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‘He’ll Roast All Subjects That May Need the Roasting’: Puck and Mr Punch in Nineteenth-Century China

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Asian Punches

Abstract

This chapter examines two Punch-inspired English-language periodicals published in colonial enclaves in nineteenth-century China: The China Punch (1867–1868, 1872–1876) and Puck, or the Shanghai Charivari (April 1871-November 1872). The former was a subsidiary publication of the newspaper The China Mail, which since its inception in 1845 had been the ‘Official Organ of all Government Notifications’ in the British colony of Hong Kong; the latter was issued quarterly by a printing and stationary company in treaty-port Shanghai. Both periodicals featured staples akin to London’s Punch (1841–1992) such as whole-page caricatures, comedic verses, wry commentaries on local society and politics, filler jokes, and editorials written in the voice of their namesake trickster. Each struggled to solicit contributions from its small Anglophone community and ultimately ceased publication upon the abrupt departure of a proprietor.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    My thanks to Andrew Rodekohr at Harvard and Michel Hockx and Joshua Mostow (visiting) at SOAS for helping me obtain these two periodicals. Thanks also to Hans Harder for inviting me to Heidelberg and to workshop participants for several days of stimulating presentations and discussions.

  2. 2.

    The terms ‘colony’ and ‘treaty port’ denote a basic legal distinction between these two locales. My use of the term ‘colonial’ throughout this chapter posits a ‘colonial mindset’ or ‘colonial attitude’, which, in my reading of these and other primary materials, were common to British inhabitants of both locations.

  3. 3.

    In Shanghai, for instance, Puck ceased publication in 1872, the same year that Ernest Major founded the more enduring Shenbao, from which later emerged the influential pictorial, Dianshizhai huabao (1884–1898). To note just a few historical studies that focus on print culture in later periods: Barbara Mittler’s A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004) begins with the founding of Shenbao in 1872; Christopher A. Reed’s Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004) begins with the introduction of lithography to China in 1876 by Jesuit missionaries; Catherine Vance Yeh’s studies of the Shanghai entertainment press focus on Youxi bao 遊戲報 (founded in 1897) and its contemporaries, though they also extend earlier. See her “Shanghai Leisure, Print Entertainment, and the Tabloids, xiaobao 小報,” in Joining the Global Public: Word, Image, and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, ed. Rudolf G. Wagner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 201–33; and Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, & Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). Robert E. Hegel’s Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) briefly discusses Western-style cartoons in a comparative, rather than genealogical, context. Jonathan Hay has noted that the illustrated magazine The Far East (1876–1878) helped introduce photographs to Shanghai print culture, transforming illustration style. See: “Notes on Chinese Photography and Advertising in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai,” in Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s–1930s, ed. Jason C. Kuo (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2007), 95–119.

  4. 4.

    According to one estimate, Shanghai accounted for 86 % of books published in China between the 1880s and 1937. See: Alexander Des Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 17.

  5. 5.

    Alan R. Young, Punch and Shakespeare in the Victorian Era (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 11. On Punch and ‘Shakespeareanity’, see Young’s Chap. 2, esp. 69–70 on Punch’s famous reverse caricature of Shakespeare as Chinese, inspired by an 1842 London exhibition of Chinese artefacts.

  6. 6.

    See: “A Prejudice” [1939], in Qian Zhongshu, Human, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays, ed. Christopher G. Rea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 62–65.

  7. 7.

    See, for example: Hongying Liu-Lengyel, “Chinese Cartoons: History and Present Status” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1993); John A. Lent, “Comic Art,” in Handbook of Chinese Popular Culture, ed. Wu Dingbo and Patrick D. Murphy (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), 279–306; Chang-Tai Hung, “The Fuming Image: Cartoons and Public Opinion in Late Republican China, 1945 to 1949,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36, no.1 (1994): 122–45. Of these, Lent’s ‘Comic Art,’ a historical overview, has the most to say about the nineteenth century, albeit from a bird’s-eye view.

  8. 8.

    For a representative example of this rhetoric, see Fang Hanqi 方漢奇, Zhongguo jindai baokanshi 中國近代報刊史 (a history of late Qing and early Republican periodicals) (Taiyuan: Shanxi Educational Press, 1996), 31–38 passim, which appears under the heading, ‘wei zhiminzhuyi yaoqi nahan de waiwen baozhi 為殖民主義搖旗呐喊的外文報紙 (Foreign-language newspapers waving the flag and shouting the slogans of colonialism)’. The only book to date focused on foreign-language periodicals in early modern Shanghai is Shen Shuang’s Cosmopolitan Publics: Anglophone Print Culture in Semi-Colonial Shanghai (Camden: Rutgers University Press, 2009), which is concerned primarily with configurations of cosmopolitanism from the 1920s to the 1940s.

  9. 9.

    See, for example: Rudolf G. Wagner, “The Role of the Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere,” China Quarterly 142, no. 6 (1995): 423–43; Wagner, Joining the Global Public; and Wagner, “Don’t Mind the Gap! The Foreign-language Press in Late-Qing and Republican China,” China Heritage Quarterly 30/31 (June/Sept. 2012): http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=030_wagner.inc&issue=030 (accessed 15 March 2013).

  10. 10.

    Various Chinese terms for cartoon, comic, and caricature have held currency at different points in time since the nineteenth century. The current umbrella term is manhua 漫畫, from the Japanese manga 漫畫, whose popularisation in China beginning in the 1920s is generally credited to the famed Chinese manhua artist Feng Zikai 豊子愷 (1898–1975), the subject of the monograph: Geremie Barmé, An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898–1975) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Fengcihua 諷刺話 (satirical drawing, caricature) and lianhuanhua 連環畫 (comic strip, cartoon storybook) are just two of many subcategories. While scholars have differing opinions about the exact scope of manhua, in practice it is used to denote a wide range of pictorial humour and satire. In the pages of China Punch and Puck, the terms that appear are ‘cartoon’, ‘caricature’, and ‘drawing’.

  11. 11.

    Cartoonist Ye Qianyu 葉淺予 (1907–1996), for example, was an enthusiastic reader of The China Press (aka Ta-lu bao 大陸報, 1911–1941, 1945–1949), an English-language newspaper founded by three Americans, which serialised John McManus’s comic strip Bringing Up Father (1913–2000), which in turn inspired Ye’s hit comic strip ‘Mr Wang’. See: Ye Qianyu 葉淺予, Ye Qianyu zizhuan: Xixu cangsang ji liunian 葉淺予自傳:細敘滄桑記流年 (The Autobiography of Ye Qianyu: Carefully Narrating the Changes of the Ages, Recording the Passing Years) (Beijing: Shehui kexue chubanshe, 2006), 64. (Ye mistakenly gives the English title of the newspaper as China Daily.)

  12. 12.

    Bi and Huang state unconvincingly that ‘Although its timely reflections on society and current events bear some resemblance to cartoons of current events (shishi manhua 時事漫畫), they diverge in the specific manner of their conception and execution. Thus, we believe that the earlier denotation of this periodical as “China’s first cartoon periodical” is inappropriate’. See: Bi Keguan 畢克官 and Huang Yuanlin 黃遠林, Zhongguo manhua shi 中國漫畫史 (a history of cartoons in China) (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1986), 16–17, esp. 16, note 2.

  13. 13.

    See: Lei Qinfeng 雷勤風 (Christopher G. Rea), “Jietan xiangyu de ciyuanxue: Lun Qingmo Minchu de Shanghai suyu tushuo 街談巷語的辭源學—論清末民初的上海俗語圖說 (alleyway etymology: illustrated dictionaries of Shanghai slang, 1900s–1940s),” in Zhongguo jinxiandai baokan yu wenhua yanjiu: diba jie guoji qingnian xuezhe hanxue huiyi lunwenji 中國近現代報刊與文化研究:第八屆國際青年學者漢學會議論文集 (Early Modern Print Culture in China: Papers from the Eighth International Junior Scholars Conference on Sinology), ed. Cheng Wen-huei 鄭文惠 (Taipei: Huayi chubanshe, forthcoming).

  14. 14.

    Dianshizhai huabao has subsequently been recognised as a catalyst for the incorporation of images in the Chinese print media. See, for example: Wagner, “Foreign Community”; Christopher A. Reed, “Re/Collecting the Sources: Shanghai Dianshizhai Pictorial and Its Place in Historical Memories, 1884–1949,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 44–72; Ye Xiaoqing, The Dianshizhai Pictorial: Shanghai Urban Life, 1884–1898 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Centre for Chinese Studies, 2003); and Rudolf G. Wagner, “Joining the Global Imaginaire: The Shanghai Illustrated Newspaper Dianshizhai huabao,” in Wagner, Joining the Global Public, 105–73. Rudolf Wagner, for example, has credited Major with ‘pioneer[ing] the use of the image in the new mass media’, adding that, ‘[t]he Dianshizhai huabao, which he published from 1882, established the illustrated paper in the style of the Illustrated London News, Harpers [New Monthly Magazine, est. 1850] or The Graphic [est. 1869] among the Chinese media’. See: Wagner, “Foreign Community,” 440. On the adaptation of foreign images and news items into the Dianshizhai, see: Julia Henningsmeier, “The Foreign Sources of Dianshizhai Huabao 點石齋畫報, a Nineteenth Century Shanghai Illustrated Magazine,” Ming Qing Yanjiu (1998), 59–91.

  15. 15.

    Wagner, “Foreign Community,” 426.

  16. 16.

    Richard Altick, for example, distinguishes Punch from one of its important predecessors by noting: ‘Also absent from Figaro in London [est. 1831], also, were the social satire and whimsy that characterized the writings and pictures of the two men who most influenced the direction the new weekly was to take by showing how it was possible to avoid the gamy flavor that had permeated the humorous journalism of the 1830s’. See: Richard D. Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution 1841–1851 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), 3.

  17. 17.

    For an in-depth discussion of the distinction between the totalising vision of farce and the mimetic or ‘significative’ practice of satire, see: Edith Kern, The Absolute Comic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

  18. 18.

    Gillian Bickley, “Early Beginnings of the British Community (1841–1898),” in Foreign Communities in Hong Kong, 1840s–1950s, ed. Cindy Yik-yi Chu (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 17–39; 18.

  19. 19.

    The other two were: Hong Kong Daily Press (1857–1941) and The Daily Advertiser (1871–1873), which later became The Hong Kong Times: Daily Advertiser and Shipping Gazette, (1873–1876). Another major English newspaper, The Friend of China and Hongkong Gazette (est. 1842) had recently closed, in 1859. Since 1858 The China Mail had also published a Chinese edition. See: Lin Yutang, A History of the Press and Public Opinion in China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1936), 80–81. Lin notes an ‘interesting point was the fact that the earliest Chinese dailies started in the 1860’s as Chinese editions or issues of some foreign daily papers’ (87) including The China Mail, suggesting that China Punch should have been known to some Chinese readers. For a bibliography of Hong Kong newspapers up to 1979 (which does not list China Punch), see: Kan Lai-bing and Grace H. L. Chu, Newspapers of Hong Kong, 1841–1979 (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1981).

  20. 20.

    A typical issue might feature digests from, for example, the Manchester Guardian, Liverpool Times, Hallowell Gazette, South Australian Register, the Canton Register, and ‘our overland edition’.

  21. 21.

    Bickley, “British Community,” 26. Bickley later makes the point that there existed ‘no single British community, but several communities’ (33).

  22. 22.

    Quoted in N.J. Giradot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 69.

  23. 23.

    The original cover was used for 16 issues, from 28 May 1867 to 9 January 1868. Quotations from: Wendy Siuyi Wong, Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 31.

  24. 24.

    One Punch historian notes that ‘In the first part of the nineteenth century the hoax was a favourite kind of practical joke […]. The jester’s mask that was an emblem of [Punch’s] trade enabled it to keep a straight face, thus lending plausibility to its fictions’. See: Altick, Punch, xxi.

  25. 25.

    Some scholars interpret ‘Five wits’ as meaning ‘five senses’.

  26. 26.

    The China Punch 2, no.1, November 1872 (no date given), 3. This is Mr Punch’s first, but not last, China dream. One later caricature (The China Punch 2, no. 5, 20 February 1873, 6) has Mr Punch reclining on a couch, a copy of The China Mail and an opium pipe by his side, dreaming of aspects of contemporary Hong Kong life, such as late steamers and horse racing.

  27. 27.

    The China Punch 2, no. 17, 25 May 1874, 12.

  28. 28.

    Puck (1871–1918) was to become the United States’ first successful humour magazine featuring cartoons and caricatures, publishing both English and German editions, both of which gained wide popularity for their timely political satire and creative illustrations. The magazine soon moved its operations to New York City (the German edition in 1876, the English edition in 1877).

  29. 29.

    Bickley, “British Attitudes,” 47. The telegraph first reached Shanghai (from Hong Kong, via underwater cable) the same month that Puck, or the Shanghai Charivari first appeared (April 1871), so it is highly unlikely that its creators would have even heard of the St. Louis Puck, much less been able to peruse its layout, in advance of their first issue. On China’s nineteenth-century communications infrastructure, see: Erik Baark, Lightning Wires: The Telegraph and China’s Technological Modernization, 1860–1890 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997), 82. For a history of the telegraph in Hong Kong, see: Austin Coates, Quick Tidings of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1990).

  30. 30.

    Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren Building Shanghai: The Story of China’s Gateway (Chichester: Wiley-Academy Press, 2006), 66.

  31. 31.

    Ibid, 251–52. The total foreign population of Shanghai remained under 5,000 until 1895, when it began a rapid rise that continued until the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937.

  32. 32.

    It changed its name from The North-China Herald in 1864. Like The China Mail, it also published a Chinese edition, Shanghai Xinbao 上海新報 (1863–1866), which attracted readers with news about the Taipings. A new Chinese edition, Hubao 滬報, was founded in 1882 and headed by Sinologist Frederic Henry Balfour. See: Roswell S. Britton, The Chinese Periodical Press, 1800–1912 [Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh,1933], reprint. ed. (Taipei: Ch’eng-wen Publishing Company, 1966), 49. On The North-China Herald as a ‘globalising’ force in Shanghai, see: Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Global Shanghai, 1850–2010: A History in Fragments (New York: Routledge, 2009), 21–33.

  33. 33.

    A weekly edition, Shanghai Budget and Weekly Courier, was issued beginning 1871. Another major English-language paper, The Celestial Empire (1874–1929), was founded a few years later. Three short-lived French papers were reportedly published between 1870 and 1873. See the entry on “Press, European” in Samuel Couling, The Encyclopaedia Sinica (London: Oxford University Press, 1917).

  34. 34.

    Like its American cousin, the Walshes’ Puck in its pages invokes its namesake’s famous exclamation, ‘What fools these mortals be!’ though not on its cover, where we simply see the clambering and tumbling fools.

  35. 35.

    The cartoons are preceded by a full-page caricature of an extremely tall gentleman whose height puns on him having been ‘Too Long in China!’ See: Puck, or the Shanghai Charivari 4, 1 January 1872, 52–53.

  36. 36.

    The dreaming British expatriate is something of a complement to nineteenth-century European representations of China as the ‘sleeping dragon’, which Eric Reinders calls a ‘pervasive metaphor consistent with other metaphors of mindlessness’ such as opium-drugged, mentally deficient, diseased, and atrophied. (See: Eric Robert Reinders, Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 52.) The inaugural issue of Puck, 1 April 1871, 7, playfully alludes to the ‘China wakes’ cliché in a self-advertising cartoon showing a personified ‘China’ past (sleeping), present (waking), and future (grinning while reading Puck)—that is, China awakening to humour For the China Awakening Trope ee Rudolf G. Wagner, “China ‘Asleep’ and ‘Awakening’. A Study in Conceptualizing Asymmetry and Coping With It”, Transcultural Studies 1 (2011): 4–135.

  37. 37.

    Puck, or the Shanghai Charivari 1, 1 April 1871, 1–2. All excerpts keep to original punctuation.

  38. 38.

    As early as 1858 the Hong Kong Colonial Office announced it would abolish racial preference from legislation, a pledge renewed by Governor Richard Graves MacDonnell in 1866. See: Gillian Bickley, “British Attitudes Toward Hong Kong in the Nineteenth Century,” in Foreign Communities in Hongkong 1840s–1950s, ed. Cindy Yik-yi Chu (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 39–61; 45.

  39. 39.

    Wasserstrom, Global Shanghai, 24.

  40. 40.

    Such pervasive bias in the Western-language press provoked biliterate Chinese such as Wang Tao 王鞱 (1828–1897) to advocate the establishment of Chinese-run Western-language newspapers to counter Western misrepresentations of the Chinese. Britton cites Wang as arguing that ‘The Chinese should establish foreign-language newspapers to convert the foreigners. The foreigners have established daily papers at the treaty ports. […] Their general tendency is to praise the foreigners and to belittle the Chinese, to the extent of utter falsification, representing black as white, and confusing right and wrong. The Western readers generally know only their own foreign languages, and receive as true whatever their papers say. In international issues, the words that first reach the ears exert the greatest influence. The readers are biased from the beginning, and so it is difficult for China to argue. If we were in a position to guide opinion, and could set forth carefully the history of each particular issue, then the rights of the case might be manifested. Then how could the foreigners play their tricks?’ See: Britton, The Chinese Periodical Press, 44–45.

  41. 41.

    James Parton, Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and Many Lands (New York: Harper & Bros., 1877), 191. Referring to Punch and Judy style street puppetry, Parton likens the Chinese Empire to ‘an immense fair’ and speculates that ‘[t]he Orient knew Punch perhaps ages before England saw him’.

  42. 42.

    Wong, Manhua, 31.

  43. 43.

    Reinders, Borrowed Gods, 39.

  44. 44.

    See, for example, the caricature above ‘Never seed the dawg your Vurship’ (The China Punch 2, no. 19, 16 October 1874, 13) and ‘I gif you my vord of honour’ (The China Punch 3, no. 7, 22 November 1876, 2). Ricardo K. S. Mak notes that, early on, Hong Kong’s small German community tried to hide their German identity and assimilate into British society. With the establishment of the German Empire under Otto von Bismark in 1871, however, German national identity consciousness led to increased tensions with the British. See: Ricardo K. S. Mak, “Nineteenth-Century German Community,” in Foreign Communities in Hong Kong, 1840s–1950s, ed. Cindy Yik-yi Chu (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 61–85; 68, 75.

  45. 45.

    The China Punch 2, no. 7, 24 April 1974, 6. Much fodder for both magazines’ humour was drawn from news reports in other periodicals. China at the time had foreign-language publications in English, Japanese, Portuguese, French, German and Russian. See: Fang, Zhongguo jindai baokanshi, 31.

  46. 46.

    Charles G. Leland, Pidgin-English Sing-Song (London: Trübner, & Co. Ltd, 1876), 1.

  47. 47.

    Ibid, 9.

  48. 48.

    Puck, or the Shanghai Charivari 5, 1 May 1872, 62–63.

  49. 49.

    Puck, or the Shanghai Charivari 2, 1 July 1871, 21.

  50. 50.

    Puck, or the Shanghai Charivari 1, 1 April 1871, 2.

  51. 51.

    The China Punch 2, no.19, 16 October 1874, 15. ‘On horror’s head horrors accumulate’ (Othello III, iii, 370).

  52. 52.

    Excerpted from: The China Punch 2, no.19, 16 October 1874, 2.

  53. 53.

    Puck, or the Shanghai Charivari 1, 1 April 1871, inside cover.

  54. 54.

    Metaphors of China being broken or in pieces (or carved up like a melon, as seen in I-Wei Wu’s chapter, Participating in Global Affairs: The Chinese Cartoon Monthly Shanghai Puck) were to become even more common in the early twentieth century, after the collapse of the Qing dynasty.

  55. 55.

    The literature on this topic is vast, with much attention paid to canonical texts such as Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904). For a theoretical introduction to gender and Orientalism, see: Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  56. 56.

    In a much later cross-cultural roundabout, the bilingual intellectual Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895–1976) promoted the scamp as the centrepiece of his ‘wise and merry’ humanistic philosophy. See: Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (New York: The John Day Company, 1937), 11–14.

  57. 57.

    Wong, Manhua, 12–13.

  58. 58.

    Parton, Caricature, 196–1997. This account of Chinese misreading of Western humour (albeit with Western agency) recalls the 2002 case of the Beijing Evening News publishing a freelance journalist’s plagiarism/translation of a parodic item from The Onion humour magazine about the U.S. Congress threatening to relocate to the south unless the Capitol dome is rebuilt with a retractable roof. See: http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/06/53048, accessed 21 April 2010.

  59. 59.

    See, for instance, Punch’s satirical reaction to an 1842 Chinese exhibition in London shortly after the First Opium War, as described in Altick, Punch, 615–16. For a detailed analysis of how the periodical Dianshizhai huabao helped mediate Chinese perceptions of foreigners during the late nineteenth century, see Henningsmeier, “Foreign Sources”.

  60. 60.

    The Japan Gazette 28, no. 1, 8 July 1881, 105.

  61. 61.

    The China Punch once felt compelled to answer criticisms even from its parent publication: ‘CHINA SNAIL—We are obliged to you for your handsome tribute to our humble efforts. So you think that “some of our contributions are indifferent, and some—well worse”, do you? No, Sir, nothing that appears in our columns is “indifferent or—well, worse”. There may be some articles, the wit of which is so transcendent and the satire so keen that it is beyond your appreciation. A “China Snail” is after all a thing that crawls along but slowly. We are far too fast for a Snail’. (The China Punch 2, no.5, 20 February 1873, 3).

  62. 62.

    Altick, Punch, xxii.

  63. 63.

    See: Wong, Manhua, 31; Bi and Huang, Manhua shi, 17. The cartoon appears on p. 6 of the illustration insert in Bi and Huang’s book, reproduced from a 1903 Shanghai reprint. The authors’ comment that the illustration ‘shows that the rise of China’s early modern print cartoons had begun at least by 1903’ (17) is misleading in that it excludes both colonial Hong Kong and cartoons drawn and published by foreigners in China.

  64. 64.

    Punch-style cartoons also appear in a book published earlier that decade: ‘VALDAR’ and others, Yiqian jiubai ershi nian Zhongguo lishi chahua wushi’er fu 一千九百十二年中國歷史插畫伍拾弍幅 (the history of China for 1912 in 52 cartoons) (Shanghai: The National Review, 1912).

  65. 65.

    This multilingualism was inspired by Tokyo Puck (est. 1905), which published captions in Japanese, Chinese and English, and Shanghai Puck, which focused on contemporary politics, and whose founder had visited Japan in 1917. Tokyo Puck, whose circulation reached 100,000, was sold in China, Taiwan, and Korea as well as in Japan.

  66. 66.

    Ye, Ye Qianyu zizhuan, 112.

  67. 67.

    See: Peter Duus, “Presidential Address: Weapons of the Weak, Weapons of the Strong—The Development of the Japanese Political Cartoon,” The Journal of Asian Studies 60, no. 4 (November 2001): 965–97; esp., 974.

  68. 68.

    Catherine Vance Yeh, “The Life-style of Four Wenren in Late Qing Shanghai,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 57, no.2 (December 1997): 419–70; 420.

  69. 69.

    ‘Sapajou’ is a double pun on Sapojnikoff’s last name and the French word for a species of monkey. Some of his cartoons have been republished as: Sapajou with R.T. Payton-Griffin, Shanghai’s Schemozzle: Volumes 1 and 2 Together (Shanghai: Earnshaw Books, 2007). Others appear in Five Months of War (1938) and Carl Crow’s Four Hundred Million Customers (1937). One version of a Richard Rigby essay on Sapajou is available online at: http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=022_sapajou.inc&issue=022, accessed August 20, 2010.

  70. 70.

    China Punch’s demise also coincided with the merger of its parent publication, The China Mail, with The Evening Mail and Shipping List in 1876, suggesting that business considerations may have also contributed to its termination.

  71. 71.

    See the contribution by Barbara Mittler, the epilogue, in this volume.

  72. 72.

    Yeh, “Shanghai Leisure,” 204.

  73. 73.

    See: Christopher G. Rea, “Comedy and Cultural Entrepreneurship in Xu Zhuodai’s Huaji Shanghai,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 40–91.

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    Christopher G. Rea

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  1. Languages and Literature, Heidelberg University Department of Modern South Asian, Heidelberg, Germany

    Hans Harder

  2. Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg, Germany

    Barbara Mittler

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Rea, C.G. (2013). ‘He’ll Roast All Subjects That May Need the Roasting’: Puck and Mr Punch in Nineteenth-Century China. In: Harder, H., Mittler, B. (eds) Asian Punches. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28607-0_16

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