"The situation in the Far East" β Chinese map, ca. 1900, illustrating colonial interference in China.
Designed by Australian-Chinese revolutionary and newspaperman Tse Tsan-tai, the map was based off an earlier design on the same subject.
In the map, the Russian bear enters China from the north while the rising sun in the east clings onto Japan, casting its rays across northern China (while also fishing for Taiwan).
The British bulldog-lion hybrid stretches out across the south, with its tail on the Shandong peninsula where a small German flag is planted in reference to the German territory in Kiautschou Bay.
(The text around the "sausage" reads "Cernan sausage ambitions", presumably meant to be "German sausage ambitions").
The French frog encroaches from the south, labelled "Fashoda - Colonial expansion" in reference to the 1898 Fashoda Incident in Africa between the British and French. It holds onto Hainan with its right hand.
The American eagle soars to China from the Philippines, labelled (with a misprint) "Blood is thicker than water" in reference to Captain Josiah Tattnallβs justification for his pro-British intervention during the Second Opium War: oxfordreference.com
Other European countries meanwhile jostle at the bottom for their turn to join the fray.
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