[Imagine Imperial Museum 1: Specimen] Empire, as a whole

1/ Although born and raised in the colonies of the British Empire, I seldom think of the "Empire" as a whole before. From a geography or a public policy point of view, life in the colony was cut off from the rest of the empire. Looking back now, when we were in elementary and middle school, we never received any imperial patriotic education. For example, I don't know which places are also part of the British Empire, and no teacher taught me to sing "God Save the Queen". (On the contrary, one year the school taught us to sing the national anthem of the People's Republic of China.) And because I didn't study in a leftist school, no one instilled in me the idea of hating imperial colonialism. Neither hate nor love. No need to be loyal to anyone or identify with anyone, and live lightly. Hong Kong, which has gone away, is not so much an imperial colony as an isolated body. It is not very familiar with the suzerain country, and it does not have the concept of "the empire as a whole" because it is part of the empire.

Until when did I start thinking "empire as a whole"? Perhaps the colony is no longer a colony, and the collapse of the status quo makes people miss the time when the colony was there. I remember reading a book at that time called "Before and After the British Empire Withdrew from the Colonies", which was a history of the British Empire written from the perspective of a typical left-wing critique of colonialism. (Of course I didn’t know how to distinguish left from right at that time, thinking that the history of empires must be written in this way.) This book is still lying in my bookcase today. I dug it out a while ago, only to find that it was printed three times in one year! This is the atmosphere of the times: when it comes to the end, we rush to get to know each other. When I was no longer a citizen of the empire, I understood it with the mentality of learning book knowledge, that is, I began to look at the empire as a whole.

More than 20 years later, the collapse became intense, and many people left. I also stayed in the UK for a while with the turbulent waves of the times, and became interested in the empire as a whole again. The empire in the real world has fallen (only some isolated islands remain on the list of colonies), but the empire in the conceptual world continues to haunt as an afterimage. For example, museums are haunted by ghosts of the "Empire".

In the past, people thought that the exhibits could speak and be more neutral than words, but in fact, what the exhibits said changed with the times, because people's understanding of the exhibits was like their understanding of history, influenced by the trend of thought and ideology of the times. The exhibit descriptions of the British Museum today reflect the left-wing critique of colonialism in recent decades: the same exhibits, which used to focus on revealing that they were cultural masterpieces collected and preserved by the empire, must now mention how they were acquired. Representatives of the empire plundered it back with high-handed or bandit tactics.

Because I am used to being an editor, I often suffer from occupational diseases. I like the explanatory text of the Slow Twist Museum, trying to capture the traces of revisions from the words and layout. Is the part of the previous chants cut short? The critical text at the end should be a new addition... After reading it so carefully, I slowly saw a new perspective of the empire as a whole.

2/ Books about empire usually take the perspective of how the empire plundered the natural resources of the colonies to enrich London's pockets. For example, the British used black slaves to produce a large amount of sugar in the Caribbean Islands (formerly known as the West Indies), and shipped them back to London for sale. The empire has already paid pigs for the sugar tax alone. But in addition to commodities and slaves (the latter were also "commodities"), there were other unexpected things flowing in this imperial network on the British merchant ships plying to and from the Atlantic: such as those that now lie quietly in museum exhibitions, it seems An unrivaled specimen.

The specimen's relationship to the Imperial network, can be found in Hall 1 of the British Museum. In the 18th century, British studious gentlemen and ladies fell in love with collecting plant and insect specimens. This craze can probably be traced back to the famous Sir Hans Sloane collection in Europe in the early eighteenth century. Hans Sloane (1660-1753) was an avid collector and the "father" of the British Museum. In 1753, in order to accommodate the more than 70,000 collections left by him after his death, the British Parliament passed the British Museum Act to buy his entire collection in the form of lottery fundraising. A few years later, the British Museum was established, creating a free national museum.

In the No. 1 exhibition hall, there are still a small number of collections of the "curator": a giant Malayan hornbill skull, round sea urchin fossils, ore gems with characteristic patterns, ancient Roman seals, primitive stone tools, etc. But this is not enough to reflect the variety of his collections: in addition to specimens, manuscripts, books, portraits, coins and other common collection items today, he also likes to collect some interesting items that are difficult to classify: shoes made of human leather, medieval stars, etc. Plates, corals shaped like human hands, cow gallstones (bezoar), golden Buddhist shrines smuggled out of Japan, ancient tombstones from China... These collections collectively called "curiosities" have mostly been forgotten by the world , but his 265 plant specimen collections (herbarium) are still highly valued and are safely preserved in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London. Each herbarium is neatly pasted with dried plant specimens. In addition to the actual objects, there are highly realistic pictures and text materials hand-painted by the artist; these more than 200 specimen booklets have collected a total of 120,000 plants from all over the world. specimen.

Plants, because of their medicinal uses, developed into a special science very early, but botanical knowledge did not advance by leaps and bounds until the eighteenth century, in part because scholars had to see enough species to find a valid taxonomy. (This classification was invented by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and is still in use today.) However, botanists can collect global varieties in a short period of time, and the existence of the empire is "indispensible". Please imagine: at the beginning of the seventeenth century, doctors and scholars in the Dutch Republic, with the help of the Dutch East India Company, collected plants from India and the Caracae Islands, thus becoming a specimen exchange hub after Italy; in the eighteenth century, The doctors and scholars of the British Empire took advantage of the British East India Company and global colonies to collect plants from the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, India, Asia and other places, thus taking over and becoming a new hub... If there is no "Empire" The huge field gathers all specimens and information together, and the accumulation of knowledge will have another appearance.

The colonists' monopoly promoted scientific knowledge, and the advancement of scientific knowledge promoted the standard of living of mankind. In this way, the existence of empires has some advantages. (to be continued)