The emerging concept of the museum: Staging architecture and China’s 1910 World’s Fair in the first Chinese daily pictorial magazine (1909-1910)

How can the representation of architecture revive the forgotten history of exhibitions and collections? The Great Qing Empire (1644-1912) participated in international expositions such as the World’s Fairs in 1893 in Chicago and in 1905 in St. Louis, but it was the 1903 Osaka Fifth National Industrial Exhibition that led directly to the first world’s fair held in China in 1910. The Nanyang Industrial Exhibition opened on June 6 in Nanjing and ran for almost six months, until November 29. This historical event was widely reported in newspapers and periodicals because it was the Empire’s attempt to modernize China by promoting industry and commerce. While China’s flourishing print culture took a pictorial turn with the Dianshizhai Pictorial, the Daily Pictorial (Tuhua Ribao) represented another watershed moment with the publication of a pictorial on a daily basis. In August 1910, the Daily Pictorial published eighteen pictures of the architecture of the exhibition halls as part of a series entitled “Scenery of the Continents.” This paper centers on the library and museum buildings, and selected exhibition environments depicted in the Daily Pictorial to examine how the daily magazine became a fashionable medium that allowed the broader public to embrace the visibility of foreign architecture and the concept of the museum. The paper will contribute to the writing of global exhibition history, and to a reconstruction of the narrative of this largely understudied 1910 world’s fair in relation to physical and sociocultural environments and the project of nation-building.