Hu Xiansu mistakenly identified as Chen Duxiu in photo alongside Hu Shih

Jeremy Brown Discussion

Hi everyone,

Following up on Joseph W. Esherick's "Tracking an Iconic Photograph" (PRC History 1, no. 3, Dec. 2015), I feel compelled to write this self-criticism because I have been mistakenly using a different iconic photo circulating on the internet.  I don't remember how I originally found the image, but I've been using it on PowerPoint slide in my modern China class to discuss Chen Duxiu and Hu Shih, even asking the students to analyze the mens' clothing and bearing.  Two days ago, after a fruitful discussion about gowns, top hats, canes, glasses, and leather shoes, an undergraduate named Walter approached me and said, "That's not Chen Duxiu, it's Hu Xiansu."  He showed me Hu Xiansu's Wikipedia page.  I thanked him, promised I would look into it, and...it looks like Walter was right:

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4c2373c30102vkoa.html

http://wap.sciencenet.cn/blogview.aspx?id=943544

Many Chinese books, as well as the New World Encyclopedia online, reproduce this error, confirming Esherick's point that scholars should treat photos as critically as we treat textual sources.  Time to revise my lecture slides.  Hu Xiansu deserves it.  

Jeremy Brown

4 Replies

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非常好的一个澄清。读胡宗刚关于胡先骕的文献时看到过他的那篇小文章,没想到这张照片的流传这么广,误解这么深。

Jeremy,

Thanks for sharing. Your post prompted me to correct an iconic photo of May Fourth (1919), often used on the web, in textbooks, and which I too have often used in teaching.
The photo shows protesters at Tiananmen during May Fourth, yet I often wondered why they are wearing jackets in May, and why the trees look barren. The mystery was solved when I accidentally came across information of the photo at the digitized Sidney Gamble archives at Duke, where the date is noted as November 1919. The jackets and trees now make perfect sense. The photo can be seen at:
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gamble_312-1783/#info

Shakhar Rahav

Shakhar

Thanks, Jeremy, for the initial post, and to Shakhar for the follow-on correction. We just used the Gamble photograph in a poster announcing our spring lectures at the Fairbank Center, mis-identifying it as taken on May 4 1919. We'll be issuing a clarification too now.

I just checked the Spence book from which we took the photograph, and the caption there is careful not to make the same mistake. It states words to the effect: a gathering at Tianmen, which was the site of the May 4 1919 protest.

best wishes,

arunabh

Thank you, Jeremy (if I may), for criculating the note. Also thank others for further demonstrating the note's significance. This makes me feel "self-critical" in the other direction. Last April, I published a paper regarding Hu Xiansu and other Chinese biologists working in Nanjing during the Republican period, which used the exact photo. Though having cited the correct information, I have not mentioned the photo's wide-spread misidentification in the paper or elsewhere. Jeremy, you certainly set a good example for me here. On this note, I also recall Sigrid Schmalzer has recently helped to correct a long-term mistransliteration of the family name of Le Tianyu (乐天宇), an influential Chinese Lysenkoist, with the correct transliteration and an elegant footnote in her book Red Revolution, Green Revolution.

If any of you has interest in the cultural significance of this photo for science and traditionalism in Republican China, my recent paper can be found at the journal Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences: http://hsns.ucpress.edu/content/46/2/154. It's freely downloadable on my academia.edu page as well. The photo is cited on page 174.

Lijing