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Westerners and Chinese might have conceived of
– and attempted to shape – Chinese identity.” 203
On the eve of the first Opium War, the balance
of power between traditional China and the
modern West shifted clearly westward. For
example, Ari Larissa Heinrich argues in his
study on a series of medical portraits that
accompanied the American Reverend Peter
Parker on his fundraising mission to medical
schools and Protestant authorities in the West in
106 the 1830s, that Lamqua’s portraiture can be
considered as “an important ideological resource
concerning visions of a newly emerging and
Fig. 3.27. Chinese man 204
increasingly racialized Chinese identity.”
with an ulcurous tumor
(Figure 3.27.) Furthermore, according to
of the left cheek,
Heinrich, “we see both the creation and
Lamqua, oil on board,
pathologization of an image of Chinese identity
1830-1850, 61 x 47 cm,
based on certain Chinese ‘characteristics’:
Cushing/Whitney
insensibility to pain, the inadequacy of native
Medical Historical
medicine, a cultural inability to perform either
Library Yale University,
amputation or autopsy, a belief in the spirits of
portrait no. 38. 205
the dead, and superstition in general.”
Heinrich concludes his study with the idea that
this particular Lamqua series “represents one
stage in the process of gradual ‘medicalization’ surprising that the afterlife of these paintings
of Chinese identity in visual representation that evokes new meanings in the twenty-first century.
coincides with the emergence and establishments But to relate them to the stereotype concept of
of the idea of a racialized Chinese self-identity.” 206 the ‘Sick Man of Asia’ – a term only in use since
Although we can consider this series of medical 1895 – is farfetched. 207
portraits as a representation of the superiority of In terms of the representation of the different
Western medicine and/or Western ideology and subject matter, we can say that, around 1800,
as visuals associating the Chinese character with depictions were especially accurate and detailed,
pathology (‘China you are sick; we can heal you and that, around 1900, many of the images were
through the ministrations of the missionary predominantly imaginative and exotic.
medical men’), I seriously wonder if this was the According to Dawn Odell, the Chinese
primary underlying intention of Parker’s developed an early “ethnographic gaze” in
commission. These paintings were primarily response to Western demand and produced
used to promote his missionary enterprise and to scenes of China that were attractive to Western
support his ‘begging-for-money tour’ around the taste, but had little to do with objective or
United States for his hospital in China. It is, scientific reality. 208 European ‘ethnographic’
however, imaginable that they had this side prints of Chinese subjects were used, for
effect (of pathologising the Chinese people) at instance, to decorate porcelain from China, or
the time of their production and it is not were copied on paper or canvas. 209 According to

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203 Heinrich 1999, 240.
204 Ibid.
205 Heinrich 2008, 70.
206 Heinrich 1999, 242.
207 The concept of the ‘Sick man of Asia’, so I learned from Chu Pingyi (Chu 2010, 356), refers to the ruling
Chinese dynasty at the end of the nineteenth century. In the first place, the referent was not the physical
characteristics of the Chinese people. “The main source”, so Chu states, “for this metaphor derived from the
political situation of the Turkish empire.” At the turn of the century, late Qing intellectuals projected this sick-man
image onto the Chinese people to inspire political reforms and self-strengthening.
208 Odell 2002, 156-158.
209 It is known that prints by Johannes Nieuhof (1668) were seen in the eighteenth century were used as
examples for decorations on Western ceramics or on Amsterdams Bont, but were not used as decoration on
Chinese porcelain.