A Travel Guides’ View on a (Post)colonial Place:
Tsingtau/Qingdao, China
Doris Stolberg
Abstract
Travel guides and travel reports constitute an important source for the generation and spread of popular geopolitical epistemes and assumptions. With regard to colonial attitudes and their possible perpetuation, it is therefore of great interest what kind of information such texts convey regarding (post)colonial places, and how they contextualize it. The paper compares descriptions of Qingdao (Tsingtau), a German colonized territory between 1897 and 1914, in travel guides and related material from colonial and postcolonial times and in different European languages. It investigates what differences can be found between these descriptions in relation to time, language, and medium (print or online) of publication. Of particular interest is the question whether, and in what ways, colonial perspectives are perpetuated in present-day (especially German) travel literature.
Keywords: Travel guides, Tsingtau, colonialism, postcolonialism, popular knowledge