This article examines available narratives and modes of representation concerning “civilization” and “savagery” in the early Meiji proto-colonial discursive sphere. It focuses on a major event in the 1874 Taiwan Expedition: Japan's capture and attempted assimilation of an orphaned aboriginal girl. Through an analysis of Japanese newspaper reports, woodblock prints, illustrated books, and commercial photography, this article argues that alongside the well-characterized “rhetoric of aboriginal savagery” that exaggerated the otherness of Taiwanese indigenes, there developed a synergistic “rhetoric of aboriginal civilization” that emphasized the indigenes' capacity for transformation. This mode of representation stressed not the aboriginals' alterity but rather their latent affinity to Japan. According the aboriginal a measure of temporality, the rhetoric of aboriginal civilization formed an indispensable counterpart to the rhetoric of aboriginal savagery: one that affirmed the campaign's “civilizing” component by demonstrating its viability.

In recent decades, historians of European history have produced many studies on the history of emotions. Based on the hypothesis that emotions are neither a biological essence nor a universal fixed attribute, they have sought to trace constructions of human emotionality as reflected in literary and other works in a particular society over time. This new sub-discipline, the study of what is often termed “sentimental culture”, has illuminated the interaction between the articulation of an emotional sensibility and significant social trends of the age, including the rise of humanitarian discourse, radical Protestantism, and a destabilizing of sexual norms. From the new perspective of the cultural history of emotion, the modern idea that emotions express individual inwardness and autonomy now appears to be contingent and culture bound. In the case of China, while there has been an abundance of studies of the cult of qing 情 (‘passion, desire’) in the late Ming, there are few works dealing specifically with the historical construction of emotion in pre-modern China, particularly from a linguistic point of view.

This article substantiates for the first time that Tay (Shan) script was written on a Ming dynasty scroll dated 1407. In the past, Tay scholars have assumed that early Tay script exhibited uniquely Tay characteristics from the outset, and only gradually acquired Burmese features after the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The data presented here demonstrates beyond doubt that the Tay borrowed heavily from the Burmese script to create their writing system before the fifteenth century. It also shows that the 1407 Tay script resembled the Ahom script more than the lik6 tho3 ngök6 script, and on the basis of this similarity concludes that lik6 tho3 ngök6 was not the progenitor of Tay scripts, as previously thought, and that the Ahom script preceded it.

The impact of Burmese script on the Tay writing system from the outset raises the broader issue of borrowing from Burman culture during the Pagan and early Ava periods. The Tay of Mäng2 Maaw2 and surrounding polities turned to Pagan and Ava for a written script, but shunned Theravada Buddhism, the religious apparatus that we assume always accompanied the spread of writing. Their adoption of a writing system stands out as a rare case of script without Buddhism in northern continental Southeast Asia. To the Tay, Pagan and Ava were dominant political powers worthy of emulation, and the adoption of their writing system attests the magnitude of its influence. It is hypothesized that such borrowing arose out of Tay aspirations for self-strengthening their polities, possibly in an endeavour to rival the Burman monarchy. Tay script emerged in an age when the Burman language had just become predominant among the elites of Pagan and early Ava. Two features of this case stand out. First, the Tay borrowed at a time when Burmese script was relatively novel and still the preserve of the Burman elite, a fact which reinforces the notion of borrowing for prestige value as well as practical utility. Second, the Tay gravitated towards the northern parts of Pagan and Ava, rather than the southern areas where Mon language retained predominance in inscriptions.

Based on the advertisements in the Dagong bao 大公報, this article first attempts to understand the concept of weisheng 衛生 as promoted by advertisers, arguing that during the first decade of the twentieth century, when social reformers had already used this old Chinese term to translate the Western concept of hygiene and associated it with public health programs and a stronger state, the general public as consumers in Tianjin continued to understand the concept according to its traditional meaning of “guarding life.” However, new ideas, such as disease-causing germs, cleanliness, and odor, were grafted on to this old weisheng concept as a result of strong Western influence. Still, Chinese “weisheng” differed from Western “hygiene” even in the context of private health, as foreign ideas were often transformed drastically to fit into the Chinese medical tradition. The second part of this article further explores the consumption activities involving products that were associated with the weisheng concept and discusses three questions: What did weisheng products include? Who were the consumers of weisheng products? And what kind of role did gender play in weisheng consumption?