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

Empire, as a whole

Although I was born and raised in a colony of the British Empire, I rarely thought about the "Empire" as a whole. From a geographical or public policy perspective, the lives people lived in the colony at that time were separated from the rest of the empire. Looking back now, when we were in primary and secondary schools, we did not receive any imperial patriotism education at all. For example, I’m not sure which places were also part of the British Empire, and no teacher ever 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 did not study in a leftist school, no one instilled in me the idea of ​​hating imperial colonialism. Neither hate nor love. You don’t need to be loyal to anyone or agree with anyone, live lightly. The long-gone Hong Kong is more of an isolation than an imperial colony. It is not very familiar with the suzerain country, and it does not have the concept of "the empire is a whole" because it is part of the empire.

Until when did I start thinking about "empire as a whole"? Perhaps the colony is no longer a colony, and the collapse of the current situation has prompted people to miss the colonial days. I remember reading a book at that time called "The British Empire Before and After its Retreat from the Colonies". It was a history of the British Empire written from a typical left-wing perspective critical of colonialism. (Of course, I didn’t know how to tell the difference between left and right at that time and thought that imperial history must be written this way.) This book is still lying in my bookcase today. I took it out a while ago and found that it had been printed three times in one year! This is the atmosphere of the times: hurry to get to know the end. When I was no longer a subject of the empire, I began to understand it with the mentality of learning book knowledge, that is, I began to look at the empire as a whole.

More than twenty years later, the collapse became intense and many people left. I also followed the waves of the times and stayed in England for a while, and became interested in the empire as a whole again. The empire in the real world has declined (only a few isolated islands remain on the list of colonies), but the empire in the conceptual world continues to appear as an afterimage. For example, the museum is a place where the "empire" is haunted.

In the past, people thought that exhibits could speak and were more neutral than words, but in fact, what the exhibits say has changed with the times, because people's understanding of exhibits is like their understanding of history, affected by the trends and ideologies of the times. The descriptions of the British Museum's current exhibits reflect the left-wing criticism of colonialism in recent decades: for the same exhibits, the descriptions used to focus on revealing that they were the fine works of civilization collected and preserved by the empire, but now they must mention how they were collected and preserved by the empire. The representatives of the empire plundered them back through tyrannical or bandit methods.

Because I am used to being an editor, I often suffer from occupational diseases. I like to slowly twist the explanatory text in museums, trying to capture the traces of modification from the word choice and layout. Was the singing part at the front shortened? The critical text at the end should be new... Reading it carefully, I slowly saw a new perspective of the empire as a whole.

Strange things and specimens

Books that talk about empire usually take the perspective of how the empire plundered the natural resources of the colonies and enriched London's pockets. For example, the British used black slaves to produce large amounts of cane sugar on Caribbean islands (formerly known as the West Indies) and shipped them back to London for sale. The empire had already issued pig heads to the sugar tax alone. But in addition to commodities and slaves (the latter were also "commodities" at that time), there were other unexpected things flowing within this imperial network on British merchant ships plying the Atlantic: such as those that now lie in museum exhibitions, watching A specimen that has nothing to do with the world.

The specimen's relationship to imperial networks can be found in Gallery 1 of the British Museum. In the eighteenth century, studious British gentlemen and ladies fell in love with collecting plant and insect specimens. This craze can probably be traced back to the Sir Hans Sloane collection, which was famous throughout Europe in the early 18th century. Hans Sloane (1660-1753) was an avid collector and the "Father" of the British Museum. In 1753, in order to house the more than 70,000 collections he left behind after his death, the British Parliament passed the British Museum Act and purchased his entire collection with lottery funds. A few years later, the British Museum was founded, the first free national museum.

In Exhibition Hall 1, a small amount of the "Father's" collection is still on display: a giant Malayan hornbill skull, round sea urchin fossils, mineral gems with distinctive 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: human leather shoes, medieval astrolabes rituals, corals shaped like human hands, cow gallstones (bezoars), golden Buddhist shrines smuggled out of Japan, Chinese tombstones... Most of these collections, collectively called "curiosities", have been forgotten by the world. But his 265 herbariums are still highly valued and are safely preserved in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London. Each herbarium is neatly mounted with dried plant specimens. In addition to the actual objects, there are highly realistic pictures and written information hand-drawn by artists. These more than 200 specimen albums collect a total of 120,000 plant specimens from around the world. specimen.

Plants developed into a specialized knowledge very early because of their medicinal uses, but botanical knowledge did not advance rapidly until the eighteenth century. One reason was that scholars had to see enough species to find a valid classification. (This classification method was invented by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and is still used today.) However, botanists were able to collect varieties from all over the world in a short period of time, and the existence of the empire was "indispensable". Please imagine: In the early seventeenth century, doctors and scholars of the Dutch Republic used the Dutch East India Company to collect plants from India and the Cocos Islands, thus becoming the hub for specimen exchange after Italy; in the eighteenth century, Doctors and scholars in the British Empire took advantage of the British East India Company and global colonies to collect plants from the Americas, Caribbean, Africa, India, Asia and other places, thus taking over and becoming a new hub... If there was no such thing as "empire" The huge field brings together all the specimens and information, and the accumulation of knowledge will take on another aspect. The colonists' monopoly promoted scientific knowledge, and the progress of scientific knowledge promoted human living standards. From this point of view, the existence of the empire was also somewhat beneficial.