Resumen de Peepboxes, society, and visuality in early modern China
When European peepboxes and their associated perspectival views arrived in China in the seventeenth century, the elite who first encountered them treated these rarities as foreign curiosites. This essay shows that by the mid-nineteenth century, however, not only had both the optical device and the art been sinicized into common local products, but the peepbox had also become a form of street entertainment specifically directed toward children and the lower classes. Unexpectedly, the translation of the peepbox and its perspectival views in early modern China, it is argued, therefore speaks as much to internal differences in class and sophistication as to perceived differences between China and the West.
