Lantern Slide Moments and the Taught Subject, 1906 and 2006
Lu Xun’s lantern slide moment looms large in the history of modern China. As is well known, it occurred when Lu Xun was a student at the Sendai Medical Academy in Japan between 1904 and 1906. As Lu Xun tells it, he had nurtured the dream of becoming a Western medical doctor since the premature death of his father, whose life traditional Chinese medicine had failed to save. At the time, microbiology lectures were delivered using instructional images projected by a slide lantern in the classroom, and when there was extra time at the end of each class, the students were shown slides of scenic landscapes or current affairs. These included reportage images of Japanese victories in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, which Lu Xun, as the only Chinese student in the room, said he felt obliged to join his Japanese classmates in applauding.
in positions: asia critique, 23:1, 2015
find at Duke University Press