Glossary

Kiautschou Bay Leased Territory was an area in the south of the Shandong Peninsula on the east coast of China. As early as 1860, Prussian troops had explored the bay and identified it as a suitable base in East Asia, and a Sino-Prussian trade agreement was signed in the following year. When two German members of the Steyler Mission, which had been granted protection by the German Empire in 1890, were murdered in China on 1 November 1897, Emperor Wilhelm II used this as an excuse to have the bay occupied by German troops. China tried to end the occupation in vain. Following a series of negotiations, the Chinese government eventually agreed to a lease treaty with the →German Empire on 6 March 1898, surrendering all sovereign rights within the leased area and a 50 km wide neutral zone. The capital city of Tsingtau (now mostly spelled “Qingdao”) was located in this zone and was long considered a prime example of the development of a “colonial metropolis” in which Chinese and German inhabitants lived in strictly separated areas and were also subject to different legal regulations. On 27 April 1898, the bay was officially placed under German "protection" and given the same status as the other →“protectorates”, but it remained subject to the authority of the Imperial Naval Office (Reichsmarineamt) due to its special importance as a naval base. In the First World War, the disputed territory of Kiautschou was brought under the control of the Empire of Japan as early as November 1914. (SF)

Julius August Konietzko (1886-1952) was an explorer and trader who started selling ethnographic objects to German museums in 1910 and soon established his business premises in Hamburg. Between 1911 and 1914, he and his wife Anna embarked on several collecting tours to Scandinavia, Spain, Portugal, Ireland (Aran Islands) and the Upper Nile region in South Sudan on behalf of various major ethnological museums (e.g. Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Hamburg and Frankfurt). During the First World War, he worked as an ethnographer for the German army in the Balkans. This was followed by further trips to India, Kashmir, Tibet and Sardinia until the 1930s. In 1933, Konietzko turned his attention from his own collecting trips to international trade in →ethnographic items  and antiques. Many of the objects collected or sold by Konietzko are still in ethnological / ethnographic collections, while others are in the hands of private dealers. Although the main objective of his trips was to assemble collections, his journals contain detailed accounts of his travels and the people he encountered, as well as notes on the climate, settlements and ethnographic observations. His collections reveal his scientific aspirations; he had an extensive scientific library and dealt with specialist literature. He corresponded with Felix von Luschan, Heinrich Schliemann and other dealers in ethnographic objects, such as the company →Firma J.F.G Umlauff. (SF)