An album of striking pencil, ink and wash drawings compiled on board the Austro-Hungarian corvette SMS Auroraon a tour of commercial diplomacy to China and Japan between September 1886 and April 1888. Although the artist is unknown, the composition of the plates, frequently incorporating a variety of scenes and combining a mixture of coastal views, landmarks, foreign and native settlements, landscapes and historic or religious sites, along with the technical skill displayed throughout the album, suggests that it might originally have been intended for publication.
SMS Aurora’s tour represented the first significant attempt by the Austro–Hungarian government to open commercial channels with China and Japan and, as the late nineteenth-century historian, Jerolim von Benko, who published a record of the Aurora’s voyage in his book Die Schiffs-Station der k. und k. Kriegs-Marine in Ost-Asien: Reisen S.M. Schiffe “Nautilus” und “Aurora”, 1884–1888(Wien, 1892), notes, the Aurorawas the first Austro-Hungarian tour to travel as far as the Yangtze River region. The album follows the route of SMS Aurorasailing from the port of Galle, in present day Sri Lanka, via the Nicobar Islands and through the Straits of Malacca, stopping at various locations in Malaysia and Indonesia on the way, and continuing along the Indonesian islands of Jakarta, Bali, Zumbawa and Celebes before reaching the Moluccas. From the Moluccas, the Aurorasailed north visiting various locations in the Philippines before arriving in Hong Kong in May 1887. It then sailed to the Chinese treaty ports of Shantou (Swatow) and Xiamen (Amoy) and then continued on to Japan where the Aurora stopped at Hakodate and Miyako. In October 1887, Aurorareturned to China spending time at the ports of Yantai (Zhifu/Chefoo) and Shanghai, sailing up the Yangtze River from Shanghai to the port of Zhenjiang (Chenkiang) near Nanjing, before sailing south to the Chinese ports of Ningbo (Ningpo) and Fuzhou (Foochow), the latter having also become of particular significance as one of China’s foremost naval bases built, beginning in 1867, to control increased European activity on its coasts in the second half of the nineteenth century. From Fuzhou, the Aurora sailed south to present day Vietnam spending some time in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) where the artist appears to have been particularly interested in French architecture, including in this album views of Norodom Palace (built between 1868 and 1873 by the first Beaux-Arts-trained architect to work in Indochina, Georges L’Hermitte, to be the residence for the Governor of Cochinchina and now on the site of the Independence Palace), the Palais de Justice, the Pont des Malabars (replaced in 1930 by Eiffel’s Pont de Messageries) and the 1877 municipal water tower or château d’eau(which was the first built in French Indochina).
The artist also includes views of the homeward journey via Aden in Yemen and Suez (the Suez Canal having opened in 1869). TheAurora’s tour of China was the result of increased European activity in the region following the opening of Chinese ports to European traders consequent to the Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860 though, as can be seen from the Aurora’s progress, access was limited to the ports, known as treaty ports, which the Qing dynasty agreed to make open to foreigners beginning with the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing. ‘The initial ports of Shanghai, Ningbo, Fuzhou, Xiamen (Amoy) and Guangdong soon flourished and the treaty port system grew to become a vast system of ports and outports on the China coast, also stretching inland along waterways and at the frontiers of Qing, and later Republican China. As Robert Bickers observes, “So as a Chinese man or woman, you could take a walk in Tianjin as recently as 16 March 1917 from the north-east gate of the port city, and traverse a French, a British and then a German concession”. This same walk could lead one past the Belgian, Russian, Italian and Austro-Hungarian districts. This description captures something of the complex world of the treaty ports where China played host to numerous foreginers who existed in a world that was physically in China and, yet, often perceived themselves as “set apart” by cultural difference’ (Brunero, D. and S. Villalta Puig, eds., Life in Treaty Port China and Japan, Aldershot, 2018,p. 2). It is this hybrid world which the artist of this album, as a visitor to it, captures in his illustrations creating an aesthetically-pleasing as well as unusual and valuable eyewitness visual record. Thus, for example, the views of Fuzhou include one of Pagoda Island in the Min River about twelve miles east of Fuzhou. This anchorage was considered the cradle of Chinese seafaring but was frequented by Western shipping and, from 1866, was the point of departure for the famous annual tea races to London. As its name, ‘Pagoda Anchorage’, implies it is the site of an important Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279) pagoda, the Luoxing (Falling Star) Pagoda, a seven story, 31.5 m high monument built of granite which for centuries acted as a landmark for mariners and was included in the charts of the great Chinese explorer Zheng He (1371–1435). In this album, the artist incorporates a detailed, close up sketch of the pagoda alongside his view of the anchorage. Similarly, one of the views of Yantai in Shandong Province depicts the then modern signal station with its signal mast located next to one of the historic watchtowers (built on Mount Qi in 1398 during the reign of Hongwu Emperor of the Ming dynasty) from which Yantai, meaning ‘smoke tower’, derives its name. As previously mentioned, the Aurorasailed further north and inland than previous Austro-Hungarian ventures, along the Yangtze River to Zhenjiang in Jiangsu Province. Zhenjiang lies on the south side of the Yangtze River near its intersection with the famous Grand Canal. It was captured by the British during the First Opium War in 1842, then by the Taiping during the Taiping Rebellion in 1853 and then recaptured by the Qing in 1858. It was opened as a treaty port in 1861 and grew in importance in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its landscape was dominated, as the artist of this album shows, by Jinshan Mountain (‘Jinshan’ meaning Gold Hill or, in German, as this artist describes it ‘Goldberg’). The summit of this mountain contained the Jinshan temple, built during the time of the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317–420 AD) and today the site of a national historic park. There are also views, which were then purely modern, such as the Fuzhou Chinese naval arsenal or the International (created in 1863) and French Settlements in Shanghai, and landscapes such as views of the hills surrounding Ningbo and Yantai.
There are also illustrations, which depict the activities of the crew of the Aurorawhen visiting these locations. A view of Hakodate (a treaty port since 1854) in Japan, for example, includes a detailed illustration of the celebrated sulphur spring baths at Junokawa as well as a view of the beautiful surrounding countryside. As Lawrence Sondhaus notes in his study of the naval policy of Austria-Hungary, the years the Auroraspent between 1886 and 1888 studying the feasibility of extending Austro-Hungarian shipping lines beyond their terminus at Hong Kong under the command of Frigate Captain Franz Müller, seemed to pay off as the Austrian Lloyd line, ‘which had been serving Singapore and Hong Kong with regularly scheduled steamers since 1880, subsequently extended its lines to Japan in 1891’ (L. Sondhaus, The Naval Policy of Austria-Hungary 1867–1918: Navalism, industrial development and the politics of dualism, West Lafayette, Indiana, 1994, p. 84). When the Boxer Rebellion broke out in China in 1899, motivated in large part by conservative, anti-foreign, anti-colonial and anti-Christian sentiment, Austria-Hungary joined the military coalition, the ‘Eight-Nation Alliance’, along with Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Germany and Italy which sent forces to suppress it. As a reward, Austria-Hungary gained a concession zone in Tianjin in December 1902.
