The Representation of China’s Natural Heritage: Nationalism, Tourism and Picturesque Landscape

The early half of the twentieth century was a crucial period which saw a rapid development in mass tourism in modern China. During the period, a considerable amount of tourist-focused infrastructure, in the form of transportation networks and the publication of a significant amount of literature on the subject of travel, were established in response to the growing demand of tourism. The proliferation in the publication of travel guidebooks, catalogues and magazines in a way suggests an increasing travel desire among urbanites to visit picturesque sites within China. In these publications, practical and useful information for the travellers, such as timetables, prices, maps, routes for a wide variety of transportation options and photographs of scenic site etc. were provided, conditioning and shaping travellers’ views, and promoting the ‘tourist gaze’ and representation of China’s scenic sites. The selection criteria of the views to a large degree demonstrate how scenic China was perceived, viewed and shaped, and what visual and cultural elements were regarded as important constituent of picturesque landscape in the Republican period. Focusing on the texts and images of scenic China that were produced under the patronage of the market and the state, this paper examines the project entitled In Search of the Southeast, sponsored by the Zhejing provincial government in 1934, aiming to explore the inextricable link between picturesque landscape, tourism, transportation and nationalism and to address the questions of how the novel transportation infrastructures have generated modern travel experience and tourist gaze, which benefited the artistic processes and products, how artists translated what they had viewed into visual language, and to what extent the introduction of Western landscape painting and the development of tourism conditioned the ‘ways of seeing’ in the production of landscape painting. It attempts to reconstruct the visual identity of modern China and to deal with the taste and practice of tourism as well as the way in which travel industry contributed to nation-building in the early twentieth century.