Library exhibition marks 600th anniversary of Tianjin

By Franklin Crawford

This Chinese Year of the Monkey coincidentally marks the 600th anniversary of the historic Chinese city of Tianjin, the subject of a spring exhibit in the Hirschland Gallery of Cornell's Kroch Library. The exhibit, titled "600 Years of Urban Development and Planning in and Around Tianjin," is free and open to the public and runs through June 5. Hirschland Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., and Saturday, 1-5 p.m.

Curated from holdings in Cornell's famous Wason Collection on East Asia, the Tianjin exhibit includes historical photographs, architectural drawings, cartographic materials and many other documents and artifacts.

"This exhibition aims to show how Tianjin developed as a colonial, urban 'collage city' of very diverse styles," said Thomas Hahn, curator of the Wason Collection. The display also reveals "how its various components were defined architecturally and socially; and how the parts constituted a functioning whole that dominated most of the economic and cultural landscape of northern China for almost 100 years."

Tianjin (formerly spelled Tientsin, in English) is located in northeast China, about a 90-minute train ride southeast of Beijing. Although modern Tianjin is home to more than 7 million people and is China's third-largest seaport, the municipality includes more historic foreign buildings than any other Chinese city. As a so-called treaty port during the late Qing and Republican era (circa 1860-1949), Tianjin's leaders were forced to grant economic and territorial "concessions" to a number of foreign powers. Thus American, British, Belgian, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Italian interests manifested themselves spatially around the original, walled Chinese city of Tianjin. These controversial, imposed concessions -- in Tianjin and elsewhere in China -- were targets of the forces of the Boxer Uprising in 1900, an unsuccessful effort to oust the unwelcome foreigners. Parts of the Kroch Library display reflect that particular uprising in word and image.

Mapping and recharting the city of Tianjin is a study in the highly complex socio-economic relations between the East and the West. Today, parts of the old city retain a European character, even as this sprawling manufacturing center continues to grow and expand outwards.

This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Cornell's East Asia Program, the Cornell Council for the Arts, Cornell alumnus Jack Clarke, LLB '52, and Michael A. Tomlan, associate professor of city and regional planning.

An online version of the exhibition also is available at http://wason.library.cornell.edu/Tianjin. For more information, contact Hahn at 255-5759.