The Cornell University Library/Wason Collection Tianjin Project

– a brief overview and background

Project Title: Reflecting on Tianjin's 600 years of Urban and Social History

Description:

The Chinese port city of Tianjin (6 million+ citizens), located 1 ½ hours by train east of Beijing, was and still is a highly important municipality. It was a trade and treaty port during colonial times (1840-1949), and is the third largest port in China today. In its rather unique history of urban development, it consisted of ten discreet but highly interconnected spatial entities: the nine foreign concessions, all representing different approaches to building styles (American, Belgium, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Italian and British), and the Chinese walled city itself, which celebrates its 600th anniversary in 2004.

With the largest body of foreign architecture preserved on Chinese soil today, Tianjin represents a text book case regarding the political dimensions of colonial architecture, urban planning and the socio-economic relations between the East and the West. It was home to important historical figures, such as the last emperor of China (Pu Yi), or former President Herbert Hoover, who was stationed in Tianjin (together with the future First Lady) as an army engineer in 1899/1900; or the famous scholar Liang Qichao It was also the site where two of the so-called Unequal Treaties between China and the western powers were signed, granting Britain, France and other powers extraterritoriality, together with specific legal, trade and customs rights, and yielding parts of Hong Kong Island on a 100 year lease basis (an “agreement” ending ultimately in Hong Kong's return to Mainland China only recently, in 1997). Incidentally, Beiyang University, China's first modern (western-style) university was founded in this city in 1895, explicitly using Cornell and Harvard as models. Beiyang University was called the “Oriental Cornell” at the time.

Aim of the exhibit:
The exhibit aims to show how Tianjin developed as a colonial, urban “collage city” of very diverse style and orientation; how the various parts and pieces (nine tenth of them of foreign extraction) defined themselves architecturally and socially; and how the parts constituted a functioning whole which dominated most of the economic and cultural landscape of Northern China for almost 100 years.

On display are historical photographs, architectural drawings – such as the important Palace Maps of 1897 which depict modifications to an imperial palace for the benefit of the Chinese emperor's visitations to Tianjin – plus a great variety of textual materials and objects.

International participation and interest:

The project is overseen by a national steering committee of library and academic colleagues at the universities of Cornell, Princeton, Vanderbilt, Hong Kong, and UW-Madison. Colleagues at various institutions in Tianjin are contributing in a number of very important ways.

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