ABSTRACT
The deep symbolic meaning for the Chinese government of the July 1, 1997, reunification of Hong Kong with the People’s Republic of China, is clearly illustrated through a comparison of two cultural representations of historical artifacts, one an exhibition in a shopping mall, the other contained in an internationally released film. Both address the Treaty of Nanjing, the 1842 agreement between China and Great Britain that ended the first Opium War (1840-1842) and ceded Hong Kong to Britain. On September 2, 1997, I visited “The Treaty of Nanjing,” an exhibition inside Plaza Hollywood, a new shopping mall in Hong Kong’s Kowloon District. The exhibition, organized by two youth organizations (one in Hong Kong and the other in Nanjing), lasted a week (from August 29 to September 3) and contained about one hundred illustrations and artifacts portraying the main events associated with the treaty, including British military invasion, signing of the treaty, national catastrophes, resistance to foreign aggression, and development of China. The stated aim of the exhibition was to educate Hong Kong’s youth to “keep national humiliation in mind, [and] develop China vigorously (wuwang guochi, zhenxing zhonghua)” (both English and Chinese text original). Although the mall was bustling, very few people looked at the exhibit, and those who did seemed to scan it quickly, as if it were a commercial advertisement. On the one hand, an exhibition inside a shopping center (rather than a museum or a government institution) seemed out of place; on the other hand, the very presence of a patriotic exhibition from Nanjing in post-1997 Hong Kong was an event more significant than the reception of its content.1
