Mnemonic Devices: Memorializing the West as Victim and Hero

In narratives designed to "suture" the West's self-perception, the West is seen as a victim and the overcoming of Chinese savagery is viewed as a heroic act deserving of memorialization, serving an effective way of reducing anxiety over barbaric violence.

Tales of suffering substituted for looting: the cause of the uprising seen as little more than anti-foreignism. Missionaries relied on worldly powers for support yet also sought to establish a moral ground aloof from it. Missionaries did not provoke the outbreak, they were victims and even heroes. Atrocity anecdotes abound these explanations and are closely linked to accounts of retribution that give meaning to what otherwise might have been construted as Blood and Iron triumphalism. Also helps counter claims that missionaries were out-of-control.

Chrisitan monuments to memorials in China reconfirmed the right to prostelityze and provided optimism. Christian teleology wedded to a secular vision of evolution and progress in a universal pattern of human development. Missionaries would forgive the repentent Chinese and continue their good works for the sake of progress, humanity, and development.

A marked shift in the study of monuments occurred over the past few years as sites where national and individual effort to construct meaning converged and diverged: willful efforts to remember as well as remold memory: as sites where the interests of the individual and the state might intervene: the meaning of sites of memory transform with time and memory is collectively formed and sustained and linked to material objects. Memorials in China and elsewhere part of a larger pilgrimage a missionary could go through.

China now put into the larger adventurism plot and reinforced the dichotomy between the virtue of civilized against uncivilized. Monuments had encoded in their very structure the language of higher moral purpose centered around sacrifice and valor. Tourbooks guided visitors on an inspiring tale of history where Westerners saw their nations triumphant and enjoyed special privilege.

The construction of authoritative narratives in institutional forms of memorymaking also drove a wedge between the West and Chinese, though some ex-pats led lives that defied the rigourous boundary.