Landscape Photography, Infrastructure, and Armed Conflict in a Chinese Travel Anthology from 1935: The Case of Dongnan lansheng

During the 1930s, a great number of travel-related texts and images were published in China; they were printed in specialized journals, pictorials, newspapers, anthologies of travel writing, and photobooks. The most sumptuous of these publications was a book titled Dongnan lansheng in Chinese. Edited by a Southeastern Transportation Tour Propaganda Committee and sponsored by the Construction Bureau of Zhejiang Province, it was part of a public-relations campaign that promoted the completion of highways and a railroad in the southeastern provinces. The achievements of modern engineering are, however, not extensively covered in the book; instead, it is an anthology of travelogues and poetry, richly illustrated with a few paintings and numerous photographs. This article examines how the photographs in Dongnan lansheng negotiate the tasks the book aims to fulfill -- to promote travel on modern roads, to map the scenic sites of formerly remote regions, and to convey both the movement of travel and the conventions of Chinese landscape imagery in the medium of photography.