Illuminating Night Gardens: the Visual Culture of Nightscapes in Modern China

When gas and electric lights were introduced to China during the second half of the 19^th century, they were immediately employed for urban infrastructures and festival celebrations, which not only illuminated the nightscapes of China’ metropolises like Shanghai, but also sparked the residents’ imaginations for modernization. The new illuminating technologies transformed the city’s pleasure gardens into the trendiest outdoor urban space at night in late 19^th-century Shanghai, when Chinese gardens were once exclusive to elites for private uses and outing in the nighttime was traditionally off-limit in China. Assorted nocturnal entertainments such as horse-drawn carriage rides, light shows, lantern exhibitions, and pyrotechnic displays frequently performed in gardens. These nocturnal spectacles engaged with various temporary structures in the gardens, while provoked ephemeral sensations of light, sound, temperature, and motion in the darkness. The unique experiences became emblematically represented in prints and other media. Exploring the custom of nocturnal entertainments and decorative structures in Shanghai gardens alongside their pictorial representations, this paper set out to investigate how the new technologies and nocturnal spectacles in night gardens broke down conventional spatiotemporal boundaries of the Chinese society at the turn of the 20^th century. I argue that these nocturnal spectacles, sensational experiences, and various images together constituted a significant part of Chinese visual modernity. They fostered for the Chinese audiences an aesthetic of nightscape visual culture, while also opening up broader discussions on the intersection of arts and technologies.