RECOUNTING HISTORY: Constructing a national narrative in the Hong Kong Museum of History

An exhibition convention quite widespread in nineteenth-century ethnographic displays at world fairs, museums and amusement parks was lacking entirely at the event in Stockholm. Unlike the aesthetic and didactic principles that govern the sparse displays in present-day museums, the Stockholm exhibition revelled in the aesthetics of mass effect. Congo Free State already occupied a place in the minds of the Swedish audience which visited the exhibition, and it did so not simply as a result of missionary zeal. By the time of the exhibition, the atrocities in Congo Free State had already been greeted with public condemnation in Europe. Only a year after the exhibition opened, in 1908, after the death of King Leopold, the Belgian nation was to take over and transform Congo Free State into a more regular national colony, not least in response to growing international criticism. The Ethnographic and Missionary Exhibition merged two fields: scientific and religious which developed in the wake of European colonialism.