Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Die Ceylonschau der Hagenbecks


Impressive picture but the subtitle baffles me. Posted by Picasa

Posted by Buckles at 1/24/2007 05:47:00 AM

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was this where Hagenbecks got their elephants??cc

24 January, 2007 08:38
Anonymous said...

Hagenbeck’s name became famous with the European public not through his animal business but because of these touring “people shows” that preceded his involvement in the circus business. In the 1870s he exhibited at his Hamburg compound some reindeer and their keepers. The public was as fascinated by the native peoples in their traditional clothing as the animals they accompanied and so Hagenbeck began to expand on his success. Soon he was touring elaborate shows with demonstrations of native customs including, for example, the expert riding of camels and horses. These shows appeared only in a few locations, often at various European zoological gardens as special attractions. The Ceylonschau or Ceylon show first toured in 1882 though other versions of it such as the Ceylontruppe traveled as part of his first circus in 1887. These could be big shows with up to 200 people and 25 elephants depending on his latest animal importation. They were sometimes set up as stops on the way across Europe during the importation of animals from distant lands, sort of a sales trip. About 69 of these type shows appeared in Europe from the 1870s through the 1920s promoted by Hagenbeck and others. They were imitated in the US with the Barnum show featuring an “ethnological congress,” housed in a separate tent about large as its menagerie or sideshow, in 1884 and again in 1894-95. World’s fairs of this period also featured exhibits of native peoples (the “Streets of Cairo” appeared first at the 1889 Paris exhibition and then at Chicago’s big fair in 1893—an attraction visited by my great-grandfather and his 19-year old daughter, my grandmother). The developing amusement parks in the first years of the 20th century sometimes featured such shows, especially the Inuit people of the Artic region or Filipinos following America’s acquisition of their country after the Spanish-American war. These shows were successful because of growing curiosity by Europeans and Americans about the foreign peoples living in the world’s new colonial empires. For Hagenbeck, they were a natural extension of his animal importation business and led him into the circus business when he had a herd of unsold elephants left over from one of his Ceylon shows. Hagenbeck wrote that he never had a deep interest in his circus and his son Lorenz, an enthusiast for the circus business, recalled his father not wanting him to become a “gypsy!”

Dick Flint
Baltimore

24 January, 2007 09:06
Anonymous said...

This type of exhibit was also carried on the Barnum and Bailey circus in 1886. I have a 2 sheet panel of this but unfortunately no photos.
P.J.Holmes

24 January, 2007 11:11
Anonymous said...

Richard Reynolds says - - Great commentary Dick.

Our fellow CHSer Nigel Rothfels wrote at length about these Hagenbeck ethnological shows in his 2002 book "Savages and Beasts - -The Birth of the Modern zoo." On p 85 he describes the Ceylon Show.

24 January, 2007 12:52
Raffaele De Ritis said...

There was a big difference between Hagenbeck's and Barnum's ethnic shows, as Mr.Flint points. Hagenbeck created them not only for amusement venues, but also for the great exhibition or scientific institutions. If you check the dates on the Barnum Bailey "ethnic" posters, you can see that they followed the Hagenbeck idea. On the Saxon biography of Barnum, you can find interesting traces on relationships between the two impresarios.
The Rothfels book is great about that,clarifying a lot of historical mistakes in previous works, especially in the Hagenbeck writing.

26 January, 2007 04:03

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