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By the 1880s, Chinese American temples were sufficiently familiar to the public imagination to serve as an effective visual basis for political satire. Yet, however, the imagery was often not rooted in ethnographic realism; it remained a caricature of Western fantasy.

This 1884 cover of Puck depicts Gen. Benjamin Butler as a Chinese deity named “Ben Joss” receiving offerings from Charles Dana, the editor of the New York Sun, dressed in yellowface. Frederick Opper’s illustration draws attention to the effusive editorial praise Dana lavished upon Butler.

The lithograph portrays Butler as a cross-legged Buddha, but such figures were nearly non-existent in Chinese American temples of the era. In fact, the image portrays a “nodding” chinoiserie magot figurine, a European caricature of a Chinese Laughing Buddha, with bobbing hands and tongue.

Magots were popularized in Europe as grotesque and whimsical decorative figurines, made with mechanically balanced heads, tongues, and hands that moved. Opper’s illustrations adds a string-like mustache and pointy fingernails to Butler, racialized visual cues to identify the figure as Chinese.

Even as satire, such illustrations imply buddhas were commonplace in Chinese American temples, but this was not the case. Opper’s illustration is a pastiche of visual tropes – paper lanterns, dragon candle holders, and Buddha statues – to evoke a exoticized notion of Chinese religiosity.

To see a better representation of the kinds of icons enshrined in early Chinese American temples, see the online “Map of Temples in San Francisco’s Chinatown: 1850s-1906,” viewable here: https://tinyurl.com/ykyaas2d.

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