China, the Maritime Silk Road, and the Memory of Colonialism in the Asia Region

Abstract

This chapter analyzes how the city museums of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Galle Fort deal with the memory and legacy of colonialism in the framework of the expanding economic and political power of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Asia. In the PRC, the historical memory of the country’s colonial past has been shaped by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In contrast to the transnational nature of the communist ideology, the CCP’s interpretation of history is strongly nationalist. China’s political expansion in the ex-British colony of Hong Kong and its economic ties to other Asian countries such as Sri Lanka open space for a discussion about its power to influence these countries’ understanding of their own history. How is the expansion of China, defined by many as a neo-colonial power, changing the way other countries in Asia understand the colonial past? Is China able to exports its own vision of colonialism and post-colonial order outside its own borders? This chapter answers these questions through an analysis of the permanent exhibitions of three city museums: The Shanghai History Museum; the Hong Kong Museum of History, and the Galle Fort Museum in Sri Lanka, part of the “One Belt, One Road” project.

This chapter forms part of the ECHOES Project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 770248.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) emerged as one of the major political powers in the Asia region, and as such its influence over the social memory of Asia’s past is gradually increasing. Projects such as the “One Belt, One Road” (yidai yilu 一带一路), launched in September 2013 by president Xi Jinping 習近平, exemplify China’s attempt to strengthen its political and financial influence in Asia, also through the shaping of transnational historical memories of the Asia region.

Public history is a lively field in China, where new projects are regularly opened (Li 2019). The relationship between history, memory, nation, and identity is particularly evident in state-financed projects, such as the multiplicity of oral history projects aimed at collecting the memories of the survivors of the War of Resistance against Japan (Li 2019). Schools, museums, documentaries, memorials, and heritage have become agents of memory that employ traumatic memories of colonialism and war to shape the identity of millions of Chinese people, intensifying at the same time nationalistic feelings among the population (Wang 2008). Since the 1990s, the authorities have been using the discourse of “national humiliation” (guochi 国耻) not only to legitimize their rule within the borders of the PRC, but also to shape Chinese foreign relations with Japan and the United States (Wang 2008, 800–2). The traumatic memories of humiliation, however, are of no use to support China’s project of economic expansion in the Asia region. Therefore, to back their vision of China’s leading role in Asia, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been resurrecting collective memories related to the glorious past of China as the major crossroad of the Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road. In this sense, the One Belt, One Road is also an exercise in collective memory at the transnational level.

Preservation of cultural heritage in the cities involved in the One Belt, One Road is one of the soft power strategies employed by the PRC to connect people from different countries to China’s past (Winter 2019). In this framework, China’s appropriation of the history of the Maritime Silk Road serves to promote a Sinocentric vision of the pre-colonial regional networks that connected countries in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea (Kwa 2016, 16).

This chapter analyzes how three museums in ex-colonial cities in Asia attempt to revive memories of China’s central role in the Maritime Silk Road by reframing its heritage. It claims that exhibitions created in the framework of the One Belt, One Road aim not only at promoting China’s political agenda, but also at overriding the history of European colonialism with new memories of China’s glorious past. How is the expansion of China, defined by many as a neo-colonial power, changing the Asian region’s memory of its colonial past? Is the PRC able to shape public history in and outside China’s borders? Is the PRC able to propose an alternative to European colonialism by re-emerging pre-colonial memories of peaceful commercial exchanges in the Asia region?

Answers to these questions are gleaned through an analysis of the exhibitions of three museums: the Shanghai History Museum/Shanghai Revolution Museum, the Hong Kong Museum of History, and the Galle National Museum in Sri Lanka. Based in municipalities that occupy different positions in the hierarchy of the One Belt, One Road initiative, each of these museums also reframes the heritage of the Maritime Silk Road in differentiated ways, providing us with relevant information on the PRC’s political agenda and its gradations of influence over the Chinese-led construction of an Asian region of memory.

The Silk Road, the Maritime Silk Road, and the One Belt, One Road Project

In September 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched a proposal for the construction of a new Silk Road by creating transportation corridors between China and Europe through Central Asia. One month later, during an official visit to Indonesia, Xi Jinping also launched the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”, a project aimed at opening new maritime economic routes linking deep water ports across the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and beyond. These two programs are collectively called the One Belt, One Road initiative, a project designed to promote China’s political and economic position in Asia and in the world (Winter 2019, 9–18).

In the years following the announcement of this initiative, scholars have accused China of appropriating and manipulating the ideas of the Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road for political purposes, using the past to serve the present-day foreign policy agenda (Kwa 2016, 1; Chan 2018, 160–61). One of the main criticisms raised against the PRC’s heritage policies is regarding the historicity of the Maritime Silk Road itself and of China’s supremacy in it. The idea of the Silk Road is a relatively recent historical construct coined by geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905) to describe the commercial routes that connected China to Europe as early as during the Han Dynasty (207 BCE–220 CE) (Waugh 2007). This concept was later popularized by Swedish geographer Sven Hedin (1865–1952), whose book entitled The Silk Road was published in 1938. More recently, scholars described the Silk Road not as a path, but as an ever-changing commercial, economic and cultural network that connected the Eurasian continent (Chan 2018, 161).

The concept of the Maritime Silk Road is even newer. Scholars began to employ it at the beginning of the twentieth century to describe cultural and commercial exchanges between ports in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea (Chan 2018, 161). The history of the origins, development and consequences of these maritime networks has been at the center of historical debates from the beginning of the twentieth century, and historians are still studying the role of different civilizations in maintaining ties between ports in the region.¹ Mostly, the concept of the Maritime Silk Road is understood as the connections and interactions between three different trading worlds—the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the South China Sea—through the centuries (Kwa 2016, 19). Historians have studied these networks from different perspectives. For instance, in his analysis of the “Silk Road of the Seas”, Lincoln Paine focuses on Muslim mariners’ routes in the Indian Ocean (Paine 2013, 262–90), while Lo Jung-pang privileges the description of the maritime expansion of China (Lo 2012). Neither Lo—one of the major experts on Chinese maritime civilization—nor the historian of Chinese-Islamic relations Hyunhee Park (2012) defines the maritime networks that connected China to north-east Africa as a “Maritime Silk Road”, demonstrating that this term is not indispensable in the analysis of the trading networks of the pre-modern Indian Ocean.

While historians tend to emphasize the transnational and multicultural nature of the maritime ties defined as the Maritime Silk Road, the cultural projects financed by the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road promote a Sinocentric vision of this historical regional network (Chan 2018, 160). According to scholars, President Xi Jinping has not only appropriated the idea of an ancient Maritime Silk Road as a metaphor of China’s recent rise in the Asian region, but by promoting the centrality of China in this ancient network, he is also trying to “deepen the social memory of a regional integration in Southeast Asia and South Asia with China at his centre” (Kwa 2016, 17–18).

Heritage plays an essential role in the Chinese authorities’ reconstruction of the regional memory of a Sinocentric Maritime Silk Road. One of the official goals of the One Belt, One Road initiative is to improve “people-to-people bonds”, an aim that China is attempting to fulfil by using heritage domestically and internationally to reconstruct the history of the Maritime Silk Road (Winter 2016, 8). There are different examples of how the Chinese government supports the reframing of heritage to promote the One Belt, One Road initiative. In Guangzhou, local historians and policy makers worked together to prove that the city was one of the earlier ports from which Chinese mariners started their exploration of the South China Sea (Chan 2018, 165). Maritime archaeology also became a strategic tool to prove the far-reaching power of China overseas in the past. Chinese officials are financing underwater research and excavations to discover ancient Chinese vessels and ceramics in domestic as well as in international waters, for example off the coast of Sri Lanka (Adams 2013, Winter 2019, 119–25). The discoveries made during archaeological excavations are then handled by museums that contextualize vessels and potsherds to confirm the links connecting China to the rest of Asia with the aim of deepening the social memory of the Maritime Silk Road. Museums, however, adjust their narratives to the position their city occupies in the political and economic hierarchy of the One Belt, One Road initiative to promote slightly different views of China’s role in the Asia region.

Creating a Past for Shanghai Before the Opium War: The Shanghai History Museum

The permanent exhibition of the Shanghai History Museum/Shanghai Revolution Museum (Shanghai shi lishibowuguan, Shanghai geming lishi bowuguan 上海市历史博物馆|上海革命历史博物; hereafter, the Shanghai History Museum) provides a thought-provoking example of how the PRC’s institutions reframe heritage to fit the Maritime Silk Road narrative, offering visitors a new interpretation of the historical role of their city in national and international affairs.

After becoming an open port in the mid-nineteenth century, Shanghai started its ascent into what Jeffrey Wasserstrom calls a “global city”, a neuralgic center for economy and culture at a global level (Wasserstrom 2009). Western historiography tends to overlook the history of pre-colonial Shanghai. For instance, in A Short History of Shanghai (first published 1927), author F.L Hawks Pott declares that while Shanghai existed before it became an open port, compared to many other places in China the city was “insignificant from [a] historical perspective” (Hawks Pott 2009, 2). This opinion is much contested in Chinese historiography, which sets the origin of the city during the Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368), more precisely in 1291 (Wasserstrom 2009, 2).

Despite work by local historians on the imperial history of the city, Shanghai remains mostly known for its economic and commercial growth during the colonial era. Between 1843 and 1949, a period referred to in China as “the century of humiliation”, the city was governed by a system of concessions under the authority of several foreign powers, which also controlled other areas of the country. While Chinese historians strongly criticize foreign imperialism and highlight the abuses and injustices promoted by the colonial system in China, the idea that the prosperity of the city was due to its openness to modern technology and finance imported by foreigners proved long-lasting.

Public institutions in China advanced, and they are still advancing, the belief that while European colonialism was harmful to the Chinese nation, it nevertheless promoted the development of modernity in cities like Shanghai (Ifversen and Pozzi 2020, 157). For instance, exhibitions about the history of the city opened in the 1990s and the 2000s neglected the pre-colonial history of the city to focus instead on the period between 1843 and 1949 (Duan 2009, 32–41; Niu 2002; Pozzi 2021). These two exhibitions acknowledged the aggressive nature of foreign colonialism in China, nevertheless, they also glorified this epoch as a golden age for the economic and cultural development of the city, almost promoting a sense of nostalgia for the old Shanghai. Curators mention the lack of space in the building which hosted these exhibitions to explain the neglect for the pre-modern history of Shanghai (Duan 2009, 35), but the choice to promote the commercial growth of the city in the modern era also followed the contemporary political agenda to attract foreign investment and open the country to the world after years of political closure (Denton 2014, 88–94).

The current permanent exhibition of the Shanghai History Museum, which opened in spring 2018, overturns this tendency. Instead of focusing only on the colonial years, this exhibition analyzes the development of the city from its prehistoric origins to the present day, also prominently featuring its imperial history. Divided in two main galleries, the “Ancient Shanghai” gallery and the “Modern Shanghai” gallery, this exhibition employs the paradigm of the Maritime Silk Road to reframe the contemporary economic prosperity of the city as a prolongation of the commercial activities originated in the Tang Dynasty (618–907).

The Ancient Shanghai gallery aims at showing that Shanghai, at the time called Qinglong (青龙), was thriving before the arrival of western colonizers and that the prosperity of the metropolis in the twentieth century finds its origins in the vitality of the pre-colonial town. The captions and items in the exhibition show that the town of Qinglong was a one of the most prosperous ports of the Maritime Silk Road already during the Tang dynasty and that its economy continued to develop during the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Because of its financial success and strategic position, Shanghai was upgraded to the level of county during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). According to the bilingual captions (Chinese and English) that guide visitors through the exhibition, the “considerable amount of porcelain ware excavated in town indicates that it [Qinglong/Shanghai] was once an important port of transshipment along the Maritime Silk Road during the Tang and Song Dynasty.” Porcelain wares excavated in the proximity of contemporary Shanghai are employed as evidence of the existence of the Maritime Silk Road and of the key-role that the city played in it.

Besides the archaeological remains, the exhibition employs innovative methods to attract the attention of visitors. A two-meter large screen placed in the middle of the main exhibition route plays a video entitled “The Maritime Silk Road”, which restates the information provided in the exhibition captions in a trendier format (Fig. 1). The four-minute video, whose colorful images attracts the attention of visitors more than the fragments of porcelain, mixes animated recreations of the city’s past with digital maps of ancient maritime routes. The video restates that “The port of Qinglong, the first in the region of Shanghai, was positioned on the estuary of the Wusong river. Since it was positioned on the river and on the sea, Qinglong became part of the Maritime Silk Road during the Tang and Song Dynasties.” It also shows that during the Southern Song (1127–1279), the imperial court established in Qinglong an office for the supervision of shipment of goods.² Soon Shanghai became the seventh biggest port of the Maritime Silk Road. The video then continues describing the geographical and administrative changes that influenced the history of the city during the Yuan, Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties. Speaking about the colonial era, the video states that “after becoming an Open Port in 1843, the port of Shanghai and the city declared that Shanghai was going to become the world-famous hub port of the East”. The short film concludes with images of the contemporary port claiming that nowadays Shanghai still supports “the spirit of the Silk Road” (sichou zhi lu de jingshen 丝绸之路的精神).

Fig. 1

Visitors of the Shanghai History Museum watch the video “The Maritime Silk Road” in November 2018. Picture by the author

The characterization of Qinglong/Shanghai as one of the main ports of the Maritime Silk Road fulfils several aims. First, it counters the popular vision that, before becoming an Open Port, the city was irrelevant from historical perspective. Secondly, it shows that Shanghai was a “global city” maintaining international ties via the seaways before the arrival of the European colonial powers. Finally, it portrays the city as constantly evolving and growing in the framework of the Maritime Silk Road from the ancient past until its glorious present.

These claims are controversial. While China’s commercial ties with other kingdoms in East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia are well-documented since antiquity (Lo 2012), to describe them in the framework of a well-defined and ever-expanding Maritime Silk Road comes close to historical revisionism. The fact that Shanghai is not even on the official list of the major Chinese cities applying for UNESCO protected status as part of the Maritime Silk Road (such as Nanjing, Penglai, Yangzhou, Ningbo, Fuzhou, Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Guangzhou, and Beihai) supports the argument that the claims of the exhibition are dictated by current political contingencies (Wang and Cang 2015).³ Furthermore, by linking the present commercial and financial success of the port of Shanghai to the older Maritime Silk Road, the exhibition trivializes the development of the city-port in the colonial era. The expansion of navigation in China, the ensuing development of the city’s port, and the construction of arsenals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are well studied, but they are hardly represented in the museum.

To conclude, the often-overviewed pre-colonial past of the city re-emerges in the permanent exhibition of the Shanghai History Museum, reframing it in the context of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road project. They draw connections between the pre-modern and early modern Chinese maritime expansion and the contemporary role of Shanghai as one of Asia’s most successful ports, effectively downplaying Shanghai’s role as a global port in the colonial era.

The Maritime Silk Road and the Silk Road in the Hong Kong’s Museums

The PRC’s institutions are not the only ones employing the historiographical concepts of the Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road to reframe history and memory in the Asian region. On the contrary, in the attempt to shape visitors’ understanding of China’s international relations and to override the memory of the colonial past in the region, references to the Silk Road and to the Maritime Silk Road are also becoming more common in museums in the Hong Kong SAR.

Despite the “One Country, Two Systems” policy, political and economic interests between the PRC and its SAR are increasingly constraining curators’ freedom to represent Hong Kong’s past. In the early 2000s, the Home Affairs Bureau that supervises museums announced that Hong Kong “should recognize and return to its ancestors”, while in 2009, the former Secretary of the Home Affairs Bureau and later Vice Chairman of the Silk Road Cities Alliance Zeng Decheng announced that Hong Kong’s cultural policies should adhere to the functional role that “the Hong Kong people inherit Chinese culture” (Law 2013, 537).

The case of the Hong Kong Museum of History is exemplary of China’s attempt to weaken the cultural and economic ties that connect the city to the United Kingdom, its former colonizer, and create a sense of belonging to the Chinese nation instead. The Hong Kong Museum of History opened in 1998, just one year after the hand-over of Hong Kong to the PRC. Besides hosting temporary exhibitions, in 2000 it also inaugurated its permanent exhibition, “The Hong Kong Story”, which follows the history of the city from pre-history until the hand-over to the PRC in 1997.

According to the management, the museum’s mission is “preserving and carrying forward the historical and cultural heritage of Hong Kong by collecting, restoring, sorting, and exhibiting archaeological [items], historical [events], folk customs, [and] natural and historical antiques in Hong Kong and surrounding areas” (Law 2013, 537). Nevertheless, the museum has received criticism from local and international scholars for its attempt to align the history of the city to those of the PRC. According to critics, the Folk Culture in Hong Kong gallery (Gallery 4) exhibits only Chinese traditional customs, while the western culture that has existed and exerted a profound influence on Hong Kong for more than 150 years is almost totally absent. Furthermore, Hong Kong’s history as a British colony is reduced to a few small and fragmented segments (Law 2013, 539). Chen Yun, a highly influential cultural critic in Hong Kong, criticizes the exhibition as a “patriotic version” of the Hong Kong story designed simply to flatter the CCP regime (Law 2013, 538). Such criticisms, cast mostly by Hong Kong scholars, reveal the tension created by the expanding influence of the PRC over the city’s cultural institutions and a fear that the Chinese authorities might try to elide the specificity of Hong Kong identity, which is still very much embedded in the colonial ties of the ex-colony with the United Kingdom.

The attempt to frame the history of the city in the Maritime Silk Road is another attempt to substitute Hong Kong’s colonial legacy with more ancient ties to Chinese imperial history. The insertion of the Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road narrative in the permanent exhibition of the Hong Kong Museum of History is much less visible in comparison to the case of the Shanghai History Museum. References to the Maritime Silk Road mostly appear in the explanatory captions of some objects discovered by archaeologist in the area of contemporary Hong Kong. In a similar fashion to the Shanghai History Museum, the permanent exhibition in Hong Kong claims that potsherds found in Penny’s Bay prove that during the Ming Dynasty, “Hong Kong was a stop along the Maritime Silk Road to Guangzhou.”

Certainly, the Maritime Silk Road paradigm is not as pervasive as in the Shanghai History Museum. The main reason for the difference approach of the two museums is that while the exhibition in Shanghai is brand new and therefore could fully develop a narrative fitting the government’s agenda, “The Hong Kong Story” has not changed since its opening in 2000. Mentions of the Maritime Silk Road were added during the renovations of the permanent exhibitions in 2016, but no structural changes to the main narrative were applied.

Even if references to the Maritime Silk Road are minimal in the permanent exhibition, the institution has organized several events celebrating the Silk Road. For instance, between October and December 2016, the Hong Kong History Museum organized a temporary exhibition entitled “Across the Oceans: The Local Connections and Global Dimensions of China’s Maritime Silk Road”, while between November 2017 and March 2018 it organized “Miles upon Miles: World Heritage along the Silk Road.”

These exhibitions support the PRC’s project to culturally integrate Hong Kong into the Mainland. The items displayed in “Across the Oceans: The Local Connections and Global Dimensions of China’s Maritime Silk Road” came from the eight major cities on the Maritime Silk Road, and while Hong Kong is not on the list, the exhibition also included some objects found locally. According to the curators, “by using the cultural relics from eight Maritime Silk Road cities, as well as artefacts from Hong Kong, the exhibition elaborates upon the roles and functions each had as they grew and prospered on the Maritime Silk Road”. Furthermore, artefacts from Hong Kong were added to the exhibition to create a sense of belonging and “to introduce the role played by the city in the history of the Maritime Silk Road.” Like in the case of Shanghai, while Hong Kong is not on the list of the proposal for granting the Maritime Silk Road UNESCO World Heritage status, in the exhibition the metropolis is defined as a “Stop-over of the Maritime Silk Road.”⁴

The temporary exhibitions organized by the Hong Kong Museum of History are just two of several events dedicated to the subject of the Silk Road organized in Hong Kong; many others have been organized by other institutions, such as the “Landscape Map of the Silk Road” (7 December 2018–20 February 2019) (Fig. 2). This exhibition, which opened in 2018 in the Museum of Science and Technology just in front of the Hong Kong Museum of History, showcased a 30-meter long and 0.6 meter wide Ming Dynasty silk handscroll representing a section of the Silk Road. The map presents the 211 cities between Jiayu Pass and Tianfan-guo (nowadays Mecca), and it is a precious source to scholars interested in the history of mapping technology in pre-modern China (Lin 2018, 28–29).

Fig. 2

Banners in front of the Hong Kong Museum of Science and Technology to advertise the exhibition “Landscape Map of the Silk Road” in November 2018. Picture by the author

From the artistic, scientific and historical perspectives, the value of this Ming Dynasty’s handscroll is indisputable. As pointed out by Hyundee Park, maps can be used as texts which contain precious information about the geographical and cultural knowledge of a society in a given time (Park 2012, 14). While the exhibition “Landscape Map of the Silk Road” provided visitors with information on the development of mapping techniques in Chinese history and explained the unique qualities of this specific map, the acquisition of this artwork, its re-naming, and its presentation in the 2018 exhibitions are a clear example of the reframing of historical heritage to fulfil political aims.

Firstly, the acquisition of this map by the newly established and not yet open Hong Kong Palace Museum relates to the current nationalistic political climate supported by the CCP. This scroll was kept in Yurikan Museum in Kyoto until 2002, when two collectors from Beijing bought it and brought it back to China. When the owners decided to sell the map, Dr. Shan Jixiang—the director of the newly established Hong Kong Palace Museum—decided to collect funds to acquire this piece for the museum. The fundraising proved unnecessary, as businessman Mr. Hui Wing-mau—a vocal supporter of the cultural reunification of Hong Kong with China—acquired the map and donated it to the museum.⁵ The choice of the acquisition of this specific map over other items is motivated by the strategic role of the Silk Road in contemporary Chinese politics. Furthermore, The Hong Kong Palace Museum, whose construction started in 2019, is in itself a political project: most of the items of the new museums will be borrowed from the original Palace Museum in Beijing, with the intent of creating stronger cultural links between the Chinese capital and the harbor of Hong Kong. Secondly, to make the association between the map and the ancient Silk Road clearer to the public, the name of the scroll, which according to historical sources was originally known as “Illustrations of the lands and people of the Western Regions” (Lin 2018, 28–29), was changed into “Landscape Map of the Silk Road.” Lastly, the exhibition “Landscape Map of the Silk Road” while presenting the map as a precious source to understand Chinese cartography techniques, also states in its introduction that its presence in Hong Kong is a way to connect the city to China.

These examples show that museums in Hong Kong are systematically employing the heritage of the Maritime Silk Road and Silk Road to link the history of the city to the mainland. Their attempt to insert the history of the city into the Maritime Silk Road is more timid in comparison to the Shanghai History Museum, but the overwhelming number of exhibitions about China’s domination over Asian aim at educating local visitors to the history of their “motherland”, relegating the history of colonial Hong Kong to a secondary rank. Instead of criticizing the colonial experience of the city, cultural authorities have decided to downplay it by substituting it with a celebratory portrayal of the glorious expansion of the Chinese empire.

Chinese Civilization in the History of Southern Asia: The Galle National Museum

China’s attempts to change the historical memory of the Asia region transgress the borders of the PRC and Hong Kong, spreading towards Southeast Asia and South Asia. Sri Lanka is an interesting example. Since the end of the civil conflict between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009, Sri Lanka has sought to attract foreign investors to rebuild the economy of the island, and while the United States remained one of the main creditors, China has also started to offer financial assistance and loans to the Sri Lankan government (Mendis 2012). In May 2013, President Xi Jinping and President Mahinda Rajapaksa jointly announced the establishment of China-Sri Lanka strategic partnership, thereby including Sri Lanka in the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road initiative.⁶ The PRC’s interest in Sri Lanka is motivated by geopolitical and geo-economic reasons, as the island is a focal transit port within the international East-West shipping route in the Indian Ocean, and as such is a key-partner for China’s geo-economic expansion (Mendis 2012). While the PRC’s construction of a new port in Colombo and attracted the attention of scholars and politicians, China’s investment in archaeological excavations in the island and the consequent construction of galleries in museums have been overlooked.

For the last two thousand years, Sri Lanka was a place where East-West shipping interacted and as such the whole coast of the island is of high interest for underwater archaeologists, who in the 1960s started researching shipwrecks in the area. One of the most successful projects was the excavation of the seventeenth-century wreck of the Dutch East India Company merchantman Avondster, initiated in 2001 with funding from the Netherlands Cultural Funds (Devendra and Muthucumarana 2013, 50–54). Ex-colonial rulers, mostly the Netherlands and Britain, have been the main financial supporters of these archaeological excavations, but in the early 2010s the PRC offered to help Sri Lanka to find Maritime Silk Road wrecks (Adams 2013). More recently, in October 2018, the Sri Lanka Central Cultural Fund signed a memorandum of understanding with the Shanghai Museum on a five-year archaeological cooperation program to excavate Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127) porcelain in the port of Jaffna. The archaeological team of the Shanghai Museum also hope to find more evidence of Chinese presence on the island in the fifteenth century (Xinhua Agency 2018). Some of the items retrieved during these underwater excavation missions—mostly Chinese porcelains and coins—entered the collections of local museums.

Differently than the Hong Kong case, the PRC has no direct legal rule over Sri Lanka. Still, the country is trying to support China’s economic agenda, reframing archaeological findings as proofs of the long-lasting links between the two countries. One of the best examples of this tendency is the “Sri Lanka-China Historical Relationship” gallery opened in the Galle National Museum on September 10, 2013 to coincide with the visit to Sri Lanka of Liu Yunshan 刘云山, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CCP’s Central Committee.⁷

Opened in 1986, the permanent exhibition of the Galle National Museum includes pieces from the colonial history of the city, such as dresses and furniture of the Dutch and British colonists, and a collection of local masks and paraphernalia employed in religious rituals on the island. The “Sri Lanka-China Historical Relationship” gallery occupies a room at the very end of the building. Its ceiling is decorated with Chinese-inspired red and gold decorative motifs, and banners representing lions and dragons, traditional symbols of power in China, hang from the walls. The aim of the exhibition is to celebrate the 2000-year relationship between the two countries, which according to the introductory note located at the entrance of the gallery “existed mostly via the Sea Silk Road” and that had the distinctive feature of being always “peaceful and friendly.”

The gallery displays coins and fragments of Chinese porcelain found in Sri Lanka as evidence of the commercial relations between the two countries since ancient times. These cultural relics, however, play a secondary role in the exhibition, whose main aim is the celebration of two Chinese historical figures who visited Sri Lanka in the pre-colonial era: Buddhist monk Fa Xian (法显; 337–422) and Admiral Zheng He (郑和; 1371–1433). Fa Xian—whose golden bust donated by Zhaoxianzhang Hanxuechen International Tour Management Association stands in the middle of the gallery—visited Sri Lanka on his return journey to China by sea after collecting Buddhist scriptures in India. His memoirs, which include references to religious rituals and the political situation in Sri Lanka in the fourth century, remain a precious historical source for researchers of pre-modern history.⁸ The captions describing Fa Xian’s travels underline the religious nature of the early contacts between Sri Lanka and China, claiming that the two countries were, and still are, Buddhist states. Given the centrality of Buddhism to Sinhala identity and culture, to present China as a custodian of Buddhist tradition is an extremely powerful statement aimed at drawing the two societies closer through religious feelings (Holt 2011, 334).

The gallery presents Fa Xian as a symbol of the religious connection between China and Sri Lanka, but the main hero of the exhibition is Admiral Zheng He. By order of Ming emperor Yongle 永乐 (1402–1427), this Muslim admiral led eight expeditions—seven official and one private—in the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433, going as far as the East Coast of Africa (Lo 2012, 333). Because of his role in Chinese maritime expansion, and the size of his fleet, Zheng He is celebrated as a hero in the PRC as well as in Singapore. In recent years, several museums and memorial halls dedicated to his endeavors have been established in China and abroad (Winter 2016, 10).

In the framework of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road project, Zheng He is portrayed as an agent of peace and friendship between China and other nations. The reliability of this portrayal has been subject of scholars’ scrutiny. During the Yuan Dynasty, commercial networks between China and the Islamic world through Southeast Asia and India flourished, but at the end of the Pax Mongolica, maritime trade in the Indian Ocean shrank (Park 2012, 167). The decrease of Chinese maritime trade after the fall of the Mongol rule was caused by the Ming court’s ban on private sea travel (1371) and on travel relations with foreign countries (1381) (Park 2012, 167). While the Ming court attempted to circumscribe the expansion of private trade, it also sought to rebuild China’s power over foreign countries through the re-establishment of a traditional tribute system. Zheng He’s travels were aimed at rebuilding “China’s commercial networks as an integral part of the state’s tribute-base diplomatic order, as well as show off the power of their new empire” (Park 2012, 169). While Park claims that Zheng He’s expeditions were peaceful and not comparable to European colonization project (Park 2012, 200), other scholars have shown that violence was often used during these diplomatic missions (Sen 2006). The case of Sri Lanka is one of the most revealing of the military nature of Zheng He’s expeditions. During his second voyage in 1409, he erected a trilingual stele (in Chinese, Tamil, Persian) in Galle claiming Chinese suzerainty over the island (Lo 2012, 336). During his return to China after his third trip (1409–1411), Zheng He and his squadron were attacked by 50,000 Singhalese lead by Vira Vijaya Bahu VI, the king of Ceylon (reign 1397–1409). The Chinese marched inland and occupied the capital, and the king was taken as a prisoner to China, while a new more friendly Singhalese prince was chosen to rule the island (Lo 2012, 336–37).

Even though calling Zheng He’s missions “peaceful” is anachronistic, the Sri Lanka-China Historical Relationship gallery celebrates the admiral’s visits to the island as the peak of the two countries commercial relations. The plates’ positions in the gallery claim that Zheng He “managed to maintain good rapport with the king and the administrators of the countries he visited” and mention the trilingual stone slab he installed in Galle during one of his trips as a sign of his benevolence towards the island.⁹

While captions describe Zheng He as a guardian of “peace” and “free trade” (another anachronistic concept) to prove China’s interest in maintaining peaceful commercial ties in the country, the dioramas and models exhibited in the gallery endorse a different narrative: they compare Zheng He’s missions to those of his contemporary European explorers, more precisely Christopher Columbus’s (1451–1506) travel to the Americas. For instance, one of the display cases contains the replicas of Zheng He’s ship and one of the “Ships of Christopher Columbus,” accompanied by a detailed description of the measurements of the two. The larger size of Chinese vessels in the Ming Dynasty compared to European vessels is supported by historical sources (Lo 2012, 114; Park 2012, 333), but the aim of this display is not only to inform visitors of the historical details regarding Chinese navigation, but also to prove the superiority of Chinese technology and maritime skills over western equivalents. This display aims at undermining the relevance of western maritime expeditions to celebrate Zheng He’s as a new Christopher Columbus, a comparison which has become common in scholarship despite the fact that Columbus navigated in unknown waters, while Zheng He followed routes already explored by many before him (Park 2012, 195–96). This narrative is strengthened by the content of the larger diorama in the gallery representing Zheng He and his collaborators landing on the coast of Sri Lanka: the men in the group, led by the admiral, wear clothes and hats of western features, and they are represented while pacing around their ship observing the foreign land (Fig. 3). The structure of this diorama has several elements in common with the celebratory images of Columbus arriving in Americas, such as the celebration of a more developed civilization coming to civilize the natives with their superior technical skills.

Fig. 3

Diorama of the arrival of general Zheng He and his men in Sri Lanka in Galle National Museum in August 2018. Picture by the author

While the celebration of Chinese presence in Sri Lanka as peaceful and respectful of local traditions can be interpreted as an attempt to criticize the brutality of western colonialist powers, which exploited the natural resources of the island and tried to convert locals to Christianity, the celebration of Chinese maritime expansion and its comparison to European explorers hide a less peaceful subtext: the superiority of Chinese civilization in comparison with the local one. The not-so-subtle comparison of Zheng He to Columbus, whose endeavor is now considered as the beginning of centuries of suppression of civilizations living in the Americas and of western colonialism, contradicts the peaceful message promoted by the gallery. The celebration of Chinese civilization becomes a hymn to Chinese dominance not dissimilar to the claims of western superiority supported by colonial powers in Sri Lanka. Instead of celebrating the peaceful relations, the Sri Lanka-China Historical Relationship gallery not only promotes a revisionist history of the relationships between the two countries (defined as against historical evidence mirrors of the current nation-states), and instead of promoting equal foreign relations, it inadvertently presents China as a substitute to European colonial powers.

Conclusions

This chapter has analyzed how museums in ex-colonial cities in Asia attempt to construct memories of the Maritime Silk Road forging a new region of memory focused on China’s peaceful rise as the main commercial player in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. It showed how, in the context of the One Belt, One Road initiative, heritage of the maritime networks that connected China to the rest of Asia from the Tang dynasty onwards became a powerful tool to promote the PRC’s political and economic ascent in the region.

The exhibitions taken into consideration share similar aims: to deepen the regional memory of China as the main political and economic power in the region and to challenge the historical and cultural ties that connect these cities with their European colonizers. In this sense, the One Belt, One Road project can be considered a transnational collective memory project as well as an economic one.

The narratives promoted in the three museums and their impacts, however, are adjusted to the history and legal framework of each city. The CCP can control the narrative in history museums in the PRC, and it is steadily extending its cultural and political influence on the Hong Kong’s cultural scene. The Shanghai History Museum reframes the heritage of the Maritime Silk Road to demonstrate that Shanghai was a prosperous port before the Opium Wars, contradicting the popular view that the city was historically irrelevant before the arrival of the (western) colonizers. In the case of Hong Kong, the Maritime Silk Road is used to bind the city to the Mainland, foregrounding the cultural and historical legacies that connect Hong Kong to the PRC. By resurrecting the past glory of China, both museums downplay the impact of the colonial history of the city on its culture and economy.

The case of Sri Lanka is quite different, as the PRC’s links to the country are mostly commercial. The museum in Galle demonstrates how the PRC employs heritage connected to its own history in foreign countries to promote its foreign policies and economic interests. Furthermore, it also shows that while museums in China do criticize the terrible consequences of western colonialism, this message gets lost in the PRC’s self-promotion program. The Sri Lanka-China Historical Relationship gallery in the Galle National Museum does not criticize western colonialism of the island, instead it compares the deeds of Chinese explorers to those of contemporary European mariners, also implying that Chinese technology was superior. The exhibition revolves around Chinese travelers and Chinese culture, while the agency of local authorities and the accompanying violence is completely overlooked. If the reframing of the past is a reflection of present goals, the Sri Lanka-China Historical Relationship gallery betrays the neo-colonial ambitions of the PRC. Nevertheless, the PRC’s political power in Sri Lanka is not comparable to its power to shape public history in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Despite its strong message, the Sri Lanka-China Historical Relationship gallery occupies only a small room of the whole museum, suggesting that while China uses its financial influence to intervene in Sri Lanka’s cultural matters, there are limitations to how effectively it can promote its ideology on the island.

It is difficult, and perhaps too early, to assess the impact of these exhibitions on visitors in different cities and countries. The success of the PRC in changing the memory of the Asian region to a more Sinocentric vision of the past depends not only on the reframing of the heritage of the Maritime Silk Road, but also on its ability to create actual peaceful commercial and cultural connections among countries in the Asia region.