Stephen McDowall

Global China: Material Culture and Connections in World History

The multidisciplinary articles in this special issue were developed in conjunction with a research project on the cultures of porcelain in global history, hosted by the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick. These articles all situate porcelain within wider contexts of material and visual culture. This approach reveals the complexities of the processes involved in the appropriation of Chinese ceramics in England and Iran and in the diffusion of Chinese-style ceramics in the western Indian Ocean, and explores the ways in which ideas about Chineseness were formed, and a global visual culture on the theme of porcelain production emerged.

Imperial plots? Shugborough, Chinoiserie and Imperial ideology in Eighteenth-Century British gardens

Abstract This article examines the place of the Chinese House (c. 1748) at Shugborough, Staffordshire, within the context of the mid-eighteenth-century craze for chinoiserie architecture in British gardens, and within the longer history of Sino-British encounters more generally. Drawing on evidence from published and archival sources, it argues that the expression of imperial ideology manifest in the garden at Shugborough represents an exceptional case for the period, during which more nuanced and ambivalent attitudes towards Britains expanding presence in Asia generally prevailed. Attention is drawn to the need to locate the specific social settings of art objects within their wider historical contexts.

China's Second Capital — Nanjing under the Ming, 1368–1644

chapter 5 is also instructive. There she points out that Ricci went to great lengths to generate Chinese place names so as to distribute the world equally between east and west. We are familiar with the parallelistic Chinese usage of Dongyang and Xiyang for the oceans to the east and west of China. When Ricci realized he needed to distinguish the Atlantic from the Indian Ocean, he named the nearer, Small Xiyang and the farther, Great Xiyang. But also he decided for the sake of east–west balance to distinguish between a Small Dongyang to the east of Japan and a Great Dongyang west of the Americas, though even then European cartographers regarded this as a single body of water. Ricci performed the same mirroring with the Red Sea, matching it with the Gulf of California, to which Francisco de Ulloa in 1539 had fortuitously given the name, Vermilion Sea (Mar Bermejo). These appear on his world map as Western Red Sea and Eastern Red Sea. Was this act of mirroring a “consciously tactical and expedient” device on Ricci’s part to adjust the truth for, and thus conceal it from, his Chinese friends, as Yu Liu might wish to suggest? Or was it a creative attempt by Ricci to respond to the cultural resilience he should have detected on the part of his Chinese friends? The debate about the Jesuit contribution to China thus remains open, although on terms that books such as these have helped to redefine.

The Shugborough Dinner Service and Its Significance for Sino-British History

Tradition has it that the Shugborough dinner service was presented to Commodore Anson (1697-1762) by the European merchants of Canton in gratitude for his crews part in extinguishing a fire that threatened the city in 1743, and the service has come to symbolise the ultimate triumph of this courageous and determined commodore over dithering and obstructive Chinese mandarins. This article argues that the link between the dinner service and the fire is actually a twentieth-century invention, and that its story, as currently presented to us, distorts our understanding both of Canton in 1743 and of mid-eighteenth-century Sino-British relations more generally.

China on Paper: European and Chinese Works from the Late Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century

The appearance in paperback form of a book several years after the conclusion of the exhibition that generated it suggests a continuing public interest that not every exhibition inspires. This is the honour now afforded China on Paper, structured around a catalogue of 37 items exhibited at the Getty Research Institute between November 2007 and February 2008, and which collectively illustrate aspects of China’s early modern global history. The catalogue entries are accompanied by a series of introductory essays by Reed and Demattè themselves, with a contribution from Gang Song and an excellent final chapter by Richard E. Strassberg. The exhibition catalogue stretches chronologically from the 1586 edition of Juan González de Mendoza’s (1545–1618) Dell’historia della China (cat. 1) to the 20 prints depicting the European Pavilions at the Garden of Perfect Clarity (Yuanmingyuan) in Beijing, produced by the Manchu court artist Yi Lantai (fl. 1750–90) in 1783–86 (cat. 30). As the editors thoughtfully suggest in their Introduction, the European Pavilions (1747–83) and their ruins, perhaps more than any other structure, ‘‘epitomize centuries of interactions between European visitors and Chinese hosts, documenting a history of mutual curiosity and mixed communications that have sought but never achieved perfect clarity’’ (p. 2). While many of the works and themes discussed in China on Paper will be familiar, one of the undoubted strengths of this book is its sustained and detailed discussion of its high-quality images, many of which are in colour, along with its meticulous treatment of publication histories. The ample catalogue entries themselves, and the discussion of supplementary figures included in the essays, allow us to explore in detail how these images were reused, reimagined and republished for different ends. We are able to see, for example, how the remarkable Song nianzhu guicheng (Method for the Recitation of the Rosary) of 1619–23 transforms a late sixteenth-century engraving of the Annunciation into the inner quarters of a late-Ming household (figs. 12–13), complete with latticed windows and a painted screen in the style of the great landscape painter Ni Zan (1301–74) (p. 36). At the other end of the cultural spectrum, a work that must truly have startled Chinese and Manchu observers is an engraving (fig. 45) from the Pingding Zhunga’er Huibu desheng tu (1765–75), Asian Studies Review June 2012, Vol. 36, pp. 271–305