Erecting a Gurdwara on Queen’s Road East

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tens of thousands of Sikhs emigrated from Punjab to Southeast and East Asia to purse a better livelihood. At the same time, the Singh Sabha Movement was gradually gaining momentum in Punjab, strengthening the Sikh identity. Furthermore, Sikh soldiers and policemen were deployed widely in Asia to safeguard the interests of the British Empire. This chapter argues that the three seemingly irrelevant historical events (the modern Sikh diaspora, the Singh Sabha Movement, and the Indian expedition during the Boxer Uprising in China) were essentially interrelated. The convergent point of these moments was the erection of a Sikh temple (gurdwara) on Queen’s Road East, Wanchai, Hong Kong Island, in 1902. Taking this event as a case study, this chapter seeks to explore the Singh Sabha Movement through the lens of the Sikh diasporic network and the imperial network. It also unveils the Indian face of the British Empire by the turn of the twentieth century, when Indians, rather than the British, were the protagonists and engineers.

China in the Popular Imagination

The crisis in China at the turn of the twentieth century, beginning with the Boxer Uprising and the ensuing International Expedition, elicited tremendous sympathy and support for China and the Chinese from people in India. As contemporary books and articles highlighted in this chapter show, China exerted a powerful hold over the popular imagination in India because its people saw themselves and their experiences as colonized subjects reflected in the tumultuous events in China. Vernacular newspapers in Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu echoed similar concerns and sympathies; their reports on China also invariably sided with their Asian neighbour and lamented the growing might and influence of Western powers in the region. Many voices also expressed concern that the colonization of China would mean the end of an Asia they envisioned themselves part of, with ties particularly strong and intimate with China because the two countries were bound together by geography, history, civilization, and the shared experience of Western imperialism and colonialism.

Drawing Stereotypes

This article explores Russian political caricatures regarding the Boxer Uprising (1900) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) that appeared in two of the empire’s largest newspapers, Novoe vremia (The new times) and Russkoe slovo (The Russian word). The article argues that caricaturists both poked fun at international politics and crafted visual identities for their readers of Russia’s European, Chinese, and Japanese neighbors. The images examined here sketch out the crowded and dangerous stage of global imperialism, while also pointing toward Russia’s place within it. In the process, they articulate stylized notions of Europeanness and Asianness that had important connotations for how each periodical depicted the actors in each conflict.

Ambiguity in Parallel

This chapter provides an analysis of Gene Luen Yang’s two-volume set Boxers and Saints, which offers historical fiction about the Boxer Uprising in the visual medium of comics. Embedded with numerous historical references, these graphic narratives unfold around two fictional characters who represent the complexity of a particularly contested period in Chinese history. Little Bao (a Boxer who is inspired by nationalism) and Four-Girl (a Christian convert who seeks belonging through faith) are on opposite sides of the conflict at the time, thus presenting parallel stories that prompt the reader to contemplate the nuances in the historical past. Both characters come to terms with who they are and what they believe in while being spiritually guided by the first Chinese emperor Ch’in Shih-huang and Joan of Arc, respectively. This chapter discusses how Yang’s work visualizes the intersectional images of the “thousand palms with eyes” of Guan Yin (the Buddhist goddess of compassion) and of Jesus Christ and how they present what Paul A. Cohen has called a “historically reconstructed past” in which the Boxers and the Chinese Christians’ encounters are visualized as “event, experience and myth” at the end of the nineteenth century.