JOEY S. KIM

Figure 1. The Oriental newspaper’s April 28, 1855 nameplate states that the paper has shifted to “Information relating to the Chinese People, the Eastern World, and the Promotion of Christianity”

Figure 2. . Reinforcing the nameplate’s proselytizing and Orientalist function, the masthead’s epigraph is a Bible verse: “Behold, these shall come from far; and lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim” [China.] Isaiah 49:12” “Sinim” is a Biblical hapax legomenon unclearly defining China and/or the far East [1]. What is clear from these paratextual materials is the newspaper’s creation of the “Chinese” subject as distinct from the reading public of the paper’s Anglophone audience.

Figure 3. The Chinese-language nameplate of the same issue in Figure 1 (above).

[1] The first issue does not contain this epigraph.