The parlor of the metropolis public parks and open space in the British concessions of China, 1842-1937
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2016
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| 01front.pdf | contents and abstract | 417.64 kB | |||
| 02whole.pdf | thesis | 8.81 MB |
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NO FULL TEXT AVAILABLE. This thesis contains 3rd party copyright material. The hardcopy may be available for consultation at the UTS Library. ----- Formed in the globalizing encounters between Asia and Europe, the first modern parks in China became established in the foreign concessions. The public parks in the British concessions were the most numerous. They developed their own characteristics, aesthetics and social values, demonstrating both similarities and differences with their counterparts in Great Britain and native Chinese cities. These designed landscapes played a fundamental role in the formation of the public parks in China, becoming incorporated into the history of Chinese gardens, and also provided a window through which to examine settlement practices of the British in China. Through construction of public parks in the concessions, the British wrote colonial modernity in stone.
Employing historical documents, newspapers, photographs, maps and other sources collected in archives in Great Britain, China, the United States, Australia and Belgium, this dissertation examines the multiple relationships between social activities and natural-social spaces of all the British concessions in China: Shanghai, Tianjin, Hankou, Jiujiang, Zhenjiang, Guangzhou, and Xiamen. It reveals how the Chinese authorities adopted geographical separation and boundary making as spatial approaches to limit the activities of the settlers and prevent interaction with local Chinese, while the British attempted to locate, establish, map and expand their concessions through negotiation. Consequently, the British concessions formed unique urban landscapes and administrative systems, which also ultimately coalesced to establish ‘model’ foreign concessions. With the settlers in tension between triangulated identities of settler, indigene, and subject of the British Empire, the landscape aesthetics of public parks strayed from the Imperial model, and merged, through local affiliations and cosmopolitan networks, to frame independent creations of hybrid landscape forms. By introducing various infrastructure and ideas, and instantiated in the symbolic and physical life of the residents, the uses and functions of the parks transformed from decoration of the concession to necessity of the British concessions
In doing so, this study not only provides a critical examination of unique places that developed as a part of the British informal empire, but also reveals the presence of the British in China by negotiating with the conflicting parties, which offers a comparative international insights for colonial and post-colonial research in Asia and beyond. Furthermore, it also contributes to providing a documentary history for the conservation of these historical urban landscapes during the rapid urbanization of Chinese cities today.
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