The Sidewise Historian

Part of the Conversation

[Wenqing Peng] — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Mention of the word museum often brings to mind a place in which old, dusty, static objects – albeit valuable ones – are preserved in rows of glass boxes. But history is not a static phenomenon; it is constantly interpreted and reinterpreted in different forms: not only novels and records, but also exhibitions, video games, audiovisual works and so on.

So, what does history look like in a museum? A few questions are worth considering. Could a museum exhibition count as an adaptation? Museum professionals variously see themselves as collectors, scholar-researchers, educators, conservators, money-making entertainers and consultants with stakeholders in a community. But are they also adapters? A museum exhibition takes material objects from the past and recontextualizes them within a historical narrative. But does the audience experience it as such – that is, in a palimpsestic way?

Academic studies of adaptation generally identify three modes of engagement with a text or object: telling, showing and interacting.¹ This framework also applies to how we look at history, particularly in museums. Both showing and interacting are involved when museum visitors explore the history presented in the objects and images that comprise the exhibits, and reconstruct that history in their minds.

A few weeks ago, I was passing by a local history museum and was attracted by a poster outside advertising a special exhibition on Records of the Three Kingdoms, a classical Chinese historical text. Mostly out of my own research interest, I decided to go in.

Apart from the range of objects from the Three Kingdoms period on display in the exhibition, as well as the archived printed books and paintings related to the period, I was also impressed by its introduction to the history: a short video presenting clips of key parts from the 1994 Three Kingdoms TV series, presented on a screen in the corridor connecting different sections of the exhibition. This video brought back memories of the good old days when I was a child and watched the series every winter and summer vacation. Being very faithful to the novel on which it is based – Luo Guanzhong’s San Guo Yan Yi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) – it is a very popular adapted work, with 500 billion views on Bilibili, a popular streaming website in China, as of June 2020. The use of footage from this TV series in the exhibition therefore brought the history and the items on display much closer to the visitors (myself included).

Aside from this display, and the larger screen presenting beautiful landscape videos of various small local towns as they would have appeared in the Three Kingdoms period, there were a number of interactive exhibits set up throughout the museum. During my tour, I noticed quite a lot of children playing the fishing games, a good way to learn about the changes in the fishing industry around Taihu Lake, while other visitors were using texture machines to explore the history of texture-making south of the Long River and the delicate craftsmanship of Suzhou embroidery.

As Hyuk-Chan Kwon has pointed out in his discussion of Three Kingdoms adaptations, ‘The reader often attempts to accommodate new Three Kingdoms revisions enhanced with more liberated and imaginative interpretations and re-creations in terms of translations or adaptations of the novel, console games, Internet role-playing games, cartoons, and animations’.² Museums can be added to this list of ‘liberated and imaginative interpretations’, weaving the intertextuality between historical novels, records, antiques and audiovisual works into the visiting process. The cultural world presented in the museum through the adaptation and reshaping of the original history resonates with the world of the Three Kingdoms period in the visitor’s mind.

In addition to all this, the museum organized a programme of events based around the Three Kingdoms exhibition, including educational activities, academic lectures and in particular the ‘Night Reading of the Three Kingdoms’ reading salon, which delved into the details of society, poetry, the humanities and other aspects of cultural life in the Three Kingdoms period. I attended one of these salons, and found it absolutely fantastic to be able to continue a journey I’d started in the pages of books in a series of evening talks along a riverbank, hearing a panoply of voices from various corners of society interpreting the historical period and characters of the novel in a host of different ways. The museum even released a special New Year’s edition of Romance of the Three Kingdoms in a modern, vernacular style for the audience to read for free.

Experts also got involved in both engaging with and publicizing the exhibition. On 3 March, Yi Zhongtian, a scholar studying the Three Kingdoms history and related literary works and well known in China for his excellent storytelling on the popular TV show Bai Jia Jiang Tan (Lecture Room), made a visit to the museum, and the Three Kingdoms exhibition in particular. Yi praised the collections of cultural relics from the Three Kingdoms period, taking particular interest in the pottery buildings from the late Han Dynasty, as well as the repeating crossbow machine. Though his views on this period are somewhat controversial in academia, his visit did attract more attention to the exhibition and, again, brought this display of antiquities closer to modern people and society.

As public spaces, in short, museums offer a way of thinking about the variety of responses that can exist in society to an established story or historical narrative. The integration of the showing and interacting modes of engagement position the adaptations of history presented in museums specifically as (re)interpretations and (re)creations. Arguably, therefore, museums represent an extended interpretive and creative engagement with the past.

See, for example, Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). ^[return]
Hyuk-Chan Kwon, ‘Historical Novel Revived: The Heyday of Romance of the Three Kingdoms Role-Playing Games’, in Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 121–34, 126. ^[return]

Video Games: Rewriting History in the Public Mind?

[Wenqing Peng] — Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A very interesting phenomenon aroused my attention when I was watching a Chinese TV show. The show featured a game in which one of the participants was asked to act out (without speaking) the well-known historical figure Xiang Yu (项羽, 232–220 BC). The contestant performed just three actions, and his partner immediately got the right answer. This made me really confused, as the three actions didn’t suggest anything related to Xiang Yu to me, but everyone both on the show and in the audience seemed to understand them straight away. I then took some time to learn more about these actions and discovered that they were famous as representations of Xiang Yu’s skills in the multiplayer online battle arena Honor of Kings (王者荣耀), a video game so prevalent in China that almost everyone has heard of it – even if, like me, they’ve never really played it.

For me, mention of the name Xiang Yu brings to mind key phrases like ‘general of Chu’, ‘strong character’, ‘proud’ and ‘brave’, as well as the famous story of ‘his rejection of being captured after his defeat and committing suicide on the bank of the Wu Jiang River’ (霸王乌江自刎). Xiang Yu’s heroism has been glorified in Chinese stories and poems, such as the one by Du Fu (杜甫): ‘Jiangdong has no lack of brave lads among its offspring, / Who knows if a comeback might not be in the offing’ (江东子弟多才俊,卷土重来未可知). Even Xiang Yu’s farewell to his concubine Yu Ji has moved countless readers across the centuries to tears. Xiang Yu himself composed a number of songs, and his last, written shortly before his defeat and death, has become well known in history:

力拔山兮气盖世, 时不利兮騅不逝。騅不逝兮可奈何, 虞兮虞兮奈若何!

I could pull mountains down, oh! With main and might,
But my good fortune wanes, oh! My steed won’t fight.
Whether my steed will fight, oh! I do not care.
What can I do with you, oh! My lady fair!

—Translated by Xu Yuanchong (许渊冲)

So, do contemporary TV audiences and other ordinary people in China immediately think of these key words and famous poems when they hear the name Xiang Yu? Probably not. What comes more easily to mind are the more popular actions of the general’s video game counterpart. Is that a sad commentary on modern society? It’s hard to give a simple answer.

Personally, I would rather the public remained aware of historical facts and retained images of figures more closely related to real history, as real history and classic literature are important representatives of our culture as a whole. However, we cannot deny other ways of reshaping history; even in some classic literary works, such as San Guo Yan Yi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), we find many adaptations of historical facts, but these works remain classics nonetheless. Why shouldn’t we grant the same licence to video games?

Though they do not represent an authorial way of reshaping history, video games, as a relatively new form of culture, ‘play’ with history in their approach to the past. As Andrew B. R. Elliott and Matthew Wilhelm Kapell note, ‘When history can be simulated, re-created, subverted, and rewritten on a variety of levels, new questions arise about the relationship between video games and the history they purport to represent, questions that traditional historical approaches cannot properly address’.¹ Historical video games create a different relationship to the narrative and experience of history. Even if the game designers’ intentions in engaging with history are innocent, and they genuinely try to construct a past world as authentically as possible, players are not exposed to a faithfully reproduced past, but to a version deeply influenced and reshaped by the fact that it is being presented in a game that they are trying to win. That is why Xiang Yu’s in-game actions have become so profoundly embedded in today’s Chinese youth culture as a major part of the image of that historical hero. This makes us rethink the question ‘What do we mean by history?’

Andrew B. R. Elliott and Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, ‘Introduction: To Build a Past That Will “Stand the Test of Time”: Discovering Historical Facts, Assembling Historical Narratives’, in Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1–29, 2. ^[return]