About The Eastern Miscellany

The Eastern Miscellany

The Eastern Miscellany (Chinese: 東方雜誌; pinyin: Dōngfāng Zázhì) was a Chinese-language general magazine published by the Commercial Press in Shanghai from 1904 to 1948, with a brief revival in Taiwan from 1948 to 1952. It was one of the first periodicals of the Commercial Press — then becoming China's largest and most prestigious publishing house — and it grew into the most substantial Chinese magazine of its era: by 1910 it had the largest circulation of any Chinese magazine, at about 15,000 copies, a figure that rose to some 45,000 by 1931. Across more than four decades and more than 30,000 articles, the Miscellany chronicled the fall of the Qing dynasty, the founding of the Republic, the warlord years, the war with Japan and the civil war — and today its complete archive, with some 12,000 illustrations and 14,000 advertisements, is regarded by scholars as a major chronicle of Republican-era China.

The magazine's character changed with its editors. Founded under the Commercial Press's great editor-publisher Zhang Yuanji as a journal largely of news and official information, it was transformed from 1911 by its editor Du Yaquan into a forum for commentary on politics, science and culture, carrying advertisements, fiction and poetry alongside analysis. That breadth — serious, commercial and encyclopaedic at once — made the Eastern Miscellany the closest Chinese equivalent of the great general reviews of the nineteenth-century West, and its run is coextensive with the entire lifespan of the Republic of China on the mainland.

The Commercial Press and the founding in 1904

The Commercial Press (Shangwu Yinshuguan), founded in Shanghai in 1897, was the pioneer of modern Chinese publishing: a printer that became a publisher of textbooks, dictionaries and translations, and from 1904 a magazine publisher as well. The Eastern Miscellany, beginning publication in January 1904, was among its first periodicals, launched under the direction of Zhang Yuanji, the scholar-publisher who built the Press's editorial operation and chose its staff. Zhang selected the staff writer Tao Xingcun as the magazine's working editor, and in its first phase the journal concentrated on reporting news and relaying official announcements, with only limited, anonymous commentary.

Even in that restrained form, the magazine rode the first expansion of the Chinese periodical press. The last years of the Qing saw an explosion of newspapers and magazines as reformers, revolutionaries and commercial publishers discovered the new medium; by 1910, with circulation around 15,000, the Eastern Miscellany stood at the head of the magazine field. Its base in Shanghai — the centre of Chinese print capitalism, with the country's best printing plants, its densest readership and its treaty-port access to foreign models — was an advantage it never lost, even when war later forced issues to be produced in Changsha, Chongqing and Hong Kong.

The Du Yaquan era, 1911–1919

In May 1911, months before the revolution that ended the Qing, Zhang Yuanji handed the editorship to Du Yaquan, and the magazine changed character. Du was a science educator and popular-science publisher who had founded what is regarded as the first Chinese-run scientific journal, Yaquan Magazine, in 1900, and had joined the Commercial Press in 1904 to direct its physics and chemistry compilation work. As editor of the Eastern Miscellany he reorganised it around commentary: political, scientific and cultural discussion took priority over straight reporting; commercial advertisements were introduced; and serialised stories and poetry entered the contents. The magazine became, under Du, a self-conscious organ of enlightened opinion for China's new reading public.

The magazine and the crises of the young Republic

Du's editorship coincided with the most turbulent decade of modern Chinese history — the 1911 Revolution, Yuan Shikai's presidency and monarchist attempt, the outbreak of the First World War and the beginnings of the New Culture Movement — and the magazine debated all of it. Du's own editorial line was distinctive: gradualist, scientific and culturally conservative in some respects, he argued for the reconciliation of Chinese and Western civilisation rather than the wholesale rejection of tradition that younger radicals demanded. That position brought the magazine into famous controversy with the New Youth circle: exchanges between Du Yaquan and Chen Duxiu over the direction of Chinese culture were among the defining intellectual debates of the late 1910s, conducted substantially in and around the pages of the two magazines. In 1919 Zhang Yuanji removed Du and replaced him with a committee of three editors, closing the magazine's most personal editorial era.

Format, frequency and contents

The Eastern Miscellany appeared monthly from 1904 to 1920 and thereafter generally twice monthly, returning to monthly publication at points in its later history. Its contents were encyclopaedic by design. A typical issue combined political commentary and foreign-affairs reporting; essays on science, industry and education; literary pages with fiction and poetry; translations; illustrations; and, after Du's reforms, a substantial body of advertising. The complete archive assembled by modern database publishers counts more than 30,000 articles, 12,000 illustrations and more than 14,000 advertisements across the run — a scale that makes the magazine one of the richest single sources for the material and intellectual life of Republican China.

Advertising and consumer culture

The advertisements are part of its historical value. The Miscellany sold space to the department stores, patent-medicine makers, cigarette companies, publishers and manufacturers of treaty-port China, and its advertising pages record the arrival of modern consumer culture in Chinese cities as vividly as its editorials record the era's politics. Scholars of Chinese advertising, design and consumer history mine the archive alongside historians of politics and literature, which is precisely what its founders' commercial model intended: a magazine that paid for serious content with the commerce of the new urban marketplace.

Circulation and readership

Circulation figures carried in reference sources trace the magazine's growth with the Republican reading public: the largest circulation of any Chinese magazine by 1910, at about 15,000 copies, and approximately 45,000 copies by 1931 — the year of the Manchurian Incident, when Chinese readers' hunger for national-affairs coverage peaked. In a country where literacy was still limited and magazines were shared within families, schools and reading rooms, each copy reached several readers, and the Miscellany's effective audience included the teachers, students, officials, merchants and professionals who constituted Republican China's opinion-forming class.

The magazine was national in distribution from its Shanghai base and, in wartime, literally itinerant: issues were produced in Changsha, Chongqing and Hong Kong as the Commercial Press moved operations ahead of the Japanese advance. That it kept publishing through the war — interrupted only in 1942, according to the archive's publishers — testifies to both the Press's resources and the magazine's institutional importance within the company.

The magazine through war and revolution

The Eastern Miscellany's life spans the whole arc of the Republic. It began in the reformist last decade of the Qing; it debated the new Republic's crises under Du Yaquan; it followed the Nanjing decade's state-building, the intellectual ferment of the 1920s and the growing confrontation with Japan in the 1930s; it endured the full-scale war of 1937–45; and it continued into the civil war between Nationalists and Communists. Few periodicals anywhere have published continuously through a comparable sequence of national catastrophes and transformations, and the magazine's files offer historians a single editorial vantage point across all of them.

The end came with the Republic's mainland collapse. The Commercial Press's great Shanghai operation was fatally disrupted in the 1930s — its headquarters and plant were destroyed in the fighting of the January 28 Incident in 1932, a blow from which the company recovered only partially — and the Communist victory of 1949 ended the conditions under which the Miscellany had existed. The magazine ceased mainland publication in 1948; a brief revival in Taiwan, where the Republic's government and some of its publishers withdrew, ran from 1948 to 1952 before the title finally closed.

Scholarly afterlife: the archive

Uniquely among Chinese magazines of its era, the Eastern Miscellany survives complete and searchable. Database editions produced for research libraries present the entire run — every article, illustration and advertisement in full text and facsimile — and university libraries from Johns Hopkins to Penn State describe it in the same terms: one of the most significant publications of the Chinese intelligentsia in the first half of the twentieth century, and a significant chronicle of Republican-era China spanning the collapse of two millennia of imperial rule, warlord rule, invasion, world war and revolution. The archive has made the magazine a standard primary source across fields: political and diplomatic history, the history of science (a reflection of Du Yaquan's priorities), publishing history, advertising and design, and the study of how modern knowledge entered Chinese public life.

That afterlife secures the magazine's larger significance. The Eastern Miscellany was not the most radical Chinese magazine of its time — New Youth holds that place — nor the most literary, nor the most popular in absolute terms by the 1930s. It was, instead, the most durable institution of the Republican magazine world: the Commercial Press's flagship of record for forty-four years, edited in its formative decade by one of China's great popularisers of science, read by the class that governed and taught the Republic, and preserved entire as the era's archive of itself.