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U.S. -China Trade

“A Diplomatic (Chinese) Design Presented to the U.S.” 1881

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“A Diplomatic (Chinese) Design Presented to the U.S. – 12 February 1881 by Thomas Nast, for Harper’s Weekly. Source: Scan at UDel by Walfred. Public domain

This highly detailed full-page wood engraving appeared in Harper’s Weekly without an accompanying article.

In the cartoon a Chinese dragon curls around a Chinoiserie vase—it drops a document “New Treaty”  from its claws into the neck of the vase.  The vase is highly ornate – its style familiar to fashionable American households that collected Chinese art and porcelains (Chinoiserie) to display as a statement of cultural sophistication.

The vase is also cracked.  The fracture is serious, running from under the dragon’s tail to the base of the porcelain, where it bifurcates into another fracture.  At first glance, the dragon, who Nast has drawn with a devilish grin, appears to be possessive of the vase, but it might be trying to hold the vase together with its body and tail—and the offering of a negotiated concession—as an incentive to stay together. Under the dragon’s left claw reads “diplomacy.” The dragon is dark, menacing, and both protective and defensive of its territory and history in dealing with western culture.

The treaty Nast refers to is the 1880 Angell Treaty – a modification to the Burlingame Treaty negotiated by Rutherford B. Hayes. Bending to the will of anti-Chinese hysteria in California, China agreed to American limitations on Chinese immigration on the promise that the United States will not try to trade opium in Chinese ports.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, China enjoyed an advantaged position between itself and England. England wanted the advantage neutralized or eliminated and began to forcibly import opium into China. In Collecting Objects/ Excluding People, Lenore Metrick-Chen sums up the consequences of the opium trade and its relevance to the U.S.

When the Qing government protested this illegal activity, Britain used its military to force the trade’s continuation. The Opium Wars resulted in huge financial, military, cultural and humanitarian losses for China. Poverty forced many people, mainly young men, to risk the truly wretched conditions of the ocean journey to America. (6)

Harper’s Weekly commented on the treaty in response to an apparent snide editorial originating out of England. Harper’s justified the terms of the new treaty, which ironically continued to award China “most favored nation” status, and reflected on the possible prohibition of Chinese immigrants as being good if it kept the U.S. from forcing opium on the Chinese as the British had done. Harper’s went on record earlier and speculated that “The friendly acquiescence in the restriction of immigration should at once satisfy the California apprehension” (Harper’s Weekly Jan. 29, 1881) which of course the treaty did not.

An aftermath of the Opium Wars was the damage it did to American opinions on all things Chinese. Chinese works of art, once prized by cultured Americans, began to lose their luster in American homes, and American began to favor Japanese objects. “For a short time in the 1870s, Americans began to look enthusiastically at both Chinese and Japanese things, but as the decade drew on approval voiced for Chinese things diminished” (Metrick-Chen 37).

In Nast’s image the caption reads that the artist sketched the vase from a private viewing in Washington D.C. Upon the neck of the vase, Nast has drawn the U.S. Capitol, and, the U.S. Flag upside down, a symbol of distress. A single shamrock replaces the flag’s stars, an indicator that Nast continued to feel the Irish had too much power and influence in American governance. An eagle bearing “85” on its shield (the significance of that number cannot be determined) hovers over the Capitol dome. A string that appears to be kite ties, crosses the throat of the vase. Under the neck of the dragon, Nast includes two Chinese men who dangle from nooses created from their queues, They hang under a sign that reads “Rum Hole.” A fire smolders with “Washington Herbs.”  The herbs indicate a ritual or ceremony accompanied the hangings.

In the center, representing England, is a portly John Bull. Bull has fallen off his steed. The horse escapes to the left. Bull wears a “St. George’s” medallion. Big Ben can be seen in the background. The face of the famous clock is Chinese. John Bull bears the scars of other diplomatic mishaps. His right leg is in a cast, adorned with shamrocks and a harp, both symbols Nast used to represent Ireland.

At the vase’s base, a semi-circle frame labeled “Opium Business” is affected by the fracture. Two Chinese men are stoned by the product they are forced to sell. To the right a ship carrying “opium”  arrives ashore.

Nast also addressed the new treaty in the Feb.5th issue with his cartoon “Celestial.”

He included a similar vase in the 1882 cartoon “The Veto.

 

Chinese Exclusion

“Blaine’s Teas(e)” – 20 March, 1880

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Blaine steam from his tea resembles a chinese man
“Blaine’s Teas(e)” 20 March 1880, by Thomas Nast for Harper’s Weekly. Source: UDel-Walfred. Public Domain

Republican presidential hopeful James G. Blaine was all too aware that Nast’s sphere of influence on the electorate was wide.  Nast relished exposing Blaine’s hypocrisy and anti-immigration stance. East Coast, New England tolerance toward accepting newcomers had been a point of Republican pride. Blaine was the first Republican official to defect to the Democratic way of thinking. Nast’s fixation on Blaine was unrelenting, and nearly equaled his Tweed/Tammany days.  The attention worried Blaine, who “attempted to explain and to justify his position, but the artist could see in the Chinese immigrant only a man and a brother, trying to make a living in a quiet and peaceful manner in a country that was big enough for all” (Paine, 413).

Nast’s Blaine’s Teas(e) shows the dilemma the politician faced. The Evening News Blaine reads, chronicles the West Coast’s growing calls for “The Chinese Must Go.” A savvy politician, Blaine needed votes in the West. All the while working to undermine the legitimacy of Chinese Americans, Nast lets Americans see that Blaine enjoyed the teas and porcelains resulting from U.S. trade with China. Nast calls out hypocrisy and incongruity of admiring Chinese “things” but hating the source of the objects.

The clammy Chinese figure rising before Blaine’s conjures the haunting, ethereal quality of ghosts who confront Dickens’ Scrooge. Whether Dickens’s spirits were an inspiration is unknown. Blaine is visited, in this instance, by a hot steamy specter who rises up from Blaine’s teacup to scold and confront the politician. This apparition will not allow Blaine to enjoy his tea in peace and privacy. Blaine’s hair appears to rise in alarm,  but Blaine looks more annoyed that fearful. His right hand has gripped the paper suddenly, indicating he is unnerved, yet he continues to clutch at his truth as he comes to terms with what is before him. Otherworldly, and celestial, the Chinese tea ghost peers directly into Blaine’s eyes with and bears a stiff upper lip.

The cartoon asks a question, which in a century and a half later, Lenore Metrick-Chen made the focus of her book Collecting Objects/Excluding People. “What happens when the exotic refuses to remain our fantasy, our abstraction and instead intrudes into our space?”(1)

Nast’s ghost intrudes, haunts and teases Blaine with the reality of the politician’s actions and xenophobic policies. Nast challenges the worthiness of  Blaine’s Republican ideals – his obligation as a member of Lincoln’s Party to tolerate newcomers to the United States.

Nast confronts a reality that Metrick-Chen continues to wrestle with and unpack in her book. Throughout America’s earliest history, spanning across Nast’s era and well into the twentieth century, American and Western culture held a fascination with exotic Eastern objects and artifacts. Blaine wants to enjoy his Chinese tea from Chinese porcelain. He embodies exactly the kind of person who collects objects but excludes people. Nast reminds his audience, and Blaine, that the Chinese people created these cherished goods and services. Blaine deserves to be haunted by his hypocrisy.

Chinese head coming out of a lamp
Money vs. Muscle, or, Chinese Emigration, To the Workmen and Trade Unions of America, New York: The “Season” Press, 1870. Courtesy of New York Public Library

Nast’s idea for this cartoon, however, may not be original. A “spectral disembodied head emerges from a magic lamp” in John S. Cook’s 1870 illustration of Money vs.Muscle, or Chinese Emigration. To the Workmen and Trade unions of America, published by the Season Press. It is not known if Nast had access to the book. The images are strikingly similar.

Metrick-Chen writes that soon after the United States was formally recognized as a country under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, the U.S. eagerly entered into trade with China. “The predominant American view of the Chinese had been laudatory” (19).

With the conclusion of The Opium War (1839- 1842), American superiority (Manifest Destiny) grew. Reports from Protestant missionaries stationed in China relayed to the American people their unsuccessful attempts to convert the Chinese to Christianity. These reports making their way home factored in supplanting favorable views toward China into negative opinions (Metrick-Chen 21-23). Defining Chinese as non-Christian heathens was an important element in disqualifying them as competitive laborers and applicants as citizens and visitors to the U.S.