The early slide projector and slide shows in China from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the mid-seventeenth century, Europeans invented the early slide projector, which was later introduced to China both by Jesuit missionaries and through foreign trade. By the nineteenth century, this “Western instrument” had become an important aid in Protestant missionaries’ “scientific preaching,” and its use had spread throughout China; slides and the slide show became a major medium for disseminating modern knowledge. Against the background of the global circulation of knowledge in the period from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, complex interactions occurred between local resources in China and this medium in terms of denotation, production, use, and diffusion. Modern educational technologies and patterns involving the projector and slides became popular at church speeches, at public lectures in treaty ports, and in modern school education in China. Changes also occurred in how Chinese intellectuals gathered and in the role they played: they shifted from forming their own associations to holding open slide presentations. This had a profound influence on their transition from literati to intellectuals.