From a Tall Man to “Zhan the Chinese Giant”

Abstract Since the 1970s, institutionalized enfreakment as represented by the Victorian freak show has provided scholars with a lens through which to examine nineteenth-century Western societies. However, current scholarship sidesteps questions such as how people in colonized countries perceived their enfreaked compatriots and how they negotiated their positions in the new international order as symbolized by this globalized entertainment industry. This article addresses these questions through a case study of Zhan Wu, the celebrated “Chinese giant” in Euro-American freak shows from approximately 1865 to 1887 who was, at the time, a spectacle in Chinese print media. The article argues that the way the Chinese media represented Zhan's body, shifting from nonchalance to disdain and then to eventually viewing it as a symbol of China's recent suffering, epitomizes a history of cooperation and mutual influence among the global entertainment industry, print media, and their consumers worldwide. More important, it reveals that as China's mass media and reading public joined in a global imaginaire that enfreaked the Chinese as a race, they were not merely incorporated by this discourse; they also reshaped it to express their understandings about a new Chinese identity that was to emerge in the fin de siècle era.