open enclaves where Chinese businesses and communities resided. The vast majority of these settlements formed in the 18th to 19th Centuries when Chinese migrants first arrived and settled in places as far off as Liverpool (1830). [3] Kolkata’s experience with Chinese communities began around the late 18th Century, centred around the tanning industry, in the district of Tangra and the surrounding areas of central Kolkata. [4]

Tanning was typically seen as an undesirable occupation that was fulfilled by lower caste individuals. This was due to the smelly and often dirty nature of the trade. In what Shivani Kapoor calls ‘Sensory Politics’, he describes the literal stench of the leatherworker and the industry as a whole influencing how society treated the profession. [5] Although this concept for Shivani was applied to the Untouchable caste tanners in Uttar Pradesh. Parallels can be drawn to tanners in Kolkata. As Vernon Briggs notes, it has long been understood that immigrants take the unwanted and often “dirty” jobs in their host country. [6] This was especially true in Kolkata, where Hakka migrants flocked to the tanning industry not because there weren’t any jobs available for them, but because they were willing to take on the jobs that no one else wanted. There was a massive demand for the luxury of leather goods, but very few were willing to supply that demand. Apparently free from the social dynamics of caste, the Hakka could take up these jobs that paid very well.

Kolkata’s Chinatown has many of the distinct elements that most others do, with Chinese style gates, businesses, and temples. What is most curious is the incredibly central location that this particular Chinatown occupies. In comparison to San Francisco, London and Tokyo’s Chinatown, which is relatively central but occupies only a small part of the city. Tangra occupies a comparatively large area in the Eastern part of Kolkata, in close proximity to important landmarks such as the Victoria memorial hall and central railway station. [7] There are assertions that Tangra was not the ‘original’ space that the Chinese occupied in Kolkata. Various other central districts such as Dharamtallah and Kasoitollah also featured important Chinese temples and businesses. Which indicates that the Chinese presence in Kolkata was even more important in centuries past.

The curious case of the Chinese tanner raises certain questions about how the Chinese immigrant community occupied such a prominent social and spatial position in the city. One could very well accept an application of Kapoor’s assertion of the politics of smell in the tanning trade, combine it with Brigg’s understanding of immigrant “dirty labour” and assume that the Chinese in Kolkata was a community that faced marginalisation and discrimination. [8] However, this did not seem to be the case. The earliest sources on the Chinese immigrant community to Kolkata pointed to a small number of Hakka migrants that occupied a central part of the city and appeared to be well established under the East India Company’s purview. [9] Did the supposed “otherness” of the Chinese allow them to avoid the restrictions of caste? Or were caste associations with the profession of tanning so strong that the social status of the Chinese community was impacted? These are some of the interesting questions that arise from this particular case study that don’t have answers at the moment, but that I hope to find through my research. These kinds of questions are not limited to just a study of social structure in India. It raises a whole host of further questions on how significant Diaspora populations integrated or found a place in the social structure of a particular state or even urban space. It questions the relationship between professions and social status. In the particular case of Chinatowns, it even questions the social and spatial fabric of a city’s present and historical reality.

The leather tanning industry in Tangra is still alive today and although the community has dwindled due to the Sino-Indian War of 1965 and the redevelopment of Tangra itself. Tiretti Bazaar and Tangra are still the heart of a vibrant Chinese food market. On the street, you can get momos shaomai (烧卖) and Baozi (包子). In restaurants, Pork with Mustard Greens, fish ball soup and sweet and sour pork. The Hakka have left their mark on Kolkata, in their profession, their culture and most of all, in their noodles.

 

Sources

[1] Hsieh Ting Yu, ‘Origin and Migration of the Hakkas’, 1929, <https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/HsiehHakkaHistory.html>[accessed 26 February 2022]

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid

[4] Map of Tangra, Google Maps

[5] Shivani Kapoor, ‘The Violence of Odors: The Sensory Politics of Caste’, The Senses and Society, p. 164-176. 

[6] Vernon M. Briggs Jr., ‘Immigrant Labor and the Issue of “Dirty Work” in Advanced Industrial Societies’, Population and Environment, 14:6 (July, 1993), p. 503.

[7] Umang Sharma, ‘Open at 5am, Tiretti Bazaar In Kolkata Is A Paradise For Every Authentic Chinese Food Lover’, India Times, 2nd July 2017, <https://www.indiatimes.com/culture/food/open-at-5am-tiretti-bazaar-in-kolkata-is-a-paradise-for-every-authentic-chinese-food-lover-321337.html> [accessed 2 February 2022].

[9] Ibid

The emphasis of a space’s represented centre reveals how the author of that representation creates a hierarchisation of certain spatial practices in governmental discourses, although these discourses may be normative and fail to reflect the reality of the cityscape. However, the effect which this can have on an urban environment can be explored through Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift’s concept of the distanciated economy, where ‘work on urban economies has been framed in terms of points, lines and boundaries… cities have been seen as entities that can be cut up into centres and peripheries,’[1] and while their argument was to deconstruct the ways in which some urban cities are defined against others, this can equally be applied to how an individual city’s areas are defined against one another.

 

In the case of Rangoon, one of the most cited histories of the town from the colonial period, B. R. Pearn’s A History of Rangoon, was commissioned by the town’s municipal authorities and mostly relied upon municipal reports and first-hand testimonies from members of the municipal establishment to construct its history.[2] Due to this, the way in which Pearn’s history approaches matters of public transport emphasises the role in which the municipal authorities’ intended for it to fulfil. This end goal was for the town’s public transport networks to link areas of industrial production to suburbs further afield in order to depopulate the centre, the overcrowding of which was impeding the flow of traffic and worsening disease spread.[3] Due to this, the actions of the suburban in Pearn’s history have already become peripheral to the town’s economic centre and such a representation of the town’s history creates an operational definition which reinforces the municipal authorities’ actions: that the town is primarily a space for economic production,  which suburbanisation would help intensify, and the town’s inhabitants are economic units that can be rationalised for these ends. This can be understood by Pearn’s suggestion that the public transport networks were consistent failures because their establishment did not decentralise the town’s labour pool away from their places of production.[4] Such portrayals of the town’s history were ultimately designed to build up to Pearn’s justification of the municipal authorities’ exceptional expenditure of over Rs. 14,000,000 in creating this idealised delineation between the suburban and spaces of economic production at the end of his critique of the towns’ transport networks.[5]

However, what is missing from Pearn’s history of Rangoon’s transport networks are the circles of social activity that existed outside of the intended suburbanising effect. For instance, when the town’s tramlines were extended to the Burmese village of Kemmendine, the services saw a massive increase in usage from 3,433,540 annual passengers to 6,026,915, despite the fact that it is highly unlikely that many of the Burmese in Kemmendine worked in the town’s industrial sectors since they were based in the furthest and least accessible quarters from Kemmendine.[6] Indeed, the purpose of the trams were to decentralise the Indian workers living around the industrial centre, not to bring in new workers from further afield. Instead, the trams enabled new transportation options for other socio-cultural activities, such as the pilgrimage to the Shwedagon Pagoda, as suggested by representations such as a postcard of the pagoda line’s terminus depicting a tram being filled with Buddhist monks.[7] Similarly, the Burmese were also brought closer to their spaces of socio-cultural interaction by the trams with their extension to the newly established racecourse in Kyaikkasan and Kandawgale’s Burma Athletic Association playing fields, which saw the lines experience great popularity when events were being held in that area.[8] Additionally, the significance which the trams held for the suburban Burmese was emphasised by the fact that in death it was the wealthy Burmese and the Buddhist monks who used the tramway’s funeral service, carrying their bodies through their communities to be celebrated in public before alighting at the cemetery.[9] On the one hand, this was good business on the part of the tram company to tailor their services around the needs of the already suburban population who were most likely to use the trams’ services, but simultaneously this undermined the political objectives of the municipal authorities as these people were not using the trams to further the town’s economic functions, but rather used them to create new spaces for cultural interaction outside of the town’s centre.

 

The use of sources such as Pearn’s history reveals where the planner’s gaze saw the focal points of Rangoon. However, by reading between the lines of sources such as postcards, newspaper clippings, or the frustrated language of municipal reports, all productions of the colonialist, the actual centres of activity which created the experience of the cityscape for those who inhabited it can be unveiled.

[1] Ash Amin & Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge, 2002), 51.

[2] B. R. Pearn, A History of Rangoon (Rangoon, 1939).

[3] Ibid., 278-282.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 282.

[6] Report on the Working of the Rangoon Municipality for the Year 1907-1908 (Rangoon, 1908), 20.

[7] Tilman Frasch, “Tracks in the City: Technology, Mobility and Society in Colonial Rangoon and Singapore”, Modern Asian Studies, 46: 1 (2012), 106.

[8] Ibid.; Pearn, A History of Rangoon, 281.

[9] Frasch, “Tracks in the City”, 107; “New Departure in Burmese Funerals”, Straits Echo, Singapore (26/04/1907), 5, <https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/straitsecho19070426-1.2.23?ST=1&AT=search&k=rangoon%20tram&QT=rangoon,tram&oref=article> [accessed: 20/02/22].

One of the most prominent themes when encountering colonial literature is the notion of ‘modernity’. Whether it is a self-congratulatory remark on western-derived actions or the assertion of native ‘barbarism’, the language of modernity is a consistent tool utilised within primary source text. Elizabeth LaCouture, in her talk with the School of Transnational and Spatial History about her book, At Home in the World: Family, House and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860-1960, stated how modernity was constructed only in relation to the traditional¹ In the examples of Tianjin domestic space, the western object was assumed as modern because of the ‘unmodern’ status applied to the Chinese object. LaCouture emphasises this concept in her description of the sofa in Chinese homes that distinguished Chinese living space from a traditional Chinese home from a ‘modern’ sitting room.² By buying and placing a modern western object in a Chinese domestic space, the space had itself become ‘modern’. This definition of modernity is constructed in contrast to existing Chinese sitting furniture, where the sofa was established as modern in comparison to the unmodern Chinese alternatives, including the upholstered armchair or rattan chair.³ In her example, LaCouture emphasises that modernity in style is only constructed in contrast to traditional or unmodern other. I would argue that this understanding of modernity is also applicable to architecture in colonised spaces where the modernity of design was imposed by primarily establishing an unmodern traditional ‘other’ to contrast. This idea is exemplary in the British introduction of Indo-Saracenic architectural styles in Kuala Lumpur, where the style’s modernity was constructed by asserting the ‘simplicity’ of Malay-style domestic spaces. 

The establishment of an ‘unmodern’ other was the first step in establishing the modernity of British architectural styles. Common amongst officers in the Malayan Federated States were descriptions of the everyday life of the Malay people, especially their domestic space. A common term frequently used within the primary sources is ‘simple’. Malay dwellings are commonly described as primitive domestic spaces, simple in functionality, architectural style, and material usage. In its material composition, Richard Winstedt, a colonial administrator of British Malaya in the 1920s, heightens the modernity of European and Chinese dwellings based on the material composition of Malay houses.⁴ He emphasises their simplicity because the floors are constructed from split coconut trees fastened by rattan, or roofs made of palm leaves or wood could be imagined as ‘tents’.³ Under the pretence of the consistent urban fire outbreaks in wooden housing districts, wood as a material for housing construction is deemed an unmodern feature.⁵ In contrast, Winstedt highlights the modernity of Chinese and European housing due to their materiality, as both style housings used brick, tiles and glass, fireproof and sturdier materials.⁶ In addition, the multifunctionality of the Malay dwelling further emphasises the ‘simplicity’ of the Malay space as Winstedt asserts how one room is used for eating, sleeping and working, which contrasts to European domestic spaces, which were much larger and held separate spaces for each purpose. The limited size and multifunctionality constructed a less grandiose and unimposing structure within the urban environment, unlike Western-designed buildings. These descriptions highlight attempts to construct a narrative of ‘simplicity’ that emphasises the unmodern standard of Malay spaces, which is later used to support British architectural styles. 

It is evident that the modernity of the Indo-Saracenic architectural style was established by contrasting it with the Malay architectural styles under the pretence of functionality and material composition. In their article on the completion of the newly constructed Government Offices built in the Indo-Saracenic style, the Selangor Journal attributed the modernity of the building to the consistent use of brick, cement and steel as the primary material of construction.⁷ The materials are proudly described as fireproof that prevents the potential hazard of a fire breaking out in the complex like in Malay districts built entirely from wood.⁸ The emphasis on the fireproof nature of the building not only supports the style’s modernity but also contrasts it to Malay style dwellings, which have consistently been prone to fire outbreaks. In addition, the style’s modernity is also attributed to the functionality of the Offices as a grandiose space that appropriately supports the functions of the British colonial administration.⁹ Its functionality is defined not in terms of practicality, but its ability to represent British colonial power. As described above, the ‘functionality’ of the Malay dwelling was limited due to its small size ‘primitive’ use of space. Thus, the Malay dwelling is viewed as unmodern based on the parameters to support and represent colonial authority, which establishes the modernity of the British style.

It becomes clear that ‘modernity’ is not only the representation of what the object is, but it is also a representation of what the object is not. In relation to architectural styles, the British constructed Indo-Saracenic architectural style was deemed ‘modern’ by primarily establishing an unmodern ‘other’. LaCouture’s application of modernity raises interesting questions of how it speaks to wider discussions of how colonial power and authority is represented in colonised spaces. 

 

1. Elizabeth LaCouture, At Home in the World: Family, House and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860-1960.(New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), p. 174. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩]
3. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
4. Richard O. Winstedt, Malaya: The Straits Settlements and the Federated and Unfederated Malay States (London: Constable & Co. Ltd, 1923), pp. 91-92. [↩]
5. Shapiza Sharif and Arba’iyah Mohd Noor, ‘The Brick-making Industry in Kuala Lumpur in the Late Nineteenth Century.’ Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 90, Part 1, No. 312 (June 2017), p. 62. [↩]
6. Winstedt, Federated and Unfederated Malay States, p. 92. [↩]
7. Selangor Journal: Jottings Past and Present, Volume V (Kuala Lumpur: Selangor Government Printing Office, 1897), pp. 219-222. [↩]
8. Ibid., p. 222. [↩]
9. Ibid., p. 222-234. [↩]

“I walked back through the streets of this jungle city where detectives and gangsters hunted all men and women who entertained any thoughts other than the official ones. Within half an hour the girl [an activist] would have moved her dwelling and be warning all her friends”.¹

The problem of “messy urbanism” is not one restricted to modern-day theory. Of course, more recently, this concept has been formalised in an edited volume by Manish Chalana and Jeffrey Hou: Messy Urbanism: Understanding the ‘Other’ Cities of Asia.² Here, the contributors aim to look beyond the spatial and imagined construction of East Asian cities and award agency to the informal practices of urban life, which are given meaning as processes which both subvert and interact with formal hierarchies of city planning and organisation. “Messy” urban practices, such as the autonomy of slum dwellers on the periphery of a city, are renewed as a dynamic expression of the inhabitants of the city which constitute its real meaning.³ The authors suggest that the layers of actors and actions revealed by the concept of ‘messy urbanism’ allow us to view urban life from a diverse, rather than hierarchical perspective. However, the search to understand “conditions and processes which do not follow institutionalised or culturally prescribed notions of order” has long been a task of historians, anthropologists, theorists, and travellers alike.⁴

The lament of the “jungle city” above belongs to Agnes Smedley, an American triple agent who worked for the Soviets, Chinese Communists, and the Indian Nationalists. She has been described as a “fellow traveller”- a term coined by Trotsky to describe someone who had Communist sympathies, without actually belonging to the party or nation in question.⁵ The line comes from her monograph Battle Hymn of China, which describes China in the midst of the Sino-Japanese War which she witnessed alongside Chinese soldiers and Japanese prisoners of war (POWs).⁶ Her dedication at the start is “to the soldiers of China: poor, glorious pioneers in the world struggle against Fascism” and is representative of her desire to uncover the lived experiences of the population at the birth of Communism.⁷ For Smedley, the war created the cultural conditions for the articulation of the lives of the Chinese population, which arguably, she saw as the messy “urban fabric” that lay beneath China’s imperialist history.⁸

Smedley’s description of underground activists in Shanghai is largely valuable for an accurate representation of “messy urbanism”. The war-trodden city is described as a “jungle”, which suggests that the concrete fabric of the city had dissolved in favour of a natural loss of order. Here, Smedley adopts an almost nostalgic tone, as she illuminates the hidden structures of the city which worked toward the Communist resistance. The proletariat is inherently connected with the “messiness” of the city to emphasise their origins of poverty and disconnect from the old hierarchical and imperialist vision of Shanghai. Smedley describes this through a contrast between the “detectives and gangsters” of the government and “men and women” who can be seen as a personification of the spatial and visual order of the city. The “detectives and gangsters” enforce order against the messier undercurrents of “men and women” of resistance, who inhabit the street corners and slums which Smedley describes first-hand. Her account demonstrates how the Communist resistance formed part of the everyday “forms of planning and engagement” with the city, by using street corners to advertise Communist literature and slums to house temporary Communist ‘libraries’.⁹ This spatial usurpation was exacerbated by the fact that the perpetrators in the case were not only women, but “girls”. This heightened the objective sense of urban messiness by removing the female from her traditional role within the house and placing her in a visible position of defiance on the street corner, which she had claimed as her explicitly Communist “dwelling”. These dwellings were significant as an undefined and restricted feature of the city because when their activism was threatened, the girl and her friends simply moved their dwellings and “warn[ed]” fellow activists through their network of communications which subverted the government’s attempts at restraint. This demonstrates the fluid reality of Shanghai’s urban structures, which did not conform to planning or zoning, but instead provided a flexible foundation for the inhabitants of the city, who defined and utilised the streets according to profession, ideology, and present-time experience or emotion. The changes in the energy, success, and motivation of Communist activists during this period was reflected in the changing makeup of the different districts of the city, as dwellings emerged, moved, or were destroyed. Consequently, Smedley’s account illuminates the “broader patterns of informalized urban orders” through her description of wartime resistance, which can be characterised as the “messy” urban fabric of Shanghai in the 1930s.¹⁰ Likewise, Smedley’s own text can be seen as an effective form of engagement with this “messiness”, in which she gives meaning to urban messiness as an immersed witness of emerging Chinese Communism.

Frequently identified as a “fellow traveller”, Agnes Smedley’s grappling between the role of external witness and immersed reporter is representative of the struggle that the ‘Messy Urbanism’ authors elucidate between the removed ideology of the city and the lived experiences of its inhabitants.¹¹ Smedley’s unique role places her between in a gulf between the two, and her text is a continual struggle to represent the “messy” urban conditions of the rise of Chinese Communism without the impression of an urban, foreign, gaze of misunderstanding- a “paradoxical quest for attachment outside the nation”.¹² Overall, the text is largely valuable for an understanding of the informal structures and practices of the city, which, as historians, allow us to avoid “historicising the city instead of doing history inside the city”.¹³ 

1. Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China, (London, 1944), <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207541/page/n5/mode/2up> [accessed: 11 February 2022], p.56. [↩]
2. Manish Chalana, Jeffrey Hou, Messy Urbanism: Understanding the ‘Other’ Cities of Asia, (Hong Kong, 2016). [↩]
3. Chalana, Hou, Messy Urbanism, p.9. [↩]
4. Chalana, Hou, Messy Urbanism, p.1. [↩]
5. DWF Kerr, ‘Agnes Smedley: The Fellow Traveller’s Tales’ in DWF Kerr and J Kuehn (eds), A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s, (Hong Kong, 2007), p.1. [↩]
6. Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China, (London, 1944), <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207541/page/n5/mode/2up> [accessed: 11 February 2022]. [↩]
7. Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn, Title Page. [↩]
8. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (California, 2011), p.47. [↩]
9. Chalana, Hou, Messy Urbanism, p.17. [↩]
10. Chalana, Hou, Messy Urbanism, p.5. [↩]
11. Kerr, ‘Agnes Smedley’, p.1.  [↩]
12. Maureen Moynagh, Political Tourism and its Texts, (Toronto, 2008), p.112. [↩]
13. Sheetal Chhabria, Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay, (2019), p.9 [↩]

James Ranald Martin opens his 1837 ‘Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta’, with a quote from Hippocrates on the title-page:

 

‘It is necessary for a Physician, when entering a city of which he knows nothing, to examine its exposure, the predominant winds, the seasons, the nature and elevation of the soil, the quantity of the waters of which the inhabitants make use, and the kind of life they follow’.¹

 

However, rather than examining the habits and lifestyle of the inhabitants, Martin was one of many European travelers to “the Tropics” to look upon their lives with utter disdain. ‘The Foundation of an English School of Medicine’, he writes, ‘…must prove one of the most direct and impressive mores of demonstrating to the natives the superiority of European knowledge in general’ (italics in original).² There is little of the Hippocratic call to examine and learn about the life or habits of the local population in Martin’s remarks. Instead, they reveal a sense of superiority, and a belief in the righteousness of European colonialism. Shang-Jen Li argues that as the 19^th c. progressed, British medical practitioners were less and less inclined to learn from native customs or from indigenous medicine- it was now seen as a ‘loss of the white self’, as a sign of contagion.³  Tropicality, with its pseudo-scientific observations, creates the perfect environment for the cultivation of scientific racism. Unlike Orientalism, which is rooted in an interest in history, languages and cultures of South Asia, Tropicality takes its inspiration from science, nature and observation. Despite its seeming dedication to empirical evidence and interest in the environment, writings about the tropics frequently omit mention of the local population or local practices, and instead focus on discussing the discrepancies between the imagined tropics and the actual environment travelers encountered.

For instance, in Joseph Hooker’s 1855 Himalayan Journals he does little to hide his disappointment at the disparity between the tropics he had imagined in his mind, and the “tropics” he encountered. Of the Sunderbunds he writes “these exhibit no tropical luxuriance, and are, in this respect, exceedingly disappointing”.⁴ As David Arnold argues, despite their “scientific” backing, the Tropics were frequently romanticised. Romanticism in tropicality played the role of glorifying nature, selling travelers the idea of a wild landscape which was rarely found by the traveler upon their visitation.⁵ As we can see from Hooker’s memoirs, , “the tropics” for him are more a playground for the medic, the naturalist, the botanist, the geologist, rather than a place on equal grounds with Europe. The tropics in these writings exist for European observation, cultivation and improvement. Even Hooker’s desire to see true “tropical” and “wild” nature appears false. When visiting the botanic garden during his travels, he writes that instead of a beautiful tropical garden he finds ‘an unsightly wilderness, without shade (the first requirement of every tropical garden) or other beauties’.⁶ Clearly, the reality he was in did not match the very specific European conception of a wild, yet cultivated tropics.

Beyond his disappointment with the nature, Hooker’s account of his early travelling experience seems devoid of people. He dedicates paragraphs to describing plants he sees, or buildings he stays in, but there appears to be no mention of the native population. Therein lies the contradiction of the tropics: they must maintain wilderness, but also careful cultivation. They must be a place of novelty for the European, but the medicine, the food, and the buildings must be European in style. Most revealingly, however, travelers’ disdain for the experiences, voices, and habits of the indigenous populations of the places the visited show that tropicality was and continues to be an imagined place.

 

Bibliography: 

Arnold, David. 2005. The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800-1856. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.

Hooker, Joseph Dalton. 1954. Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist. London: J. Murray.

Martin, Sir James Ranland. 1837. Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta. Calcutta: G.H Huttmann.

Shang-Jen, Li. 2013. “Eating Well in China: Diet and Hygiene in Nineteenth-Century Treaty Ports.” In Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century, edited by Qizi Liang, Che Leung, Angela Ki, and Charlotte Furth. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

1. Sir James Ranland Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta: G.H Huttmann, 1837), front cover. [↩]
2. Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta, p60. [↩]
3. Li Shang-Jen, “Eating Well in China: Diet and Hygiene in Nineteenth-Century Treaty Ports,” in Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century, ed. Qizi Liang et al. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013). p124 [↩]
4. Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist (London: J. Murray, 1954), p1. [↩]
5. David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800-1856 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2005), pp104-5. [↩]
6. Hooker, Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist, p2. [↩]

The professionalisation and academisation of advocacy for slum communities has furthered a construction of an abstract conceptualisation of the “slum” where the agency of the slum-dweller is dependent upon the nature of their representation by academics and professionals, making the navigation between these representations in an attempt to write a history more difficult. This begins by how academia tends to rationalise phenomena in order to fit it within a structuralist system of understanding the world, as it is through this system of comprehension that allows the academy to connect disassociated events together and justify the construction of such ideas by feeding them into wider metanarratives. A lot of the inspiration behind this method of knowledge construction comes from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in which Hegel described the origin of knowledge as coming from the distance between an object’s essence, its being in-itself, and the acknowledgement of that object by an agent’s consciousness, this acknowledgement creating a second object, that of the being-for-consciousness.[1] Therefore, since knowledge is created by individual consciousnesses, Hegel argued that the movement from knowledge to truth comes in the mediation between an individual’s original notion regarding an object and another individual’s antithetical notion, with the eventual coalescing around a common universal notion that overcomes both notions’ limitations.[2] It is during this explanation of how knowledge is created that Hegel likens the process to a social struggle, inspiring the understanding of the actions of social agents during historical events as being the result of those individuals self-perceiving their existence as a part of a dialectical struggle.[3]

 

However, this understanding of historical forces can lead to the disassociation of the historical individual from being an agent during historical events, instead relying on wider metanarratives as drivers of history. This can lead to the oversimplification of the motives of agents, as Marc Askew argues exists in the historiography surrounding slums which represents slum-dwellers as participating in wider struggles against the state and capital for the historians’ normative advocacy purposes.[4] The issue that arises from this is that the increasing abstraction of the historical agent as participating within wider struggles makes the historian’s representation of the original object, the potential primary sources offered by that agent, an obfuscation of differing narratives of the objects. For instance, in Shu Mei Huang and Hyun Kyung Lee’s representation of the eviction of residents from Huaguang, the authors argue that recording the heritages of this community can help create wider geographies of responsibility which would reconceptualise the usage of state power.[5] The authors achieve this argument in a number of ways, including by connecting the symbols of national identity displayed by residents to the histories of their ancestors, by recording the viewpoints of those gathered at a student protest against the state’s seemingly arbitrary measures to achieve eviction, and the likening of the plight of the residents of Huaguang to those of residents in other slums which have experienced eviction.[6] However, these generalisations of this community’s history fail to take into account the viewpoint of the individual, instead grouping the heritages represented in the book as part of a wider discourse of the push-and-pull between collective remembering and state power, which may explain why the authors fail to explain the community’s failure to effectively organise against the eviction of individuals.[7]

While this can be seen as an example of one of Askew’s points, that normative academic work on slums tend to highlight notions of communitarianism over the reality of individual responsibility, a more pressing question as to how this community’s heritage can actually function as a platform from which academia can create a geography of responsibility is raised when reading how other sources have represented the individual agents within this community.[8] For instance, how Cheng Wei-hui, one of the community’s leaders, has been represented in the Taipei Times offers an alternative view of the residents as failing to view the actions of the state as constituting part of a wider governmentality of arbitrariness. In one article, she is said to have complained that the government destroyed several dormitory units without warning because ‘it was rude that the work took place without prior warning,’[9] the emphasis being on the failure to communicate the impending action to the residents rather than on the actual policy of destruction itself. In another article, Cheng Wei-hui is quoted as saying ‘I was taught to love my country, but I didn’t know the country I loved was like this,’ adding that ‘it gives money to big corporations and condemns us people to death,’[10] which implies that the issue is not the state’s power in enacting eviction but with the misplacement of government policies on the side of capital, again failing to criticise that the state has this ability to employ its legal and security apparatuses to enforce eviction. While these two articles do link Cheng Wei-hui’s quotations to wider critiques of the government’s policies, none of these critiques are explicitly attributed to Cheng Wei-hui, which would suggest that she does not personally frame herself as existing in a dialectical contest against the punitive state. Instead, these perspectives are implied to be the views of the author, which again feeds into Askew’s perspective on the generalisation of slum politics as robbing the individuals living within them of their agency in describing social phenomena from their own perspectives.

 

What both the Taipei Times’ articles and Huang and Lee’s narrative on Huaguang offer are normative positions regarding state power, but both of them fail to explicitly highlight a moment in which the individuals involved in these events perceived themselves as participating in a slum-communitarianism/state-authority dialectical struggle. It is the abstraction of these events as existing within such a paradigm that turns the agent of the slum-dweller into an object to be represented, and if academia is to serve as a normative force to direct future social development through the representation of knowledge, it would be better to accurately record the histories of the individuals in these communities from their perspectives, perspectives which these two sources currently obfuscate through their framing of them within a wider abstract metanarrative. Askew argued for the deconstruction of how these communities are represented, and so maybe it would serve best to abandon the dialectical construction of these people through the creation of a common “heritage”, and instead ask who the slum-dweller is as an exception to these generalisations, how do they live, and how do they identify themselves and the world around them. This would serve to produce articles which could be considered to better represent the historical nature of the primary sources which they use.

[1] G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Germany, 1807; 1977), 55.

[2] Ibid., 80-86.

[3] Ibid., 111-119.

[4] Marc Askew, “Genealogy of the Slum”, Bangkok: Place, Practice & Representation (Abingdon, 2002), 139-169.

[5] Shu-Mei Huang & Hyun Kyung Lee, “Disarticulation and Eradication of Dissonant Place in Replicating Roppongi Hills in Taipei”, Heritage, Memory, and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia (Abingdon, 2020), 132-146.

[6] Ibid., 135-138.

[7] Ibid., 138.

[8] Askew, Bangkok, 144-145; Ibid., 141.

[9] Rich Chang, “Demolition Work at Taipei’s Huaguang Community Begins”, Taipei Times (24/02/2013), 3, <http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/02/24/2003555616> [accessed: 13/02/22].

[10] Ho Yi, “Refugees ‘Squatting’ on a Gold Mine”, Taipei Times (03/07/2013), 12, <http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2013/07/03/2003566212> [accessed: 13/02/22].

Within colonial-era travel writing and orientalist discourse, ‘despotism’ is a common term used to describe Asia. Montesquieu applies the term ‘despot’ as a reflection of a civilisation’s ‘enslaved’ status.¹ However, writers that utilise this term through orientalist language fail to expand on their application of despotism. Its definition, application and usage are vague and contradictory. Thus, I argue that in most historical discourse, engaging with the notion of despotism utilises it as a literary device as a form of othering, constructing barriers between a civilisational ‘us’ and a despotic ‘other’. Unsurprising that orientalist discourse is utilised to construct boundaries of ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’, my argument highlights the importance of distinguishing between rhetoric and concept within historical writings. Despotism and enslavement are not used as conceptual terms to describe a governmental system or nation state, rather, they are used as rhetoric tools to establish boundaries of civilisation.

‘Despotism’, within Montesquieu’s texts, is used to construct an idea of a ‘despotic Asia’, in contrast to the free and liberated Europe.² Asia exists in a state of enslavement, either enslaved by other Asian empires or enslaved by their own people.³ Despite the existence of vast empires similar to those in Europe, those empires differ in that they are not truly free. Montesquieu provides the example of the ‘Tartars’ as ‘Asia’s natural conquerors’, describing how despite their military prowess in expanding their empires, the ‘Tartar’ people will eventually become enslaved.⁴ This characteristic is attributed to their eventual demise into ‘despotism’ as a desire to emulate the original conquerors of their newly acquired land.⁴ Thus, the ‘Tartar’ colonies become enslaved from arbitrary powers imposed on the colonised subjects. The example provided here describes despotism not as an intricate governmental system but rather as a rhetorical tool to invoke an idea of Asia and Asians as disenchanted, enslaved people. Despotism constructs Asia into both a geographic and ideational space in the minds of European readers.

This ideational spatiality is also applied in travel literature as travellers were important in constructing ‘Asia’ into the minds of their readers. The language of despotism is also applied within the writings of Howard Malcolm, an American missionary who wrote accounts of his travels to British India, Burma, Siam and Malaya during the mid 19th century. Notable mentions of despotism come in his description of Siam, where he constructs a dystopian image of Siam as opposed to Burma as a ‘civilised’ society.⁵ His descriptions of the Bangkok population fall upon orientalist discourse’s rhetoric as he views them as ‘crafty, mean, ignorant, conceited, slothful, servile, rapacious, and cruel.⁶ This assessment of Siamese character reflects on their ‘civilisational value’ as Malcolm attributes these characteristics to Siam’s ‘despotic’ state. Slavery is emphasised to support Malcolm’s despotic reflection of Siam as he argues that ‘men may sell their wives, parents and children, at pleasure; and often sell themselves’.⁷ By highlighting the arbitrary nature of the Siamese slave trade and how people ‘sell themselves’, Malcolm emphasises Siam’s despotic nature through its ‘enslaved’ population. Much like Montesquieu, Malcolm constructs an idea of Asia and the ‘Asian’ as a disenchanted and enslaved individual. This is not to challenge Malcolm’s observations of slavery, rather, I provide this example since Malcolm uses slavery to support notions of ‘despotism’ while also utilising slavery as a means of highlighting Burma’s civilisational prowess. As mentioned previously, despotism is ill-defined and vague, used in contradictory manners. While constructing a disenchanted image of Siam through its extensive slave trade, Malcolm argues how Burma’s well-structured regulations regarding slave maintenance and usage show Bruma’s civilisational prowess in relation to its neighbours.⁸ Additionally, Malcolm’s contradictory discourse on slavery disregards his national context as an American whose country still practised slavery during the time of his travels and publications.

Although it is unsurprising that colonial discourse is contradictory, it is important to unravel those contradictions to highlight the writer’s underlying messages and intended image. It becomes clear that Malcolm utilises dystopian rhetoric to construct an idea of a ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ Asia in the reader’s mind. Siam, through the rhetoric of enslavement, is othered as ‘uncivilised’, while Burma, through the same rhetoric of enslavement, is accepted as ‘civilised’. The contradictory application of despotism and enslavement highlight the weaknesses in his argument but also uncover the role of these terms as rhetoric tools rather than conceptual terminology. As a result, the imposition of an idea of Asia becomes the primary effect of Malcolm’s text as Asia becomes more than a geographic space, but it is an ideational space within the mind of the reader.

1. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone (eds.), Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, 1989), p. 282. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩]
3. Ibid., pp. 282-283. [↩]
4. Ibid [↩] [↩]
5. Howard Malcolm, Travels in South-Eastern Asia: Embracing Hindustan, Malaya, Siam and China; with Notices of Burmese Missionary Stations and full account of the Burman Empire (Philadelphia, 1850), p. 161; pp. 320-322. [↩]
6. Ibid., pp. 320. [↩]
7. Ibid., pp. 321-322. [↩]
8. Ibid., p. 169. [↩]