Britain's Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Britain’s Chinese Eye

Britain’s Chinese Eye literature, empire, and aesthetics in nineteenth- century britain

Elizabeth Hope Chang

stanford university press Stanford, California 2010

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved This book has been published with the assistance of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Parts of Chapter 2 were first published in Nineteenth Century Studies 19 (2005): 17–34. Reprinted with permission No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chang, Elizabeth Hope. Britain’s Chinese eye : literature, empire, and aesthetics in nineteenth-century Britain / Elizabeth Hope Chang. p.â•… cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-5945-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1.╇ Great Britain—Civilization—Chinese influences.â•… 2.╇ Great Britain—Civilization—19th century.â•… 3.╇English literature—19th century—History and criticism.â•… 4.╇Aesthetics, British—19th century.â•… 5.╇ China—In literature.â•… 6.╇ China—In art.â•…I.╇Title. da533.c46      2010 303.48'24105109034—dc22 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/13.5 Galliard

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To my grandmothers

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to be able to thank the many people who have helped see this book into print. Their assistance has added immeasurably to the value of this work; any faults that remain are mine alone. The University of California at Berkeley introduced me to wonderful scholars (some now dispersed to other places) who helped start this project in the right direction and, more important, taught me how to ask the questions I needed to keep it going on my own: Celeste Langan, Sharon Marcus, Colleen Lye, Catherine Gallagher, and Lydia Liu. Mai-Lin Cheng and Asali Solomon remain trusted sounding-boards and true friends. I also thank the University of California for a Dissertation-Year fellowship and the Townsend Center for the Humanities for allowing me to participate as a year-long fellow and showing me what interdisciplinary conversation could look like. At the University of Missouri, the English Department as a whole, and especially my colleagues in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies— Noah Heringman, George Justice, Devoney Looser, and Nancy West— have offered support, advice, and friendship in equal measure. Sam Cohen, Joanna Hearne, and Donna Strickland read every page of this book and made every page of it better. The students, both graduate and undergraduate, have helped me tremendously both by taking generous interest in my work and by sharing their interests with me. The University of Missouri Research Board and Research Council supported a year’s leave and a summer’s visit to London archives, respectively; both were indispensable to the progress of this manuscript.

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Acknowledgments

For their comments on and support of my work, I wish to thank the members of the Dickens Project, Ross Forman, Dane Kennedy, Douglas Kerr, Julia Kuehn, Peter Logan, Teresa Mangum, Erika Rappaport, and Philip Stern. David Hanson published an earlier and partial version of Chapter 2 in Nineteenth-Century Studies and gave valuable editorial feedback. I also thank the library staffs who have helped me acquire the necessary materials for this study, in particular all the library staff at the University of Missouri, as well as the Bancroft Rare Book Library, the British Library, the Wellcome Library, the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society, and the Library and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. At Stanford University Press, I want to thank especially Emily-Jane Cohen, who shepherded this book through its long development process, and Sarah Crane Newman, attentive to every detail. I also want to thank the anonymous readers of the manuscript whose suggestions changed this book in uniformly good ways. My family has remained ever patient with the demands of this project. I want to thank all of them, especially Claire and Ed Stiepleman, kindest of in-laws; Lily Shih, Witt Monts, Gabriel Monts, and Serena Monts, best of cousins; and of course my parents, Margaret and Raymond Chang, who showed me how to write and to teach long before I realized that I would want to do both of those things. I have since realized both how hard and how wonderful it is to follow their shining examples. Most of all I must thank my children, Isaac, Ezra, and Jacob, and my husband, Peter, for love and companionship beyond the bounds of words.

Contents

Introductionâ•… 1

1. Gardenâ•… 23 Sir William Chambers and the Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 28. The Macartney Mission of 1793 and the Qing Imperial Gardens, 37. Robert Fortune as Horticultural Spy in Racial Disguise, 56.



2. Plateâ•… 71 Romantic Satires on Blue and White China, 75. The Willow Pattern and George Meredith’s The Egoist, 88. Whistler and Rossetti as Collectors of Blue and White Porcelain, 97.



3. Display Case and Denâ•… 111 Exhibiting China in Victorian London, 115. Display Cases and Opium Dens in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 125. Edwin Drood’s Inheritors, 133.



4. Photographâ•… 141 Felice Beato and the Second Opium War, 146. Through China with John Thomson’s Camera, 152. “A Truthful Impression of the Country”: Isabella Bird, 163.

Conclusionâ•… 179 Notesâ•… 187 Works Citedâ•… 219 Indexâ•… 229

Figures

1. William H. Parrish, “View of the Emperor’s Park at Gehol” (1793) 2. William Alexander, “View in the Eastern Side of the Imperial Park at Gehol” (published 1804) 3. Willow Pattern Plate, Spode, ca. 1800–1820 4. James McNeill Whistler, Purple and Rose: Lange Leizen of the Six Marks (1864) 5. James McNeill Whistler, The Artist in His Studio (1865–66) 6. Felice Beato, “Prince Kung: Brother of the Emperor of China, Signer of the Treaty” (1860) 7. Felice Beato, “Interior Angle of North Fort Immediately after Its Capture” (1860) 8. John Thomson, “The Willow Pattern Bridge” (published 1875) 9. John Thomson, “Wang-Show-Shan” (published 1875) 10. Isabella Bird, “The Author in Manchu Dress” (published 1899) 11. Isabella Bird, “Fort on the Peking Wall” (published 1900) 12. Lois Conner, “Beihai Yuan, Beijing” (1984)

46 47 86 99 102 148 151 156 161 164 172 176

Britain’s Chinese Eye

Introduction

In the British nineteenth century, vision became subjective, material, and, consequentially, modern.1 This book tells one part of the story of how those changes in vision came about, and tells too how literary and artistic texts directed and made plain those changes. But I recount my history of vision’s development not through accounts of new technologies but through a study of one specific subject and object of vision: China, a geographical location that also came to designate particular kinds of visual and aesthetic form, as well as a particularly antithetical kind of foreignness.2 China, for nineteenth-century Britons, was at once place, commodity, people, and, at the same time, something more than all of those. It was a field of imagined visual possibility that directed many other kinds of material and rhetorical interaction. Many who traveled to China, and many more who did not, understood the Chinese especially and fundamentally in terms of the way the Chinese seemed to look—or fail to look—at things. When Leigh Hunt writes of the Chinese, “little-eyed .€.€. and little-minded,” that toddle upon the surface of his porcelain teacup, he makes plain in fancy an assumption broadly held in fact: that deficient Chinese ontology manifested in the physical limitations of Chinese eyes.3 Equally important, those who understood the Chinese to look differently, in both senses of the phrase, further understood Chinese objects and spaces—whether located in China or Britain—to reflect that divergent way of looking back at the viewer. Artificial, constrained design deemed Chinese in origin was held to induce constrained and artificial ways of seeing in observers both Chinese and British. These infectious consequences

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Introduction

both include and go beyond a mirroring of anthropomorphic form. When William Rossetti, writing a review of James McNeill Whistler’s painting Lange Leizen of the Six Marks (1864), refers to Whistler’s red-haired model Jo Hiffernan as a “Chinese woman painting a blue vase” despite the fact that there is “not even an attempt at the Chinese cast of countenance,” he anchors an abstract conception of Chinese vision in a flippantly inadequate physical designation.4 Even as Rossetti explains that the model’s eyes obviously lack the “proper almond-shape,” he continues to insist on her “Chinese”-ness as a function of the Chinese objects that surround her. The contradictions of his description demonstrate a central contention of my study: that China made sense to nineteenth-century British viewers through form and context as much as content.5 The almond eye, initially the main point of distinction between the British and the Chinese, actually functions as a jumping-off site for a much broader and more abstract range of explorations of Chinese formal difference inspired by the eye’s constrained dimensions. British writers and artists seized the obvious physical difference of the Chinese eye—in particular, its smaller size—to theorize the restricted and artificial influence that China’s empire was held to offer. Given their preliminary grounding in the visual organ, such theorizations naturally found best expression in visual terms. It is therefore my argument that descriptions of ways of seeing explicitly understood as Chinese reshaped the lived experience of a wide variety of nineteenth-century British subjects in a way that we can follow through texts like Rossetti’s review and many others. These reshapings revised not only British conceptions of China but British understandings of themselves as well. Indeed, British adaptation to this Chinese way of seeing continued to be mystified as foreign interventions even as the transformations they incurred became exclusively domestic—just as Whistler’s portrait of Jo Hiffernan among blue and white vases declares much more about his allegiance to a school of European painterly realism than his connections to Jingdezhen porcelain factories. But neither did the adjective “Chinese” entirely abandon implications of difference. Rather, the word evolved to accommodate both a racial designation and an aesthetic form described by its artificial composition and disregard of European perspectival arrangements. In this conflation of the physical and aesthetic realms, as in the hybrid Chinese Irish woman who is the subject of Lange Leizen, we see how British artists and writers used the imagination of foreign difference to change the way literary and artistic form explained the reality of the world at home.



Introduction

This book, then, intertwines histories of nineteenth-century visuality together with histories of nineteenth-century Sino-British political, economic, and social relations because understanding vision’s place in the literature of the nineteenth century requires that we do so. We cannot understand what nineteenth-century writers were writing about unless we also understand what they were looking at: in ways both globally encompassing and individually specific, vision, viewed object, and text were complicit in the writing of histories both aesthetic and political. With its silks, teas, willow trees, porcelain pagodas, and countless other designs occupying a familiar yet exotic place in the British visual and literary universe even as its governing empire became increasingly entangled with British political and commercial concerns, China offers an especially good example of this complicity. In explaining the complex presence of China in the nineteenth-century literary imagination, then, this book also gives an extended example of one way that visual images should matter to literary scholars and historians alike. Such images made silent yet constant backdrop to the production of literary and historical texts. But while many writings have survived, many more images have been lost or scattered from their original context. Restoring images to their proper place in the minds and eyes of nineteenthcentury authors gives us a completed picture of the range of connotation that a particular term—“China,” for example—must imply. Yet making connections between the nineteenth century’s visual contexts and its conditions of cultural and racial difference, whether in China or elsewhere, has been difficult to do. For scholars of the present day, asking about how visual practices divide along cultural lines seems to invite replication of bad nineteenth-century patterns of racial determinism and stereotype at worst, or descriptive catalogues of images of difference at best.6 While works like Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer have explained to us the priority of visual practice in the creation of the modern subject, we have often lacked the cultural genealogies to complement his technical histories of visual apparati. These challenges do not mean that we have to abandon questions about global differences in vision, however— just that we ought to change their emphasis. Instead of investigating only how different cultures were understood to see and perceive differently, we also need to ask why that difference mattered. What did it mean for British writers and artists to define themselves through or against a way of seeing they understood to be categorically incommensurate? I set out to answer this question in this book by following the formation

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Introduction

of an imaginary vessel of perception that I have termed Britain’s Chinese eye.7 British writers and artists used the idea of the Chinese eye as a point of internal reference, nuancing their invented version of that organ to aid in interpreting and expanding their own creative productions. The Chinese eye came to serve as a disembodied lens through which Britons might write for or against what was imagined to be a system of Chinese aesthetics. That imagined Chinese aesthetic system, for a wide variety of British writers and artists, became a defining corollary to an evolving British selfimage. These comparisons worked sometimes positively and sometimes negatively: Dante Rossetti, brother to William, asserts his unconventional artistic sense through his studio displays of blue and white porcelain, while Charles Dickens condemns protectionist Tory foreign policy by comparing its insular perspective to carved Chinese ivory balls nested one inside the other.8 In both cases, however, the explication of foreign difference through aesthetic form is crucial to an articulation of a domestic identity. To understand what it means to have Chinese eyes, then, is to understand the ways that British subjects theorized not only Chinese vision but also their own. Explaining the visual influence of China in Britain is important because we learn something new about the history of visuality in the nineteenth century when we follow the ways that aesthetic and visual sensibilities, broadly understood, connect to particular geographies. We learn that conditions of culture, governance, and race do matter in constructing a history of vision. They matter when telling stories not only of appropriation and loss but also of stories of incorporation and gain. Most crucially, culture, governance, and race tell us of the predicatory importance of visual and aesthetic form for establishing the foundations of the nineteenth-century British literary subject. One part of the invention of the British subject as a reader, writer, and depicter in general emerges when we follow the invention of the British subject as a reader, writer, and depicter of China in particular. These inventions concern not only the individual , but the nation; China’s place within the individual imagination affirms that individual’s connection to a collective British vision. It should be immediately clear that we cannot explain China’s imagined visual value to Britons simply by deliberating the authenticity of the objects and spaces that the British called Chinese. We also must ask what China, in particular, lent to the British writers and artists who claimed a Chinese aesthetic as their own. Beyond the material borrowing of patterns for blue



Introduction

and white china and designs for landscape gardens, what did the process of invoking Chinese aesthetics and Chinese visual practice mean for the British author? How did the sense that an object “looked Chinese,” or, more precisely, “looked like something a Chinese person might look at,” carry weight for the British artist? Why were the fantastical, artificial, and unnatural qualities of Chinese artistic productions so significant to British viewers, and why too were the restricted, immobile, and shallow powers of Chinese perception so commented on by British writers in works ranging from William Chambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray? Surely a desire for escape, a love of the exotic, and a fascination with a civilization supposed immobile for many centuries are all factors here, as many scholars of Orientalism and chinoiserie have already observed. Yet these observations do not tell the whole story. British engagements with an idea of Chinese aesthetics during the nineteenth century instruct us more specifically on the evolution of vision and visual realism during that time period. In the century in which realism reached its greatest heights, the persistence with which authors and artists continued to invoke a defiantly antirealist aesthetic that they claimed to be Chinese demonstrates an aspect of realism’s development that has so far received little attention.9 For the writers and artists I consider in this study, China’s aesthetic difference gains existence when realism’s most basic tenets get denied: narrative or pictorial representation cannot be understood to be analogous to direct experience, and temporal and spatial order no longer advance symmetrically or progressively. Further, the Chinese absence of interest in techniques of linear perspective signified to Western readers a profound indifference to the system of individual perception that perspective’s techniques imply, and, by extension, the massive framework of Western subject formation predicated on the individual eye.10 These kinds of formal denials of realist standards are frequently granted to later, more familiar media of visual modernism such as photography, cinema, and Impressionist painting. But the things about those media that are most interesting to us—their manipulations of renditions of temporality, interruptions of perspectival representation, and radical rethinkings of the cohesion between the pictorial subject and its background—all began to appear much earlier, in the British writing and picturing of Chinese aesthetics.11 Although much of this book expands on the difficulties incurred by Chinese visual difference, the texts I read also share an embedded idea of

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Introduction

China’s promise for the British imaginary. When the Academy mourns in 1899 the “[l]and .€.€. of little bridges and temples, and cock-boats shining in the soup-plate, or glowing in the rare and splendid lantern.€.€. . All that is doomed. Our children will not think so of China, for China will become real,” the sorrow is only part facetious and the loss is only partly in fantasy.12 In its defiance of the real, China made visible the priorities of native British vision; in becoming real, China deprives British vision of its key counterexample. In both cases, the capacity to see and be seen sets the standard for understanding what is real in the first place. Without the specific visual evidence of China’s difference drawn from the wide range of nineteenthcentury texts and objects that wrote or pictured China, the broader case of China’s profound strangeness to nineteenth-century Britain cannot stand. For China did indeed offer an extraordinarily broad order of both national and visual difference to the nineteenth-century British thinker. In its territorial expanse, large population, enduring civilization, and globally distributed commodities, the Asiatic empire formed a space both profoundly separate from, yet uniquely imbricated in, the European imagination. No other sovereign nation in the geographical imaginary was held at once to stand apart from Western history and yet, at the same time, to penetrate its domestic and commercial spaces as much as China. Apparent throughout nineteenth-century thought is the contention that China, in particular, forms the fixed, atemporal visual and spatial alternative to European linguistic dynamism. As a country at once entirely foreign yet well known, China thus successfully made the terms by which what I call the familiar exotic came to be understood. The familiar exotic, a paradoxical category, conveys a sense of unbridgeable cultural and aesthetic difference that is amplified, not diffused, by increased circulation and reproduction; I argue that we need such a category to account for China’s simultaneous presence and difference in the nineteenth-century imagination. China by no means meant the same thing to all people, yet all agreed that the designation “Chinese” offers an essential opposition to British conventions, even if the object it designates has been entirely domestically produced. What I broadly term a Chinese aesthetic, then, might more awkwardly be named a familiar-exotic aesthetic, as this paradoxical sense of everyday foreignness is as relevant as more material design parameters for describing the nature of China’s formal influence. A foundational piece of China’s foreignness comes in its temporal dif-



Introduction

ference, a difference particularly relevant given that art and literature of the period reflected changes in the representation of time more radically than ever. In British minds, China’s stasis and recursion stands in contradiction to empire-building progress and order: “[B]etter fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay” as Tennyson explains in “Locksley Hall.”13 While receptive of externally imposed delineations, China is understood by nineteenth-century observers to be internally unproductive, unwilling or unable to travel forward in time along with the European nations.14 As the civil servant, and secretary to Lord Macartney, John Barrow writes in his 1804 Travels in China, an account of Macartney’s diplomatic embassy to the court of the Qing emperor: “The Chinese .€.€. were civilized, fully to the same extent they now are, more than two thousand years ago .€.€. but .€.€. they have since made little progress in any thing, and been retrograde in many things.”15 This dismissal represents a sea change in European attitudes toward China’s social constancy; earlier observers, such as the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, had praised China’s immovability as evidence of the legitimacy of its governmental structure.16 Barrow’s critique echoes other late-eighteenth-century denigrations of Chinese influence that, for later interpreters, together seem to signal the definitive end of the era of European interest in Chinese aesthetics. Yet this interest cannot be connected solely to aesthetic concerns. As David Porter has shown, the eighteenth-century fondness for Chinese fashions known as chinoiserie connected crucially to larger debates about aesthetic theory, consumerism, and the global commercial prowess of the British nation.17 Even though nineteenth-century writers abandon the earlier fondness for the decorative style of chinoiserie, they maintain and even strengthen the notion that China’s visuality must be linked to political and economic conditions. In the nineteenth century as in the eighteenth, China is understood through its aesthetic objects and the conditions of its seeing; whether the understanding is celebrated or deplored does not diminish that primary circumstance. While the commanding, possessive gaze that renders its racially other object primitive and degenerate has become a well-studied visual formula, particularly in the British imperial encounter, forms of viewing dependent on movements of integration and exchange should receive more attention.18 This book, therefore, makes several complementary arguments. First, that ways of seeing and ways of occupying space are crucial components in the experience of any given historical moment and that these components not

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Introduction

only are apparent in the physical experience of daily life but also are recordable in narratives both visual and verbal. Second, that nineteenth-century artists and writers broadly understood these ways of seeing and ways of occupying space to happen differently in different places, and that cross-cultural relations are inflected accordingly. And finally, that these assumptions about cultural variations in vision have great power to direct the ways that novels and other kinds of writing explain themselves to be real, and so to shape our knowledge of what could be called real in the British nineteenth century in the first place. The story of how the British came to understand and rely upon a sense of Chinese visual difference must be, of course, closely tied to the story of how the British came to interact politically as well as economically with the Chinese during the nineteenth century. This book relies on key SinoBritish historical encounters to flag its narrative, beginning with the first official British contact with the Chinese empire in Lord Macartney’s 1793 embassy to the Qing court and continuing through to the Boxer Rising of 1898–1901, the last and most significant antiforeign uprising before the collapse of the Qing imperium. This is a period whose historical significance has been greatly revised in recent scholarship. The rise of the British empire over the course of the long nineteenth century is a story well known and often told; the decline of the Qing dynasty over the same period, perhaps equally so—and both narratives have been nuanced and complicated by recent scholarship on British and Qing imperial history.19 In particular, two kinds of historiographic models have both recently become insufficient, in large part because of an increasing attention to global economic patterns. Histories reading Britain’s relations with China as functionally equivalent to Britain’s other international relations, on the one hand, or, on the other, histories claiming a special paternal and improving privilege for British influence on Chinese politics and culture no longer fit with the ways we understand the early modern world as a dynamic space of exchange. Recent works by economic historians Kenneth Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong, for example, criticize earlier accounts which presume that industrial modernity must be unique to the geography of Western Europe.20 These accounts, Pomeranz and Wong show, wrongly decentralize China’s place in international economic development. Pomeranz’s contention that it is “China, more than any other place, that has served as the ‘other’ for the modern West’s stories about itself ” forms the foundation of his critique of Western-centric narratives of modern economic development; only in di-



Introduction

vesting ourselves of essentialist ideas about China’s contrasts with Western Europe, he proposes, can we properly conceive of the development of both global regions as simultaneous and mutually progressive.21 Productive recent analysis of China has adopted the broader concept of “informal empire” to negotiate the complex network of political, economic, and cultural influences and exchanges that delineated connections between the two powers in lieu of other formal instantiations of empire.22 Although informal empire is not itself a new nor an uncontested model for describing Sino-British relations, its use to describe a range of knowledge-producing practices beyond the traditional venues of diplomacy and commerce have shifted the possibilities of its conceptual and geographical application. Jürgen Osterhammel influentially defines British informal empire in China as semi-colonialism, “a historical situation of some stability and permanence in which overt foreign rule is avoided while economic advantages are secured by ‘unequal’ legal and institutional arrangements, and also by the constant threat of political meddling and military coercion that would be intolerable in relations between fully sovereign states.”23 Fa-ti Fan has more recently proposed extending Osterhammel’s model to questions of scientific imperialism and the political economy of knowledge among British naturalists in China; but the epistemological implications of informal empire can extend beyond individual disciplines.24 More important is that we understand informal empire as epistemological engagement rather than systemic control. Making meaning of China, in a manner useful for understanding nineteenth-century empire, demands an integration of historical incident, material artifact, and ethnographic evidence, among others, into a schema in which ways of being—reflected especially in my reading by ways of seeing—produced ways of knowing. China could be imagined to be open to politically and economically beneficial influence and entry by the British, whatever the reality, thanks in part to the British understanding of Chinese visual practice as both a dominant, yet deeply deficient, mode of comprehending the surrounding world. This makes China a difficult but interesting counterpoint to the example of India.25 The influential models developed by critics like Sara Suleri for reading the rhetoric of English India transfer only partially to the Chinese context.26 While both the history of the British in India and the history of the British in China contain a midcentury flash-point—the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in north and central India and the so-called Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1850s in China—China’s political constitution greatly differed

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Introduction

from political conditions on the subcontinent. As the British government well understood, China was ruled long prior to British arrival by a centralized non-native dynasty that exerted profound national control over social and economic systems large and small.27 The notion of the despotic emperor—if not the niceties of Qing imperial politics—was clearly grasped by ordinary Britons as well. This idea of the emperor’s central body contributed signally to the theoretical embodiment of the single Chinese eye, and thus, by extension, to a range of considerations on the way that vision operated along national and cultural lines. Thus, we can read Sino-British exchange sympathetically, but not congruently, with accounts of the making of British India. That the British held only the island of Hong Kong as an official colony makes the clearest practical difference between semicolonialism in China and colonialism in India. Long before the claiming of Hong Kong as a Crown colony, and far beyond the boundaries of that small and rocky southern territory, however, British informal empire claimed a presence in China. The story of these claims emerges through a series of significant visual encounters, in which the opposing empire of China could be imagined by the British to be both opposing and an empire in ways both viewable and visually distinct. Sino-British history in this book begins with perhaps the most famous of these imagined scenes of encounter: the refusal by Lord Macartney to “kow-tow” before the Qianlong emperor during Macartney’s 1793 diplomatic embassy to the Qing court.28 Although British trade relations with China through the East India Company dated back to the start of the seventeenth century, Macartney’s rebuff came to be understood as an important beginning point in the course of Sino-British history. As Lydia Liu has observed, this single act was deeply branded into British imperial consciousness and drove symbolic and physical acts of retaliation throughout the century.29 But it also established an initial point of visual exchange from which radiated a wide range of unofficial and informal engagements with Chinese visual practice. From the example of the Macartney embassy, a moment carefully visually stage-managed by both the governments of Britain and China, British writers and readers learned that Chinese ways of seeing not only could be but had to be linked to Chinese ways of ruling and, further, that the linkage could be extended to Chinese ways of being in general as those ways were brought home to Britain’s daily experiences and domestic spaces through commodities and through narratives.



Introduction

This was both a literal and a metaphorical transference. The commodity trade in silk, tea, and porcelain active through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant that Chinese objects were growing ever more materially present in British households. But the rise of free trade in opium meant to restore British specie reserves depleted by trade imbalances, which increased especially after the 1834 dissolution of the East India Company monopoly on the China trade, carried opium from India to China directly. British arguments about the trade in opium, both for and against, therefore depended on an abstract understanding of China’s objections rather than a material contact with these commodities. In the frequent rhetorical slippage between descriptions of closed Chinese markets and blinded Chinese eyes, attention shifted away from the relative morality or economic benefit of the opium trade and toward the constitution of China as visually defiant to British influence. This understanding of China as closed and despotic made increasing contrast to a Britain moving throughout the 1840s toward a revision of its own restrictive trade tariffs via the repeal of the Corn Laws. Thus the curtailed perspective described by members of the Macartney embassy easily transformed into a critique of Chinese blinkered vision in arguments for the British right to free trade and free travel in China. Such rights were gained, in part, through the first Opium War (1840–42) and its concluding Treaty of Nanjing (1842), which granted increased British trading rights, established the exterritorial system of coastal Chinese cities opened to British settlement and mercantile activity called treaty ports, ceded the island of Hong Kong to Britain, and specified the payment of a large indemnity to the British by the Chinese for damages incurred in the conflict.30 Major further Chinese concessions came in the Treaty of Tianjin, signed in 1858 amid the Sino-British conflict of the Arrow War (1856–60, also known as the Second Opium War) and the internal upheaval of the anti-Qing Taiping Rebellion (1856–64).31 In the Treaty of Tianjin, China granted unrestricted travel to passport-holding foreigners throughout the country, expanded British trading activity further into the interior of China, and ceded an additional six treaty ports to the British (and subsequently other European and U.S.) commerce. When the Qing emperor resisted compliance to these terms, British and French troops, in a significant restaging of Macartney’s humiliation some seventy years earlier, retaliated by razing parts of the imperial palaces in Beijing, causing the Chinese to make still further territorial and economic concessions in the 1860 “Convention of Peking.”

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Introduction

Although the burning of the Summer Palace made a major visual declaration of British command in China, equally significant were the flood of British travel narratives allowed by the broad lifting of interior passport restrictions, which rewrote the story of China’s metaphorical opening to British eyes in individual experiential terms. The murder of Augustus Raymond Margary, a British agent attempting to establish a trade route from Beijing through Burma to British India, occasioned even further relaxations of restrictions on interior travel in the Cheefoo Convention (1876), and produced a range of writings detailing travels on China’s western frontier.32 The increasing presence of British missionaries from both the London Missionary Society and the China Inland Mission throughout China’s interior prompted still more writing by making possible a vast increase in the number of missionary accounts of travels through previously unproselytized terrain.33 Meanwhile, China’s participation in international law continued under increasing British regulation throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Sir Robert Hart became the first Briton to hold a position in the Chinese government when appointed head of the Imperial Maritime Customs in 1863, a position he used both to accrue revenue to the Qing and to direct its payment of indemnities to foreign nations after the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and the Boxer Rising. These payments gave restitution for attacks suffered by foreign powers, with less attention or reparation given to the famines and other internal crises suffered by native Chinese. Matters came to a head in the final few years of the 1800s. The antiforeign riots staged against British and other European and U.S. interests in Beijing and elsewhere by the group of northern Chinese men calling themselves “Boxers United in Righteousness” represent only one part of the immense social and political transformations sweeping northern China at the turn of the century.34 But to British writers, hysterical though dubiously accurate accounts of the storming of the British legation in 1900 by large groups of lower-class Chinese became both the iconic and substantive center of the rebellion, as well as the seed for countless “yellow peril” narratives in the century to come.35 After the rebellion’s end, Britain used these incursions to justify demands for further legal concessions by the Qing. These demands demonstrate once more the paradoxical construction of Chinese sovereignty in British international relations, which expected that China would both comply with Britain’s extraterritorial demands in the way of a subject state, while also demanding that China assume the capacity to negotiate international



Introduction

treaties as an equal to other sovereign nations. The constant pressures by the British to attain the advantages of informal empire in China thus facilitated much narrative representation directly, by expanding the British traveler’s physical access to China. Equally important, informal empire made China imaginable indirectly, by establishing its people, land, and products as available for British manipulation and reinvention.

 In describing this history, I deliberately identify Britain, rather than England, as the central geography, in order to emphasize that these years also encompass the course of British self-invention as a world nation. As Linda Colley has influentially shown, Britain itself came into being in the century-odd years following the 1707 Act of Union through its self-definition against what it was not, as understood on the European, transatlantic, and global stages. My proposal to read China and Britain as opposing empires during this time period should not then be understood as a call to compare directly the ways these two nations conceived of their global presence, nor to make parallel their domestic operations. Indeed, British actions in China met with frequent internal resistance, as, among other examples, the 1857 parliamentary challenges to Palmerston’s prime ministership following the opening salvos of the Arrow War make clear. Yet neither does my narrative propose that aesthetic competition between Britain and China can be equivalent to competition between Britain and other empires, most notably France. British critiques of China’s religious difference, despotic rulership, and degenerate taste for luxury have all been understood to be fundamentally exaggerations of a more geographically and politically relevant critique of France. Yet China’s racial difference, geographical distance, and vast interior territory combined to produce an order of distinction not equivalent to the Gallic counterexample. Further, the incorporation of Ireland through the 1800 Act of Union and the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in the following decade complicated France’s absolutist alterity from Britain; Catholicism was now much closer to hand, while French military threat seemed at last to be receding into the distance. French aesthetics remained both geographically and ontologically more familiar than those of what Lord Byron calls “small-ey’d China’s crockery-ware metropolis.”36 Thus while Versailles and Gehol may have both displayed the power of repressive monarchy to British observers, only in the Chinese case was that display produced through a combined sense

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Introduction

of historical isolation and profound phenotypic difference—little eyes and static minds. The ways in which China was made to be different from Britain, therefore, occur at home as much as abroad and in words about images as much as in images themselves. In this way, the conditions of Chinese visual practice as imagined in the nineteenth century complement more familiar stories of British representational practice in the same period. For the years from 1793 to 1900 mark not only a significant range in Sino-British history, of course. They also mark a profound shift in the production and distribution of all kinds of writing within and across Britain. With the expansion of the periodical press, the growth in quantity and variety of nonfiction narrative, and the rise of the long-form novel, the number of genres in which Britons could write and read—about China in particular, and about their surrounding world in general—exploded over the course of the century. Important to all these categories, but especially to the novel, was the rising priority of the literary real.37 Fictional narrative made sense because it corresponded to pre-existing collective standards of reality; in this way, readers understood that acts of reading and acts of direct observation could constitute experience in analogous ways. Nonfiction narratives and travel narratives in particular relied on systems of referentiality as well: readers depended on various narrative conventions to understand that the travels of Mungo Park could be real, though they would never experience the interior of Africa for themselves. The particular worldview authorized by the rise of the realist novel had global power, as Edward Said and many others have shown. Whether implicitly or explicitly concerned with events abroad, novels of this imperial century established through their narratives proper relations between the colonizer and the colonized.38 Yet historical conditions, as we have seen, meant that China occupied a different place in the British imagination than colonial holdings like Jamaica or India. When writing about that historical difference, British authors made clear that China posed a literary difference as well. The narrative and aesthetic terms that Britons used to conceive of China were not merely unlike but antithetical to the terms of British realism. When Charles Lamb describes “those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that under the notion of men and women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world before perspective—a china teacup,” he reminds his readers that even Chinese objects as familiar and common as blue and white teacups relay an entirely disruptive worldview to



Introduction

British viewers, and by extension, that looking at and writing about these teacups can call into question logical processes of speech and narrative.39 The imagined place of China in British literature is therefore particularly, though antithetically, connected to realism’s ongoing central effort to make the world of the novel comply to a set of theoretical external reference points that readers and authors agree are, or ought to be, real. By contrast, what these authors understood to represent a Chinese aesthetic as implied through visual practice or material object impinges constant reminders of the defiant artifice of its premise and perspective. Attacks on Chinese aesthetics, therefore, explain through counterexample the presumptions that naturalized the realist real. In looking at the ways in which the Chinese were believed to do wrong when representing lived experience, certain things that British realism consequently believed itself to do right become more clear. Thus when Charles Dickens writes of a Chinese sailing vessel on display in the London docks that “[if] there be any one thing in the world that it is not at all like, that thing is a ship of any kind,” his repudiation of the Chinese capacity to be real follows Lamb’s separation of Chinese images from their recognizable referents.40 For Dickens as much as for Lamb, however, China’s unhinged signifiers are as necessary as they are illogical. Without their peculiar presence, the necessary connection between real British object and realistic British representation could not be made clear.

 This book is divided into four chapters, “Garden,” “Plate,” “Display Case and Den,” and “Photograph,” each keywords in nineteenth-century pictorial and spatial imaginings of China and Chinese ways of seeing. These keywords are inextricably interlinked in form and content: the garden dissolves into the willow tree of pattern plate, the narrow den darkly doubles confinements of the walled garden, the photographic print itself circulates as a plate, and all signal China’s complex intervention in dialectics of public and private, domestic and foreign, real and exotic, natural and artificial, and open and enclosed. The chapters likewise overlap in time frame: the first chapter moves from William Chambers’s writings on Oriental gardens in 1772 to British tourist accounts of the destruction of the Qing imperial gardens in the 1860s; the second chapter begins with Romantic-era satires on blue and white china in the first decades of the nineteenth century and extends to descriptions of the porcelain-collecting practices of Whistler and

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Introduction

Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the 1860s; the third chapter starts with newspaper reports of Chinese ethnographic exhibitions in the 1840s and ends with evocations of London opium dens in British fiction of the fin de siècle; finally, the fourth chapter progresses from accounts of photography during the Second Opium War in 1860 to documentary photography of the Boxer Rising in 1901. This overlapping chronology demonstrates the interdependence of each term upon the other, but it also indicates the broadening reception of ideas about China in British culture, as the long time frame of each chapter implies. I have already given an overview of the ongoing diplomatic interpenetrations between the two countries throughout the century. Equally important for maintaining China’s priority in the British imagination are the material changes in publication practice that distribute allusions to Chinese aesthetic practice throughout a national textual conversation. The multiplying numbers of periodicals and periodical readers across the century made available a whole new range of subcategories in which China’s visual difference could be alluded to for satiric or serious effect. In countless incidental references to willow patterns, bound feet, and little eyes scattered across domestic magazines with disparate audiences and political leanings such as the London Magazine, Chambers’s Journal, Fraser’s Magazine, Household Words, Punch, All the Year Round, and The Strand Magazine, China established itself as a point of visual opposition to Britain just as surely as it did in the direct reportings of the London Times or the Illustrated London News. Further, the increasing facility for illustration in all of those magazines greatly aided the development of a visual vocabulary of willow trees, pagodas, queues, and slanted eyes that reinforced the corresponding textual allusions. Likewise, readers did not turn only to the sinology of John Francis Davis, James Legge, Thomas Wade, or Herbert Giles, or the travel narratives of writers such as John Barrow, William Gill, or Edward Baber, to learn of China’s influence. The multivolume novel, with its surfeit of details of the Victorian world, absorbed hundreds of passing details reinforcing the terms of Chinese visual difference. And readers of those novels needed no prompting to catch the effects of these brief references, common as they were. In many cases, the presence of a supposedly Chinese object in fact reinforces a scene of British conformity. When George Eliot, for example, wishes to capture the dull domesticity of Lydgate’s rival doctor Wrench, in Middlemarch, she points to Wrench’s family’s “lunch lingering in the form



Introduction

of bones, black-handled knives and willow-pattern.” 41 The specific naming of the willow pattern conveys, in a way that no other design reference could, an assessment of a character both middlebrow and unimaginative. Wrench’s use of the willow pattern makes the design, once sought-after and utterly exotic, into a foreignness that is resolutely drab and familiar. Thus China’s “dance of images,” which Wordsworth once condemned for its intrusion on his youthful rural fantasies, comes to form an integral part of a much larger universe of allusions populating Victorian fictional and nonfictional spaces.42 The move from the aesthetics of the picturesque to realism’s visual multiplicity therefore can be read differently given the conditions of literary practice I have sketched out in the previous paragraphs. China’s visual disunity, exemplified especially in its gardens and decorative objects, was held to be antithetical to the selective scene-making exercised by the properly educated picturesque eye, as I explain in my first two chapters. As my third and fourth chapters describe, China’s ungrounded referents and illogical composition and perspective displayed in exhibition cases, opium dens, and even photographs, also challenged realism’s productive unifications of detail. In creating a visual model removed from both of those dominant aesthetic modes, British literature about what it meant to see and be seen through Chinese eyes in such locations as the garden, the plate, and the den explored the dilemmas of visual modernism before it came to be known as such. When modernism did come to prioritize the dismantling of realism’s transcriptively referential details, it therefore restaged the intervention that the Chinese had long since been understood to perform. This intervention has rarely been taken seriously, largely because British explorations of Chinese aesthetics usually operate as comic parodies rather than careful aesthetic treatises. George Mason’s satiric “Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers” mocks Chambers’s fantastical yet seriously intentioned Dissertation on Oriental Gardening; George Meredith’s The Egoist parodies both the story of the willow pattern plate and the British aristocracy itself; even Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip” skewers conventional descriptions of the opium den before revealing the real mystery at hand. Britain’s Chinese Eye reads these parodies not as satiric byways but as substantive additions to the evolution of the visual modernism. The flexibility and durability of British comedy on Chinese aesthetics—such comedy occurs in all four of my central rubrics and across the entire century-span of my study—itself indicates that we must consider these

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Introduction

satires more fully. More generally, the Chinese example offers us a chance to restore a consideration of parodic aesthetics into our more general histories of the move from the picturesque to the real.

 The book’s first chapter, “Garden,” argues for the integration of Chinese ways of seeing nature into conceptions of the British natural world, but it also charts the ways that improved conditions of plant exchange changed the British conception of the native and natural more generally. This increased ability to transplant Chinese specimens to the British landscape paralleled a shift in the theoretical conception of the British garden. During the eighteenth century, British gardening style depended on Chinese influence enough to be termed jardin anglo-chinois by European observers. But by the mid-nineteenth century, despite the greatly increased presence of Chinese plants such as rhododendrons and azaleas in the British landscape, British garden designers insisted on the native inspiration of their forms. This chapter links a deepening British mistrust of the visual effects used by the Chinese in creating their gardens to a broader British disavowal of the influence of Chinese landscape design. In rejecting the obfuscations of Chinese designs, however, British writers affirmed those designs’ grounding logic: that stylized landscape systems relayed real information about a country’s political liberties. In the second chapter, I describe how the circulation of patterned porcelain allowed the Chinese garden to be understood as a domestic commodity, but I also explain how the increasingly mechanized production of that commodity revised British creative and narrative self-conception. Thus, this chapter connects artistic technique, commercial conditions, and consumer practice in describing the ways that domestically manufactured pieces of porcelain became identified primarily as Chinese objects wielding Chinese visual influence.43 In the transformation of British commodities into Chinese objects, we can connect the economic conditions described by traditional theories of consumer practice with the newer critical category of thing theory through rhetorics of political and racial difference.44 This helps us to revisit C. B. Macpherson’s influential theory of possessive individualism by taking into account the ways that Britons were constituted not only by the materiality of their possessions but also by the rhetorical and visual figurations by which they interpreted and put into context those same possessions.45 The developing idea of the home in the Victorian



Introduction

era as a private space for the creation and protection of the family to be decorated with objects reflecting personal tastes and national fashions gave architectural location for the display of a Chinese way of seeing.46 Objects imagined to be Chinese were therefore both designed and designing. This chapter draws on the economic histories of taste and literary liberations of fictional objects to argue for the importance of the domestically produced willow pattern plate and story to the British understanding of China.47 The third chapter shows how the urban spaces of the Chinese museum and the Chinese opium den became important locations for metonymic visions of China itself, and also demonstrates the problems incurred by narratives seeking to reterritorialize the Chinese commodities comprising these spaces into a British urban landscape. This chapter understands the description of ethnographic museums and opium dens as specifically Chinese spaces to participate in the progressive invention of social space as an “active constituent of historical consciousness,” as Lynda Nead has put it.48 The opium den gained representation greatly disproportionate to its physical presence in Britain’s urban environment—largely, I argue, by virtue of its connection to less sinister exhibitions of Chinese things. Yet the den’s imagined existence as an intrusive kind of social space again made useful counterpoint to the evolution of the urban geography more general. As changing demographics of immigration and internal relocation vastly increased city populations and so pressured the legibility of the urban environment, Chinese opium dens stood in for the most foreign and degenerate extremes of the urban slum’s general obscurity.49 Finally, the fourth chapter follows the way that photography aims to erase the effects of the Chinese aesthetic by claiming to make China real, but also argues that, given the camera operator’s embodiment of this preceding visual history, such erasure can never fully succeed. This chapter uses the idea of the Chinese eye to revisit the rise of photographic ways of seeing in the nineteenth century. The invention of photography, once held to initiate a radical break in nineteenth-century ways of seeing, has been explained by Jonathan Crary and Nancy Armstrong to mark instead a confirmation of already established visual practice. Rather than adjusting their vision to resemble the photograph, Victorians adjusted photographs to resemble their vision. So too did delineations of Chinese difference prepare the way for incorporations of that difference. This was by no means an instantaneous process. Limitations and difficulties in production of daguerreotypes in the 1840s and wet collodion plates in the 1850s through 1880s meant that mak-

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Introduction

ing images of China, or indeed any kind of image, was an expensive and time-consuming process; likewise, photographic reproductions in texts were initially possible only through the costly photogravure process. As advances in technology made possible halftone reproductions in the 1870s and handheld cameras and roll film in the 1880s, quicker, less expensive, and more portable visions of China came to proliferate, affecting not just the visual image of China but also the way in which narrative could make use of that vision. At the same time, figurative illustrations to periodical and book text evolved stylistically and technically in competitive relation to the photographic image.50 In all cases, the project of illustrating China got challenged by the very viewing practices China had initiated: British eyes had been trained when making China their subject to deny the authenticity of the Chinese object in all kinds of media, old and new. Thus each additional medium expands the popular invention of the British viewing subject. The gardens described at the start of the first chapter posed dilemmas of visual realism relevant to a few aristocratic landholders, while the pattern plates taken up in the second chapter expand those dilemmas to a far larger middlebrow audience. Industrialization, a changing class structure, a rise in literacy rates, leisure time, consumer activity, the passage of laws instantiating political and social reforms—all made the very broad national background against which subjects of many kinds gained the resources and capacities to imagine, and find relevant, a vision of Chinese difference. Although my study focuses on certain exceptional viewers of China—and, in the first and last chapters, examines those viewers as they travel in China, rather than Britain—Britain’s Chinese Eye prioritizes equally the ordinary and the domestic in its recording of the travel narratives of everyday life, the countless imaginary journeys and transformations occasioned by the flood of Chinese images and images of China washing across the British nineteenth century.

 In the opening pages of The Order of Things (1966), Michel Foucault explains that his seminal text “arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought.”51 The source for Foucault’s laughter is Borges’s anecdote of the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, that peculiar Chinese reference work appearing in his story “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.”52 This Chinese encyclopedia divides animals into categories such



Introduction

as “(a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.”53 This encyclopedia entry, dubiously sourced by Borges to the German sinologist Franz Kuhn, has traveled via Foucault very widely throughout the academic sphere and served a range of critical approaches.54 Whether readers accept or reject the Chinese encyclopedia as evidence of the culturally situated and contingent operations of meaning-making, however, they generally choose not to question the content or source of the anecdote itself. For this, of course, is part of Foucault’s point; it is the juxtaposition of the categories that is laughable, not their individual meaning nor the particulars of their provenance. Foucault himself does not, however, entirely abandon the anecdote to such interpretation. Instead, he further emphasizes the encyclopedia’s supposed source in the “mythical homeland” of China, a place that he describes as “a picture that lacks all spatial coherence” and a “region whose name alone constitutes for the West a vast reservoir of utopias.”55 He concludes: “There would appear to be, then, at the other extremity of the earth we inhabit, a culture entirely devoted to the ordering of space, but one that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak, and think.”56 Britain’s Chinese Eye might, in a way, be considered a working out of Foucault’s phrase “there would appear to be” across the wide range of nineteenth-century British subjects also seeking to name, speak, and think. In writing this book I want to relate a description not of China as it was to nineteenthcentury Britons, but China as it appeared to be, with a special emphasis on the visual constitution of that apparition. Foucault, tellingly, does not reveal whether or not he believes the encyclopedia to be an authentic Chinese document. This is because he charges the anecdote with an indeterminate dual role: it both interpolates a mythical Chinese condition of ur-order into a study of Western epistemology while at the same time, by virtue of its source in Borges, implicates a Western creativity in giving shape to the genealogy of that condition. When Foucault writes that “[in] our traditional imagery, the Chinese culture is the most meticulous, the most rigidly ordered, the one most deaf to temporal events, most attached to the pure delineation of space; we think of it as a civilization of dikes and dams beneath the eternal face of the sky; we

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Introduction

see it, spread and frozen over the entire surface of a continent surrounded by walls,” he follows conventionally out of the discourse that has described the image of China from Marco Polo to the present while still holding tight to this traditional imagery as the shared possession of our Western minds. Thus, he makes plain that the articulation of China’s difference that he uses to launch a reconsideration of European systems of order is coming from a decidedly Western text. The chain of specularity does not proceed in a linear fashion from Occidental gazer to Oriental object of the gaze; instead, the vision of China is in fact a reflection mirrored back to the European reader by a representation made by a Western writer. China therefore has both positive and negative function in Foucault’s analysis and in the broader Western intellectual tradition of liberal humanism with which he engages. It takes positive definition as a site where difference is located, but it also works as negative space, the territory beyond which exists to give definition to the defining subject. What is significant is that both spaces are ultimately meaningful to only one set of viewers, expressing for Foucault a Western understanding of Western self-constitution and display. It is tempting to imagine that Foucault’s use of Borges’s anecdote has been so widely seized upon precisely because it is an anecdote about China in particular, a country that stands as the exceptional rather than paradigmatic other. If not every commentator that follows has succeeded in capturing the subtleties of China’s contrapuntal influence on Foucault’s thought, their repeated attempts to get in on the encyclopedia’s epistemological joke help reinforce my book’s central contentions: first, that we are forever interested in the ways that cultures make perceptions; second, that we are equally interested in the ways that cultural practice relays and represents that perceptual experience; and third, that there is something about China in particular especially conducive to articulating the strangeness of that process for the Western eye.

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Garden

Writing in 1752 of the Yuanming Yuan, or “Encompassing Illumination Garden,” a part of the Qing imperial residential complex just northwest of Beijing,1 the Jesuit priest Jean Dénis Attiret declares its absolute visual difference: “Every thing is truly great and beautiful, both as to the Design and the Execution: and [the gardens] struck me the more, because I had never seen any thing that bore any manner of Resemblance to them, in any Part of the World that I had been in before.”2 It is a difference that proves powerful enough to shift Attiret’s mode of perception permanently. “Since my Residence in China,” he explains, “my Eyes and Taste are grown a little Chinese.”3 This fusion of the physical and the aesthetic in Attiret’s account of his transformation establishes a theoretical touchstone for my book as a whole. In Attiret’s concise turn of phrase, we find a miniature history of the ways that Chinese eyes could be acquired through the act of looking at Chinese things. The Jesuit’s remark, then, establishes the Chinese eye as a portable—and transferable—instrument of vision. The garden setting makes a particularly appropriate locale for initiating this particular transformation. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century descriptions of Chinese gardens, real and imagined, represent the first way that British literature came to conceive of China as a space of visual difference in the post-chinoiserie century, and, further, came to root that aesthetic difference in exigencies of politics. That the late-eighteenth-century British landscape garden was called by the French the jardin anglo-chinois is well known; yet the consequences of that perceived national-aesthetic linkage in formulating a broader political and economic conception of the relations

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Garden

between China and Britain throughout the nineteenth century remain relatively untraced.4 This chapter shows that by setting up the garden’s mediated natural space as the primary location for interpretation of national difference, British authors can best describe the double artifice of Chinese landscape and Chinese governance. But they also can, in later years, imagine a remedy to that artificiality that reasserts the native and natural priority of British observations and British landscape in both organic and narrative terms. Gardens were, of course, generally understood to be the premier formal sites for displaying power in the late eighteenth century, for both the British and for the Chinese, and as such were significant arenas for staging politically and economically significant encounters.5 As Chandra Mukerji argues, “Gardens are not .€.€. an Edenic place to escape from everyday culture, but a constituting site for the development of culture.”6 As a mediatory space between public and private, outer and inner, organic and constructed, the garden in its broadest sense defines the story and picture through which the natural world is given meaning.7 Thus rather than making a refuge from political and economic concerns, theories of Chinese aesthetics displayed in the garden became integral to their articulation. The space of the Chinese garden and the idea of the Chinese garden space conveyed crucial meaning to British viewers about a kind of geography encoded as despotic, excessive, fantastic, incoherent, illogical, and exotic. When seen through the eye of the British traveler, these aesthetic categories were never separate from imperial governance and economic circulation, but rather formed their indispensable naturalized expression.8 But these readily apparent differences between Chinese and British aesthetics grow more complicated when we pay attention to the context of Attiret’s remark. As had already been reported throughout Europe, the Qianlong emperor directed Attiret, along with fellow Jesuits Guiseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoît, to begin work in 1747 on a new section of the gardens known as the Xiyang Lou (Western-Style Buildings), integrating a European aesthetic into the architecture of Qing imperial display.9 In writing his account, then, Attiret thus not only provided a firsthand description of the grounds but also designed their alteration. His Chinese eyes and taste operated both receptively and directively, absorbing and reshaping Chinese visual difference for audiences Chinese and European. In so doing, he further complicated the authenticity of a site already deeply mediated and yet also deeply influential. The deceptive simplicity of his



Garden

declaration of visual difference established a pattern for later claims of distinction equally multidirectional. In this chapter’s history of British visions of, and interventions into, the Chinese garden, these contradictory claims of difference and assimilation proliferate. Sir William Chambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), a fictional account of a model Chinese garden, renders the imaginary spatial and visual experience of the formal Chinese garden into the terms of British narrative. In so doing, the text offers a profoundly influential definition of the way that all future observers must perceive Chinese gardens.10 When members of Lord Macartney’s embassy visited the Qing imperial gardens in the 1790s, or when Robert Fortune hunted for plants in Chinese nursery gardens in the 1840s, the legacy of Chambers’s text directed both how and where they looked at the landscape, as well as how they wrote about that vision. This chapter shows how these three sets of writings—from Chambers, the Macartney mission, and Fortune—all manage, in three distinct historical moments, to position the Chinese garden as the central interpretive problem for the British observer of China, and to parallel that interpretive effort to the project of reading national meaning in the British landscape. In writing and reading these garden narratives, Britons learned that not only their surrounding landscape but also their own organs of vision could be objects of design. Readers have usually kept these three sets of texts separate, however, because the groups value Chinese gardens very differently. The writings of William Chambers describe a fanciful garden filled with exotic elements seemingly divorced from historical concerns. He finds the very artificiality of this garden’s aesthetics—linked by others to an insipid governance rendered static by centuries of immobility—to be in fact productive of epistemological possibility through the obviousness of its own artifice. Meanwhile, the Macartney mission texts and Fortune’s writings share a general disapproval of Chinese barbarism quite distinct from Chambers’s admiring tone. Macartney embassy members found in the imperial gardens of the Chinese a carefully and deliberately staged occlusion of British vision strongly correspondent with the emperor’s general rebuff of British economic advances. Robert Fortune, who traveled in disguise as a “pretty fair Chinaman” in an effort to discover the secrets of tea cultivation in China’s forbidden interior territory, also framed cultivated and uncultivated Chinese landscape as locations where clear vision, free travel, and free trade in tea plants, horticultural specimens, and other commodities were all endlessly obfuscated.

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Garden

As David Porter has shown, however, crucial political and economic contexts do in fact ground the Dissertation’s chinoiserie fantasies.11 These contexts come through most clearly when the Dissertation is read together with the satirical poetic responses it inspired, in particular George Mason’s “Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers,” which demonstrates the disturbing political implications engendered by Chambers’s text. Mason’s horror at the Dissertation’s praise for a landscape created to please a single despotic ruler emphasizes the ways that the Dissertation was produced in, and received by, an audience thoroughly sensitive to the text’s potential influence. Despite the difference in his conclusions, then, Chambers’s work still shares with the later texts an embedded sense of the political significance of Chinese visual and perceptual difference. Further, all three sets of texts take seriously the capacity of that Chinese difference to transform British eyes and tastes at home. Reading these three sets of texts together makes plain that the way that Britons wrote about Chinese aesthetic form profoundly influenced the way that Britons were able to write about political and personal freedoms, both at home and abroad. Taking Chambers, Macartney, and Fortune in succession also illuminates the progression of British writing about the natural world. The flourishing of theoretical and practical treatises on domestic landscape design in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represented a particularly intense period of scrutiny of the epistemological production of natural space within the British isles.12 As foreign landscape gardens become the subject of travel narratives, readers gained a new perspective on the aesthetics of the picturesque within that genre. By accepting the Chinese landscape’s designed aesthetic conditions as consequential to the act of perception, the writers in this chapter record both a challenge to the picturesque tradition as well as a record of its transformation in the Chinese context.13 Picturesque views here reveal not only a competing global economy and autocratic empire but also an alternate aesthetic arrangement giving visual expression to that competitive difference. Even the most basic tenet of the picturesque narrative—that it represents something that can be pictured—grows more complicated in China’s divergent and competitive visual regime. Only by reasserting the narrative conventions of the British travel narrative can the later writers absorb the apparently static and despotic Chinese landscape into a productively forward-moving text. As all of these writers acknowledge, the power displayed in the landscape garden is most centrally the power of the eye to occupy and organize



Garden

its surrounding space as well as the power of description to convey the eye’s impressions to those not able to view the garden personally. Thus successful landscape design requires a human observer to narrate its refinements and acculturation of raw nature, as well as its representation of spatial, economic, and political power. As the predominant site for accommodating and directing practices of looking, the garden displays in its design and reception rhetorics of space and vision by bringing together the natural and national worlds. Yet while the narratives and descriptions of British gardens sought to naturalize and integrate the congruence of the vision of the garden with a more abstract vision of power, the narratives written by Britons of Chinese gardens emphasized the difficulty and artifice inherent in demonstrating that same congruence on Chinese soil. This distinction formed the key point of divergence between British naturalism and Chinese artificiality in what were often otherwise seen as interchangeable styles. Each writer’s explanation of the manufacture and operations of the garden’s visual trickery—in particular its manipulations of perspective—adds further evidence to the account of Chinese visual difference. Since the very concept of perspective, as developed and refined in the Renaissance, depended on the referent of a universal, or general, human body, the arrangement of the Chinese garden around the singular body of the emperor starkly emphasized Asian despotism. As Attiret writes of the Yuanming Yuan: “There is but one Man here; and that is the Emperor. All pleasures are made for him alone. This charming Place is scarce ever seen by any body but himself, his Women, and his Eunuchs.”14 Chambers, Macartney, and Fortune all follow Attiret in acknowledging that Eastern munificence makes possible the grandeur of the Chinese landscape. Yet these narratives also suggest that the reverse must be even more true: the experience of constructing and viewing the Chinese landscape itself produces viewers that are themselves visually despotic. In the British writing of China, gardens produce observers as much as observers produce gardens—a conclusion with significant implications for the role of domestic landscape design. That is to say, critiques of Chinese gardens had more at stake than debates over the proper arrangements of vistas and pathways. It became increasingly important for Victorian readers taking up the canon of texts on China produced by Chambers, Macartney, and Fortune to clarify the kinds of observers that these gardens might produce. John Loudon, in his history of “Gardening in China,” concludes that “Chinese taste in gardening .€.€.

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Garden

partakes of the general character of the people.€.€. . The love of the grotesque and of monstrosities is seldom accompanied in individuals of any country with enlightened views and liberal sentiments.”15 Likewise, an 1855 Quarterly Review article assessing the legacy of the picturesque tradition in landscape from Uvedale Price onward asserts: “The Chinese garden, with which Fortune’s works have now made us familiar, and the English garden, in the form it ultimately assumed, present two distinct types. The one is nature dressed by art; the other is an artificial imitation, or rather parody, of nature, cramped and dwarfed to bring her beauties within the compass of a narrow enclosure. The English garden in its failure degenerates into the Chinese.”16 At stake here, ultimately, is not only the right to free trade, or even the right to political liberty, but an even more basic sense of personal freedom as a warrant granted and maintained by the surrounding natural world.

Sir William Chambers and the Dissertation on Oriental Gardening Chambers’s Dissertation, then, stands both as an influential synthesis of visions of the Chinese garden and major point of opposition for later writers hostile to Chinese landscape styles. But Chambers was not the first to posit the Chinese garden as a positive visual influence. Even before Attiret’s descriptions received English translation, Sir William Temple’s “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, or Of Gardening in the year 1685” had earlier described the Chinese garden as emblematic of the divide between the English way of thinking and the Chinese. According to Temple, Chinese design principles seem “to lie as wide of ours in Europe, as their country does,” as demonstrated by the Chinese defiance of Renaissance ideals of symmetry and balance.17 By favoring what Temple termed “sharawadgi,” or “artful disorder,” the Chinese gardener’s “greatest reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures, where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts.”18 Later writers took up Temple’s description and expanded “sharawadgi” to become the central term in a lexicon of Chinese difference; this fanciful vision of China expanded into the European fondness for the exotic style of decoration known as chinoiserie.19 The popularity of chinoiserie designs, along with eighteenth-century Continental philosophical attention to the principles of



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Confucianism as a mode of governance and social order, all contributed to a general period of interest in China’s foreignness.20 Chambers, however, came to prominence during the waning of chinoiserie’s popularity, during the period when the style’s defiance of representational logic and multiplication of functionless ornament more disturbed than delighted.21 This made his work as author of the 1757 Designs for Chinese Buildings and architect of several Oriental buildings in Kew Gardens, including the now-destroyed House of Confucius as well as the Chinese pagoda, open to critiques meant for the fashion as a whole. Additionally, despite having traveled with the Swedish East India Company to Canton in the years 1743–45 and again in 1748, Chambers was frequently judged to lack adequate knowledge of China. And, too, his steady rise to royal favor—he was knighted by King Adolf Fredrik of Sweden in 1770 and appointed to the positions of Surveyor-General and Comptroller of the Works by George III in 1783—may have made him more available to general criticism by those not disposed to favor the ruling monarch.22 In writing the Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, however, Chambers explodes these questions of authenticity with the extremes of his text’s examples—erupting volcanoes, African giants, and spontaneous electrical storms all make a part of the Oriental garden’s charms. Despite this implausible veneer, the Dissertation also has serious work to do in positing the Chinese garden as a site bringing together equally an experiential account of aesthetic theory, a fantastical traveler’s narrative, and a practical manifesto for a national style of landscape. The charged response to Chambers’s text highlights a fourth, implicit strand of interpretation: a geographically situated articulation of monarchical power. Uniting these multiple genres is a common narrative method: the invocation of a Chinese landscape through an evocation of the Chinese eye. The text’s primary focus on visual effect propels the reader into the position of a Chinese observer, with all the associated transformations that implies. General critical opinion holds the Dissertation as a polemic against Chambers’s contemporary, the landscape designer Lancelot “Capability” Brown. Although Brown is never mentioned by name, Chambers’s insistence on using categories of emotional response to illustrate his ideas clearly challenges Brown’s more systematic style of design—as Brown puts it, in his design philosophy: “Place-making, and a good English Garden, depend intirely [sic] on Principle and have very little to do with Fashion; for it is a word that in my opinion disgraces Science wherever it is found.”23

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Chambers himself privately insisted on the domestic location of his critique, writing to a friend: I have lately published a little Dissertation on Gardening which has met with a very favourable reception here though it is in Direct opposition to the prevailing taste both in England and the rest of Europe. [It] is a system of my own which as it was a bold attempt of which the success was very uncertain I fathered upon the Chinese who I thought lived far enough off to be out of the reach of critical abuse.24

It is obvious both from the Dissertation’s content and reception that Chambers’s denials are disingenuous, despite the continued willingness of critics to take him at his word.25 The parameters of the Chinese garden were at the time of the Dissertation’s publication already well established within the British aesthetic consciousness; indeed, the spaces that Chambers deployed in service of his own theoretical position were if anything oversignified, as sites specifically and formally dependent upon their own representationality. China’s landscape, equal parts exotic and despotic, serviced Chambers’s lavish descriptions not just because it was far away, but because it best demonstrated the possibilities of limitless visual power. In sum, the Dissertation is a lengthy exploration of the power of aesthetic mediation to effect both an immediate visceral response and a permanent epistemological transformation in every garden visitor. This is held to be in marked contrast to the current state of the English landscape garden, where, as Chambers explains in the Dissertation’s prologue: “no appearance of art is tolerated, our gardens differ very little from common fields, so closely is common nature copied in most of them; .€.€. a stranger is often at a loss to know whether he be walking in a meadow, or in a pleasure ground, made and kept at a very considerable expence: he sees nothing to amuse him, nothing to excite his curiosity, nor any thing to keep up his attention.”26 Here Chambers establishes the important distinction between common and uncommon nature. The triple function of a garden—to render visitors simultaneously amused, curious, and attentive—indicates the responsibilities of the garden’s heightened version of the natural world. Chambers’s controversial proposition is that the appearance of an ordinary English field is in fact not varied or imaginative enough to elicit the kind of feeling, aesthetic response that a landscape garden ought properly to provoke. To produce a “better style,” where “Gardens are to be natural, without resemblance to vulgar Nature” and where the spectator is to be simultaneously amused, attentive, curious, and “agitated by a great



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variety of opposite passions,” the gardener must be not only a man of imagination, experience, and judgment but also “thoroughly versed in all the affections of the human mind.”27 Further, and even more controversially, this gardener must source those affections in a foreign soil. In the separation Chambers requires between his constructed, affective version of nature and the inchoate organicism of “vulgar Nature,” the connection between the perceptual and emotional capacities of both the garden viewer and the garden maker become apparent. As contemporary critics of garden history have noted, a primary issue in theorizing any garden is the initial differentiation of a garden from an ordinary organic space. The conversion of communal grazing land into landscape parks by aristocratic property-holders during this period forces a distinctive definition of the landscape garden as a space to which a feeling, educated viewer might properly respond, and respond differently than to a common field. Certainly the emblematic gardens at Stowe and others, requiring as they did a firm familiarity with classical myth, demonstrate one method of confining garden appreciation to a select, properly educated few.28 But Chambers is interested in diagnosing a bodily response as much as a shared sense of cultural capital. The landscape garden, unlike the unmediated natural world, can emphasize the subjectivity of perception through its design and form. For Chambers, it is especially the Chinese garden that can make plain that subjectivity both at home and abroad. The Dissertation therefore places a high priority on confirming the garden as aesthetic object requiring physical, emotional, and narrative interpretation. The greatest quality of the Chinese, Chambers emphasizes, is that “they rank a perfect work in [garden] Art, with the great productions of the human understanding; and say, that its efficacy in moving the passions, yields to that of few arts whatever.”29 It is a generic conception that grants the garden a capacity to engender a space beyond the linear narrative of daily reality. In suggesting that the “scenery of a garden should differ as much from common nature as an heroic poem doth from prose relations; and Gardeners, like poets, should give a loss to their imagination, and even fly beyond the bounds of truth, whenever it is necessary,” Chambers reminds readers of a connection they already know—that the Chinese garden, like the British, demonstrates in its formal qualities a capacity to represent the limits of human understanding.30 Even more important, the garden’s representation of those boundaries can, in Chambers’s reading, manipulate agreed-upon standards of visual truth. The capacity of poetic

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language, in particular, to generate the kind of figurative connections that prose cannot demonstrates why the Chinese garden’s extreme example becomes so useful for Chambers. The reader’s model for the operations of such a system of vision comes most clearly in the second half of the Dissertation, which describes the progress of a single “passenger” through garden sites representing various times of the day, seasons of the year, and categories of emotional response including the “pleasing,” the “terrible,” and the “surprising.” The temporal convulsions evident as the Dissertation moves from instructional text to travel narrative of an imaginary land give the scenes of the “terrible” a sublimity familiar from Gothic fictions of the day. But the manipulations of temporality evident in these fantastic passages also connect directly to the emerging experience of visual and spatial modernity. Chambers’s description of an Oriental garden offers a model of diversity within singularity that betokens the viewing experience of the modern subject, able to occupy more than one perspective at the same time. Expanding on his rejection of the aesthetic values of “common nature” in the Dissertation’s preface, Chambers is concerned throughout the text with the inadequacy of the raw material of lived experience precisely because it offers only a one-to-one correlation with the world at large. Incorporating the range of aesthetic influence available to a properly tasteful landscape admirer—an ever-expanding category—demanded a mental capacity to hold in concert multiple scenes and multiple sentiments from multiple moments of viewing. These multiple viewing moments connect closely, for Chambers, to a play of emotion and attention within the properly receptive aesthetic subject. As Chambers describes, Chinese gardens “produce variety, by altering the apparent figure of the open space from every point of view; and by constantly hiding parts of it, they create a mystery which excites the traveller’s curiousity.”31 As a trope that promises what it never conveys, this “apparent figure” connects generally to collective British understanding of Chinese manipulation of the natural world through its metaphorical terms. A journey down a particular stream, for example, yields a succession of views rendered multiple, deferred, or denied. Visible from the passenger’s floating vantage point, he explains, are: cut many vistoes [sic] through the woods, to distant prospects of towns, bridges, temples, and various other objects, which successively strike the eye, and fill the mind with expectation; when suddenly a farther progress is rendered impracticable, by rocks, strong branches, and whole trees lying cross the channel; between



Garden which the river is seen still to continue.€.€. . [In] the water, appear the remains of antient structures, monumental inscriptions, and fragments of sculpture: which serve to give an edge to curiousity, and to render the disappointment more affecting.32

Chambers’s catalogue of the vagaries of emotional response desirable in a garden visitor—curiosity, expectation, and disappointment—all represent temporally dependent moods at once reliant on the subjective progress of the single passenger and, at the same time, linked to the broader course of national progress. Without a comparative methodology of vision and of history contextualizing both the submerged monuments and the distant towns, the pleasures of the views are lost. Enjoyment comes in the dawning realization that standard orientations of visual and temporal progress have been deliberately and artificially manipulated. As the larger context of Chambers’s work makes clear, the Chinese garden succeeds by unsettling the viewer’s sense of the nearby and the faraway, the large and the small, and the simulated and the real, and so too, the relational standards by which likeness and difference can be construed. None of these disruptions would be effective if the viewer did not already possess a fixed understanding of how “real” nature ought to look and to arrange itself in space: an understanding of visual and spatial organization known as linear perspective. As a key centering device in the European artistic tradition, linear perspective has also always been theorized as something more; as Erwin Panofsky writes, it is “a construction that is itself comprehensible only for a quite specific, indeed specifically modern, sense of space, or, if you will, sense of the world.”33 This expanded epistemological understanding of perspective clearly underlies both the production of and response to the Dissertation. Chambers’s text, by highlighting the visual effects of the Chinese garden, implicitly challenges linear perspective’s modern sense of the world by reminding the reader of the vagaries of perception and the visual elisions necessary to view and experience aesthetically distinctive space. These vagaries of perception question the stability of the structure, giving meaning to visual arrangements in the first place. If the metaphor and other forms of symbolic expression help constitute experience through language, the garden’s figurative representations of nature shape the limits of experience in visual and spatial terms, and the play of perspective challenges the constraints of visual and spatial bounds. Thus in producing an imaginary observer capable of embodying these variable viewing perspectives, Chambers foreshadows a much later frac-

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turing of unified perspective in mainstream British aesthetics. But he also shows that a viewer can take pleasure in sights and spaces of which he cannot make order and sense. Given that the Chinese garden is everywhere connected both implicitly and explicitly to the Chinese emperor, however, the disorders, vagaries, and elisions in the conceptual framework of the garden space have serious consequences for other readers seeking to read symbolically. Chambers closes his Dissertation with the suggestion that “European artists must not hope to rival Oriental splendor; yet let them look up to the sun, and copy as much of its lustre as they can” in order to propose obvious, if tongue-in-cheek, competition between geographically situated ways of seeing.34 Yet, though Chambers limits this rivalry to the artists that create these gardens, his readers easily extended the proposed imitation to the imagined ideal spectators of the garden as well, and found in the Dissertation the disturbing proposition that the king of England ought to remake himself through the site of his national garden into a mimic Chinese emperor. As supporters of “Capability” Brown and opponents of the court of George III that favored Chambers, George Mason and Horace Walpole collaborated on one of the most stinging attacks on this proposition in their poem entitled “A Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers,” published the same year the Dissertation appeared.35 Both men had previously authored works on garden theory—Mason, An Essay on Design in Gardening (1768), and Walpole, “History of the Modern Taste in Gardening” (1780)—and both were profoundly invested in preserving and defending an undiluted national landscape aesthetic properly representative of English political liberty.36 In this their chief opponents emerge as the French, who not only themselves create gardens indicative of repressive Bourbon formality but also, as Walpole explains, persist in “calling our taste in gardening Le Gout Anglo-Chinois.”37 The Dissertation’s delight in the productive possibilities of that hyphenation is for Walpole and Mason a token of Chambers’s, and by extension Tory, sympathy for Oriental despotism. By contrast, Walpole writes in a note to the “Epistle”: “The English taste in gardening is .€.€. the growth of the English Constitution and must perish with it.”38 This taste will naturally, rather than artificially, convey the British individual and national liberties to the world; Walpole writes: “We have given the true model of gardening to the world; let other countries mimic or corrupt our taste; but let it reign here on its verdant throne, original by its elegant simplicity.”39 The difference between the British and the Chinese, for Walpole,



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is the distinction between a localized wealth, producing unnatural luxury, and a disseminated wealth, distributed among aesthetically sophisticated independent landowners; further, it is a difference readily apparent in the visual and spatial distinctions between the two nations. Even from its initial sarcastic salute to Chambers, then, the “Heroic Epistle” mocks Chambers’s favored position under George III using a rhetoric of distorted vision: “Knight of the Polar Star! by Fortune plac’d,/ To shine the Cynosure of British taste;/ Whose orb collects in one refulgent view,/ The scatter’d glories of Chinese Virtù.”40 For Walpole and Mason, the Dissertation errs in making “British taste” not a reigning original but a reflective jumble; Chambers’s position, which ought to produce its own aesthetic brilliance, instead mirrors an already ungrounded aesthetic. In making their satire of Chambers’s proposals, Mason and Walpole focus particularly on the miniature simulacra of the imperial city constructed within the garden walls, an aspect of the Chinese garden already remarked upon in the accounts of Attiret and other Jesuits. They imagine that this copy-city will eventually prove the only version of his domain that a future China-imitating British king will ever know: Where shall our mimic London rear her walls That Eastern feature, art must next produce Though not for present yet for future use, Our sons some slave of greatness may behold, Cast in the genuine Asiatic mould: Who of three realms shall condescend to know No more than he can spy from Windsor’s brow.41

In a disturbing de-evolution, the later British ruler, who ought to be preserving the triple union of the United Kingdom, instead becomes genuinely Asiatic. At work here is the same contagion of form that once made Attiret’s eyes and taste Chinese, now extended to governance. As the poem progresses, however, the contagion spreads even more quickly. The poem’s final lines describe not the imagined future king but the currently reigning monarch of the House of Brunswick-Hanover creating his own image of “London’s charms” so that he may “prolong his Asiatic dream,/Tho’ Europe’s balance trembles on its beam.”42 As in the Dissertation, the capacity of art and artists to produce scenes and settings capable of transforming, or destroying, British governance is not called into question. Rather, the problem lies in a more fundamental vulnerability of British vision, and in particular British monarchical vision, to the pleasurable yet destructive ef-

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fects of visual artifice. Given the equivalency between the natural landscape and the naturalized roots of power, a manipulated landscape prospect must inevitably result in a manipulated and distorted ruling power. Mason’s and Walpole’s poem became enormously popular, going through eleven editions in its first year and ultimately standing as one of the most popular single poems of the century. The long line of rebuttals and tenuously related epistles it inspired are extremely numerous. Of greatest interest is Chambers’s own rejoinder to Mason, the Explanatory Discourse by Tan Chet-Qua of Quang-Chew-Fu, Gent., which was printed with later editions of the Dissertation.43 In this shorter essay, written in the voice of the titular Chinese gentleman, Chambers attempts to combat the critique in the “Heroic Epistle” of the Dissertation’s fantastical excess by becoming even more fantastical and excessive while, at the same time, describing more specifically, if preposterously, how the style of “Oriental gardening” might be implemented domestically.44 The conclusion of the Explanatory Discourse proposes a grand-scale vision of a British empire that out-Orientalizes the Chinese themselves in aesthetic sweep. The narrator suggests of the isle of Great Britain: [T]his whole kingdom might soon become one magnificent vast Garden, bounded only by the sea; the many noble seats and villas with which it abounds, would give uncommon consequence to the scenery; and it might still be rendered more splendid .€.€. if all your public bridges were adorned with triumphal arches, rostral pillars, bas-reliefs, statues, and other indications of victory, and glorious atchievements [sic] in war: an empire transformed into a splendid Garden, with the imperial mansion towering on an eminence in the center, and the palaces of the nobles scattered like pleasure-pavilions amongst the plantations, infinitely surpasses any thing that the Chinese ever attempted: yet vast as the design appears, the execution is certainly within your reach.45

The substitution of the garden for the nation in this fantasy vision is no longer representational but direct. By exactly overlaying mediated and unmediated forms of nature, Chambers theorizes national culture in environmental and aesthetic terms. But there are serious consequences to Chambers’s one-to-one equation of landscaped nature and national form. The once-pleasurable explorations of aesthetic multiplicity and aesthetic artifice bring greater challenges when returned to British soil. If readers like Mason and Walpole could not accept the imagined re-creation of Chinese gardens in British minds, far less could they approve of any such actual plantings. Yet, of course, direct exchange between the two countries in material



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goods had long since begun. British traders had been operating along the China coast throughout the eighteenth century, and the demands and restrictions of the thriving China trade were enough to necessitate a concerted effort to achieve a change in conditions. Charged with negotiating a more favorable set of trade policies and establishing a permanent British embassy in Beijing, Lord Macartney traveled to China with a large retinue in the years 1792–94. Judged in diplomatic terms, the encounter was a failure from the British perspective, as Macartney’s proposals were roundly rejected. British interpretations of the embassy’s reception, however, proved very significant to the course of Sino-British history, as recent revisitings by James Hevia and Lydia Liu have shown.46 The visual rhetoric of the narrative accounts emerging from the embassy’s journey deserves a similar revisiting, for in these texts an explanation of China’s repressive visual difference is given a foundational expression, with ramifications for all later understandings of Chinese politics and aesthetics.

The Macartney Mission of 1793 and the Qing Imperial Gardens In Book 8 of Wordsworth’s Prelude, we find a description of an English landscape immediately visualized in terms of what it is not. Wordsworth recalls: Beauteous the domain Where to the sense of beauty first my heart Was opened—tract more exquisitely fair Than is that paradise of ten thousand trees, Or Gehol’s famous gardens, in a clime Chosen from widest empire, for delight Of the Tartarian dynasty composed Beyond that mighty wall, not fabulous (China’s stupendous mound!) by patient skill Of myriads, and boon Nature’s lavish help .€.€.47

The “paradise of ten thousand trees” that Wordsworth here describes as less exquisite than his childhood home of Westmorland is the Wanshu Yuan, or “Garden of Ten Thousand Trees,” which made a part of the northern palace and summer retreat of China’s ruling Qing dynasty.48 This ceremonial, enclosed space offers a contrast to Wordsworth’s description of a local

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sheep pasture, and readers might wonder why such an extreme comparison is even necessary. For Wordsworth to describe Gehol and then insist that “lovelier far than this the paradise/ Where I was reared” (ll. 144–45) must not surprise many readers; instead we might question how such a markedly foreign and exotic space could find its way into the Prelude, an epic concerned above all with the direct experiences that occasion the growth of the poet’s mind. For of course Wordsworth’s description of the gardens of Gehol comes not from his own personal experience with China but from John Barrow’s popular travel narrative Travels in China (1804).49 We know that the Wordsworths copied extracts of Travels in China to their commonplace book; William Wordsworth most likely also read descriptions of Gehol extracted in periodical treatments of Barrow’s work, including Southey’s review of Barrow’s Travels in the 1804 Annual Review.50 Barrow was certainly not the only traveler on Lord Macartney’s famous and ill-fated mission to publish his memoirs, but the wide dissemination of his volume—other notable readers included Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth—offers a particularly clear example of the ways that politics and aesthetics became thoroughly intertwined in the space of the Chinese garden. For all these writers, the vision of Chinese landscape became a vision of despotic tyranny—not only of the eye, as Wordsworth famously puts it—but also of the nation.51 The landscape garden, in particular, becomes this vision’s most fruitful narrative location. In the Prelude’s rendition of the “paradise of ten thousand trees,” the poet recollects the exotic scenery of Chambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening as he describes Gehol’s “palaces and domes/Of pleasure spangled over, shady dells/For eastern monasteries, sunny mounds/With temples crested, bridges, gondolas.”52 But he also repeatedly contains the spread of this picturesque imagery, whether through punctuation—as in the parentheses enclosing “(China’s stupendous mound!)”—or through near-homonyms referencing the sites of his own upbringing that delimit the lines of Gehol’s description: “tract more exquisitely fair,” the paradise “lovelier far.”53 As Wordsworth goes on to explain, the images of Gehol, while fascinating, are ultimately only brief disruptive episodes in the much longer developmental process of cultivating domestic connections: Yea, doubtless at an age when but a glimpse Of those resplendent gardens with their frame



Garden Imperial, and elaborate ornaments, Would to a child be transport over-great, When but a half-hour’s roam through such a place Would leave behind a dance of images That shall break in upon his sleep for weeks, Even then the common haunts of the green earth With the ordinary human interests Which they embosom—all without regard As both may seem—are fastening on the heart Insensibly, each with the other’s help, So that we love, not knowing that we love, And feel, not knowing whence our feeling comes.54

Here Wordsworth’s linkage of “elaborate ornaments” with “frame imperial” demonstrates the entanglement of political and aesthetic concerns. The redundant and aggressive sensory aestheticism that so crowd the child’s imagination as to be “transport over-great” connects directly to the political system that has ordered the construction of such a paradise. Gehol is a place of excessive visuality, its “dance of images” in direct contrast to the process whereby common haunts and ordinary interests fasten on the heart “without regard,” and the dream voyage that Wordsworth describes is a cautionary tale of the affective transformations of travel. If the virtue in this process of connection is that it occurs “insensibly,” then the space of the Chinese garden that has been deliberately chosen “from widest empire” for its sensations of delight must be condemned as manipulative despite its beauty. Wordsworth insists on the human cost of such outrageous splendor. The mighty wall and the famous gardens, Wordsworth notes, are sites demanding the “patient skill of myriads” but delighting only the Tartarian dynasty. Nature, though willingly granting “lavish help,” is also subjugated, as “rocks, dens and groves of foliage” are “taught to melt/Into each other their obsequious hues.”55 In the paradise of the English countryside, however, nature works with man as “dearest fellow-labourer,” thus indicating the personal liberty granted to all inhabitants able to open their hearts to the sense of beauty.56 In this paradise of equality Wordsworth finds “Man free, man working for himself, with choice/ Of time, and place and object.”57 While the lush landscape of Gehol serves to reinforce China’s political despotism, it is the absence of such luxuriant scenery in Wordsworth’s home country that serves to reveal its true liberty. China here is not Britain’s deficient

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other, but rather its excess. And the kind of alterity—of politics, of commerce, and of ontology—that China produces in British readers and viewers of its scenes is held to be derived from this aesthetic of excess. Thus, the Chinese garden’s very symbolic legibility requires the poet’s redoubled efforts to distinguish between the two paradises: one British and rural, the other Chinese and imperial, both replete with sensation, but only one authentic. While the Gehol description remains a minor set-piece amid the Prelude’s thirteen books, its very insignificance is also notable. The unexpected surfacing of Gehol’s gardens suggests the extent to which the exotic and fantastic aesthetic of China had already been interred in the dream-worlds of British readers, able to break in at any juncture and give image to a very different kind of nature and of governance.58 Wordsworth’s casual reference to Gehol’s famous gardens also indicates how familiar that particular mention of the Manchu seat of power must be to readers. Indeed, the very range of rewritings of Gehol, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s vision of Romantic Orientalism “Kubla Khan,” with its account of the khan’s “gardens bright with sinuous rills,” to Jane Austen’s passing mention in Mansfield Park of Fanny Price’s “trip into China” through Lord Macartney’s book, certifies the nuances of response to China and the Chinese among British writers of the Romantic era.59 While Coleridge’s and Austen’s accounts seem very different—one is a reverie on the roots of poetic genius, while the other contextualizes a submerged but vital debate on the practical, contemporary effects of British imperialism—they share a willingness to find in visions of Chinese gardens a rhetoric of difference capable of great theoretical expansion.60 Thus Gehol’s famous gardens, as center site in the narrative of the rejection of the first British diplomatic mission to China, were clearly generally known for not only their literal but also their transitive displays of power. The standard version of the embassy’s history explains that, when pressed in Gehol to make the series of ritual abasements considered customary of tributary nations visiting the court of the Qing emperor, Lord Macartney refused to kow-tow.61 The mythos surrounding this supposed single act of rebellion permanently inflected Anglo-Chinese relations throughout the nineteenth century; further, the narrative of the refusal came to serve as a kind of short-hand account illustrating, or occluding, a far more complex range of difference between the British and Manchu imperiums. James Hevia’s insightful treatment of the encounter gives useful complexity.62 Hevia



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insists that readers must “cease interpreting the Macartney embassy as an encounter between civilizations or cultures, but as one between two imperial formations, each with universalistic pretensions and complex metaphysical systems to buttress such claims.”63 That is, the complex interplay between the Manchu and British imperiums hinges on a far broader range of relations than the single cultural misstep of the refusal to kow-tow. As Hevia pointedly puts it: “I do not think it correct to characterize the encounter between the Qing and British empires as a case of cultural misunderstanding. Rather .€.€. the actors on both sides of the encounter were quite aware that what was at stake were competing and ultimately incompatible views of the meaning of sovereignty and the ways in which the relations of power were constructed.”64 Hevia’s attention to the complex relations of power can be productively focused on the Manchu-British interaction as it took place within, and took shape from, the imperial garden landscape. The formal reception of the Macartney embassy occurred in two key sites, both of them gardens: the winter Qing residence of the Yuanming Yuan, or “Encompassing Illumination Garden” in Beijing, and the summer residence at what was then called Gehol, corresponding roughly to the city of Chengde and the surrounding province of Rehe in an area that is now Inner Mongolia. As Philippe Forêt explains, Chengde must be seen as an “imperial landscape” and a “space entirely conceived for the exercise of power” where the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors used carefully deployed tools of “landscape rhetoric” to integrate “visual symbols that legitimated the dynasty’s claims to the heritage of significant places” across Qing-controlled China.65 That is to say, the Qing emperors were exactly as deliberate in their spectacles of power as Lord Macartney and his retinue imagined them to be. Both sides in the encounter were equally adept in manipulating the visual and spatial signs and symbols of their power, and the double consciousness of this aptitude is both noted and reframed in the expedition’s written reports of its journeys. Because Macartney, Barrow, Sir George Staunton, and the others who authored narratives detailing their travels in China were the first Britons ever to view the Qing court and its grounds in a formal capacity, their writings document the creation of a new set of readers of Chinese spaces and objects, proffering a new vision of China that was to be both definitive and “real.” British descriptions of these imperial gardens, whether in Gehol or Beijing, therefore, illustrated both landscape appreciation and something much more. By articulating the process by which the British came to be

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embodied and express themselves within these Chinese gardens, whether through formal ritual, illicit surveillance, or simple observation and critique, the British descriptions of the gardens in the multiple accounts of the Macartney embassy reveal a larger set of ontological concerns. An observation about the Chinese style of arranging rocks or orienting streambeds feeds back into the definition of the “Chinese” imperial consciousness responsible for such arrangements, and the effects of this consciousness on the political and economic freedoms the British visitors hoped to achieve. Yet despite their position as firsthand observers, Macartney and his fellow travelers continue to be directed by the literary tradition that shapes their garden experiences. In his remarks on the emperor’s personal garden within the Yuanming Yuan reprinted in Barrow’s Travels, Macartney observes: “It includes within its bounds .€.€. most of the beauties which distinguish the .€.€. gardens which we have already seen; but from every thing I can learn it falls very short of the fanciful descriptions which father Attiret and Sir William Chambers have intruded upon us as realities.”66 Barrow closely echoes this observation, writing of the same gardens: “But, if an opinion may be formed from those parts of them which I have seen .€.€. they fall very short of the fanciful and extravagant descriptions that Sir William Chambers has given of Chinese gardening,” and Aeneas Anderson, describing the emperor’s palaces and gardens “of which report said so much,” concludes that “I am not authorized to say any thing, as my view of the whole was very confined; but .€.€. I could see nothing that disposed me to believe the extraordinary accounts which I had heard and read of the wonders of the Imperial residence of Pekin.”67 Each account reads the imperial gardens as replete with narrative history but deficient in direct influence; indeed, the proliferation of texts directing the traveler’s view of the gardens creates for Macartney an intrusive attempt at narrative realism that cannot ground itself in the real. This is in keeping with the more general tensions involved in representing China and the Chinese authentically to British readers. As Macartney notes in a note to the introduction of his journals of the embassy, which Barrow had edited and published in 1807: Scarcely any two travelers .€.€. see the same objects in the same light, or remember them with the same accuracy. What is involved in darkness to the optics of one man, is often arrayed in the brightest colors to those of another. An impression vanishes or endures according to the material that receives it. I have therefore often thought what amusement and instruction might be derived from a perusal



Garden of the journals kept (if such have been kept) by different persons belonging to my embassy. Even the memorandums of a valet de Chambre might be of some value.68

Macartney’s backhanded assessment of the memories of a valet de Chambre was not merely figurative; the first narrative of the embassy published was that of Anderson, his own valet, whose volume’s immediate appearance came at the cost of narrative sophistication. After that followed, among others, Staunton’s An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (1797), the soldier Samuel Holmes’s Journal of Mr. Samuel Holmes (1798), and Barrow’s 1804 and 1807 volumes.69 Journals of the embassy available in manuscript include ship’s captain Sir Erasmus Gower’s Journal of the H.M.S. Lion, the artist William Alexander’s Journal of the Lord Macartney’s Embassy to China, and the younger George Staunton’s Diary, along with numerous letters, memorandum, maps, drawings, and various other documents relating to the mission.70 Macartney’s hypothesis proves largely correct—this multiplicity of accounts from authors of divergent education and training do differ in many of their observations. Yet the rampant intertextuality of the narratives, which constantly reference and quote each other at length, allows an area of central focus to emerge. The narratives all address as their most important set-piece of description the two famous gardens within which the embassy was received. For each of the authors, from Lord Macartney to Aeneas Anderson, the crucial problem of the Yuanming Yuan and Gehol comes in the nature of sight itself. The Qing empire’s synecdochal imperial gardens are to these British diplomats spaces where powers of vision are questioned, conventions of representation are pressured, and scenes of seeing scrutinized. As location for metavisual practice and as arena for diplomatic negotiation, the gardens offer a geography already overwritten with aesthetic difference, but they also emerge as the key location for addressing challenges to authentic representation. This is made more difficult given that the members of the embassy also carried with them a vision of China delivered to them through the circulation of material objects. As Aeneas Anderson writes at the beginning of his own volume: Others, who possess a brilliant fancy, or a glowing imagination, might give to their description of the scenes through which this volume will conduct the reader, those bright colors which we see on the Chinese manufactures that are imported into this country, to decorate the apartments of elegant opulence: but

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Garden my principal object is to give a strong and accurate outline of the picture; and I would rather be accused of the dulness [sic] and tautology of truth, than to risque a suspicion that I had sacrificed to a creative imagination.€.€. . [T]he merit of faithful representation is all I have to claim, and all I wish to receive.71

Anderson inverts Macartney’s suggestion that economic status determines observational acuity by imagining a set of aristocratic observers too influenced by the bright colors of their Chinese porcelain to discover the plain contours of the truth. That the project of “faithful representation” is more challenging than Anderson’s account would have it seems evident in his defensive tone. Here, as elsewhere, we find China’s challenge to the tradition of realism a burden not only on the particular genre of the travel narrative but also on the narrative project more generally. And indeed, as his account of the embassy’s travels through China continue, Anderson finds that he must abandon his commitment to truth’s tautology and concede the superiority of visual to verbal representation, writing: [It] is not in the power of language to convey any correct image even of the individual objects, much less of the picture formed by the combination of them.€.€. . When I mention that I have seen forests and gardens, mountains and vallies [sic], the palace and the cottage, the city and the village, the pagoda and the mill .€.€. I certainly inform my readers of the constituent parts of the prospect, but to give the least notion of their actual arrangement and relative situation, of their proportions and contrast, of their general distance from the eye, and comparative distance from each other, is beyond any exertion of verbal description.72

Anderson’s ideal of “faithful” representation cannot support the vagaries of Chinese landscape in either its particulars or its constitutive whole. Instead, it is in the spaces of relative distance that the British embassy sought to distinguish itself from the Chinese way of seeing and being seen. Everything about the Chinese landscape as shown (or hidden) from British eyes demonstrated to them that it was a landscape constructed for the emperor’s pleasure, and as such, exhibited a unity that was relational, not absolute. The gardens resolved themselves spatially around the mobile body of the emperor; from the pathways and roads upon which only he was permitted, dramatic scenes and set-pieces appeared that were not visible from other, subordinate positions. Anderson’s difficulty in presenting a combined picture of China’s disparate elements demonstrates the way in which the British travelers had been taught by material objects and visual narratives alike that China demanded to be perceived as a series of contextual scenes. These



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images, familiar from the very items of Chinese manufacture that Anderson condemned as source material, continue to form a visual archive that the British travelers alternately resist and reuse, but ultimately depend upon to mark the contrast between China and a more unitary domestic vision. In the accounts of the embassy’s travels, then, visual possibility is constrained both by pre-existing aesthetic systems and by literal constraints on physical mobility. These constraints converge most directly in the case of the expedition’s official draftsman, William Alexander.73 The young artist was not among those selected to accompany the smaller group that traveled to meet the emperor at his Gehol summer retreat, and he bemoaned that decision in his journal, writing: “That the artist should be doomed to remain immured at Pekin during this most interesting journey of the Embassy, is not exactly to be accounted for.”74 Britons receiving the embassy’s reports found visual illustration for the verbal descriptions not in detailed drawings made by an eyewitness, but speculative pictures executed by an artist forbidden to see the scenes for himself. The Royal Academy–trained Alexander was never able to produce independently images of the most crucial locations of Chinese symbolic power. He did later publish the 1805 Costume of China, reprinted more inexpensively in 1814 as Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese, which allowed Alexander to present a vision of China as a series of types, rather than a unified landscape.75 And while reproductions of Alexander’s drawings did illustrate both Staunton’s Authentic Account and Barrow’s Travels in China, Alexander’s lack of firsthand experience with Gehol’s gardens meant that those drawings relied heavily on both the sketches of his fellow traveler Lieutenant Henry Parrish, commander of the Royal Artillerymen. Comparing Parrish’s rendition of Gehol (Figure 1) with Alexander’s aquatint as it appeared in Barrow’s Travels (Figure 2), we see that Alexander’s version significantly alters the sketch “drawn from nature” by Parrish. The addition of several pleasure yachts in the foreground, drooping willow branches to the tree at the right, and a mountain and pagoda in the background help the illustration conform more closely to the vision of China already available in the printed patterns of Chinese porcelain. Alexander draws on his portfolio of types to populate Parrish’s relatively nonspecific view with the trappings of Chinese visual difference. And by inserting more clearly architecturally defined viewing positions from which other perspectives on the park can be made, Alexander also establishes the imperial park as a site arranged around a series of visual prospects. It is left to Barrow’s accompanying narrative to

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Fig. 1. William H. Parrish, “View of the Emperor’s Park at Gehol with Pong-chuchong in the Distance” (1793). ©The British Library Board, Add. 33931.

clarify the disbarring of the British visitors from the command these prospects imply.76 Alexander’s speculative depiction of a landscape he himself was not allowed to see demonstrates the great gap in representation between Qing seats of power in China’s interior and the already multinational Chinese coast. Painters such as George Chinnery and the uncle and nephew team of artists Thomas and William Daniell executed lively illustrations of such coastal trading ports during the first part of the nineteenth century.77 But when it came to pictures of the seat of China’s imperial power, that multiplicity of images collapsed into a very few. This restriction applied to more high-ranking embassy members as well. While John Barrow later proved a textually prolific and visually influential member of the embassy, as we have already seen in Wordsworth’s poetry, he too was subject to severe visual restriction while accompanying the embassy. Left behind with Alexander and the embassy’s excess baggage in Beijing, Barrow was barred from free movement through the Yuanming Yuan by Chinese court officials. Barrow writes:



Garden From all that I had heard and read of the grandeur and beauty of the scenery and the magnificence of the palace I had certainly expected to meet with a style of gardening and laying out of grounds superior, or at least equal to anything in the same line in Europe; and perhaps indeed, I might have been fully gratified in all my expectations provided no restraint had been thrown upon our walks, which was far from being the case. All the little excursions I made were by stealth.€.€. . I sometimes, however, ventured to stroll from our lodging in the evening in order to take a stolen glance at these celebrated gardens.78

Barrow’s keen sense of humiliation at being monitored by the palace eunuchs of course inflects his account of the Yuanming Yuan’s attributes, but his appreciation of the imperial gardens must necessarily be compromised by his surreptitious style of looking. The “stolen glances” that Barrow seizes of the gardens cannot map onto the style of viewing for which the gardens are designed, a style meant for a commanding single subject.

Fig. 2. William Alexander, “View in the Eastern Side of the Imperial Park at Gehol.” Published in Travels in China, John Barrow (London: Cadell and Davies, 1804), facing page 128. Source: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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In Barrow’s account, the controls upon his vision connect seamlessly to Chinese manipulation of visual effect in general. Staunton quotes Barrow’s description of Chinese landscape practice in his own Authentic Account, in which Barrow explains: The Chinese are particularly expert in magnifying the real dimensions of a piece of land, by a proper disposition of the objects intended to embellish its surface; for this purpose, tall and luxuriant trees of the deepest green were planted in the foreground, from whence the view was to be taken; whilst those in the distance gradually diminished in size and depth of colouring; .€.€. The effect of intricacy and concealment, seemed also to be well understood by the Chinese. At Yuenmin-yuen, a slight wall was made to convey the idea of a magnificent building, when seen at a certain distance through the branches of a thicket.79

In writing the lexicon of Chinese landscape design, then, Barrow finds himself inadequate to the position of viewing subject, for the visual tricks that the Chinese employ function only in a single place and along a single vector—the site “from whence the view was to be taken” or the “certain distance” from which the wall was to be seen. The narration of his own travails in viewing the Yuanming Yuan flows into his assessment of the Chinese garden as designed to satisfy an exclusively situational representationality; both delineate a visual truth that is relative, contingent, and of limited availability. Far from offering the productive multiplicities of perspective that Chambers described in his Dissertation, the fixed viewing perspectives in the imperial gardens connects for Barrow, in his larger text, to the hierarchical functioning of the Chinese eye and to the national immobility and restriction such hierarchy imposes. This national immobility fits easily for Barrow with the general late-eighteenth-century refiguration of Chinese history as unprogressive and unproductive. The British characterization of Chinese constructions of power is mirrored for the embassy by other forms of Chinese architecture as well. Upon their initial entrance to Beijing, both Barrow and Staunton note the embassy’s disappointment at the uniform appearance of the capital, of which Barrow writes: “In Peking not even a chimney is seen rising above the roofs of the houses which, being all nearly of the same height, and the streets laid out in straight lines, have the appearance and the regularity of a large encampment.”80 Instead, the scenes of interest are concentrated in areas available exclusively to the emperor. Peking’s low rooftops, universally scorned by members of the embassy, are that way by decree: no house may rise



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higher than the imperial palace. The advantage of uninterrupted prospect belongs solely to the emperor’s individual eye. Subjects to the emperor’s visual despotism, the Chinese in Staunton’s account cannot differentiate beyond their subjugated scope of sight. As he writes: The rest of the world is, in the contemplation of a vast multitude of his subjects, of little significance; and they consider his dominion, as virtually extending over the whole. With these ideas, they scarcely can distinguish the relations or duties of other nations or individuals towards him, from their own, which are, indeed, unbounded.81

And while the British find the lowered rooftops of Peking merely aesthetically displeasing, they regard the expectation that the embassy is to perform the ritual of the kow-tow before the emperor with absolute revulsion. Staunton writes: “It is difficult to imagine an exterior mark of more profound humility and submission, or which implies a more intimate consciousness of the omnipotence of that being towards whom it is made.”82 Yet despite this strong assessment of the humiliation contingent upon Britons performing the kow-tow, the act was actually not immediately ruled an impossibility. Staunton writes of the alternative that Macartney proffered: “that a subject of his Imperial Majesty, of rank equal to his own, should perform, before the picture he had with him of his Majesty, dressed in his robes of state, the same ceremonies that the Embassador [sic] should be directed to do before the Chinese throne.”83 Macartney’s option of concession therefore allows that the problem with the kow-tow lies not in ritual content but symmetry of ritual arranged around symbolic image. Crucially, his refusal to perform the kow-tow does not take place in an abstract space of individual liberty, but remains carefully balanced against the concessions and compromises offered by the Qing emperor in turn. His embassy, intent on establishing a British imperium equal to the challenges of the Manchu powers, demands a clearly visible equivalence when tracing the outlines of power. Given the failure in establishing the kow-tow as mode of negotiation and exchange, the Qing imperial gardens remain the primary site for British response to Chinese aesthetic and political difference. Skilled in the practice of decoding British landscape, the aristocratic members of the embassy granted legitimate access to the garden grounds found a receptive terrain in the Qing emperor’s palaces. Staunton and Macartney, however, differed

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in their understanding of the aesthetic and political import of the Qing imperial gardens. For Staunton, the gardens’ easy readability allowed him to readily adduce China’s threatening difference. In his Account, Staunton describes the garden’s set-piece of a miniature simulacra of the imperial city already mentioned in the texts of Attiret, Chambers, and Mason. This simulacra, he writes: include[s] every variety of ground in miniature which the sportive hand of nature has created upon the surface of the globe. Mountains and vallies, lakes and rivers, rude precipices and gentle slopes, have been produced where nature did not intend them; but in such correct proportions, and with so much harmony, that, were it not for the general uniform appearance of the surrounding country, a spectator would entertain some doubt whether they were the real productions, or the successful imitations of nature. This world, in miniature, has been created at the command and for the pleasure of one man, but by the hard labour of many thousands.84

The division between the “uniform surrounding country” and the emperor’s garden containing “every variety of ground in miniature” matches the split between the labor of many thousands and the pleasure of one man. Here the gardens proclaim the despotism of the Chinese in both the physical scale of their alterations and the more abstract constraint of their scenes to a single pair of eyes. Like the abased, kow-towing body or the low rooftops of Beijing forbidden to rise higher than the imperial palace, the gardens demonstrated a fundamental spatial asymmetry representative of the tyranny of the Qing empire. Even the right to cross the terrain belonged to only one. In one of a series of articles on the embassy’s advances in China, the London Times reported on 29 July 1794 that “[on] their journey they were much surprised to find a number of men levelling the road, for the accommodation of the Emperor on his return from Gehol.€.€. . The road for the emperor is as smooth and level as any walk in the gardens at Kew; no person is allowed to ride or travel upon it, and it is guarded night and day.”85 The reference to Kew, though evocative of the satiric vision in the “Heroic Epistle” of a British king Orientalized and immured, also reminds the reader of a crucial distinction these texts mean to convey: in the Chinese landscape, power rewrites nature; in the British landscape, nature affirms political right. That this distinction must appear differently to the highest-ranking and thus least limited observer becomes clear in Lord Macartney’s generally enthusiastic praise of the Chinese gardens. Barrow’s work reprints the pleasure Macartney takes in a ride through the grounds of Gehol:



Garden It would be an endless task were I to attempt a detail of all the wonders of this charming place. There is no beauty of distribution, no feature of amenity, no reach of fancy which embellishes our pleasure grounds in England, that is not to be found here.€.€. . [In] the course of a few hours I have enjoyed such vicissitudes of rural delight, as I did not conceive could be felt out of England, being at different moments enchanted by scenes perfectly similar to those I had known there.86

Macartney’s “vicissitudes of rural delight” confirm China as an imperium equal to Britain in its sophisticated manipulation of landscape to further the construction of pleasure parks. His journey, however, also substantiates more than the Chinese ability to create scenes “perfectly similar” to those of the great estates of England. Macartney’s tour concludes with a triumphal prospect of gardens achieved from a covered pavilion that is: situated on a summit so elevated as perfectly to command the whole surrounding country to a vast extent.€.€. . [So] rich, so various, so beautiful, so sublime a prospect my eyes had never beheld. I saw everything before me as on an illuminated map, palaces, pagodas, towns, villages, farm-houses, plains, and vallies [sic], watered by innumerable streams, hills waving with wood, and meadows covered with cattle of the most beautiful marks and colours. All seemed to be nearly at my feet, and that a step would convey me within reach of them.87

Macartney’s position here is complicated. As he looks out over the landscape prospect, he also superimposes that landscape’s symbolic representation in the form of the illuminated map. As is made evident by his emphasis that all “seemed” to be nearby, however, he himself is barred from access to the power encoded in this view by his nonsovereign status. Thus, neither can he occupy the place of historically certified command he might when overlooking a similar prospect view in a British landscape, nor can he assume the proleptic control of geographic power that an imperial explorer in a colonized landscape might claim.88 Yet despite his impotence, the view itself is not illegible. The ease that Macartney displays in interpreting China’s visual splendor as equal or even superior to British designs and fancies shows us that the emperor’s visual sense is not nearly as foreign as some other members of the embassy make it out to be. Macartney, as the member of the embassy granted greatest entrance to the formal imperial grounds, was also the author who most extols the site of the Chinese garden. Macartney’s pleasure and Barrow’s distaste for Chinese gardens thus suggest to us the ways in which the members of the embassy described Chinese aesthetic differences in accordance with their own viewing positions.

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These contributions of Macartney to the voluminous textual productions of the embassy, therefore, give us a hint of what Sino-British relations might have been if the symbolic correspondence found in the garden sites had thrived. Instead, negotiations failed and the British left without gaining the trade benefits they had sought to achieve. As Macartney writes with bemusement in Barrow’s Some Account: How are we to reconcile the contradiction that appears in the conduct of the Chinese government towards us? They receive us with the highest distinction, show us every external mark of favor and regard, send the first minister himself to attend us .€.€. for two days together through their palaces and gardens .€.€. and express themselves greatly pleased with so splendid an embassy .€.€. yet, in less than a couple of months, they plainly discover that they wish us to be gone, refuse our requests .€.€. precipitate our departure and dismiss us dissatisfied.89

The viewing of the gardens, the participation in Chinese spectacle, and the successful reception of the embassy’s trade requests here become interchangeable. Macartney’s puzzlement stems from the Chinese failure to match their political concessions to the unity of their visual spectacle; once allowed to traverse the imperial pathways in the palaces and gardens, he reasons, how could the British embassy be refused free movement in its commercial demands? The observers produced by the gardens, Macartney finds to his dismay, are excluded from political domains. As James Hevia points out, the discrepancy here is between signifying systems, which explicate the dynamic of relations between two different nations, and symbolic systems, which describe a single nation’s certifying connection to a transcendent assurance of power. Although Macartney can view the gardens, he cannot gain access to the matrix of imperial power guaranteed by their design. His eye is receptive, but not transitive. While Macartney did not retract his praise of the Chinese gardens that he had seen, despite the negative result of the embassy and the increasing backlash against the Chinese court for pursuing the humiliating request to kow-tow, his distinction between Chinese and British styles of gardening quoted in Barrow’s Travels in China does reveal his construction of a variant Chinese methodology. If the results could not be faulted in their equivalently pleasurable beauties, it must be the process of garden design that illuminates the difference between Chinese despotism and British dynamism. Whether our style of gardening was really copied from the Chinese, or originated with ourselves, I leave for vanity to assert, and idleness to discuss. A discovery which is the result of good sense and reflection may equally occur to the most



Garden distant nations, without either borrowing from the other. There is certainly a great analogy between our gardening and the Chinese; but our excellence seems to be rather in improving nature, theirs to conquer her, and yet produce the same effect.€.€. . [A Chinese gardener’s] point is to change everything from what he found it, to explode the old fashion of the creation, and introduce novelty in every corner.90

How tempting it is to substitute “style of governance” for “style of gardening” here, for Macartney’s suggestion that the British aim to “improve” while the Chinese “conquer” lays out the essential distinction being established in both governance and gardening. A British empire steered by a progressive, dynamic leadership might look forward to very different global prospects than a Chinese dynasty bent on alteration for alteration’s sake, ceaselessly uprooting and replanting itself in an endless cycle without enacting any substantial change. Thus the textual productions of the Macartney mission, despite the many passages detailing admiration for Chinese scenes and spaces, came to confirm the image of China’s aesthetic as despotic, full of intoxicating beauty but lacking in human liberty. One of Macartney’s observations about the western landscape garden in Gehol also printed in Barrow’s Travels in China here becomes particularly telling. Macartney writes: If any place in England can be said in any respect to have similar features to the western park, which I have seen this day, it is Lowther Hall in Westmoreland, which (when I knew it many years ago) from the extent of prospect, the grand surrounding objects, the noble situation, the diversity of surface, the extensive woods, and command of water, I thought might be rendered by a man of sense, spirit, and taste, the finest scene in the British dominions.91

Lowther Hall, of course, was also the boyhood home of William Wordsworth, Lord Lowther his father’s employer, and the surrounding Westmorland countryside the grounds that the Prelude finds “lovelier far” than Gehol’s gardens. As “the man of sense, spirit, and taste” whose renderings Macartney unknowingly anticipated, Wordsworth briefly incorporates the Chinese paradise that Macartney describes into his account of the landscape’s effect on a poet’s mind. Yet the poet also rejects Macartney’s comparison. Far from emphasizing Lowther Hall’s “similar features” to the western park at Gehol, Wordsworth’s poetic re-creation of Westmorland becomes its antithesis. Westmorland, plain where Gehol is ornate, natural where Gehol is contrived, and free where Gehol is restrained, forms part of a vision of the English countryside foundational to all later accounts of

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British native landscape. China, as the vivid dream disturbing the peaceful sleep of the rural child, becomes Britain’s opposite, its elaborate aesthetic symptomatic of its restricted ontology. In the decades that followed the Macartney mission, the accepted historical narrative of the Qing empire’s blinkered isolationism grew ever more solid even as contacts and exchanges with the land and people of China diversified. While contemporary European philosophical discourse, most notably Hegel’s lectures and writings, emphasized Chinese despotism as the millstone ensuring the country’s continued segregation from world history, British commerce and politics engaged the Qing imperium with increasing frequency if varying degrees of success from the British perspective. Lord Amherst’s 1816 diplomatic embassy, bearing nearly the same demands as Lord Macartney’s, failed even more rapidly.92 Yet matters began to shift after the ending of the East India Company’s monopoly on the China trade in 1833. Importation of opium into China expanded tremendously, with a parallel depletion of Chinese silver reserves, and Lord Napier, the British superintendent of trade charged with managing the postmonopoly commerce, advanced foreign interests aggressively despite an 1838 Chinese ban on trade in opium. Possessing advanced military technology, including the armed steamship Nemesis capable of navigating the shallow waters surrounding Canton, the British dominated the ensuing military conflict, now known as the First Opium War. In August 1842 the Qing government agreed to the terms of the Treaty of Nanjing, a document that marked a major turning point in British legal and commercial claims to Chinese goods and territories. This treaty achieved in partial measure the results the diplomatic missions had not achieved. China opened five coastal cities to British consulates and private residents, turned over the island of Hong Kong as a British colony, and paid the British a substantial cash settlement, among other concessions.93 These concessions spurred a rise in British travel and residence in China, despite the limited degree of penetration into China’s interior they allowed. Along with traders and missionaries, naturalists and other scientifically minded explorers arrived in the treaty ports ready to describe China, and Chinese difference, in ever greater precision.94 This was, of course, part of a global story, as recent scholarship has shown; the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries constituted a changing era not only in British literature but also in British travel and exploration.95 Literary prose and travel narratives written in the Romantic era evolved along interdependent epistemo-



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logical grounds, as the connections between Wordsworth’s Prelude and Barrow’s Travels in China have already made plain, but the narrative possibilities opened up through global exploration extend beyond the constraints of what Wordsworth calls the “frame imperial.” Not just formal imperial expansion, but the expansion of scientific knowledge under the aegis of informal empire broadly defined, and the concurrent rise of disciplinary organizations of that knowledge, all directed British investigation and understanding of global conditions, territories, and peoples. These knowledge workers claimed particular interest in China, whose unknown interior seemed to offer limitless possibilities of geological, botanical, and anthropological difference. Yet the truism of exploration’s post-Romantic transformation from heroic knowledge quest to professionalized search for valuable material resources must hold even less true in China than it does elsewhere in the British empire. The search for the secret of cultivating tea, for example, had brought specific practical purpose to scientific missions by the early eighteenth century, while the allure of the mountains in far western China preserved until the early twentieth century a romantic longing for uncharted lands.96 This makes China’s rhetorical position in the standardization of the nineteenth-century exploration narrative uneasy. Strict separation between accounting of facts and pursuits of fancy was now demanded not just for reasons of narrative realism but also for principles of scientific accuracy. And yet, China’s deeply rooted visual difference troubles this separation. The inextricable connection between ways of seeing and ways of making meaning implies that China’s landscape, like its social and political structure, cannot easily be removed from the entrenched epistemological difference that defined its exoticism. Indeed, efforts to deny the early effects of China’s disruptive entrance into the sleep of the British rural child end up confirming the foundational influence of those disruptions. Returning China to a blank state of nature in the scientific travel narrative, then, requires the erasure of a century’s worth of writings acculturating Chinese landscape to Chinese states of governance and conditions of mind. The unbiased eye, the scientist’s most crucial tool, met specific challenges in a country predominantly understood through differences in vision. I choose the example of Robert Fortune to help illustrate these challenges, though he was neither a distinguished scientist nor a noted explorer, because his popular travel narratives detailing his horticultural adventures while disguised as Chinese in the interior of China demonstrate the broad reach of these dilemmas in the nineteenth century. Particularly during the

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inter–Opium War period, when all kinds of travel, scientific and otherwise, within the interior of China were sometimes physically possible but always legally forbidden, Fortune’s writings detail a doubled transformation of both the physical and natural world. His combined efforts to import Chinese plants to Britain and export his own body to the interior of China by passing as Chinese make textually obvious what is in other narratives more obscured: the processes and consequences of turning British eyes Chinese.

Robert Fortune as Horticultural Spy in Racial Disguise In Fortune’s third narrative of his travels to China, A Residence among the Chinese (1857), he gives a provocative account of his visit to the garden of an elderly Chinese man. The incident begins with Fortune arriving at the garden’s surrounding fence. Inside of this fence there were a number of trees and bushes which seemed worth looking at.€.€. . At last I thought there would be no great harm in jumping over the fence. A number of watch-dogs, which I had disturbed, came running towards me, looking very fierce .€.€. [but] with a good stout stick in my hand, I felt no alarm whatever, but went quietly on with my botanical researches. In a few seconds an old man .€.€. came rushing towards me with a stout bamboo in his hand, and looking as if he intended to use it. He was evidently in a towering passion.€.€. . I then told him .€.€. that I was no thief, that I had merely come to pay him a visit, and if he treated me so rudely I would go away again.97

Fortune’s arrogance receives no check; instead, the old man’s son arrives and whispers to his father that Fortune is “hong-mou-jin,” or foreigner. The affair is then concluded to Fortune’s satisfaction: In the twinkling of an eye his countenance changed, the storm had passed into sunshine, his bamboo was thrown from him, and, clasping the palms of his hands together, he made me a low bow and asked me to forgive him, for he was blind. It was indeed so, and hence the whole cause of the strange, and, to me, unaccountable scene in which I had been one of the actors. I was now surprised at my own blindness in not detecting this before; but the whole thing had occurred so suddenly that I had little time for observation. The old man, now all smiles and good-humour, led me round his garden—blind, stone-blind, though he was—and told me the names of his various trees and shrubs.98

This set-piece, metaphorically recapping Fortune’s larger invasion of the walled garden of the Chinese nation, demonstrates how thoroughly reliant



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Fortune’s travel narratives are upon the general narrative of British penetration of China. By this volume’s 1857 publication date, relations between the British and Chinese significantly changed from the years of Fortune’s first visits to China in the mid-1840s. Fortune’s account of his determined attempt to inspect trees and shrubs worth looking at reads as the horticultural version of the Nemesis’s naval bombardment, up to and including the persistent contemporary British sense that the Chinese literally could not see—and by extension properly manage—their own country. Further, his stirring success in entering the garden reflects a post–Treaty of Nanjing assumption that China must yield to British terms. It is also striking, therefore, to note the narrative’s less obvious preoccupation with the language of visual lapse. From Fortune’s discovery of the garden hidden behind its high enclosing fence, to the guard dogs that look fierce but do not bite, to the old man who looks as if he might attack but does not, to the revelation of the old man’s blindness, to Fortune’s figurative blindness, to even the narration of the man’s transition in mood as taking place “in the twinkling of an eye,” the entire scene is given narrative shape by the participants’ oscillations between misprision and perception. Speech, meanwhile, is written out of this “unaccountable” meeting. Completely elided is the presence of Fortune’s Chinese servant/translator who was his constant companion. Here China must be seen to be understood, but the vision of China is one frequently mystifying and unreliable; visual control moves between invader and invaded with only a narrative composed long after the fact to explain the results of the encounter. Just as Fortune’s entry into the garden restages and renders triumphant his more complicated and difficult entry into China, his metaphorical evolution from blindness to sight in this encounter smoothes out the intricacies of his complex physical visual engagement with both the cultivated Chinese landscape and the people who cultivate it. Of course one crucial verbal communication does enter into the narrative through the son’s whisper of “hong mou jin,” or “red haired man,” a common term designating all non-Chinese regardless of hair color. While we might imagine that identifying the middle-aged Scottish horticulturalist as non-Chinese might be a simple judgment for Chinese and foreigners alike, in fact determining Fortune’s status had not always been so easy. On Fortune’s two previous journeys to China taken during the mid and late 1840s—detailed in his travel narratives Three Years Wandering in the Northern Provinces of China (1847) and Journey to the Tea Countries (1851)—he had,

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with the aid of a purchased queue and tinted spectacles, worked to transform himself into a mandarin from western China so that he could travel into the country’s forbidden interior regions.99 Strict Chinese edicts forbade foreigners from going beyond the thirty-mile boundary surrounding the coastal treaty ports during this period, and while the recently concluded First Opium War had increased the number of those treaty ports, the ban on travel to China’s interior remained in place. But the sponsors of his first two journeys—the Royal Horticultural Society and the East India Company, respectively—sought flowering plants and tea bushes that could not always be purchased in the few commercial nurseries located within the treaty limits, and so Fortune began his project of acculturating himself into the habits and customs of the Chinese. As his servant puts it, the horticulturalist must “make a change in [his] ‘outward man,’ and adopt the costume of the country”; the transformation is so effective that Fortune claims that he cannot even recognize himself in a mirror when dressed as Chinese.100 The legibility of Fortune as a foreigner invading a blind man’s garden in the mid-1850s internalized the transformations he underwent while passing as Chinese in the mid-1840s. In the early writings that describe these acts of passing, the pre-existing understanding of the differences in foreign vision must be explicitly stated to make plain the extent of his success. By the time of his later writings, his visual control becomes implicit, though never unchallenged, both by Chinese natives or subsequent British travelers. Fortune was, of course, neither the first nor the last British plant hunter in China.101 Sir Joseph Banks had long coveted specimens from the country so renowned for its horticulture as to be frequently called the “Flowery Land,” and had equipped Sir George Staunton with a collection of natural history texts and a catalogue of species to acquire while assisting Lord Macartney; Banks had also hoped that Macartney and his embassy might help rectify the lagging state of British technological sophistication by stealing Chinese techniques of porcelain-craft and tea-cultivation.102 Lesser known men with professional and personal interests in natural history also worked as part of the large and informally organized network of Banksian collectors in China. Similarly, Linnaeus dispatched many hands on behalf of the Swedish East India Company in search of tea trees that might grow in Europe, among them the young Sir William Chambers.103 Yet as Fa-ti Fan has shown, early British naturalists in China found most of their specimens not in an uncultivated state of nature but in the marketplaces of Chinese ports.104 As the naturalist and surgeon Clarke Abel who accompanied the



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second British embassy to the Qing Court led by Lord Amherst in 1816 concluded: “From the gardens I obtained the greater number of the botanical specimens that I collected.€.€. . No country could be more barren in uncultivated plants.”105 In later decades, however, dissatisfaction with the restricted selection of plants available legitimately grew along with speculation about availability of more spectacular plants in still-forbidden areas of the interior. The Royal Horticultural Society directed Fortune to “collect seeds and plants of an ornamental or useful kind, not already cultivated in Great Britain,” which the society hoped might include both “the Plants that yield Tea of different qualities” and “the Plant which furnishes Rice Paper” as well as “Peonies with blue flowers, the existence of which is, however, doubtful” and “Camellias with yellow flowers, if such exist.”106 Here the society’s concerns over inauthentic Chinese botanicals suspected to be doctored by unscrupulous Chinese nurserymen both echoes earlier anxiety over artificial landscape effects and reflects ongoing fears of adulterated or contaminated tea leaves; in all cases, unnatural Chinese alterations corrupt the status of the natural. Fortune, meanwhile, was aware of both the opportunities and dangers available beyond the port boundaries. “I may have an opportunity, some time, to get a little into the country, and a stick will scarcely frighten an armed Chinaman,” wrote Fortune to the Royal Horticultural Society in a letter of 1 January 1843, requesting that he be supplied with a firearm, adding that “we must not forget that China has been the seat of war for some time past & that many of the inhabitants will bear the English no good will.”107 Equipped with fowling piece and Chinese phrase-book, Fortune was able to evade restrictions and penetrate the countryside of southern China, where he gathered a wide variety of flowers, trees, and tea bushes that were profitably exported to Britain and its colonies. This he did so successfully that later plant-hunters complained that there was not a single plant existing in the cultivated gardens of southern China that Fortune had not already sent back.108 In addition to the 120 entirely new species of plants that Fortune distributed to nurseries across Britain, he also sent some 13,000 tea plants to British India.109 Fortune’s collections of these tea plants—along with harvesting equipment, documents, plans for tea processing, and even Chinese plantation workers themselves—helped establish tea plantations in British India that, later in the century, would eliminate the Chinese monopoly on tea. Susan Thurin has pointed out how Fortune’s

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writings demonstrate the ways that “occupation and acculturation collude in the business of empire.”110 Full understanding of this collusion means attending to the complex visual terms of Fortune’s personal and botanical acculturations. Fortune’s writings on his multiple acts of conversion—of British landscape, of foreign territory, and of his own body—make his travel narratives different from those of his contemporaries. In his texts, the place of the “foreign” and the “native” are subject to constant visual slippage and manipulation, both of plants and of people. His writings exemplify a concern not just with how China looked to him but also with how he looked to China, for Fortune, in writing of his travels in a pre–Treaty of Tianjin context, is constantly attentive to the ways in which he is perceived by the Chinese. As he explains his racial disguise at the beginning of his first travel narrative: “I was of course travelling in the Chinese costume; my head was shaved, I had a splendid wig, and tail, of which some Chinaman in former days had doubtless been extremely vain, and upon the whole I believe I made a pretty fair Chinaman.”111 In an 1844 private report to the Royal Horticultural Society, Fortune is even more emphatic, writing that “I have had another journey in the interior visiting one of the most celebrated cities in the north.€.€. . It would have been impossible to accomplish this in the dress of an Englishman & I therefore substituted for this the Chinese Costume & succeeded most completely. [In] fact were it not for the treaty made by our own Government I should not have [had] the slightest hesitation in travelling to Pekin itself.”112 And in a postscript characteristic of his general narrative tone, Fortune not only requests reimbursement for expenses, including $12 spent on “Chinese dress,” but also requests a raise from £100 to £150 per annum, reasoning: “From the nature of my employment I am necessarily obliged to expose myself more than any other individual in the Country, an exposure which—judging from what has already taken place—would prove fatal to 9/10th of the English residents in China.”113 Here Fortune’s exceptionalism stands in direct contradiction to the false geographic structure imposed by political treaties made by the British government, as the successes of his visual transformations trump other means of making sense of China. Clad in his Chinese dress, Fortune is able to “pass” through the crowded city of Suzhou, apparently unrecognized by the surrounding Chinese. He describes standing on a bridge overlooking a busy street:



Garden I .€.€. looked down on the gay and happy throng, with a feeling of secret triumph when I remembered that I was now in the most fashionable city of the Celestial Empire, where no Englishman, as far as I know, had ever been before. None of the loiterers on the bridge appeared to pay the slightest attention to me, by which I concluded that I must be very much like one of themselves. How surprised they would have been had it been whispered to them that an Englishman was standing amongst them.114

As in the encounter with the blind man, the passage relies on the vagaries of perception to make its point. The heavy conditionality—none of the loiterers appeared to pay attention, thus Fortune must be very much like one of them—suggests how unreliable a visually based system of definition must be. Both this scene on the bridge and the garden encounter demonstrate the way that Fortune constantly imagines his travels in China as a strangely staged scene requiring the presence of an outside observer to integrate the unseeing players into a viewable whole. In the “unaccountable” encounter with the blind man in his garden, Fortune plays both roles himself. At first he is a blind actor in the scene, unaware of the truth about the old man’s blindness. But once his status as a foreigner is established, he is also the allseeing audience of the scene, able to view both man and vegetation as they truly were. In this scene on the bridge, the whisper of foreigner is only imagined—there are no sighted Chinese available to correct the blindness of the loiterers ignorant (or inattentive) to Fortune’s difference. (His guides, who constantly supported, and often literally carried, Fortune during his explorations, would have been subject to severe punishments if they had revealed themselves to be aiding a foreigner.) Thus the role of the whisperer must be played in this scene by the British reader. Only the audience consuming Fortune’s travel narrative can see Fortune’s doubled status as both native “Englishman” and traveler “very much like the Chinese” in this scene.115 Thus Fortune’s passing does on a bodily scale what his botanical exchanges replicate on the level of landscape: both unhinge visual markers of origin and nationality from their conventional contexts. Fortune’s acts of racial disguise link his own bodily transformation to the widespread transformation of the landscape he enacted. By mining Chinese nursery gardens for flowering plants and trees that he then introduced into Britain, Fortune literally infiltrated his domestic landscape with foreign influence. And by imagining a widespread distribution of plants that would effectively erase regional specificity, Fortune’s horticultural collection reflects a radically dif-

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ferent kind of environmental conception than those focusing on the native or permanent characteristics of a country and its inhabitants. In making everything subject to manipulation, whether it be racial classification or native vegetation, Fortune works against a conception of the land and its productions as stably and determinately related. For Fortune, “native” identity—both of his own body and of the plants that he gathered—was constantly being called into question. Whether sending azaleas and peonies to England, tea bushes to India, or covering himself in mandarin’s robes, Fortune demonstrates the possibility of manipulation inherent in once seemingly organic links between land and vegetation, body and race. In this way, Fortune represents the culmination of Chambers’s vision for the influence of Chinese gardens on the British landscape, both in his facility in translating between Chinese and British ideas of nature and in his ready capacity to manipulate visual conditions to suit his own purposes. Fortune’s writings are in fact everywhere concerned with establishing the modes of a Chinese way of seeing that he can adapt and manipulate. He writes in Three Years Wandering: A great proportion of the northern Chinese seem to be in a sleepy or dreaming state, from which it is impossible to awake them. When a foreigner at any of the northern ports goes into a shop, the whole place inside and out is immediately crowded with Chinese, who gaze at him with a sort of stupid dreaming eye; and it is difficult to say whether they really see him or not, or whether they have been drawn there by some strange mesmeric influence over which they have no control: and I am quite sure that, were it possible for the stranger to slip out of his clothes and leave a block standing in his place, these Chinese would still continue to gaze on, and never know the difference.116

Although the figuration of the Chinese as either childish or idiotic may seem familiar, this mesmerized dream-state vision is also Fortune’s attempt to explicate the techniques of Chinese observers. That these Chinese are held transfixed by not the physical body of the foreigner, but rather his suit of clothes, suggests a way of seeing read from surfaces and patterns rather than substance or essence. It is context, not content that identifies the “foreigner” and the “native” in Fortune’s narrative. His writings help establish China as a place understood as much through the habits of the eye and customs of seeing as through the people and landscape constituting that sight. This makes a part of a growing British priority on visual primacy, real or imagined, when figuring the terrain of China for domestic readers. Fortune’s symbolic destruction of the bounds of the Chinese garden is one



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small but significant effort in the general competition for the components of Chinese nature. Yet while Fortune makes frequent use of this divergent Chinese way of seeing in his geographical re-envisionings, his narrative also attempts to place this way of seeing exclusively in the past. “I have no intention of writing or ‘making’ a book on China,” he declares in the opening pages of his first narrative, rejecting such fabrications in favor of what he deems the practical realities of contemporary Sino-British relations. It is a movement Fortune frames as both a development from childhood to maturity and from visual mystification to clear-eyed sight. Fortune writes: We were in the position of little children who gaze with admiration and wonder at a penny peep-show in a fair or marketplace at home. We looked with magnifying eyes on everything Chinese, and fancied, for the time at least, that what we saw was certainly real. But the same children who look with wonder upon the scenes of Trafalgar and Waterloo, when the curtain falls, and their pennyworth of sights has passed by, find that, instead of being amongst those striking scenes, which have just passed in review before their eyes, they are only, after all, in the marketplace of their native town.€.€. . [T]he curtain which had been drawn around the celestial country for ages, has now been rent asunder; and instead of viewing an enchanted fairy land, we find, after all, that China is just like other countries.117

Fortune’s metaphor attempts to stage an anticipatory familiarity that the rest of his narrative cannot supply—for of course if China were truly “just like other countries,” Fortune’s elaborate acts of disguise would not be necessary. What is actually at issue here, however, is the proleptic transposition of focus from China and Britain as separate imperial powers to the transnational space of the marketplace. Both the “enchanted fairy land” of China and the scenes of the British military victories at Trafalgar and Waterloo exist only in the childish visual space of the penny peep show. Visual maturity comes with the rending of the curtain and the revelation of the “marketplace of the native town,” suggesting that China is just like other countries because it too occupies a place in the local market. In works as recent as Dawn Jacobsen’s Chinoiserie (1993), this quotation has been used as evidence of the evacuation of fanciful Chinese aesthetics from nineteenth-century conceptions of China.118 But the increasing availability of Chinese goods in the British marketplace and penetration of British eyes into Chinese spaces in fact resulted in the further preservation of what were thought of as Chinese ways of seeing within a modernizing

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British vision. Fortune’s activities in particular supplemented the archetypal vision of China familiar from the patterned porcelain ware that was China’s most familiar export product. Through his written accounts of his movements as a “pretty fair Chinaman,” readers found in the little figures scattered across the pattern pieces a more complicated image of the “native.” And through his horticultural exchanges, British gardeners could match the representations of Chinese trees and flowers printed on the porcelain to living botanical specimens growing in their own gardens. If we are to understand the ways that Fortune contributed to the replication and manipulation of this vision of China, however, we must also attend to the material processes that actually circulated Chinese objects around the globe. As the Edinburgh Review’s essay on Fortune’s Three Years Wandering points out, improvements in the British art of garden design are contingent upon enhanced systems of global exchange: “The layer out of a garden has at present abundant power of forming his taste.€.€. . He can .€.€. select for the decoration of his spaces, from so large and admirable a catalogue of trees, shrubs, and flowers, that any shape or colour can be acquired. Cheap glass puts within his reach the vegetable productions of every climate.”119 The availability of plants from gardens the world over made the nineteenth-century designer of outdoor spaces a global consumer equal to any decorator furnishing an interior space. Initially the network of global plant exchange had served mainly scientific interests, with only a few aristocrats able to pay the high prices demanded for foreign specimens.120 But the technical and scientific advancements coinciding with the start of Fortune’s collecting career allowed distinctions between climate zones and native plant habits to disappear. The cheap glass of the greenhouse negated the effects of Britain’s local climate and opened up the practice of landscape design to the whims of its designer. In so doing, the constructed version of nature that the garden had always represented changed as well, as the vision of an integral, holistic botanical landscape gave way to a scenery both transportable and contingent.121 While for Chambers the portability and translatability of the Chinese landscape had been theoretical, by Fortune’s era the equation between native and natural was under direct material assault. Thus for Fortune, economics and aesthetics worked together as he sought to construct and transplant a beautiful landscape via the passages of commodity trade. His description of the China he sees always gives way to a focus on its constitutive, transportable parts, as in his discovery of a rare



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botanical specimen in the mountainous crossing between the provinces of Fokien and Kiang-see. Fortune recognizes the tree as the Japan cedar: a tree which I had already introduced into England, and which, even in a young state, had been greatly admired there. I had never before seen such a noble specimen, and, although I would rather it had been something new, I yet felt proud of having been the means of introducing into Europe a tree of such size, symmetry and beauty.€.€. . My Chinamen looked upon it with great admiration, and informed me it was the only specimen of the kind in this part of the country, and that it had been planted by some former emperor when he crossed the mountains.122

Fortune, as selector and disseminator of new species, assumes the role of emperor himself as he distributes new plants among his far-away subjects in Britain. But Fortune’s acts of distribution differ from the emperor’s custom of planting rare and beautiful specimens along his travel route, for the prioritized perspective of the emperor made evident in the design of the imperial gardens is here diffused by Fortune’s dispersals. Fortune relies on pathways of commodity exchange to mark the course of his travels, and his plant exchanges, concentrated as they are on the single specimen, work to rewrite China as solely a generative locale, with Britain’s gardens the site for proper development and future cultivation. From the single Chinese sample a new lineage of plants can be established that will be British in origin and management. Fortune’s narratives are full of his plans for this kind of distribution, which constantly look forward to the literal creation of the vast garden that William Chambers once caused Tan Chet-qua to facetiously imagine. He writes with pleasure: “I was able to procure some new and valuable plants.€.€. . These plants are now in England, and will soon be met with in every garden in the country.”123 For Fortune, the pleasure in managing to introduce so many Chinese natives into England comes both from the rewards of the labor and the pride in England as a site of cultivation. As he writes of one plant, Olea fragrans (commonly known as sweet olive): In England we know nothing of the beauty of this charming plant. But there is no other amongst all the beautiful productions of the East which more deserves our care, or that would more richly reward it. And I am quite sure that English gardeners have only to take the subject in hand to ensure the most complete success. Look at Camellias, Azaleas, Gardenias and a host of other things, all natives of China, and most of them much better grown, and brought to a greater state of perfection in England than amongst the Chinese themselves. And why should one of the most delightful plants of China be so neglected?124

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The process of managing Chinese plants, like the process of managing a Chinese nation crippled by the slow collapse of the Qing empire, is now best left to the British. In keeping with his general misprision of political matters, however, Fortune sidesteps discussion of the midcentury conflicts between China and Britain and instead maintains a notion of international relations largely dependent on plant exchange. He asserts: Since the last war .€.€. Chinese plants have not only been introduced to Europe and America, to enliven and beautify our parks and gardens, but we have also enriched those of the Celestial Empire with the productions of the West. Nothing, I believe, can give the Chinese a higher idea of our civilization and attainments than our love for flowers, or tend more to create a kindly feeling between us and them.125

That none but a particularly myopic botanist might think the British love of flowers could be the country’s strongest international calling card hardly needs saying. Yet Fortune’s mention of “the last war”—that is, the first Opium War—as impetus to this botanical diplomacy is telling. For Fortune, the upheavals of Chinese government and society occasioned by midcentury conflicts both foreign and domestic can best be understood through their effect on the cultivating capacities of the country. How, then, does Fortune’s narrative vision of China represent the largescale re-envisionings of landscape his horticultural exchanges enacted? A descriptive set-piece in Journey to the Tea Countries gives a sense of the temporal disruptions of the picturesque occasioned by Fortune’s vision of the Chinese landscape. He writes: As we went over the passes we always rested while on the highest point, from which we obtained a view, not only of the valley through which we had come, but also of that to which we were going. The long trains of coolies laden with chests of tea and other produce, and with the mountain chairs of travellers, presented a busy and curious scene, as they toiled up the mountain side, or were seen winding their way through the valleys. These were views of “China and the Chinese” as they are seen in everyday life.126

Atop the mountain pass, Fortune is poised at a moment of transition looking back at past ignorance of the Chinese landscape in general and the work of tea production in particular, while also looking forward to future dissemination and replication of the elements of this landscape. In Fortune’s vision the train of coolies is inexorably being supplanted by his active ex-



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portation of the tea that gives them their livelihood, but the vision also represents the alternate visual past as it came to exist in the emerging British narrative of Sino-British history. Fortune’s use of quotation marks to delineate “China and the Chinese,” in particular, establishes the geography and population of China as a joint conceptual category captured best in retrospective view. The awkward shift to present tense, and the more general contemporary conditions of “everyday life,” partition the vision of China as a series of staged scenes within the temporally progressive “everyday life” of the British traveler in China. Fortune therefore recuperates and claims for himself the symbolic command over the landscape in a way that Macartney, viewing the “illuminated map,” could not. He does so by understanding the Chinese landscape as mediated nature. Organic space here undergoes reinvention not only through changing economic conditions but also through the changing rhetorical constructions of its viewable prospects. While Fortune uses the general cultivation of the Chinese landscape as the focus for his rewritten visual history of China, other British activity of the period enacted more spectacular and direct alteration of particular Chinese gardens. The treaty resolving the First Opium War had not quelled ongoing disagreements, and eventually a dispute over the search of the Arrow, a small sailing vessel flying (improperly) a British flag, led to the outbreak of renewed fighting between the Chinese and the British in late 1856, even as both sides pursued military conflicts in other arenas—the British were engaged in the Indian Mutiny, while the Qing were embroiled in the debilitating civil conflict of the Taiping Rebellion. The conclusion of what has been called both the Arrow War and the Second Opium War repeated what had come before; the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin yielded further Chinese concessions to British travel and residence within the interior of China, as well as the expansion of British treaty-ports. Initial Chinese resistance to the terms of this treaty drove the 1860 march of Anglo-French forces led by Lord Elgin and Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gros into Beijing to destroy the palaces of the Yuanming Yuan, redressing in British minds the wrongs done some three-quarters of a century earlier to Macartney and his embassy members in those same gardens. LieutenantColonel Wolseley’s Narrative of the War with China in 1860 describes the army’s revision of the Chinese landscape in their destruction of the Yuanming Yuan, and thus, the apparently final disposition of the landscape generative of so many European imaginings.

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Garden By the evening of the 19th October, the summer palaces had ceased to exist, and in their immediate vicinity, the very face of nature seemed changed: some blackened gables and piles of burnt timbers alone indicating where the royal palaces had stood. In many places the inflammable pine trees near the buildings had been consumed with them, leaving nothing but their charred trunks to mark the site. When we first entered the gardens they reminded one of those magic grounds described in fairy tales; we marched from them upon the 19th October, leaving them a dreary waste of ruined nothings.127

The pine tree specimens that Fortune had been so proud to introduce to botanical collections in Britain here prove notable through their complete immolation, as Elgin’s and Gros’s actions definitively overwrite the fairy tale vision of the gardens that once disturbed the sleep of Wordsworth’s rural child. Yet Fortune and the allied troops, despite their many differences, are alike in changing China’s “face of nature.” In both cases an integrated notion of landscape and vegetation must be revised as ultimate token of China’s subjugation to European imperial will. For Fortune, the Chinese refusal to reveal rare horticultural specimens or proprietary knowledge of tea cultivation and production is a concealment that must be controverted through his own work of disguise. For the Anglo-French forces, the refusal of the Qing court to agree to the concessions of the Convention of Peking is a stubbornness best answered through a destruction of the symbols of Manchu personal power. But as Wolseley’s narrative makes clear, the destruction of the Summer Palace had further symbolic significance. In Wolseley’s reading of the garden space, the very design of the garden was directly responsible for the dissipated and despotic rulers who, according to British accounts, so misled and betrayed their subjects. Wolseley writes of the Yuanming Yuan: Generation after generation of emperors had added to its works of art and artificial beauty. From thence mighty kings have issued their commands to the widest empire ever yet ruled by any one man; but the very gorgeousness of the scene has been one great promoting cause of the luxury and effeminacy which have served to debase the late rulers of China, causing the descendants of fierce warriors to degenerate into mere enervated debauchees, alike incapable of wielding the sword themselves or commanding in the field those who could. After a childhood passed in the seclusion of such palaces, the greatest exercise allowed being a daily stroll amidst the luxurious gardens around, it is scarcely to be wondered at that the royal heir should grow up into a indolent, dreamy, and unpractical manhood.128



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Only with the destruction of this breeding ground for dissipation and effeminacy could China productively begin again, with a new landscape structured around British ways of seeing. Here all Macartney’s attention to the subtle cues of wealth and power embedded in the landscape’s contours is forgotten. Instead, a wholesale reinvention is necessary, not to return China to former days of “fierce warriors” but rather to render it an empty subject ready for the enlightenment of European commercial, scientific, and religious interests. By destroying China’s metonymic garden, Wolseley’s narrative suggests, the space of visual and political difference that that garden signified can be erased as well. Yet despite the devastation enacted by Elgin and Gros, the landscape— and the narrative tradition of writing about that landscape—retained its power to convey a Chinese way of seeing. In 1885, tourists to China were remarking on the “sickening .€.€. scene of devastation” still evident in the Summer Palace site in language deeply reminiscent of Attiret’s century-anda-half-old work. Constance Gordon-Cumming writes: “The park, which is now once more closed to the barbarians, contains fine palatial buildings, faced with colonnades and altogether of a very Italian type, having been built under the direction of the Jesuits, but the beautiful pleasure grounds, where we wandered over wooded hills all strewn with beautiful ruins, is purely Chinese, and as such is to me far more interesting.”129 To British eyes, the gardens, even destroyed, continue to offer metonymic representation of the Qing empire as a whole. It is a representational difference still compelling to the British observer. In ending with these British assertions of rights to trade and territory, we return to the disillusioning moment described in Fortune’s narrative when the penny peep show concludes and reveals the surrounding local marketplace. Visual mystification gives way to free material circulation. In the next chapter, I follow further these accounts of Chinese representations of nature into their embodiment as domestic British commodities as well as the animations of British commodities into Chinese nature. Imported blue and white porcelain became British because accounts of its possession were made to constitute the British subject, while willow pattern plates produced in Britain became Chinese in design and reference because that contrast was useful for midcentury rhetorics and fictions. Neither transformation could have occurred without the visions of Chinese gardens that the narratives of this chapter describe. Together the garden narratives offer not only a vision of Chinese difference—of artifice, disunity, and formal-

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ized disorder—but also a field for British vision to itself undergo transformation. And having become “a little Chinese” after receiving a vision of China, Britons found the cultural distinctions of vision and visual narrative that structured their conceptions of their own selves as perceiving, thinking, and knowing beings disrupted in turn.

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In 1838, Mark Lemon published what purported to be “A True History of the Celebrated Wedgewood [sic] Hieroglyph, Commonly Called the Willow Pattern” in Bentley’s Miscellany. The broad and questionable humor of this piece, in keeping with Lemon’s later role as editor of Punch, comes not so much in its description of the “true” origins of the willow pattern plate’s standard elements of mandarins, pavilions, rivers, bridges, and, of course, willow trees, which all make familiar components of the Chinese garden as readers had come to understand it. Nor is the humor especially located in the basic plot of Lemon’s story of Chou-chu, who had, “in addition to his other commodities .€.€. a daughter.”1 In Lemon’s story, just as in other accounts this daughter, Si-So rejects her father’s choice of husband and instead conducts an unsanctioned affair with the impoverished musician Ting-a-ting that ends, inevitably, in parental discovery of the affair, the lovers’ separation and consequent double suicide, and, finally, the transformation of the two young Chinese into doves. Indeed, in these bare facts Lemon’s history, though silly, is not really different from the many other “retellings” of the willow pattern’s fabricated folk tale in British periodicals and children’s literature throughout the century. Instead, Lemon’s satire declares itself through an acknowledgment of the willow pattern’s ubiquity. Before beginning his “true history,” Lemon inserts a bracketed imperative to the reader—“[Gentle reader,* ring the bell, and desire John to bring you a ‘willow pattern plate.’ John has obeyed you, and, with your permission, we will now proceed]”—to which is added the following note: “*The humour (if any) of this sketch will be better

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understood if the above requisition be complied with.”2 Lemon then describes the building and grounds of Chou-chu’s residence on Lake Slo-Flo, concluding with their most salient aspect: “[T]here is one feature which it would be presumptuous to describe,—a feature which has given it celebrity as undying as that of the Staffordshire Potteries: This feature is its WILLOW!!! (See plate).”3 To understand what might be considered humorous in Lemon’s pun, we have to understand what it meant to look at a willow pattern plate, or indeed any patterned blue and white china in Britain in the nineteenth century, and to expect that look to return both value and meaning to a broader reading context. While descriptions of Chinese gardens offered by British travel narratives showed China’s aesthetic difference as a spectacular direct experience, writers’ descriptions of looking at blue and white china conveyed that aesthetic difference allusively. The china provides a material reference point for a pre-existing storehouse of images and narratives of Chinese gardens so embedded that it would be “presumptuous to describe” them. This isn’t to say that physical Chinese gardens didn’t embed their own shared visual histories for those who traveled to see them, only to emphasize what Lemon also makes clear: the china’s availability to every “gentle reader” greatly increased the population doing that sharing. China, therefore, directs the visual constitution of nineteenth-century British subjects most effectively through its metonymic commodity. This china is an object both individually possessed and understood as a defining national possession, a site of reading open simultaneously to all British people at once—or at least all those able to summon John with a bell. Here what is significant is not so much the specific moment that porcelain is offloaded from a trading ship or produced in a kiln, but more the evolution of porcelain as an epistemological category throughout the British nineteenth century. Following these circulations allows us to read the china through what Arjun Appadurai has called the history of the commodity’s social life.4 Blue and white china is a material object that through its developing social life becomes understood by British writers and artists to be capable of encoding vision, and the cultural categories that make vision possible, through the artificial intrusions of its design. It is important to make immediately clear here that I am handling material difference and history imprecisely within this discussion. Antique imported blue and white porcelain from China and domestically manufactured modern patterned earthenware and porcelain from Britain are of



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course not interchangeable. Yet early European traders had influenced the designs of such antique porcelain from the beginning days of the China trade, as I discuss further below. Thus, when certain British consumers insisted on taking their china as Chinese they did so in order to deny key circumstances of both material and formal hybridity. The efforts involved in rendering a common domestic object unequivocally foreign exemplifies the paradox of the familiar exotic that I have described. In particular, the kind of blue and white porcelain labeled the willow pattern comes to be both a comforting icon of British domesticity and a dangerous token of visual difference. But for the china to carry weight as a symbol of both domesticity and foreignness, collectors of china needed to negotiate a conversion from economic to cultural capital. As I show in this chapter, the operative terms of that conversion change across the century. First, the material signified by the common term “china” came to encompass not just foreign-produced true porcelain but also domestic earthenware. Second, the designs printed on this domestic china became refined, standardized, and mechanically reproducible. And third, the literature and art that made narratives out of the china’s pictorial image increasingly sourced those stories in a domestic present rather than a foreign past. This chapter pays attention to all of these changing ways of reading china, whether those readings understand china as circulating object, reproducible image, or rewriteable story. This is necessary because, regardless of assignments of aesthetic value, all of these evolutions propose a similar primary significance for the Chinese commodity in the making of British standards of authentic representation. In this chapter, as in the last, interpreters of Chinese aesthetics are connected not so much by their affection or disregard for China’s influence but by their shared understanding of Chinese aesthetic productions as important places to locate discussions about the complex nature of visual truth in the modern global era. I read three historical moments that evidence this progression. First, the chapter examines several Romantic-era essayists: Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, and Leigh Hunt. All of these writers understand the conception of the writing subject through the blue and white china in that subject’s possession not just as an intimation of consumer practice but as a meditation on visual interpretation. Southey, Lamb, and Hunt all take the pattern’s visual challenges seriously and seek, in their texts, to absorb the artificiality of its Chinese aesthetics within a native British literary tradition. Later, with the development of the willow pattern in domestic potteries, that in-

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tegration gets so fully economically and materially achieved that the mere circumstance of possession is no longer remarkable. Instead, writers turn their attention to the narrative context of the pattern, and, like Lemon, use the “true history” of the willow pattern story to challenge the operations of literary realism, most thoroughly in the case of George Meredith’s novel The Egoist. Concurrently, pre-Impressionist artists attempt to rescue antique porcelain from its conflation with ubiquitous domestically produced earthenware, and use the porcelain’s rarity to mark their own aesthetic difference from the more middle-brow artistic taste that surrounds them. Whistler and Rossetti constitute themselves as visual subjects through their possessions as much as Charles Lamb did, but for the later artists the china is valuable only by virtue of, rather than in spite of, its difference. In all three moments, the china and the larger aesthetic conventions that it makes a part of give important information about the material object’s capacity to convey the making of the creative British visual subject. This effect is registered across social strata high and low, and remains powerful whether the blue and white means to convey luxury or the middlingest domesticity. Remarking on the wide range of China’s influence, as Lemon does in the “True History,” also becomes cover for a deeper anxiety: that this influence imposes distinction where there is no true difference. Lemon’s lengthy setpiece upon one of the musician Ting-a-ting’s nightly serenades to his lover Si-So, for example, makes clear the satirist’s play on false translation of an exoticized domestic object already apparent in the title. In this verse, the “original” lyrics first printed as “O-re ye-wi-te Slo-flo/ Ic om-to mi Si-so” are then “translated” as “O’er the white Slo-flo/ I come to my Si-so.”5 While the sing-song hyphenated rhythms of the “original” verse reflect a general British mockery of Chinese phonemes, the aural equivalency between the two verses redirects the critique internally. Reminding the reader of the seemingly exotic willow pattern’s domestic origins with the Staffordshire pottery firm of Wedgwood, comparing the pattern’s design to the newly understood writing system of hieroglyphics, and exaggerating the arbitrary linkage between printed words and spoken sounds, Lemon’s essay finds its humor in the slippages between apparently separate terms. These are as much visual and verbal conditions as oral and verbal contrasts. When he directs his reader to “See plate,” punning on the interchangeability between china cabinet commodities and textual illustrations, he makes clear that the problem of Chinese visual difference must equally be a problem of British textual production.



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Romantic Satires on Blue and White China Although the texts this chapter considers are all published after Macartney’s embassy, the history of porcelain’s reception in Europe long predates that failed expedition. Indeed, it was in part porcelain’s global popularity that occasioned Macartney’s requests for trade concessions in the first place.6 This history, however, rarely emerges in British writings on China, as Lydia Liu has shown in her analysis of porcelain and earthenware’s linguistic chiasmus of cause and effect in Robinson Crusoe.7 In negotiating between popular and personal stories of the place of china in Britain, Southey, Lamb, and Hunt all ignore or revise the general economic and industrial inequities that allowed China to dominate the worldwide porcelain market in the eighteenth century. Yet the rhetorical repudiations and revisions of Chinese visual influence that their essays perform were only possible given that blue and white had been such a long-standing universal object of desire. As the premier Chinese export porcelain since at least the fifteenth century, blue and white china had a profound effect on the Near East and Europe both through the quality of its material manufacture and the sophistication of its design. Traders bringing porcelain westward frequently requested particular patterns as well as specific shapes and sizes of porcelain pieces. In response, Chinese manufacturers used those specifications not only to make exact copies but also to extrapolate a hybrid aesthetic that incorporated both European- and Chinese-specified designs. By the early eighteenth century, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, and Swedish artisans were all supplying forms and decorations to the hodge-podge style known as “Chinese export porcelain.” The resulting product, as Julie Emerson notes, “confuses modern historians: it is not easy to ascertain the original destination or intended market for these hybrid wares.”8 As its melange of design inspirations grew and multiplicity of production points expanded, the cultural assignations given to the export china became, if not increasingly arbitrary, increasingly revelatory of the cultural imperatives directing aesthetic distinction. Yet eighteenth-century critiques of Chinese porcelain usually focused much more on the material object than on the visual implications of the design printed on that object. Throughout the eighteenth century, these attacks had taken particularly gendered and classed shape; for only wealth-

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ier kinds of women were held to possess the leisure necessary to build an impressive collection of imported porcelain. John Gay’s 1725 “To a Lady on Her Passion for Old China,” for example, documents a woman’s obsessive desire for china—“China’s the passion of her soul;/ A cup, a plate, a dish, a bowl/ Can kind wishes in her breast,/ Inflame with joy, or break her rest”—but also directly equates fragile femininity with the delicacy of the empty, functionless porcelain vessel: “When I some antique Jar behold,/ Or white, or blue, or speck’d with gold,/ Vessels so pure, and so refin’d/ Appear the types of woman-kind:/ Are they not valu’d for their beauty,/ Too fair, too fine, for houshold duty?”9 Men, on the other hand, metaphorically correspond to a different kind of material in Gay’s poem: “He’s a strong earthen vessel made, For drudging, labour, toil and trade.”10 The ensuing metaphorical dichotomies, which posit women as antique, pure, refined, empty, and useless while men are modern, earthy, strong, and useful, give an early example of the potent metaphorical power carried by the material distinction between porcelain and earthenware. Gay’s equation of women with porcelain, like Alexander Pope’s linkage of lost female chastity with a flawed china jar in The Rape of the Lock or Addison’s or Steele’s attacks on women’s irrational appetites in The Spectator, brings together critiques of feminine frivolity, impurity, and consumerism.11 As the century turned, however, two changes occurred. For one, the East India Company’s trade in imported porcelain to Britain began to lull, in part because of the rise of domestic porcelain manufacture by the Staffordshire potteries. Although the British manufacturers had lagged behind Meissen and Sèvres in discovering the technology for fusing minerals at the very high temperatures needed to produce true porcelain, British industrialists like Josiah Wedgwood did pioneer new marketing techniques to sell that porcelain once it began to be produced, allowing British porcelain rapidly to gain wider distribution. Joanna Bailie’s 1790 poem “Lines to a Teapot” provides a fascinating imagined history that traces this falling-off of interest in imported Chinese wares from the perspective of the now-undesirable Chinaware teapot itself.12 But additionally, the once domestically focused critiques began to incorporate information from the increasing number of British travel narratives describing journeys to China, John Barrow’s Travels in China chief among them. Patterns on china now could be compared with first-hand reports of the gardens they supposedly depicted, and the verbal-visual debate revived anew in China’s particular geographic and visual context.



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Robert Southey clearly draws on his reading of Barrow’s work, among other travel narratives, in his own satiric take on the travel genre, the 1807 Letters from England.13 In this work, a purported translation from Spanish of the travel observations of one Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, the author finds among other English faults a misguided English proclivity to import Chinese porcelain. As Espriella explains, while the Chinese material has a technical quality not present in English productions, the Chinese “must yield the palm in whatever depends upon taste.”14 Even given the superior heraldic and armorial designs of domestic manufacturing houses, “such are the effects of prejudice and habit, that the grotesque and tasteless patterns of the real china are frequently preferred; and the English copy the hair-line eyebrows of the Chinese, their unnatural trees and distorted scenery, as faithfully as if they were equally ignorant of perspective themselves.”15 Yet, Espriella continues, this adherence to the grotesque may be forgiven. He writes that the China-designed plates and tea-saucers have made us better acquainted with the Chinese than we are with any other distant people. If we had no other documents concerning this extraordinary nation, a series of engravings from these their own pictures would be considered as highly curious, and such a work, if skillfully conducted and annotated, might still elucidate the writings of travellers, and not improbably furnish information which it would be in vain to seek in Europe from other sources.16

Southey’s satire of course depends upon the needless complexity of this suggestion. Yet the altogether improbable conditional tense of the suggestion shifts the target of the critique from consumers to readers and writers. In framing his sentences without human subjects, Southey ensures that no particular hand or eye takes responsibility for the exegesis of Chinese works. And in emphasizing the degrees of visual and textual remove from the actual distant Chinese themselves, Southey makes mockery of such an approach to cross-cultural understanding, while at the same time acknowledging the powerful wish for such documentary visual evidence as a way of providing an authenticating visual truth. Espriella’s proposal reminds readers of the problems inherent in realist documentary representation, not the least of which is the proposition that such representation can ever exist in the first place. Having reviewed Barrow’s Travels in China only two years earlier for the Annual Review, Southey clearly remembers the attacks in Barrow’s narrative on the Chinese porcelain painters as “servile imitators” who do “not

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in the least [feel] the force or the beauty of any specimens of the arts that may come before them; for the same person who is one day employed in copying a beautiful European print, will sit down the next to a Chinese drawing replete with absurdity.”17 In Southey’s mockery of the annotation the plates might provide, knowledge production itself becomes a form of copying across media, inevitably undermined by its circular origins. Meaning-making through commodity content fails before it can begin, as Espriella’s offhand contention “if we had no other documents” makes clear. Reading the Letters’ satire against the opening lines of Southey’s review of Travels in China further illuminates Southey’s disdain for the serious study of material culture. If in the Letters the plates offer only a critique of strategies of comprehension, the careful work of travelers discussed in the Barrow review seems, at least, to be transparently instructive: “Whatever the commercial effects of our embassy to China, literature has reaped ample advantages from it. The drawings of Mr. Alexander, and the work of Mr. Barrow, have communicated more information concerning this extraordinary empire and its inhabitants, than could be collected from all our former travellers.”18 Given Alexander’s exclusion from many of the embassy’s most important occasions, Southey’s praise of his drawings as accurate communications of visual truth must already be suspect. But we also need to question the implicit visual hierarchy that Southey establishes between his review of Barrow’s Travels and his own satiric Letters from England. Although Southey asserts the higher value of the information communicated by Alexander’s drawings over the acquaintance imposed by Chinese plates and tea-saucers, Britons increasingly came to imagine China by way of the latter rather than the former. Looking ahead through the century, Southey’s hope that literary representation and fine art might supplant the commodity’s visual influence clearly cannot be fulfilled. Charles Lamb’s 1823 essay “Old China” demonstrates a different resolution of this dilemma. While Southey’s Espriella took refuge in his national difference from the English and their misguided appreciation of the “documents” of Chinese porcelain, Lamb’s fictional alter ego reclaims that frivolous appreciation and remakes it as a point of pride. When Lamb, writing in his customary London Magazine persona of Elia, begins his essay with the amused confession that “I have an almost feminine partiality for old china,” he immediately calls forth long-standing associations of women and china.19 Yet it is also evident that Lamb’s “feminine partiality” will not lead the essay into a comparison of fragile female virtue with frail china jars in



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the way of Gay or Pope, any more than it will pay attention to contemporary travel narratives in the manner of Southey. Lamb’s essay concerns itself less with the material of porcelain, which British potteries now possessed the ability to manufacture, and more with the emotional effects of the designs painted upon that porcelain. Although Lamb’s essay complies with contemporary understanding that blue and white documented a repressed and despotic Chinese imperium, he also makes clear from the title onward that the long-standing common knowledge of these patterns licenses his cursory and playful readings of that despotism. Karen Fang has read “Old China” as a troping of Romantic genius and imperial consumer culture, a contextualization that fits with more general calls to understand Lamb not just as a superb stylist but also as an active observer of the public sphere writing in an era when periodical publication was becoming an increasingly important way of constituting that sphere.20 Fang finds “Old China” to be Lamb’s second-generation Romanticist, commodity-based, periodical response to Coleridge’s great poetic work of the imagination, “Kubla Khan,” and indeed, it is clear that Lamb cannot conceive of an independent vision of China divorced from the substance of the commodity. “Old China” contains none of the vividly exotic imagery that troubled the sleep of Wordsworth’s rural child or Coleridge’s opium-addicted poet.21 This is despite, or perhaps because of, the nature of his daily occupation—both Lamb and his alter ego are commercial clerks, Lamb in the East India Office and Elia in the South Sea Office. Writing to his friend the Cambridge Orientalist Thomas Manning, who was then traveling in China, Lamb exclaims: “China—Canton—bless us—how it strains the imagination and makes it ache!”22 A vision of China squeezes in only around the edges of Lamb’s London existence. Toward the end of the letter to Manning, he writes: “How the paper grows less and less! In less than two minutes I shall cease to talk to you, & you may rave to the great Wall of China. N.B. Is there such a Wall. Is it as big as Old London Wall by Bedlam?”23 While Lamb fails to conceive (even jokingly) of the vastness of China’s famous landmark, he retains control at the smaller scale of the souvenir. In a letter written to Manning before his departure for China, Lamb is already requesting mementos for himself and his sister: “But you must bring [Mary] a token[,] a shawl or something and remember a sprightly little Mandarin for our mantel piece as a companion to the Child I am going to purchase at the Museum.”24 The level of vivid familiarity demonstrated in Lamb’s request for a “sprightly” figurine to fit a planned group of

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collectibles suggests how firmly Lamb’s vision of the country is shaped by China’s exports. Indeed, the metonymic products of China are so entrenched in Lamb’s consciousness as to be untraceable. Lamb acknowledges that “we have all some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one.€.€. . I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination.”25 The product of china backdates the country of China; the former growing ever more intimate as the latter remains distant. Likewise, the figures on the tea-cup remain familiar even as their context dissolves. Lamb, nostalgically contemplating his favorite designs, recalls: those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that under the notion of men and women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world before perspective—a china tea-cup. I like to see my old friends—whom distance cannot diminish—figuring up in the air (so they must appear to our optics), yet on terra firma still—for so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue, which the decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, had made to spring up beneath their sandals.26

For Lamb, the distinction between commodity and communal memory overlap. Even his satire of the tea-cup’s failed perspective carries a doubled meaning. The “old friends whom distance cannot diminish” may fail to have grown appropriately smaller within the flawed perspective of the pattern, but they also refuse to subside into the shadowy space of Lamb’s lost memories. This twists a new perceptual strand into the standard nineteenth-century formula ordering the globe, which placed Britain in a dynamic present and China in a spatially dislocated, temporally stagnant past. If China’s unchanging empire no longer connoted beneficial stability, as it had for earlier observers, the patterns of its china gave comfort in their familiarity. Lamb locates his comedy in the disjunction between the tea-cup’s standards and the British conception of standardized linear logic, codified social ritual, and distinctive identity formation. Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a salver—two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect! and here the same lady, or another—for likeness is identity on tea-cups—is stepping into a little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, with a dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle of incidence (as angles go in our world) must infallibly



Plate land her in the midst of a flowery mead—a furlong off on the other side of the same strange stream! Farther on—if far or near can be predicated of their world—see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays.27

Filtered through the optics of a British observer and the angles of a British world, the tea-cup patterns render incomprehensible the everyday movements of offering tea, stepping into a boat, or dancing the hays. Insurmountable distances inflate and collapse; inanimate objects interact actively with the natural world. The artificial play of spatial and temporal markers described by Chambers in the Dissertation on Oriental Gardening expands exponentially here. The gardens presented on the surface of the china symbolically refer to a space already understood to be more symbolic than real. Indeed a vision of the world refuses representation here in either visual or narrative terms, and the eye must adapt to a different standard to justify its own affections. Yet the failed attempt to give grounded existence to these figures demonstrates more than just the nonsensicality of the Chinese world. Lamb’s imposed relationships serve a self-creating purpose as well. By describing the figures as old friends and his fondness for china as an ancient taste, Lamb writes the commodity of china into the foundations of his own consciousness and gives the figures a temporal continuity that the mutability of the design does not immediately provide. The very deficiencies of the pattern provide the terms by which Lamb can map the shifting spaces of his own consciousness. Lamb does not, however, abandon the china’s commercial derivation. In admiring his “set of extraordinary old blue china (a recent purchase) which we were now for the first time using,” Lamb remarks “how favourable circumstances had been to us of late years, that we could afford to please the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort.”28 But the trifle is bittersweet. While Elia fulfills his promise of the first sentence and takes the “feminine” role, delighting in the acquired object and the ritual surrounding it, his cousin Bridget—read by critics to be a stand-in for Charles’s troubled sister, Mary Lamb—objects to their easy ability to acquire such objects. She points out: “A purchase is but a purchase, now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph.€.€. . A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it.”29 With the wealth to invest in china representations of leisure, Bridget suggests, their own pleasures in actual recreations are vanished: “[H]olydays, and all other fun, are gone, now that we are rich.”30

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On the surface, Elia scoffs at Bridget’s concerns, saying, “I could not help .€.€. smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured out of a clear income of poor—hundred pounds a year.”31 But her memories of earlier, smaller purchases replicates on a lesser scale the kind of nostalgic revisionism that Elia invests in his own notions of the mandarins and ladies of the china tea-cup. Enclosed within his present purchase is the consciousness of an irretrievable past preserved only through a perpetual rereading of the china’s design and a parallel perpetual capitulation to the china’s defiant rejection of visual and temporal logic. Elia ends by writing of his desire to have the delight of youthful days back again, no matter the cost: I know not the fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would be willing to bury more wealth in than Crœsus had, or the great Jew R——is supposed to have, to purchase it. And now do just look at that merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed-tester, over the head of that pretty insipid half-Madonna-ish chit of a lady in that very blue summerhouse.32

The blue china, held out as a diversion from the pain of the past’s unrecoverable loss, also signifies something more than that. In the exercise of viewing the blue china, Lamb finds space to conflate the systems of commodity and nostalgia irreconcilable in external life. Not even the spectacular wealth of the mythic or the alien can buy back the past, but even the modest new domestic wealth of a clerk can purchase a set of china that matches his most deeply entrenched imaginings. Possessed with the reflective capabilities to imagine the “world” of the tea-cup disengaged from rules and measures, Elia/Lamb proposes a supplemental space for the articulation of memory. The capacities of nostalgia to collapse the past into a string of intensely felt experiences immune to the contingencies of money find their embodiment and articulation in the description of the figures painted upon the blue china. Although the figures, in Elia’s imagination, are divorced from daily exigencies, the set of china itself can be purchased. In the viewing of a china collection, therefore, some measure of connection to an imaginative space without rational demands can be constructed. The ironically stated “feminine partiality” of the essay’s first line becomes a possible revision of that partiality’s implications: acquisition of china not out of a shallow concern with appearance and status but as an attempt to instill and preserve feeling within the contours of the commodity.



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The lingering presence of Lord Amherst’s failed 1816 mission to the Qing court shadows Lamb’s words here, as Macartney’s failure shadowed Wordsworth’s, Coleridge’s, and Southey’s.33 Amherst, carrying a list of requested commercial and political concessions closely equivalent to Macartney’s, was pressed into an audience with the emperor on the first day of his arrival in China and nearly as summarily dismissed from the country with his demands unfulfilled. Despite this short stay, members of Amherst’s mission did manage to observe Chinese landscape and commodities. Clarke Abel, the naturalist accompanying the Amherst mission, comments particularly on the masses of china, writing: “I scarcely recollect seeing any spectacle in China that gratified me more than a first-rate porcelain warehouse.”34 Although Lamb’s essay shares this gratification, its rarified tone excludes the very economic contexts that were the substance of the Macartney and Amherst missions. Yet the narratives of the Amherst mission, like those of Macartney’s, also highlighted China’s deliberate self-removal from contemporary events as a defining precondition for Chinese aesthetic production. Lamb’s elision of the conditions that brought his old china to Britain in the first place, then, is itself an expression of an aesthetic detachment learned from designs upon China. In this way, Lamb’s essay foreshadows the efforts of the pre-Impressionists later in the century. Both used their possessions to capture a sense of distant aesthetics without directly engaging with the contemporary crises that enforced that distance. Yet Lamb’s fellow Romantic periodical writers tended to resist this remove; for many of these authors, the interest of the pattern came specifically in its generic parody of travel narratives. This comedy came in the contrast between visual illustrations and verbal descriptions, as in the case of Southey, but it also emerged through repetition and the serial self-perpetuation of satire in the expanding periodical press. When Thomas Hood begins his 1826 essay “Fancies on a Tea-Cup” thus: “I love to pore upon old china, and to speculate, from the images, on Cathay. I can fancy that the Chinese manners betray themselves, like the drunkard’s, in their cups,” he both echoes and debases Lamb’s rarified aesthetic by inserting direct national reference. 35 Likewise, Leigh Hunt’s 1834 essay “Tea-Drinking,” which appeared in the London Journal, continues Lamb’s ekphrasis while shifting the import of that reading strategy. For Hunt, an inspection of the porcelain pattern serves to link defects in the tea-cup’s artistic composition directly to the epistemological defects of the Chinese people. Hunt writes that

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Plate their tea-cup representations of themselves (which are the only ones popularly known), impress us irresistibly with a fancy that they are a people all toddling, little-eyed, little-footed, little-bearded, little-minded, quaint, overweening, pigtailed, bald-headed, cone-capped or pagoda-hatted, having childish houses and temples with bells at every corner and story, and shuffling about in blue landscapes, over “nine-inch bridges,” with little mysteries of bell-hung whips in their hands,—a boat, or a house, or a tree, made of a pattern, being over their heads or underneath them (as the case may happen), and a bird as large as the boat, always having a circular white space to fly in.36

The easy movement from “little-eyed” to “little-minded” demonstrates how much more than decorative significance these patterns carry. Here, as throughout, ways of seeing connect easily to ways of being seen. Popular knowledge here equals visual knowledge, and visual knowledge proves endlessly vulnerable to the twisting conceits of fancy. In tea-cup representations, at least, meaning cannot be controlled, but instead transfers “irresistibly” to any chance viewer. As a result, Hunt’s essay is everywhere concerned with the specter of societal transformation through commodity exchange. He writes: “What a curious thing it was, that all of a sudden the remotest nation of the East, otherwise unknown, and foreign to all our habits, should convey to us a domestic custom which changed the face of our morning refreshments; and that, instead of ale and meat, or wine, all the polite part of England should be drinking a Chinese infusion, and setting up earthenware in their houses, painted with preposterous scenery!”37 These “simpletons,” who display their earthenware as if it were true porcelain, cry, “‘Well, what is a tea-cup! .€.€. It holds my tea—that’s all.’”38 But if such tautologies doom the common reader, Hunt takes solace in the “right tea-drinker,” whose habit reinforces an already leisured lifestyle: “It may be noted that the introduction of tea-drinking followed the diffusion of books among us, and the growth of more sedentary modes of life,”39 Hunt concludes, noting the many appearances of the country of China in the European literary tradition. Here the focus of Hunt’s essay is not a critique of the improper perspective of the tea-cup pattern but rather a demonstration of the development of correct vision supported by refined tastes. To see properly requires an act of reverse ekphrasis: reading in the picture not its represented scenes but a canon of literature that defies and subverts the established commodity chain. To do this allows the reader to participate in an alternative collective imaginary supplied by text, not design. That is



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to say, reading from tea-cup to tea is the thought-progression of a simpleton, but nuancing a represented scene with the received history of European literary representations, however, demonstrates both taste and cultivation. Literary transport here overwrites visual transport, and, more particularly, literary fiction outclasses travel narrative in representational force. While Hunt’s diversion into Western literary history represents one endpoint, “The Broken Dish,” another poem by Thomas Hood, suggests another. The poem comically describes the fate of the pattern: “Walking about their groves of trees/ Blue bridges and blue rivers/ How little thought them two Chinese/ They’d both be smashed to shivers!”40 These lines, frequently cited in subsequent blue and white satires, suggest the inevitable direction of this minor genre: that the essayist will become increasingly the pattern’s ventriloquist, speaking from a perspective within the pattern’s diegetic space in order to make that narrative available for extra-diegetic play. And, increasingly, this play will take as its comic object neither the Chinese nor the individual author, but the wide class of British “gentle readers” looking at their patterned plates. The domestic production of patterned china was indeed already well under way throughout the Romantic era. With the invention of transferprinting in the mid-eighteenth century, designs on earthenware (and later porcelain) could be easily standardized through mechanical reproduction and so marketed by pattern. Yet the patterns marketed remained derivative of Chinese designs. Design historians point to the belated technological modernity of the British potteries as one cause of the persistence of Chinese styles, suggesting that British firms replicated Chinese designs as compensations for their failure to match Chinese manufacture of true porcelain.41 Others suggest that Chinese and other Asian designs, as well as European imitations of those designs, were successful because they “had the effect of giving a physical form” to new social and cultural values integrated in rising imported social practices such as tea and coffee drinking, made possible in turn by other imported commodities.42 The persistence of Chinese designs also, however, must be understood to endure as a particularly useful point of contrast—describing personal resistance to their regulated forms helps make clear how a Briton might see both individually and naturally. Britain was not the only country whose native tradition of applied arts was influenced by imported blue and white china. But in the development of the Chinese-inspired willow pattern by British potteries, the phenomenon achieved by far the most commercial success. The history of the pat-

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Fig. 3. Willow Pattern Plate, Spode, ca. 1800–1820. Given by Miss E. J. Hipkins. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

tern’s early days is somewhat murky and contested, but certain points seem agreed upon. A Chinese pattern known as “Mandarin” inspired Thomas Turner, at the Caughley manufactory, to develop two proto-willow patterns in the mid-1770s. Josiah Spode produced the earliest examples of what is considered the standard pattern in or around 1790, and the designation of willow pattern was in general use by a variety of manufacturers by 1800.43 Under the standardizing effect of transfer printing production, the range of blue and white designs effectively narrowed into a single, formalized design made up of certain key elements: a bridge, a river, a gate, two or three pedestrians, two doves, and a willow (Figure 3). To read as the willow pattern narrative directed, one begins in the lower right portion of the plate, at the



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palace where the daughter defies her father’s choice of husband, and proceeds clockwise around the plate across the bridge and lake, until arriving at the two doves which represent the lovers’ spirits united even after death. The particular plate reproduced here is from the Spode factory in Stokeon-Trent and was manufactured sometime in the years 1800–1820, but its elements nearly exactly match designs still in manufacture today. This is certainly not to suggest that every willow pattern looked exactly like this one; different firms developed their own signature variations, and further, these variations were pillaged from firm to firm with great regularity as patterns were frequently abandoned in favor of more fortuitous combinations of the standard elements. The profusion of British producers eager to make more “Chinese” porcelain and British consumers eager to buy it expanded both the pattern’s influence and its openness to satiric attack. The willow pattern therefore remained a familiar reference point. Writes Chambers’s Journal in 1860: “How is it that, after so many explorations of Cathay, and almost as many books as explorers, we seem to know nothing certain concerning the Chinese and their character? Nay, we are in some respects even worse off than in the days when our information was drawn exclusively from the Willow Pattern Plates in every dwelling-house; for although less extensive and practical, that was at least consistent and uniform.”44 The sheer weight of the commodity’s presence has now overcome the mocking influence that Southey once assigned to the visual influence it conveyed. Its standardization now becomes its virtue despite the unreliability of its internal referents. The willow pattern plate and its associated narratives have proved both too numerous, too popular, and too flawed to enter into critical studies of ekphrastic literature, more usually focused on such works as Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”45 Yet accounting for the presence of the willow pattern in nineteenth-century Britain ought to extend beyond histories of economics and design and into such epistemological questions. As one of the most centrally recognizable touchstones of Britishness, and particularly domestic middle-class Britishness, during the greater part of the century, the willow pattern at the same time constantly evokes Britain’s opposites: both the foreign geography of China and the unintelligible visual logic of an image composed without attention to standards of European design. Seeking meaning in the willow plate, whether truths about the Chinese character or truths about the way the British can begin to tell their own stories, presupposes that these seemingly opposite truths will in the end be revealed to be the same.

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The Willow Pattern and George Meredith’s The Egoist The literature of the willow pattern plate is, therefore first and foremost, a literature of ubiquity. As J. F. Blacker attests in his Nineteenth-Century English Ceramic Art: “[It] would be difficult to find any inhabited spot on the earth’s surface, where an Englishman had lived, without some evidences of the willow-pattern plate.”46 At the Strand Theater in London, the 1851 play “The Mandarin’s Daughter” featured an opening speech delivered by a Chinese enchanter in which he explains his surprise “At finding the English so ready to treasure/The legends of China,” as evidenced by their display of blue and white “upon table, stand, dresser and shelf/In Earthenware, China, stone-hardware and delf/Drawn longways and shortways, drawn outside and in/On plate, cup and saucer, dish basin, tureen.”47 It is even reported by Compton Mackenzie that Cardinal Newman “picked up half a Willow Pattern saucer in the crater of Vesuvius” while visiting Italy in 1833.48 Of the many essays emphasizing the willow pattern’s omnipresence, the Family Friend’s 1849 sentimental narrative tellingly entitled “The Story of the Common Willow Plate,” perhaps best explains both the nostalgic affection for the pattern as well as the visual dilemmas it proposes by virtue of its ubiquity. The Family Friend exclaims: “The old willow pattern plate! By every association, in spite of its want of artistic beauty, it is dear to us. It is mingled with our earliest recollections; it is like the picture of an old friend and companion whose portrait we see everywhere, but of whose likeness we never grow weary.”49 The piece here echoes Lamb’s entrenched memories of blue and white china, but with a difference. Now the material is linked to a single design, produced in domestic factories, and the old china is not associated categorically, by material kind, but identically, by pattern name. Further, in imagining the plate as an old friend seen everywhere, the Family Friend description highlights the ways that the willow plate’s omnipresence cuts between domestic and public venues of knowledge. The very multiplicity of the reproduction becomes not alienating but endearing, even though the double sense of “common” suggests not only its wide availability but its lowered cultural status. Although this ubiquity parallels the expansion of British informal empire in China in the years surrounding the Opium Wars, the willow pattern’s availability stems not from international trade but from domestic produc-



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tion. Thus, repeated dismissals of the pattern as a fleeting fashion belie the snowballing power of its cultural presence: the willow pattern came to be this national touchstone because it was always already present as a point of reference, whether in imagination or in point of fact. As a result the willow pattern’s history is simultaneously self-generating and self-effacing, sourcing its narrative origin in ancient Chinese legend even as its material production takes place in contemporary Britain. From the moment of its first production in the late eighteenth century, the willow pattern changed the way that British writers and artists understood their self-constituting relationship with commodities and with the foreign. The willow pattern therefore betokens British belated technological modernity in its falsely archaic imitation of actual antique china while frequently disguising the actual technical innovations of the plate’s transferprinted process. An 1845 Fraser’s Magazine tour of an English manor house points out in the course of “a history of the plates and dishes” that “the commercial manufacturing advantage given by the power of transferring a print to the clay over the production of the same effect by means of the pencil .€.€. became of the same relative importance as printing to manuscript,” and finds the willow pattern to be the emblematic image of this changeover.50 This reinforcement of the pattern as a readable site, however, poses difficult implications for the narrative it produces. If the plate itself is a printed page, does reading the plate produce the same effects as reading a verbal work? And, as that printing is reproduced, do the narratives themselves multiply? Charles Dickens offers eccentric but instructive answer to these questions through the voice of an animated willow plate itself. As Lara Kriegel has shown, the personification of various goods was a favorite rhetorical device of writers in the era of the Great Exhibition and of Dickens in particular, as my next chapter will also explore.51 In his “A Plated Article,” cowritten with H. W. Wills for an 1852 issue of Household Words, Dickens makes plain the ways in which the technical history of pattern printing offers a visual equivalent to the history of changing forms of print media, and, more specifically, the ways that an aesthetic difference deemed Chinese challenges the realistic representation toward which both of these histories ought to build. Dickens’s contribution to Wills’s detailed summary of transferware’s industrial production is a lengthy and fantastic description of the encounter between a bored reporter seeking refuge from a tiresome dinner in Staffordshire and that reporter’s tirelessly self-promoting willow pattern din-

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ner plate. Comments the plate: “[D]idn’t you see (says the plate) planted upon my own brother that astounding blue willow .€.€. [?] And didn’t you observe .€.€. that amusing blue landscape, which has, in deference to our revered ancestors of the Cerulean Empire, and in defiance of every known law of perspective, adorned millions of our family ever since the days of platters?”52 To which the reporter responds: “I had seen all this—and more. I had been shown, at Copeland’s, patterns of beautiful design, in faultless perspective, which are causing the ugly old willow to wither out of public favour; and which, being quite as cheap, insinuate good wholesome natural art into the humblest households.”53 This anticipated withering of the willow pattern, of course, fails to come true, and purchasers of Copeland Spode china were far more likely to display willow on their mantelpieces and dinner tables than any “natural art.” That Dickens recognizes this preference is evident in the piece’s title linking the periodical article printed from a plate to a porcelain plate that is itself an article of print. But the idea that printed plates of either kind can carry out transformative moral work through visual insinuation continues the persistent sense of the visual object’s capacity to change the way its viewers see. Dickens’s fears of the tyranny of the Chinese images makes a part of a larger cultural discussion of China’s oppressive sameness prominent in midcentury liberal discourse. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty notably singles out China as a nation both repressive and temporally disjunct in two paradoxical ways: both as a stagnant nation of the past and a warning example of the future. The Chinese, Mill writes: “have succeeded beyond all hope in what English philanthropists are so industriously working at—in making a people all alike, all governing their thoughts and conduct by the same maxims and rules; and these are the fruits .€.€. . [U]nless individuality shall be able successfully to assert itself against this yoke, Europe .€.€. will tend to become another China.”54 Although the forces impelling England’s progress “towards the Chinese ideal of making all people alike” do not work in the same way, in both cases Mill frames the “Chinese ideal” of identicality as one that unites rhetoric of aesthetics with those of politics and morals.55 The emphasizing of China in particular, among all the despotic nations of the East, for particular analysis in a chapter that ends with the warning that “[m]ankind speedily become unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it” reminds us how the stereotyped character that China both produced and threatened to impose took visual shape across conceptual levels.56 In looking specifically at the chal-



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lenge China posed to British liberalism through the work of its material metonyms, we find that this crisis emerges as much through the internal logic of domestic culture as from observations made abroad. George Meredith’s 1879 novel The Egoist makes a difficult but interesting example of this by seizing upon the legend of the willow plate to direct the formation of the individual self in a domestic context. Meredith produced the narratively innovative Egoist at the beginning of the latter half of his career, a period in which, disgusted by the poor reception of his earlier novels, he increasingly disregarded concerns for public popularity and critical attention alike. This perhaps explains the challenge in summarizing The Egoist, a novel that makes complex use of both the narrative of the willow pattern legend and the image of the willow pattern plate as preexisting structures. In this sense, The Egoist can be read as a novelization of an invented folk tale. But Meredith adds additional layers to his use of the material object by writing the willow pattern plate and the willow pattern legend into the novel as cultural reference points that the characters can discuss and as material commodities that can be displayed, exchanged, or destroyed. The Egoist’s plot, as critics have noted, recapitulates the willow pattern legend almost exactly: a young daughter seeks to marry a poor scholar rather than the wealthy husband her father has chosen, and, after enduring setbacks and risking paternal wrath, jilts her wealthy suitor just before their hasty wedding and flees away across a lake—in this case Lake Lucerne— with her beloved. In The Egoist, the young daughter is Clara Middleton, the poor scholar Vernon Whitford, and the wealthy man for whom the daughter is intended is an English aristocrat named, significantly, Willoughby Patterne. The metanarrative play on the structuring legend works only intermittently, however; while the characters are seemingly unattuned to the title character’s antonomasia, they are perfectly aware of the symbolic implications of the willow pattern story. In a typically convoluted exchange, Willoughby’s neighbor and staunch supporter Mrs. Montstuart recounts to Willoughby an earlier comment made by another neighbor, Lady Busshe, on the topic of Lady Busshe’s wedding present to Sir Willoughby: “‘I shall have that porcelain back,’ ” Mrs. Montstuart quotes Lady Busshe as saying. “ ‘I think,’ says she, ‘it should have been the Willow Pattern.’ And she really said: ‘he’s in for being jilted a second time!’”57 What this compacted interchange means to convey, in terms of the plot, is that Lady Busshe understands that Clara Middleton is wavering in her willingness to marry the

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tyrannical Sir Willoughby, and seeks to convey this knowledge to Sir Willoughby via Mrs. Montstuart through a coded reference to the legend of the willow pattern as represented by willow pattern china. Sir Willoughby, typically, catches the reference easily, reflecting later on “the claws of Lady Busshe, and her owl’s hoot of ‘Willow Pattern,’ and her hag’s shriek of ‘twice jilted.’”58 Meredith’s description of the struggle for control between Willoughby and Clara central to the novel thus works as a critique not only of aristocratic practices of courtship and marriage but also of the genre of realist novel most evocative of that milieu. When Clara stands looking out over the grounds of the landed estate to which she will soon be bound by marriage, her sense of constraint falls heavily on the reader. She went to her window to gaze at the first colour along the grey. Small satisfaction came of gazing at that or at herself. She shunned glass and sky. One and the other stamped her as a slave in a frame. It seemed to her she had been so long in this place that she was fixed here: it was her world, and to imagine an Alp, was like seeking to get back to childhood.59

As is typical throughout the novel, Meredith’s prose is both epigrammatic and densely allusive. This description of Clara as “fixed” and “stamped .€.€. as a slave in a frame” seems fitted to a vision of a pattern framed upon a porcelain plate; for Clara’s position seems not unlike that of the two Chinese unaware of their imminent smashing to shivers in Thomas Hood’s “The Broken Dish.” Both are enslaved to the inevitability of their own story. Coming as it does in a novel that certainly represents the most sustained and many-registered attempt to thematize patterned porcelain in all of British literature, this description of Clara highlights Meredith’s close attention to patterns “stamped” upon porcelain as a rich middle ground for social comedy. But it also shows that he recognizes them as an opportunity for something more: a sustained consideration of the epistemological fixity of narrative. As both mirror and sky work to contain Clara’s visual and mental self-conception as well as her narrative direction, a fixity of place becomes a fixity of form. This enslavement via visual enframing serves, in Meredith’s rendering, as a critique of the tyranny of realist representation itself. Linkages of the realist novel to shifting visual practices, such as those of Nancy Armstrong and Alison Byerly, find the genre of realism dependent on what Armstrong terms “a shared set of visual codes” that operate as “an abstract standard by which to measure one verbal representation against



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another.”60 Byerly, focusing more specifically on representations of particular visual works within realist novels, judges that “these representations imply a real world through their representational reference to it”—that is, “the representations themselves attest to the presence of an ontologically prior world.”61 That neither critic examines The Egoist demonstrates generally the difficulty of incorporating the applied arts into theories of representational practice conceived upon a fine-art model. Unhinged from the eye of any individual artist or author, the material object usually instead envelopes a broader, culturally determined way of seeing. The willow pattern, however, funnels this vision back into a single visual field without abandoning its broader consequences. Patricia O’Hara has suggested that “The Egoist .€.€. critiques civilized egoism by allusively displaying the blue willow legend as a mirror in which Victorian society is meant to find its own reflection: the collective British ‘we’ are unmasked as being just as barbaric as the collective oriental ‘them.’”62 Meredith’s text, however, focuses less on explorations of oriental barbarism and more on the ways that a narrative legend can become a visual mirror of the self. The shared visual memory that links the image of the willow plate to the text of the willow legend for every British reader offers a model of narrative enslavement that Meredith can exploit for his own ends, which, for Meredith, is more important than the legend’s alleged geographical origins. Thus the consideration of pre-existing images, both real or imagined, must still be central to discussing both The Egoist’s realist representations as well as its critiques of such practice. That characters repeatedly reference the visual pattern when they in fact mean to refer to the verbal story is telling but as of yet little attended to; indeed, if critics have recognized the structuring conceit of the willow pattern in The Egoist at all, they have focused on the textual narrative of the legend as disseminated through nineteenth-century literature and not on the visual narrative of the pattern plate. In general Robert Mayo’s 1942 pronouncement on the text still stands as a commonplace: Meredith’s use of the willow story, Mayo concludes, is “an exercise in adroitness, an elaborate conceit which adds to the effect of quaintness and artificiality in the novel, but advances nowhere.”63 Instead, much recent criticism of The Egoist draws on its links to Darwin’s 1872 The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Willoughby, himself an amateur scientist, contents himself with the knowledge that “[he] looked the fittest, he justified the dictum of Science. The survival of the Patternes was assured.”64 Yet in the careful readings of Carolyn Wil-

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liams and others, which find post-Darwinian narratives and counternarratives within The Egoist’s texts, the connections between visual and evolutionary patternings have rarely been drawn.65 Certainly Meredith’s novel is, at least to some degree, a proleptically feminist text attentive to male barbarism, and, certainly, its narrative fatalism owes much to a sense of Darwinian determinism. But Meredith’s own obsessive return to the details of female and marital subjectification imposed by the realist novel through his self-conscious parodying of the realist novel’s modes of representation redirects our attention not to the novel’s ends but to its processes. As Michael Riffaterre observes of the novel’s relentless return to porcelain in his Fictional Truth: “The signs that function as indices pointing to fictionality are, I think, quite visible.€.€. . [S]uch obviousness is designed to represent the artist and his artifice even more clearly than would conventional authorial intrusions.”66 For Riffaterre, as in some ways for Armstrong and Byerly, these kinds of self-questioning and self-exposing moves by the realist novel in the end enhance rather than deny the genre’s representational authenticity. Yet Riffaterre’s analysis does not follow up on the obviousness of the willow pattern’s structure plot in particular, focusing instead on the general presentation of Clara Middleton as “a dainty rogue in porcelain” and the multiple material implications of that judgment.67 Thus Riffaterre’s lack of attention to the complicated pattern history of The Egoist’s “obsessive trope” of porcelain necessarily confines his discussion to a formal consideration of the play between text and subtext, in which the subtext “always constitutes a second reading of what the text surrounding it is about, a poetic or humorous metalanguage of the narrative.”68 Restoring the circulating text and object of the willow pattern legend and plate into the narratological analysis, however, returns us to the scene of Clara at her window. The novel foregrounds the fatalistic inevitability of its ends: “I’m haunted by an idea that porcelain always goes to pieces,” offers Colonel De Craye, a would-be wedding guest who has seen his own planned wedding present for Clara and Willoughby, a porcelain vase, shatter in a carriage accident caused by Clara’s first attempt to escape marriage and Patterne Hall.69 But if in a patterned temporal chronology past necessarily begets future, a pattern stamped within an encircling frame only partially depends on such synoptic order. As Richard Brilliant has observed, “[C]omplex visual narratives have a dramatic character in an Aristotelian sense, because both the single action and complex whole are implicated in the visual field open to the beholder. As a result, the presentation of visual



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narratives may develop both diachronic and synchronic modes of reading, the former determined by the succession of images, the latter freed from those constraints.”70 While the willow pattern plate is not a visual narrative in the classical sense that Brilliant analyzes, the real significance is that it is treated by Meredith—both intra- and extradiegetically—as one, with the expectation that the reader will understand these multiple levels of reading and the challenges they mean to impose. The presence of the willow pattern plate as a visual artifact connecting the realist world of the novel with the real world to which it refers, then, confounds the authenticating power of that connection. The willow pattern is at once a diachronic narrative, a synchronic narrative, a reproduced and reproducible narrative, and a metavisual site. Although ostensibly a single object, it is consistently understood in the literature of the period as a kind of visual medium. In Meredith’s hands, the pattern’s presence is a tool in his deconstruction of high realism via the genre of comedy. Throughout his “Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit” (1877), a short work produced just prior to The Egoist and perhaps even more reflective of his bitter attitude toward his own readers and critics, Meredith thematizes comic genius as, above all, clear social vision, a formulation that holds true in the novel as well. The willow pattern plate, both “glass and frame,” is at once a mirror of the novel’s narrative constrictions and a metanarrative consideration of the framing constraints of vision. That Meredith considers this work of refraction to be taking place both within the plot of the novel and also in the novel’s generic exchange with other literary productions is evident in The Egoist’s “Prelude.” This prefatory essay on the sources of comedy begins with a consideration of “the biggest book on earth .€.€. ‘The Book of Egoism’ ” and proceeds to reflect on the role of the humorist in reducing this text to manageable proportions: [T]he inward mirror, the embracing and condensing spirit, is required to give us those interminable milepost piles of matter .€.€. in essence, in chosen samples, digestibly.€.€. . [T]he realistic method of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for .€.€. that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady.71

Meredith’s archaism of “vasty” as a disapproving characterization of the excessively visual realist novel might seem perverse given his novel’s obsessive narration of each character’s every blink and look, but it also demonstrates how much the material artifact of the willow pattern plate can enhance what

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is in essence such a familiar European story of betrothal and betrayal. In relying on his readers’ shared visual memory of the object, Meredith can capitalize on the plate’s boundary crossing status by incorporating visual as well as textual perspective. Like the Romantic-era satires of china discussed earlier, The Egoist thrives on the play between positions that are distinct but not different. Orient and Occident, barbaric and civilized, primitive and modern, past and present—to the novel these divisions are ultimately irrelevant. They are all equally meaningless in essence, and only take meaning through the relations they are assigned as pages in Egoism’s giant book. The randomness of these distinctions, however, is only evident if a reader adopts a temporally synchronic, and thus necessarily visual, mode of reading. Meredith’s novel then represents an immense amplification of the kinds of interpretive possibilities Lamb begins to assign to blue china in his essay some fifty years earlier. Yet in embedding the willow pattern plate within The Egoist, Meredith is, for all his attention to porcelain’s fragility and value, ultimately not particularly interested in any critique of consumer culture. Rather, the material object offers a trajectory of resistance to what he defines as the transcriptive representationality of the realist novel through the plate’s filtering presence in a reader-viewer’s personal archive of remembered images. Clara must reject both “glass and frame”—and, implicitly, pattern plates—because such forms work in Meredith’s reading only as arbitrary marker-points along the vast stretch of experience, dividing but not distinguishing assigned life events. The condensing spirit of the inward mirror, however, operates more like Lamb’s entrenched memories of old china: it offers a visual corrective to the undigested spread of all the visible. A way of seeing derived from a Chinese pattern undergoes a double translation—first into the industrially mass-produced pattern plate, and then into the satiric self-critique of narrative. In its rewriting of the marriage plot as darkest comedy, The Egoist, perhaps alone of the works I consider in this study, foregrounds China’s aesthetic distinction to the complete exclusion of its geographic remove. Despite Meredith’s individual inattention to the circumstances of Chinese ethnographic difference, however, his radical satire would not have been possible without the preceding century’s amalgamation of aesthetic forms. The thoroughly domestic location of the novel’s critique, therefore, represents not a successful excision of Chinese influence from British creative fictions, but the definitive integration of the two. Writing China becomes a way of writing home, and vice versa.



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The formal artistic innovations of the later nineteenth century also depend on submerged cultural associations with foreignness, both contemporary and antique, but the artists prioritize the associations differently. In pre-Impressionist painters’ adoptions of Chinese porcelain as a signature component of their creative personae, the exotic associations of the china are not evacuated of foreign influence, but endlessly dependent upon it. The imagined territory of China remains an important counterpoint to their own spatial self-creation in their studios and houses, and so their employment of Chinese porcelain continues to be geographically situated in a way that Meredith’s writing is not. What makes these artistic collections meaningful domestically as well as expressive of an exotic aesthetic, however, is their foundational acceptance that the act of viewing Chinese things transforms the British field of vision. Indeed, for Whistler and Rossetti, the modern British viewing subject cannot come into existence without, among other influences, the constitutive effects of a Chinese way of seeing.

Whistler and Rossetti as Collectors of Blue and White Porcelain In his review of Whistler’s 1864 work Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, William Michael Rossetti begins enthusiastically, writing: “[H]is picture of a Chinese woman painting a blue vase is the most delightful piece of colour on the walls: the more you examine it, the more convinced you become that it will yield new pleasure on reinspection” (Figure 4).72 For those looking at the painting, the description of the red-haired Jo Hiffernan, Whistler’s frequent model, as a “Chinese woman” perhaps proves surprising. Equally surprising is the suggestion that she is painting the vase, since the pot is clearly long since glazed and fired. But Rossetti is not the only one to describe the painting this way. The Illustrated London News writes: “The subject is a Chinese lady, painting the blue jars known to collectors of Oriental china for their “six marks” and their painted representations of ladies innocent of crinoline.”73 The Art Journal interprets the model herself as forming part of the inanimate decor, writing: “[S]he looks as if she had just stepped out from a china bowl, so stiff is she in bearing, and so redolent of color in her attire.”74 Even Whistler himself told Henri Fantin-Latour in a January 1864 letter: “I have a picture for the academy here—I shall send you a sketch very soon—It is filled with superb porcelain

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from my collection, and is good in arrangement and colour—It shows a porcelain dealer, a Chinese woman painting a pot.”75 The mysterious redefinition of the adjective “Chinese” in these assessments of the painting becomes clearer in the continuation of William Rossetti’s review: Its harmonizing power of art is so entire that we find it a choice piece of Orientalism, though conscious that there is not even an attempt at the Chinese cast of countenance. This “lange lizen” .€.€. is painting her blue pot “of the six marks,” so deservedly prized by collectors, with a natty touch and appreciative turn of the head which do not allow us to mind whether she sees her own “lange lizen” through eyes of the proper almond-shape or not.76

Clearly phenotype does not determine the designation of the model as Chinese, just as her movement of a paintbrush across an already glazed and fired porcelain does not alter her designation as artist. The overwhelming visual influence of the porcelain pots here spreads from the design of the pots themselves to the woman associated with them. Though the formal pattern that the contagion of visual influence stems from is not nearly as precisely defined, the surface tracings of blue that distinguish the porcelain remain equally important. Looking at china, we find, can give one the look of China, and, through the site of the painting, viewers can reconcile seeming differences: porcelain dealer and porcelain collector, eyes of proper almond shape and eyes of other shapes, displayer and displayed, model and artist, artist and objet d’art, viewer and viewed. Functioning as a surrogate for the painter himself, the model’s acts of “painting” replaces the productive creative process with a performative aesthetic. Here the model’s “appreciative turn of the head” carries heavier significance than her dry paintbrush; the modeling of an aesthetic involvement comes to replace the demonstration of a physically marked participation in that aesthetic. The porcelain, then, is not only a prop supporting the model’s “choice Orientalism” but also a touchstone for a kind of artistic and aesthetic operation that goes beyond the patterns of representation. What we as viewers must notice are not so much the elements of the painting’s composition but the character of its subject’s gaze. Her way of seeing, like ours and like Whistler’s, is an action in progress shaped by the visual media of the blue and white jar. The painting is a translated self-portrait, with the female model demonstrating the preference for old china that Lamb calls “almost feminine” and the movements of the dry paintbrush a symbolic demonstration of the invisible reverse, the trace effects the porcelain’s designs convey to the artist’s eyes. In

Fig. 4. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks (1864), Philadelphia Museum of Art: John G. Johnson Collection, 1917.

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observing this reverse visual process, we are ourselves drawn into the cycle of spectatorship. As Rossetti puts it: the more we look, the more we know we will want to keep looking. By our participation in the negotiations Lange Leizen performs, then, we are involved in the complex use to which Whistler and his fellow artists put these blue and white pots. Subjects of the paintings as well as tokens of the taste and artistry of the painter, the pots grant a tangible example in which a Chinese way of seeing can be located. If viewers cannot physically render their eyes the proper almond shape, these pots can perform that figurative refocusing for them. Furthermore, the staginess of the model’s actions denotes the artificiality of the decorative scene, a scene dependent not on an organic correlation of self and surroundings, but on a constructed collusion between possessions and aesthetic sensibility. Whistler’s mother, Anna, catalogues the content of Lange Leizen in an 1864 letter to James Gamble, describing a girl who “sits beside a shelf .€.€. upon which several pieces of China and a pretty fan are arranged as if for purchasers .€.€. . [By] her side is a large jar and all these are facsimiles for those around me in this room—which is more than half Studio for here he has an Easel and paints generally—tho he dignifies it as our withdrawing room.”77 The blue and white china, arranged as if for purchasers, yet a fundamental decorative object in Whistler’s studio and also a feature of the intimate domestic space, bridges three initially divided sites—the showroom, the studio, and the drawing room—which are beginning to come together in the lives and work of these Victorian artists. As Paula Gillet has shown, the arrangement of the mid- to late-century English painter’s studio represented a radical revision of the workshops occupied by the artisan-tradesmen of previous centuries. These elegant spaces, Gillet argues, demonstrate one way in which ideals of gentility and sophistication might be reconciled with handwork, which traditionally stigmatized trade; as Gillet points out, the acknowledgement of painting as a profession, which came in the 1861 census report, was double-edged, granting financial security even as it betrayed Romantic-era ideals of artistic originality. Whistler’s “dignifying” of his creative and commercial space with the implied leisure of the “withdrawing room” exemplifies these tensions, and the arrangement of blue and white china offers one possible route to reconciliation.78 This composition of a woman engrossed in contemplation of luxury commodities is not only found in Lange Leizen; Whistler’s paintings Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen (1864), Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony (1864–70), and, in some



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sense, The Woman in White (1862) and Rose and Silver: La Princesse du pays de la Porcelaine (1864) all demonstrate what Michael Fried terms “the exploitation of an absorptive matrix to give affective ‘depth’ to a highly decorative gestalt.”79 Fried contends that this matrix “was later to be fundamental to the work of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists such as Pisarro, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, and Matisse.”80 Whistler’s The Artist in His Studio (1865–66) (Figure 5) represents a culmination of a sorts to this series, though its loose brushwork and small size comparatively diminish the attention it has received. The allusive effects of the composition are here especially important. Whistler stands, brush in hand, painting a canvas outside of the compositional frame. Directly behind him, a large mirror offers a heavily blurred impression of the scene, while two women sit to his back right, one, in European dress, languidly reclining on a chaise, the other, clad in a silken robe, standing and contemplating a fan, while on the wall opposite the implied canvas, blue china is displayed from floor to ceiling. The barely discernible reflections in the mirror and the clue that Whistler’s paintbrush appears to be in his left hand when in fact he was right-handed suggest to us that the painting must be a representation of the image in another mirror, one that occupies the same position we do when we view the painting. This recalls to us the composition of Velázquez’s great portrait Las Meninas (1656–57), a painting that exercised a heavy influence on the work of Whistler as well as Manet, Degas, and others of their circle. Both Las Meninas and The Artist in His Studio raise important questions about where, exactly, we can locate the perceiving consciousness that brings this scene into view.81 But examining the painting along its other axis—from side to side rather than from front to back—we find similar questions being asked in the context of a different symbolic connection. This horizontal connection links the blue china on display to the artwork in progress across the room and balances the china’s familiarity as a visual object with the unfinished painting that is its opposite. Proper understanding of this equivalency, however, poses a challenge. We cannot see the image of the painting in progress within the space in which it is created; instead, the material canvas we are looking at becomes recognizable as the canvas implied within the image only after a process of careful inspection. Given the strong emphasis on reflection in the painting as a whole, we cannot help addressing these questions about the distinction between artistic subject and artistic object to the blue china as well. It is an equivalency that proceeds circularly; we are

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Fig. 5. James McNeill Whistler, American, 1834–1903, The Artist in His Studio, 1865/66, Oil on paper mounted on panel, 62.9 x 46.4 cm (24 3/4 x 18 1/4 in.), Friends of American Art Collection, 1912.141, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.



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reminded of the china’s abstracted visual implications despite its material presence, and we discover the painting to be physically before us despite its representational absence. The Artist in His Studio, therefore, establishes this china as the symbolic canvas for Whistler’s artistic self-creation even more surely than did Lange Leizen, not only because Whistler himself is present in the image but also because the porcelain is linked even more visually explicitly to the artwork and its visual reception. Collections of porcelain and painted canvases offer reinforcing evidence of the artist’s conceiving eye. Thus, while the formal designs appearing upon the porcelain remain important, attention is now equally granted to the public personae of Whistler, Rossetti, and other members of the pre-Impressionist movement as artists and as collectors manipulating their own representations of these designs. Their painted representations of the blue china patterns, in fact, begin to attract the same criticisms the blue china patterns themselves once did. Lange Leizen, for example, is attacked for the way the large pot in the lower right hand corner is angled to present maximum viewability even at the expense of “correct” perspective. “There is not a picture with worse drawing, or one so ostentatiously careless in handling, in the whole exhibition,” judges the Illustrated London News.82 Many histories of the Impressionist era trace the broader compositional influence of Asian art on artists like Whistler, Manet, and others—influence often held by nineteenth-century reviewers to inspire such “careless handling”—though these critical histories usually focus exclusively on the connection between Japanese woodblock prints and European oil-paintings that contain reproductions of these prints, such as Manet’s Portrait of Emile Zola (1868). Yet less apparently commensurate categories of viewed images and objects also conveyed artistic influence and dictated visual practice. European artists borrowed not only artistic techniques from the Asian objects they were collecting but also a certain way of seeing that could be expressed through those techniques, just as Meredith borrowed not only the willow pattern’s “plot” but also the operations of its rhetorical design. As the very elements critiqued on the tea-cup were becoming hallmarks of pre-Impressionist art—abandonment of strict linear perspective, fragmentation and disruption of compositional elements, arbitrary bounding of the visual field, and repetition and seriality of design components—the status of blue and white china was again revised. The display of blue and white china became again a marker of distinction, but a distinction afforded

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only through a successful manipulation of the china’s status as a collectible commodity object that directly inspired a particularly modern creative capacity, a task made far more difficult by the vast amounts of “Chinese”style porcelain and earthenware available on the market by the end of the nineteenth century produced in various geographical sites and historical eras. While eighteenth-century aristocrats could demonstrate their wealth simply by displaying any pieces of the rare dishware they had managed to acquire, the growth of British potteries and a century’s worth of trade with China had removed blue and white from the exclusive province of the very rich and the very refined. Amassing a “good” collection of blue and white in the 1860s and 70s required as much technical connoisseurship as aesthetic appreciation, yet remained necessary, for only a narrowly defined sort of porcelain appeared able to sufficiently reinforce artistic status.83 Thus possession of blue and white china, like display of Japanese prints, became demonstration of foreign influence that productively differentiated the artistic eye from the everyday. But on the other hand, unlike the Japanese print, the material of china was only uneasily understood to be authentically antique and exotic. While the 1862 International Exhibition had imported Japanese prints and art objects to London, the willow pattern and other British-produced modern porcelain constantly impinged on attempts to effectively isolate blue china as token of imported difference, artistic or otherwise. Here we must keep in mind generally, though not directively, a knowledge of the sharply divergent course of Japan and China in the arena of late-nineteenth-century international relations: while a newly opened Japan was held to productively incorporate Euro-American influence throughout the 1860s, 70s, and beyond, the insular Qing ministers of that same period were viewed as repressive forces refusing necessary changes brought by the West to their country. Whistler and Rossetti were therefore subjects of the international marketplace even as they sought to use their display of china to demonstrate their removal from the workaday world. Artist and client positions overlapped, and, since blue and white china had value appreciable in both the economic and cultural spheres, the artists’ use of this porcelain as a reference point for their own aesthetic distinctiveness pulled them in separate directions. They could profit from their porcelain directly through its sale, profit indirectly through the porcelain’s artistic display, or do something of both by painting and selling portraits depicting abstracted viewers profitably contemplating their surrounding china.



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The first necessity in rendering blue and white china a productive marker of aesthetic distinction was to reinforce the separation between physical and artistic consumption. Blue and white china, even in the form of plates and platters, is always valued not for the food it holds but for its intrinsic beauty. The Pennells, Whistler’s early biographers, recount: “He slept in a huge Chinese bed.€.€. . He ate off blue and white. ‘Suppose one of these plates was smashed?’ Miss Chapman asked Whistler once. ‘Why then, you know,’ he said, ‘we might as well all take hands and go throw ourselves into the Thames!” 84 Whistler’s jocularly suicidal remark exposes both the limitation of Miss Chapman’s understanding of the china plate as an exclusively material object and Whistler’s understanding of himself as another iteration of Hood’s two Chinese wandering through a grove of blue willows that will soon be shattered. For Whistler, the plate itself is at once utterly inconsequential as a tangible possession and yet at the same time thoroughly indispensable as a site charting an aesthetic style of vision—and the paradox of this position is perhaps in itself the point. Like Oscar Wilde’s melodramatic cry “Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china!” Whistler’s staking of his physical existence on the preservation of his porcelain collection demonstrates his celebratory indifference to the frivolities of the terms of his artistic self-definition.85 Whistler and Rossetti both grounded their artistic taste in their competitive pursuit of China. Rossetti’s assistant, Henry Dunn, remembers how the two “tried to outvie the other in picking up the choicest pieces of ‘Blue’ to be met with.”86 In a letter written to his mother during an 1864 trip to Paris, Dante Rossetti recounts: “I went to [a] Japanese shop.€.€. . [T]he mistress of the shop .€.€. told me, with a great deal of laughing, about Whistler’s consternation at my collection of china.”87 The Pennells argue the opposite: “The chief bond between Whistler and Rossetti was their love for blue and white.€.€. . Rossetti was supposed to have made it the fashion. But the fashion in Paris began before Rossetti owned his first blue pot.€.€. . Whistler brought the knowledge and the love of the art to London.”88 The distinction drawn here between “love” and “fashion” helps demonstrate the ephemeral nature of the pursuit in general, which could be delineated only through abstract feeling rather than clear-cut precedence. For of course neither man introduced the world to blue and white china. Thus the only way to distinguish innovation was by establishing taste, expressed through a combined “knowledge” and “love of the art,” as an unassailably higher standard, and the artistic eye that embodied such taste as discernible through material collection.

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Competition came not only in the length or level of one’s collecting impulse but also in the quality or authenticity of one’s appreciation of it, a strain of expression that extended to the leading commercial importers of porcelain. Murray Marks, who supplied both Whistler and Rossetti with many of their pots, is described by his biographer as one who “already had a great appreciation for this Blue and White china, and who was really the first person in London to expose it under suitable surroundings, with a keen sense of its decorative importance and beauty.”89 In Marks’s memoirs, the dealer’s “keen sense” supplants even Rossetti’s taste and forms the basis for an aesthetic exchange. Marks recalls of his initial viewing of Rossetti’s blue china the thought that “it was a poor collection, and consisted chiefly of the common stuff which was to be picked up in London at that time,” but also remembers that, in the same visit, “[t]he Venus Verticordia arrested my attention, and almost took my breath away.”90 Rossetti’s sensual portrait provides the cultural capital—and economic value—to finance his collecting impulse, an impulse that renders Rossetti vulnerable to a loss of artistic status by assembling a “poor collection” of “common stuff ” not equivalent to his otherwise high artistic standards. Marks the commercial dealer, who is rendered breathless by Rossetti’s oil paintings, feels confident to challenge Rossetti’s taste in a different sort of art object. Rossetti’s ability to maintain a stable value for his own artistic output is endangered by his willingness to link his paintings with his collections of objects. If the blue china meant to reinforce the artwork’s singular value failed in that support, then the Venus Verticordia itself is in danger of ultimately being judged “common stuff.” This was danger felt more acutely by Rossetti than Whistler, largely because of Rossetti’s own willingness to duplicate his original artwork.91 While Rossetti, unlike Whistler, did not as frequently make blue and white a thematic presence in his paintings—though it appeared as a dramatic compositional back-drop to one of his most effective female portraits in The Blue Bower (1865)—he nevertheless structured the reinforcing foundation of his creativity on his possession of the porcelain.92 Rossetti, by virtue of his reputation as an artist, was still better able than Marks to inflate the value of blue china by granting his imprimatur on the object’s collectible value. When buying china, William Rossetti writes in his Reminiscences, Dante “bought largely, and very tastefully; and—unfortunately for himself as well as others—he ferreted about for such things to an extent which availed to send up the market price of them.”93 William recalls the genesis of Dante Rossetti’s china collection in terms shifting from the



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vocabulary of productive labor, aesthetic connoisseurship, and blatant expenditure. While William acknowledges that “[t]here must of course have been in London some fine collections of ‘blue china’ before Rossetti’s time,” he insists that “my brother’s zeal and persistence were such as to send up prices in the market.”94 Thus the tasteful, nonmercantile display of blue and white china and other art objects acquired on the market became essential to establishing the encompassing eye of the artist and to explain the way that eye could both transform and be transformed by surrounding commodities. The way an artist lived was an essential and exclusively visual articulation of his aesthetic refinement. Although Murray Marks could assemble a fine collection of china using his trade and commercial connections, he could not arrange them as part of general artistic lifestyle as Dante Rossetti could. Writing to his friend Ford Madox Brown, Rossetti revels in his assemblage: “My Pots now baffle description altogether, while the imagination which could remotely conceive them would deserve a tercentenary celebration. COME AND SEE THEM.”95 Dante’s artistic persona was sufficient to unify a disparate collection of purchased porcelain into a self-reflective entity. William writes of Dante’s porcelain: “One of his earliest purchases was that of the whole collection of blue china formed by the retiring Italian Ambassador.€.€. . Its cost to my brother was I think £200.€.€. . In fact, what between free expenditure and good taste in choice, he formed a very fine display of blue china, which made his big sunlit drawing-room a sight to see.”96 The moment of appreciation has an exclusive experiential, sight-based status, grounded entirely in the particular locality of No. 7 Cheyne Walk. Rossetti’s artistic vision, transformed by his own collection, can also remake the Italian ambassador’s china into part of a new picture: the aesthetic drawing room, a site that proposes a new way of seeing. Rather than warranting a pre-existing notion of the visual real, these artists assembled a new definition of seeing insinuated from their possessions. As not only a private place but also a public venue for displaying his artistry, Rossetti’s house, like Whistler’s, both defined his taste and allowed its replication by patrons and the general public. As Ford Madox Hueffer explains, “Rossetti wanted to fill his house with anything odd, Chinese, or sparkling,” and those who read accounts of his lifestyle and decorative decisions equally understood the category of Chinese-ness as functionally equivalent to designations of rarity or reflectivity.97 By erasing a vast difference in space and time and placing together objects linked only by their

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status as “curiosity,” Rossetti collapses the boundaries of distinctive origin in rewriting the borders of his personal domestic space. His collection represented a way of seeing made tangible, by which the collector-artist could demonstrate his enhanced visual acuity and model this reformatted vision to others. In making the representation of his artistic vision exist at the general level of the collection as well as at the individual level of the art object, Rossetti was able to market his eye on multiple levels. This tension between the public and private space of the artist returns again in one of Whistler’s most famous scandals. The story of the ill-fated “Peacock Room,” an 1876–77 project of the artist’s originally undertaken to provide his patron Frederick Leyland with a place to display La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelain and a large collection of blue and white porcelain, is well chronicled by Linda Merrill in her Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography, but certain elements bear repeating here.98 The falling-out between the two men occurred when Whistler, seeking to perfect the milieu in which his paintings were to be viewed, damaged the expensive leather coverings of the room walls by overlayering them completely with gold paint. The room, thus gilded, became a self-sufficient demonstration of Whistler’s taste, though not of Leyland’s. Leyland’s dissatisfied response was to pay Whistler in pounds, as he would pay a tradesman, not in the guineas that an artist would receive. Although Leyland made emphatically clear his rejection of the Peacock Room as a satisfactory artistic product, popular reception judged differently. When considered as a self-contained installation, the Peacock Room establishes a level at which wall decorations, oil paintings, and collections of porcelain functioned in the same way as more transportable canvases. Their arrangement within the room, precisely placed and proportioned, gave a permanent trace of the artistic gaze for public consumption. Indeed, Whistler ensured much appreciation of the room by inviting large parties of viewers while Leyland was out of town. That the room was written up in a number of London publications as a complete entity indicates further its holistic status as equally valued collection. It did not ultimately matter that the purchaser of the porcelain to be displayed was Leyland; now the entire room is remembered as Whistler’s creation, its disparate origins forgotten. What centers the collecting and locates the artistic eye of both Whistler and Rossetti, then, are the boundaries of commercial origin and destination. The fundamental source for these pieces of porcelain is the Oriental shop in London or Paris, but the ultimate product, after the arrangement of these objects, is the unified aesthetic sensibility



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that goes on sale as background to their paintings. The difference between the spare arrangement of Whistler’s home and Rossetti’s crowded treasure palace falls away at the source—a commercial vendor of curious objects. As the century drew to a close, however, commercial availability, imperial expansion, and colonial administration signaled a coming broadness of visual accessibility that would inevitably dull the edge of artistic difference. Charles Eastlake complains in Hints on Household Taste (1868) that “[f]or many years past the manufacture of Oriental ware has been steadily deteriorating, and this fact, I fear, is in great measure due to the increased facilities of our intercourse with India, and to the bad influence of modern European taste on native art.”99 Or, as William Rossetti writes in his diary recounting a visit to a “new” Japanese shop in Rue Vivienne during an 1864 trip to the Continent: “The bad effects of European intercourse are unmistakably visible .€.€. especially in the coloring, which is worse than worthless.”100 For the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, this depletion of exotic effect could be solved by finding new sites of influence and inspiration, both geographical and methodological. But for the many more Britons whose china cabinets contained the common willow plate, blue and white china remained in favor and, indeed, traveled a comfortable continuing path into British domesticity as a familiar site of exotic influence preserved fondly in childhood memory. The latter-day history of the willow pattern plate becomes, across the turn of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, ever more inextricably connected with a nostalgia for youth, as earlier writings by Lamb and the Family Friend were already making clear. Versions of the willow pattern story were published as picture books, dramatized as children’s plays, and even published in rhyming form and sold to raise money for the “Trent Vale Female Domestic Mission and Maternity Fund” in 1882. As a visual reference ubiquitous in certain settings even today, the willow pattern plate continues to connote an enduring and unchanging British domesticity simply in its appearance on tea-table or in a china-cupboard. All of the debilitating visual stasis that the pattern once implied has been absorbed into a positive narrative preserving English crockery as a household landmark. As the next chapter argues, Britons would find new ways of thematizing Chinese visual and physical contagion in the story of the London opium den. But, in implicating that foreign site in British narrative epistemology, they drew on their own native narrative techniques of exhibition and display. This gave representational cohesion to the den’s alternate visual aes-

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thetic, yet it also forced British writings to integrate that foreign aesthetic within their own stories. The pernicious lingering effects of this integration at century’s end counterpointed the willow pattern’s benign presence, and posed ominous questions about China’s future global status after the Qing empire’s anticipated collapse.

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If, for Rossetti and Eastlake, European influence sullies the pure exoticism of Eastern eyes, many other British observers worried more about an opposite contamination of British bodies by Eastern influence. Mid- to latecentury British writing on these contagions, in a manner akin to and yet debased from previous considerations of gardens and porcelain, isolated the particular commodity of opium and the particular space of the opium den as primary examples of a Chinese difference. As an urban site at once sinister and indeterminate, the den permeates late-nineteenth-century fiction as a persistent spatial shorthand denoting corrupting iniquity in British urban space both past and present. Writings by Dickens, Doyle, and Wilde, to name only a few, describe British observers who, upon finding their own cities invaded by the opium den’s stupefying influence, soon discover that this influence has transformed their eyes and minds as well. A general reading of these narratives, then, links anxieties about Chinese spaces to broad concerns about urban degeneration, and places the stories of the opium den within a canon of other end-of-the-century novels imagining Britain’s invasion by foreign forces. To read this way, however, gets at only the end part of the story. Following through from garden to plate to den, we start to ask not just about the effects that the opium den was understood to have but also how and why the space of the den was given representational power to enact those effects, and, further, how that power grew out of earlier explications of Chinese visual and spatial difference. In reviewing how British narratives described Chinese spaces, we most want to understand how nineteenth-

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century spaces were held to create nineteenth-century British viewers. These descriptions, then, explain the evolution of aesthetic influences as much as they delineate fears of reverse colonization. As with both the garden and the plate, the den offers an important location to resolve larger dilemmas of British visual realism by proposing a way of looking that revises the parameters of a British sense of the real. Yet much more than either the garden or the plate, the den mystifies and makes villainous this revision. Seeing with Chinese eyes in the context of the opium den has frequently fatal consequences. This chapter takes up the history preceding those gruesome ends in order to make plain the foundations for the den’s mystifications. This history begins with another kind of Chinese space, the display case, most specifically as it functioned in popular exhibitions of Chinese people and things staged around London in the era of the Opium Wars. Catherine Pagani has traced the complex networks of appreciation and disapproval in the British reception of these exhibitions;1 I want to continue reading this complexity through to the depraved fictional exhibition of the den. I understand the den to be the melodramatic endpoint of the exhibition’s attempts at understanding Chinese space to be both viewable and rationally comprehensible. While the first two chapters proposed productive and generative routes for British incorporations of Chinese aesthetics, whether through Fortune’s transplantations or Whistler’s exotic evocations, this chapter and the next follow those incorporations through to their repudiations and imagined replacements. Thus, though the two sites seem opposite in intention—the exhibition cultivates understanding and interest while the den suppresses all thought— their narrative functions in fact strongly interconnect. By indicating the initial terms with which to render Chinese space in London, the Chinese exhibition prepares the den to be its later gothic parallel. Both spaces returned geographically distant concerns about global British commodity trade to the domestic urban sphere; both were open—at a certain cost—to all comers; and both established a transportive private or even domestic space behind their public facade. The opium den made and maintained meaning so effectively in nineteenth-century urban discourse, then, because it continued a much broader pre-existing conception of nineteenth-century exhibition in that same metropole. And in making narrative their readings of these spaces, British viewers described not only the effects of viewing “China in miniature,” as one exhibition of Chinese things was often called,



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but also the efforts necessary to accommodate these miniature Chinas into the public culture of London. The journalism and fiction of Charles Dickens make particularly clear the associated functions of the Chinese exhibition and the den in British writing.2 Reading together Dickens’s journalism on Chinese displays in the 1850s with his accounts of display cases and an opium den in his final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), similarities between the two kinds of spaces become more apparent. For Dickens, an unmediated vision of either a Chinese exhibition space or an opium den can neither amuse or instruct because of its divergence from rational liberal order and standards of visual authenticity. The operations of realist narrative, however, can restore both to coherence. This restoration complies with Dickens’s general faith in the recuperative effects of a properly ordered material world anchored in a stable British domesticity, but it also indicates a broader agreement about the nature of Britain’s public conception of China as a space of artifice and excess. It is an agreement that persists through later opium den fictions, all of which draw heavily on Dickens’s example, though the increasing difficulty of achieving this resolution becomes apparent in end-of-the-century works such as Conan Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” In this story, even the master observer Sherlock Holmes is nearly taken in by the den’s false vision of foreign difference. Thus while the previous chapter investigated the changing presence of the foreign in delineating British domesticity, this chapter is concerned with the ways that such domesticity enters into more public dialogues of nation and national character and, in so doing, brings new challenges to the deterritorialization of foreign space through narrative. These narrative efforts were of course linked to historical incidents. Although Britain had acquired the colony of Hong Kong in the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing concluding the so-called First Opium War, giving the British empire limited formal presence in China, far more significant for the understanding of China’s relations to Britain during this period were the changing dynamics of Sino-British commercial trade, beginning with the East India Company’s 1834 loss of its monopoly on the China tea trade. This loss rendered official the already-occurring shift in Sino-British trading patterns. Individual firms and merchants, most notably Jardine and Matheson, worked to bypass the currency-depleting stipulations of the Qing government by importing opium, rather than paying currency, in exchange for Chinese tea.3 Merchants who chose not to traffic in opium

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accrued commodity value in different ways, by collecting Chinese trade porcelain and other exotic goods for sale and display in Britain. When, in 1860, the British and French forces looted the Summer Palace treasuries in a process that James Hevia has carefully detailed, those objects too became a part of the material evidence of China’s visual difference. 4 Commodity circulations, then, made the exhibition and den possible by providing their material contents, but a denial of those circulations made the spaces imaginable. Both the exhibition and the den insisted on Chinese space as a separate and static scene, whose inhabiting people and objects could only be looked at, not look themselves. This is especially true in the case of the opium den, which greatly simplified complex conditions of trade and diaspora in making its fictions. Opium was by the nineteenth century a global commodity whose cultivation and consumption neither began nor ended in China—the British grew the opium they sent to China in the Indian colonies, for example.5 Neither were the proprietors of these dens always Chinese; Lascars, Malays, and other South Asian and mixed-race characters occur frequently in opium den fictions. Nor did the Chinese of opium den fictions correlate clearly to actual circulations of Chinese human capital. The increasing internal instabilities caused by the Taiping Rebellion did drive an ever-increasing number of Chinese men to migrate overseas, but most often to the California gold-fields, where their presence was deemed increasingly problematic as the century progressed. Britain, unlike the United States, was subject to no significant influx of Chinese workers.6 Invocations of Chinese immigration to Britain in British fiction and periodical literature of the later nineteenth century gained economic relevance only through the transferred terms of American social conditions, even as British fictions such as Dickens’s Edwin Drood gave American writers the rhetorical terms to figure the Chinese presence States-side. Further, ingestion of opium was not initially or always localized to the site of the den. Britons could, and did, find opium anywhere, in reality and in fiction, from the country house possessed of a foreign diamond in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone to the aesthetic drawing room in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and in multiple forms, including paste, laudanum, and patent medicines.7 Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, the seminal consumption narrative, possesses a hallucinatory mobility that encompasses a wide swath of England’s geography, both urban and rural.



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Despite these caveats, however, narrative constructions of the opium den consistently identify its central malevolence as peculiarly, and exclusively, urban and Chinese.8 In the renderings of British writers, then, the opium den is only partly a place concerned with the taking of opium, just as the museum is only partly able to make—or only partly interested in making—its constitutive objects cohere into a transparently instructive world. More than these global hierarchies or narcotic exigencies, the Chinese exhibition and the Chinese opium den offer sites to consider the challenges of interpreting and writing about space in the first place. While the Chinese garden had offered a vision of power legitimized by the landscape that was, to British observers, as obvious as it was artificial, the display case and the den offered sights to see that were both confusing and dangerous. In both cases, the work of narrative could offer only difficult and partial resolution to the commodity’s impingement on the British urban real.

Exhibiting China in Victorian London As Tony Bennett has explained, nineteenth-century Britain was remarkable for recasting the museum as an “exemplary space” and an “instrument of public instruction”; Barbara Black calls the Victorian museum the “age’s great enterprise.”9 But the effects of this enterprise function, at best, in a loosely affiliated spectrum: while some museums offered disciplined and orderly collections, others presented an eclectic hodge-podge; and while some exhibitions sought to instruct, others aimed chiefly to entertain. Popular ethnographic displays often bridged those divides. In keeping with the early Victorian emphasis on the civilizing possibilities of empire, these exhibitions tried to order and classify materials and peoples from around the globe both legibly and logically according to the dynamics of British territorial expansion while also entertaining audiences with the thrill of the foreign. Many critics have examined the dynamics of exhibition in the colonial context and concluded that these displays function as domestic affirmations and instantiations of the British empire’s global power.10 However, as Robert Aguierre has shown in the case of Mexico and Central America, such affirmations must work more variably when reinforcing the knowledge-project of informal empire.11 Traditionally, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations of 1851 makes the heart of histories of the display space in the mid-

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nineteenth century. Thomas Richards, Andrew Miller, and Jennifer Wicke, among many others, all have explicated the Great Exhibition’s foundational importance to developments in the understandings of consumer relationships with commodities as grounded on increasingly symbolic models.12 As both a putatively internationalist model of material relations and a seminal formulation of the spectacular power of the commodity, the Great Exhibition gives background to this chapter’s more particular history of display. China, however, gained representation in midcentury London largely outside the synoptic order of the Great Exhibition; indeed, the Chinese section of the exhibition was assembled rather randomly by British and American traders and merchants and merited little attention from contemporary observers.13 Instead, the definitive reference point for public stagings of China was the American Nathan Dunn’s exhibition of “Ten Thousand Chinese Things,” proclaimed to be, with familiar hyperbole, “the most valuable as well as curious exhibition now to be seen in London—perhaps we might say, in the world” by the Court Magazine.14 Dunn had parlayed his sympathetic reputation among Chinese merchants as an opponent of the opium trade into a large personal collection of Chinese trade commodities and luxury goods, which he then exhibited in Philadelphia in 1839 and London’s Hyde Park in 1842; a later version of the exhibition appeared in London in 1851.15 The assemblage of this collection went beyond the scattered samples visible in the Great Exhibition to form a cohesive whole. It was a whole that implicitly rewrote the story of the Opium Wars for British viewers by reclaiming Chinese material objects from scenes of economic or martial conflict to moments of anthropological and aesthetic instruction. The accounts of viewing Dunn’s Chinese Collection composed by various journalists as well as written by Dunn himself worked to fix the fluidity of the Chinese commodity’s conversion between tea, silver, opium, and porcelain into a static and linear narrative of the museum’s display. As in the writings of Robert Fortune, a close contemporary of Dunn’s, the transnational space of the marketplace proved antithetical to the preservation of Chinese visual difference as an exotic and antique effect. To insist on China’s temporal and spatial remove meant a denial of the modernizing effects of commodity capitalism and realistic representation alike. These denials are already obvious from the exhibition’s outside appearance. Although the dimensions of the Chinese Collection are bounded by the geography of respectable London—“extending from Hyde Park Cor-



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ner to Knightsbridge, and towards the extremity of St. George’s-place, a grotesque erection has lately sprung up,” reports the Illustrated London News—the building’s shape also suggests a Chinese alternate spatial aesthetic.16 This was a geographic transposition evident on both sides of the Atlantic. Reports of the Philadelphia museum in the Gentleman’s Magazine told would-be visitors: “It is no longer necessary to measure half the circuit of the globe, and subject one’s self to the hazards and privations of a six months’ voyage on distant and dangerous seas, to enjoy a peep at the Celestial Empire. This is a gratification which may now be enjoyed by the citizens of Philadelphia, for the trouble of walking to the corner of Ninth and Sansom streets.”17 As William Langdon’s guide to the collection declared: “It is, in effect, China in miniature,” a claim repeated by nearly every reviewer.18 In describing exactly how this collection makes a miniature world out of a spectacle of excess, the catalogue relies on the priority of the holistic vision of the scene. Langdon continues: “The view is imposing in the highest degree. The rich screen-work .€.€. the many-shaped and many coloured lamps .€.€. the native paintings .€.€. the choice silks .€.€. and the multitude of cases crowded with rare and interesting sights, form a tout ensemble, possessing a beauty entirely its own, and which must be seen before it can be appreciated.”19 Yet, as many periodicals point out, “one thing alone” is needed to resolve this vision, “a key to its almost innumerable points of information,” which readers may find in Langdon’s own publication.20 The amount of annotation the guidebook provides to the prescribed circuit through the display cases, however, varies greatly depending on each case’s contents; shelves of Chinese flora and fauna receive no description at all, while dioramas of Chinese people, arranged by rank and gender, occasion long narrative excursions into China’s ethnography. These figures are described as if they are both alive and in motion, as in the case containing two civil mandarins, one seated, the other “paying the customary respect to his superior, previous to his occupancy of an adjoining chair.”21 In this way, the descriptive catalogue knits together the particularities of each Chinese figure with the wholesale invocation of the Chinese condition through specifically defined and delineated views. Both Langdon’s text and the reviews of the collection in various contemporary periodicals indeed made it impossible for the many visitors to Dunn’s original collection to conceive of the collection without such a structuring and guiding British vision. In describing the collection’s

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instructive capacity, narrative makes ostensible claim for vision’s priority while ultimately asserting verbal control. For many writers, this verbal control aimed to continue beyond the walls of the exhibition into the field of British relations with China more generally, a continuation facilitated by the interchangeability these displays proposed between real Chinese and their diorama representations. A writer for Fraser’s using the byline “A Barbarian Eye,” comments: “The figures, as an intelligent friend observed, are made of the same material as ourselves—viz., of clay. They have, however, undergone a different process, having been baked. We should hence take it for granted that all these life-sized Chinese men and women are literally made of porcelain.”22 And the London Saturday Journal adds: “There is a remarkable sameness of feature and expression running through the whole collection, though all are accurate likenesses of persons now living. This characteristic sameness extends to the mind as well as the body.”23 Chinese visual uniformity, and the functional equivalency of Chinese subjects and objects made evident by Chinese material and artistic production, energize these periodical readings of Chinese spaces and things. This effect is cumulative, becoming more obvious in periodical responses to subsequent Chinese displays that sought to capitalize on the success of Dunn’s collection. But these later displays also seek more and more to distract viewers from other, larger kinds of exhibitions. This is especially the case with a much remarked upon episode on the Crystal Palace’s opening day. A Chinese man wearing colorful embroidered silks, a peacock feather cap, and a long pigtail appeared and began bowing deeply to the Duke of Wellington and other high-ranking officers and diplomats awaiting the Queen’s arrival. His presence was not objected to, and the Queen recorded his presence in her diary of the day’s events without comment, writing: “After this the Archbishop of Canterbury offered up a short and appropriate prayer, followed by the singing of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, during which time the Chinese Mandarin came forward and made his obeisance.”24 A portrait of this mandarin is even included in H. C. Selous’s large canvas The Opening of the Great Exhibition (1851–52).25 Only after the day was over was this mandarin’s identity revealed as He-Sing, a representative of the Chinese junk Ke-Ying, and his entire presence at the exhibition a surprisingly successful publicity trick.26 The Ke-ying, a traveling museum of Chinese culture floating at the time of the Crystal Palace Exhibition near the outfall of the St. Clement’s parish sewer in Blackfriars, had actually arrived in London some four years ear-



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lier after a tempestuous and lengthy journey from Hong Kong. Its owners were “compelled to adopt various disguises to enable them to penetrate the interior of the country, and effect the purchase of the vessel” according to the Illustrated London News, which also declared the Ke-Ying to be “the first ship constructed by the Chinese which has ever reached Europe, or even rounded the Cape of Good Hope.”27 The Ke-Ying’s voyage thus replicated the spread of British empire in reverse, moving from Hong Kong, to St. Helena, to New York and Boston, and, finally, England, where its arrival met with royal interest and approval. As a later Illustrated London News article details, the Queen’s visit to the vessel re-enacted the claiming of Hong Kong as a British colony: “As her Majesty placed her foot upon the deck of the Junk, the Royal standard of England was run up to the mainmast by the Chinese sailors.€.€. . The Royal party .€.€. proceeded to the poop of the ship, and, from this elevated point, the Queen being visible to the thousands of spectators on the shipping and dock walls, her Majesty was greeted with tumultuous cheering.”28 The Ke-ying’s owners acknowledged the dangers of staging such displays during wartime in the ship’s official pamphlet: “We venture to say, that, if any person had been bold enough three years since, to have predicted that we should have had, within the walls of the East India Docks, a Chinese Junk, with her crew and rigging, the predictor would have been thought a visionary.”29 But with the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, the Ke-Ying could now be deemed worthy of a visit; after all, the actions of British steamships like the Nemesis had seemed to demonstrate the incommensurability of Chinese vessels with the terms of modern warfare. The Illustrated London News concludes: “Altogether, this promises to be one of the most popular exhibitions of our metropolis for some time to come; it is, certainly, one of the most rational objects of curiosity which has ever been brought to our shores.”30 This curiosity was given domestic as well as foreign source. Chambers’s reports the following in its “Visit to the Chinese Junk”: “One of the latest and most interesting sights of London has been the Chinese junk. The walls, omnibuses and steamers have all concurred in placarding the Chinese junk—and as everybody has gone to see the Chinese junk, we went to see it also.”31 By giving the agency of “placarding” to the very architectures and technologies of the city rather than some more interested party, Chambers’s suggests a citywide attraction to the vision of China at the level of brick and mortar. Certainly the Ke-Ying had penetrated into the contemporary street scene. Albert Smith describes a vendor in Coventry Street who “brings out

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engraved cards of Jenny Lind, Hungerford Bridge, the Chinese Junk, or the Wellington Statue,” while narratives of travel on the river put the Ke-Ying into context amid other waterfront landmarks: “We pass the Temple, the Chinese Junk, Somerset-House, the new houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey” writes Max Schlesinger.32 The mass of guidebooks printed to capitalize on visitors to the Great Exhibition frequently cited the junk as a side trip of interest as well.33 In all these examples the Ke-Ying stands as a monument rather than museum, a fixed icon integrated into the urban landscape rather than a participatory site making meaning of Chinese difference. For other readers, however, the Ke-Ying offered a rhetorical substitute for overseas travel. In Charles Dickens’s 24 June 1848 Examiner account of his visit to the junk, he opens by narrating a trip to the ship’s mooring site in Blackwall as if it were a trip around the globe: The shortest road to the Celestial Empire is by the Blackwall-railway. You may take a ticket, through and back, for a matter of eighteenpence. With every carriage that is cast off on the road—at Stepney, Limehouse, Poplar, West India Docks—thousands of miles of space are cast off too. The flying dream of tiles and chimney-pots, backs of squalid houses, frowzy pieces of waste ground, narrow courts and streets, swamps, ditches, masts of ships, gardens of dock-weed, and unwholesome little bowers of scarlet beans, whirls away in half a score of minutes. Nothing is left but China.34

Many critics have pointed to the way that the Great Exhibition of 1851 symbolically captured the collapse of distance and time allowed by railway travel through its unification of disparate scenes and settings. Here an actual railway journey becomes symbolic of a longer overseas crossing, abandoning the markers of British domestic poverty along the way. As for the viewers of the Chinese collection, London geography in Dickens’s experience is transformed by even the anticipation of viewing the Chinese material objects on display. Yet for Dickens, this transformation of urban space poses less of a problem than the difficulty of narrating the material object itself. When confronted with the actual junk, the once-definitive destination of China becomes undermined and indeterminate. If there be any one thing in the world that it is not at all like, that thing is a ship of any kind. So narrow, so long, so grotesque, so low in the middle, so high at each end (like a China pen-tray) with no rigging, with nowhere to go aloft, with mats for sails, great warped cigars for masts, gaudy dragons and sea monsters



Display Case and Den disporting themselves from stem to stern.€.€.—it would look more at home at the top of a public building, at the top of a mountain, in an avenue of trees, or down in a mine, than aloft on the water.35

The same problem is encountered with the crew itself. Dickens continues: Of all unlikely callings with which imagination could connect the Chinese lounging on the deck, the most unlikely and the last would be the mariner’s craft. Imagine a ship’s crew, without a profile among them, in gauze pinafores and plaited hair; wearing stiff clogs, a quarter of a foot thick in the sole; and lying at night in little scented boxes, like backgammon men or chess-pieces, or mother-of-pearl counters!36

The strange replacement of living sailors with imaginary commodities demonstrates both the problem and the solution for Dickens. Here the ubiquity of the Chinese commodity—whether junk, pen-tray, mother-of-pearl counter, or something else—in the collective British visual consciousness disrupts both the journalist’s prerogative of documentary reportage and the novelist’s command of realism as a mode of representation. These imagined commodities named here work as visual media to convey information about Chinese ways of seeing and being through their contours and patterns, and in doing so seem to prove their visual effect to be more powerful than the direct evidence of the real Chinese people and things present. In constantly appealing to the readerly and writerly imagination, Dickens offers a resolution reminiscent of Lamb’s “Old China” essay from thirty years prior. Both authors assume that the Chinese commodity holds longstanding and possibly disruptive place in the reader’s imagination. Yet the reader also finds in the ordering effects of narrative device a way to incorporate that influence productively. For Dickens, a return to standards of likeness and unlikeness can repair the disorienting effects of the railway journey that have stripped away a British facade to reveal a landscape populated only with Chinese commodity. Through the rhetorical power of metaphor to assess and regulate visual similarity and difference, the lingering visual effect of the commodity can remain present but controlled. This restraint appears thematically: images of the ship’s invasive and improbable presence atop buildings or underground are countered by images of commodities contained, whether in pen-trays or scented boxes. But it also takes effect formally. Dickens uses the figurative device of the visual metaphor to reconcile his dependence on the unstable external referent of the static Chinese commodity with his narrative’s temporally progressive

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invocation of the real. Although Chinese spaces and things like the Ke-Ying and the objects and people it contains might threaten accustomed ways of seeing and being through their visual disunity and artifice, the ability to rewrite those disruptions as a series of imagined similarities grounds that disruptive difference in a series of rhetorical endpoints. The antirealism of Chinese objects, where things are least like what they actually are, advances by contrast with British realism and its presentation of things that are exactly as they ought to be. Dickens, writing thirty years before the publication of The Egoist, foreshadows Meredith’s narrative methods if not his disregard of racial difference. We come, then, to Charles Dickens’s private account of his visit to the Great Exhibition with some surprise, as Dickens appears to doubt his own capacity to make narrative or visual sense of this nation-defining display. He writes in a letter of 11 July 1851: I find I am ‘used-up’ by the Exhibition. I don’t say there is nothing in it—there’s too much. I have been only twice; so many things bewildered me. I have a natural horror of sights, and the fusion of the many sights in one has not decreased it. I am not sure that I have seen anything but the fountain and perhaps the Amazon. It is a dreadful thing to be obliged to be false, but when anyone says, ‘Have you seen—?’ I say, ‘Yes,’ because if I don’t, I know he’ll explain it, and I can’t bear that!!37

Given the extraordinarily self-multiplying numbers of “things” in the Dickens universe of fiction and nonfiction alike, a reader may well be surprised by this “natural horror” that Dickens describes. Of greatest issue, perhaps, is the dash following the imagined query: “Have you seen—?” In this piece of punctuation, empty of any particular object or image but open to all possibilities of viewing, the particularities of Victorian visual practice threaten to take definite form. Perhaps Dickens’s dread seems to stem most profoundly, in fact, from the idea that anyone but Dickens might fill in this narrative gap with an “explanation” of how one should properly see, and, perhaps more important, properly represent that seeing. Yet in his public writings, Dickens himself had little compunction in charting the path away from the exhibition’s spectacular blank. In a 5 July 1851 review of the exhibition for Household Words, cowritten with Richard Henry Horne and entitled “The Great Exhibition and the Little One,” Dickens capitalizes on both the promise and the peril of the blankness of represented scenes of seeing that he wrote of to Mrs. Watson in language



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familiar and, in some sections, directly borrowed from his Examiner piece on the Ke-Ying.38 Ignoring the section of Chinese goods present within the Chinese Exhibition, Dickens chooses instead to contrast the Great Exhibition with a revived version of the Chinese Collection. Though Nathan Dunn’s original staging of his Chinese Collection had closed some years prior, this revised collection opened in the same location in 1851 with the addition of several living Chinese as curiosities and guides, along with, as Chambers’s puts it, “a few little bits of quackery, which took away from the real dignity of the collection: it had a sort of tinsel about it unlike the Chinese collection of earlier years.”39 Despite that, the second Chinese collection was as well attended and well publicized as the first, as is perhaps obvious in Dickens’s assumption that his readers will be familiar with both display sites. He writes of his decision to read the Crystal Palace together with the smaller Chinese collection: As it is impossible in any allowable space to “go through” the whole Exhibition, or touch upon a tithe of its Catalogue, let us suggest as curious subjects of comparison, those two countries which display (on the whole) the greatest degree of progress, and the least—say England and China. England, maintaining commercial intercourse with the whole world; China, shutting itself up, as far as possible, within itself. The true Tory spirit would have made a China of England, if it could. Behold its results in the curious little Exhibition now established close beside the great one. It is very curious to have the Exhibition of a people who came to a dead stop, Heaven knows how many hundred years ago, side by side with the Exhibition of the moving world. It points the moral in a surprising manner.40

Eighteenth-century approbation of Chinese historical stability has been by now completely overwritten.41 Dickens and Horne connect unproblematically the forces of world history, contemporary global commerce, and domestic British politics with the scenes of seeing staged by the Great Exhibition and the Chinese collection. The visual lesson of China’s temporal remove becomes available to all inquiring viewers through the simple evidence of the material objects on display, which signify all the wider failings of Chinese character to the liberal British eye. As Dickens continues: Consider the greatness of the English results, and extraordinary littleness of the Chinese. Go from the silk-weaving and cotton-spinning of us outer barbarians, to the laboriously-carved ivory balls of the flowery Empire, ball within ball and circle within circle, which have made no advance and been of no earthly use for thousands of years.42

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The opposition is obvious: “silk-weaving and cotton-spinning” are present-tense activities, described by actions rather than objects, while the ivory balls, despite their labor-intensive production, appear as useless objects preserved from a long-ago age. In looking at English displays, viewers conceive of the limitless possibilities of industry in the abstract; in viewing Chinese collections, viewers remain constrained by an ornate material aestheticism without reproductive potential. This is in keeping with more general comparisons of European and Asian industry; as William Whewell proclaimed, “[In Oriental] countries, the arts are mainly exercised to gratify the tastes of the few; with us to supply the wants of the many. There, the wealth of a province is absorbed in the dress of a mighty warrior; here the gigantic weapons of the peaceful potentate are used to provide clothing for the world.”43 Macartney’s understanding of the effects of the imperial gardens as pleasures for the emperor’s eye alone here adapt easily to the terms of industrial production. It is an adaptation especially appropriate given the ongoing tensions of the inter–Opium War era, both between China and Britain and between free trade and protectionist factions of the British government. But for Dickens the comparison between the Great Exhibition and its “little” counterpart merits attention to modes of interpretation as much as material histories. His response to the terror of the unnarratable scene of seeing in the Great Exhibition is an immediate redirection to the Chinese example: an example that, for Dickens, represented precisely the kind of object-driven epistemology he both trafficked in and deplored. Dickens must therefore be particularly disturbed by the idea that visual images and material objects can convey meaning directly, without the mediating work of narrative. Throughout his journalism and his fiction, Dickens instead emphasizes the disruption caused by the appearance of foreign visual and material circumstances and the necessity of a steady narration to keep such intrusions under control. This steady narration, of course, is to be provided best by Dickens himself. Dickens’s didactic ekphrasis of the material object is a rhetorical mode especially well suited to his discussion of China, an empire he considered both visually overabundant and ontologically lacking. The uselessness of Chinese objects does not for Dickens increase their value as loci for aesthetic contemplation, as it did for Rossetti and Whistler. Nor, despite his mockery of the “ugly old willow” pattern’s contrast to “good wholesome natural” porcelain art in “A Plated Article,” do Chinese objects of “no



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earthly use” signify only a debased middle-brow affection for artificial Chinese designs. Instead, the very artificiality and constraint of these designs offers for Dickens an exemplary case of the insufficiency of the Chinese material object to comprehend the world, and thus the usefulness of such insufficient objects to highlight by contrast the visual legibility of the British novel. When Dickens comes to write The Mystery of Edwin Drood two decades later, he finds the opium den’s vigorous fictional presence perfect opportunity to demonstrate and resolve the disruptions posed by Chinese objects and spaces.

Display Cases and Opium Dens in The Mystery of Edwin Drood In the decades that followed the triumphant Exhibition of 1851, techniques of displaying empire became both more common and less grand. Even the 1862 Exhibition, meant to be a spectacular match to equal the first Great Exhibition, was not a success, and plans to continue mounting exhibitions every decade were subsequently abandoned, a decline that Jordanna Bailkin has linked more generally to changing definitions of shared cultural property and a concurrent crisis in the “Liberal educational ethos.”44 One set of items in the 1862 Exhibition did stir interest, however. This was the array of curiosities looted by British troops from the Summer Palace in Beijing. Reporting in the Illustrated London News emphasized only the unthreatening aspects of this pillage; the 15 June 1861 issue included a picture and account of “Looty,” a Pekingese dog found in the palace and presented to Queen Victoria, who christened it appropriately. But, as James Hevia has shown, the process of ransacking the palace accomplished much more than gaining Victoria a lapdog. He argues: “The chaotic processes of looting the Summer Palace and transforming its materiality into curiousities might be understood, therefore, as mechanisms of deterritorialization.€.€. . Brought low and disordered by these actions, the Qing Empire could then be reterritorialized in a new role: as the backward student of a British tutor.”45 Hevia points out the important consequences for China of these reterritorializations, but, as the particular example of Dickens’s novel makes clear, such movements clearly also had domestic consequences for Britain. These consequences parallel but do not reduplicate other contemporary returns of formal colonial possessions to the imperial metropole. Adapting the

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imagined materiality of the Qing empire to the form of the novel means accommodating China’s visual difference, and the alternative national visual consciousness this difference implied, in ways appropriate to the dynamics of informal empire. This adaptation is achieved, for Dickens, through the fictional and figurative spaces of narrative itself. Moving from the “Great Exhibition and the Little One” ahead to Dickens’s last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, published in 1870, thus not only places author and reader at a remove from the spectacular promise of the 1851 Exhibition but also picks up Sino-British relations a decade after the destruction of the Summer Palace and the conclusion of the Opium Wars. In the years between 1860 and 1870, the weakening Qing empire established a brief restoration of power, facilitated in part by a greater cooperation with Anglo-French forces. In return for Qing acceptance of the expanding network of treaty ports, British and French forces helped quell the ongoing internal damages inflicted by the Taiping Rebellion; in particular, General Charles George Gordon earned his nickname “Chinese Gordon” while leading the “Ever Victorious Army,” an assemblage of Chinese soldiers trained in techniques of European warfare. At the same time, Sir Robert Hart, inspector general of China’s Imperial Maritime Customs Service, developed policies of commerce friendly to Europeans from his unique position within the Chinese government.46 Overall, Britain’s presence in China during these years, in the eyes of contemporary British observers at least, functioned more directively than ever before. The threat of Chinese influence apparent in Edwin Drood and other later opium den fictions, then, might appear misplaced. In part Drood’s menace derives partly from its apparent inspiration, Dickens’s protégé Wilkie Collins’s landmark crime novel The Moonstone (1868).47 Drood, a book claimed to be “bought by the Fifty Thousand as it left his fingers,”48 adopts both the plot device of opium trance as mode of unconscious revelation and the nascent genre conventions of detective fiction from Collins’s work, but, unlike The Moonstone, Drood focuses especially on the transformative effects of prolonged opium use on both the British individual and the British urban space. Thus, while Drood can be and has been read as a novel preoccupied with Britain’s management of the far-away geographies of the East, it should equally be understood as a novel focused on the management of local spaces and geographies already inextricably endowed with the foreign.49 Dickens’s adaptation of Collins’s work initially met with a good recep-



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tion; praising the first narrative of Drood, which appeared in April 1870, the London Times writes: “Mr. Dickens has given us some admirable photographs of still life, and has cut out in prose which is close to ivory some dozens of distinct characters.”50 Negotiating two metaphors—the supposedly documentary realism of photography and the exotic ornamentalism of carved ivory—the Times reviewer prepares us to read a narrative that is heavily involved with the complexities of visual practice. Given the novel’s abrupt ending, however, Luke Fieldes’s illustration for Drood’s cover has supplanted the ivory of the prose, as readers have more often turned in frustration to the drawing for clues to the mystery’s solution. With only six numbers completed by the time of Dickens’s death on 8 June, critics stymied by the difficulty of a narrative definitively unfinished have offered up a multitude of possible conclusions in lieu of other analysis.51 This mirrors the extratextual process that took place when nineteenth-century readers unable to finish the novel sought at least to find the origins of its setting in the real opium dens of the East End, either by their own explorations or through readings of other fiction and nonfiction descriptive of such urban dens. In both cases, the conclusions proved unsatisfactory—neither Edwin Drood’s open-ended plot nor the ongoing influence of China on the urban condition more generally found resolution in these critical and readerly excursions. Renewed focus, then, on the rhetorical figurations of space and spatial difference offer the most helpful critical approach to the text of Drood. In “The Chinese Junk” and “The Great Exhibition and the Little One,” Dickens used China and the Tories who favored British adoption of a China-like stasis as crucial counterpoints to British imperial progress. In Edwin Drood, the London opium den and the repressive Cathedral of Cloisterham—where “all things in it are of the past”—figuratively overlap in the novel’s opening scene to register this Chinese stasis as well.52 The two spaces, though far removed in function and locale, exert a parallel brutal power. Edwin Drood’s opening lines reveal the extent to which the misplaced commodity consumption of opium can remap the operations of British visual logic as well as the physical territory of British space. The novel opens with a description of Edwin Drood’s uncle, John Jasper, in the throes of an opium dream, though neither the man nor the reason for his hallucinations is initially identified. Instead, the text starts with a series of exclamatory questions:

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Display Case and Den How can the ancient English Cathedral town be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? how can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What IS the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe, it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one.53

Jasper’s primary distress concerns the inappropriate aligning of perspectives. As he puzzles over the juxtaposition of buildings from the two halves of his life, he supposes an infection of the Cathedral tower with the rusty spike of indeterminate Arab origins. This contagion, however, does not threaten to spread; it is confined and controlled by the restricted space of the opium den. Although Jasper’s ingestion of a Chinese substance in a Chinese space sends his own powers of perception into disarray, he can, upon emergence from the opium dream, begin to resolve his surroundings—“Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry?”—through the squalid confinements of the den.54 As he returns to himself, the narrator indicates the connections between Jasper’s body and the den it inhabits: “Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together at length rises, supporting his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. He is in the meanest and closest of small rooms.”55 Jasper’s body here mirrors the architecture and decor of the den itself—his consciousness is as pieced together and his frame as trembling as the old bedstead tumbled all awry. For Jasper, his opium addiction and his powerful yet unrequited desire for his nephew Edwin Drood’s fiancée, Rosa Bud, trap him in parallel; speaking of his life to Drood, he confides: “I hate it. The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the grain.”56 Though Drood, unaware of his uncle’s opium addiction, does not understand the reference, Jasper has metaphorically turned himself into the grains of the drug he consumes, to be kept in order only by the space designated for that drug’s consumption. This equivalency between physical surroundings and character becomes a commonplace for Jasper; as Dickens writes: “His manner is a little somber. His room is a little somber, and may have had its influence in forming his manner. It is mostly in shadow.”57 These equivalencies borrow heavily from descriptions of London opium dens already circulating in the periodical press. “There is no egress from the court but by its entrance,” observes the narrator about the London opium den Jasper frequents, and nonfiction narratives echo this sense of strict confines.58 Indeed, Dickens him-



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self was responsible for an influential work of opium den description that reinforces these cramped parameters: “Lazarus, Lotus Eating,” published in his journal All the Year Round in 1866. “We reach [the den] by a narrow passage leading up a narrow court,” writes the author of that piece, while another reporter describes how the sightseers “climb the ladder and mouth through the opening” to reach the opium smoking room.59 By emphasizing the den’s enclosure, the writers heighten the degenerate, depravedly foreign qualities of the opium den through a standard set of melodramatic techniques but simultaneously also distance and contain the dens by tucking them in inaccessible locales where they may be safely viewed but not distributed into London “proper.” For every description of the contagion of opium, the narratives include a concurrent emphasis on the physical space that confines this spreading plague. The very walls and windows of the rooms themselves keep the floating smoke safely pent up, away from middle-class London’s more healthful air. As much as Jasper’s awakening from his opium dream returns him to a space of confinement and repression, however, it also returns him to a sphere of spatial and sexual perversion. Jasper finds both his position and his attire inappropriate to his condition: He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a bed-stead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it. Lying, also dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman. The two first are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it. And as she blows, and shading with her lean hand, concentrates its red spark of light, it serves in the dim morning as a lamp to show him what he sees of her.60

Through a vision polluted by the light of the degenerate instrument that brings him into such degraded company, Jasper gains an intimate view of an exotic bedroom exhibition. Other narratives also focus on the bed as a particularly significant site of spatial dislocation evident within the den. A London Society reporter observes: “[T]here was in the room a large bedstead, with a bed made the wrong way on it.€.€. . [Upstairs] the bed was not arranged according to the English fashion. It was rolled up bolsterwise all along the length of the bedstead, leaving the mattress bare except for a large mat of Chinese grass.”61 Not arranging a bed in the English fashion involves more than a readjusted mattress, for, as a policeman attests, “It’s their opium at night they likes, and you’ll find half a dozen of ’em in one bed at Yahee’s a-smoking and sleeping away like so many dormice!”62 A bed both overstuffed with foreigners and positioned unfamiliarly seems to

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suggest a profound degeneracy, as it parallels the more threatening crowding of the London poor in the tenements and slums that surrounded the opium dens. Yet the reproductive directions are opposite. In the tenement, bodies crammed together produce ever more bodies that continually expand into the London streets. The opium den, on the other hand, is a destination, not an origin point, and those who enter the den frequently remain there for days or weeks at a time, or perhaps never emerge at all. Although the bed’s misuse with too many bodies lying “not longwise” but across suggests an inversion of “straight” sexuality by depicting an English woman surrounded by a Chinaman, a Lascar, and the racially indeterminate Jasper, their opium-induced lassitude curtails their sexual malevolence. The light from the pipe itself makes visible these inversions to Jasper in a peculiarly self-reflexive way. By needing the pipe’s light to show him what he sees of his companions, Jasper cedes visual agency to the pipe even as his own eyes register the perception. As a space that both offers static and artificial sights and deliberately directs ways of seeing in static, artificial, and fragmented ways, then, Drood’s opium den offers a prime example of practices of looking understood to be Chinese in origin. To Dickens, it is a threatening display, but its self-authorizing vision connects it directly to the Chinese collection and other popular exhibitions that preceded it. The novel, however, amply counterpoints this problematic space with examples of displays more clearly ordered. Reverend Crisparkle, the rosycheeked minister, boxer, and Edwin Drood’s general representation of the best of English manhood, frequently consults a cabinet full of commodities that exhibits difference pleasantly: “It was a most wonderful closet,” Dickens writes. “The upper slide .€.€. revealed deep shelves of pickle-jars, jam-pots, tin canisters, spice boxes, and agreeably outlandish vessels of blue and white, the luscious lodgings of preserved tamarinds and ginger. Every benevolent inhabitant of this retreat had his name inscribed upon his stomach.”63 Blue and white’s agreeable distinction comes both from the ease of containment—the closet slides open and closed at the touch of a finger—and the reliability of identification. This power of the hand to dominate the products of these foreign countries remains a pervasive image. The auctioneer Sapsea, dubbed a “solemn jackass” in Dickens’s working notes for the novel, captures the visual command but not the narrative cohesion that Dickens and the narrative demand:



Display Case and Den If I have not gone to foreign countries, young man, foreign countries have come to me.€.€. . Put it that I take and inventory, or make a catalogue .€.€. . I see some cups and saucers of Chinese make, equally strangers to me personally: I put my finger on them, then and there, and I say “Pekin, Nankin, Canton.” It is the same with Japan, with Egypt, and with bamboo and sandal-wood from the East Indies; I put my finger on them all.64

Finger placement alone, however, offers only analogous rather than syncretic reading of global commodity. A better example comes in the case of the sunburnt Tartar, in whose apartment the vulnerable Rosa Bud takes refuge from the unwanted advances of the opium-addict John Jasper. This apartment presents an array of foreign goods gathered from around the globe during Tartar’s service as an officer of the British navy, all ordered and nameable. By “merely touching the spring knob of a locker and the handle of a drawer,” Tartar can produce “a dazzling enchanted repast. Wonderful macaroons, glittering liqueurs, magically preserved tropical spices, and jellies of celestial tropical fruits, displayed themselves profusely at an instant’s notice.”65 But Tartar’s powers of display do not stop at foodstuffs. A long-time sailor turned gentleman and estate-owner, his attic chambers echo his recent shift in status in their tidy arrangement and ship-shape bestowal of objects to their proper spots. The approving description of his rooms notes: “Everything was readily accessible.€.€. . So with the curiosities he had brought home from various voyages[;] .€.€. each was displayed in its especial place, and each could have been displayed in no better place.”66 In Tartar’s apartment, foreign objects are not only claimed but also integrated into a larger correct vision. Thus Tartar’s collection helps ease his re-entry into British society: “I thought I’d feel my way to the command of the landed estate,” he says, “by beginning in boxes.”67 Whether the flower boxes that grace his windowsill, the boxes displaying his collection of curiosities, or the cabinet that opens to reveal his foodstuffs, the containers all assist Tartar in working his way back to a proper place in the English class structure by allowing increasing command of his foreign experience, much in the way that Robert Fortune imagined his Chinese plants would best flourish under British management. Tartar’s brand of miniaturized, compartmentalized exotic spectacle is thus wrapped up in the tendrils of the blossoms he grows from his window boxes. But Tartar’s exhibition owes far more to the British government for its assembly than any true naturalism, for it comes together only by virtue of his military travels. The vines of blooming flowers cover the het-

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erogeneous harnessing together of diverse trinkets, while Rosa’s flowering youthful sexuality disguises her naked consumerism. Based on the general evidence of the Dickens canon, we can probably assume that Rosa Bud’s youthful self-centeredness will resolve itself into an appropriate married domestic union with Tartar, just as the disparate contents of Tartar’s boxes and cabinets have already unified into a nascent land-holding. Yet while the narrative progress of Rosa’s and Tartar’s domestic reproduction remains largely undeveloped in the portion of the novel that we have, Jasper’s opium den presents a fairly fully realized vision of the dangers of nondomestic self-multiplication. In the den, reproductive potential comes through the medium of opium smoke itself. While watching the female British keeper of the opium den, Princess Puffer, Jasper “notices with repugnance that the woman has opium-smoked herself into a strange likeness of the Chinaman. His form of cheek, eye, and temple, and his color, are repeated in her.”68 Barry Milligan, among other critics, has commented that the spreading contamination of opium fumes implies a rotting away of the essential features of British femininity. Milligan finds this transgression of race and gender classifications to indicate a general fear about the “miscegenative dynamics of the opium dens, for to control Englishwomen is indirectly to control the domestic environment, and to control the domestic environment is to control .€.€. society at large.”69 The physically contaminative reproduction of the Chinaman’s form in the British woman, however, masks other kinds of generative possibilities. As Princess Puffer’s muttered monologues constantly remind us, the pipes for opium smoking in Edwin Drood are made from “old penny ink-bottles,” and, via these bottle-pipes and the light they provide, opium becomes ink’s double, allowing another more sinister kind of writing to take place. 70 Although the narrative produced by the medium of opium is impermanent and frequently garbled—“Unintelligible!” pronounces Jasper of the words of the Chinaman and the Lascar—it also seems intended to be Jasper’s undoing.71 In the novel’s abortively final pages, Jasper returns to the opium den where he continues to imaginatively restage an act that is likely Edwin Drood’s murder under the watchful eye of the Princess Puffer. While Puffer keeps Jasper under surveillance in search of clues to his crime, she also encourages Jasper in his hallucinations through devious manipulation of the opium she mixes for him. “Where’s my ink-bottle and where’s my thimble, and where’s my little spoon? He’s going to take it in an artful form now, my deary dear,” schemes Puffer.72



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The story form that Puffer writes and Jasper retells through the opium smoke perpetuates itself endless and insidiously in Jasper’s drugged vision: “Well, I have told you. I did it, here, hundreds of thousands of times. What do I say? I did it millions and billions of times. I did it so often, and through such vast expanses of time, that when it was really done, it seemed not worth doing, it was done so soon.”73 The controlling form of the novel, even in its unfinished state, contains these billions of re-enacted crimes through its single artful narrative.74 Thus unlike the master-narrative expressed through Tartar’s boxes or Crisparkle’s cabinet, the opium den offers something more and yet less. While all three spaces use architectures of restraint and confinement to regulate and organize their displays, there remains a crucial difference. The foreign and exotic curios gathered up in Tartar’s tidy apartment and Crisparkle’s residence at Minor Canon Corner remain subject to the narrative imposed upon them by their curator, in both cases fine examples of British masculinity. In the opium den, however, the keeper, whether the Chinaman-ized Princess Puffer or her competitor, Jack Chinaman himself, makes up a part of the display, and joins with his or her customers in an endlessly curious exhibition of foreign degeneracy, effeminacy, and ultimate stasis. Jasper says of himself: “I have no prospect .€.€. but the tedious, unchanging round of this dull place,” and, though he is speaking of Cloisterham, the prediction is even more true of the space of the opium den.75 Here China’s eternal stoppage carries its effects from politics to spatiality to narrative itself. Jasper’s dreams give him endless reproductions of the same plot, leaving him poised forever at the moment of the murder, unable to move forward or in any new direction. As the trappings of English domestic life—bedframes, armchairs, ink-bottles—whirl away, “nothing is left but China.” While the rest of the novel’s narrative proceeds in resolving commodity difference through bonds of social union, the opium den remains behind as a space besieged by the epistemological crises necessary to make it visible in the first place.

Edwin Drood ’s Inheritors In the general mourning following Dickens’s death on 9 June 1870, more specific concerns about the lost conclusion of Edwin Drood became subsumed. Yet, in the subgenre of writing on urban slums, Drood remained

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a key foundational text that continued to dictate viewing practice for decades to follow. In its fictive constructive of Chinese space, the narrative representation of the den could both authenticate physical space and gain further rhetorical strength from that physical authentication, in ways prepared for by iterations of Chinese aesthetic spaces throughout the century. Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, in their comprehensive London: A Pilgrimage (1872), speak of their quest to be “introduced to the room where Edwin Drood opens,” and, as with other writers, it is unclear whether they imagine the room as the inspiration for Edwin Drood or Edwin Drood as the inspiration for the room.76 Even James Fields, who accompanied Dickens around London in the summer of 1869 prior to the writing of Edwin Drood, finds it difficult to separate out which came first when recalling the room for his Yesterdays with Authors: [We] also visited the lock-up houses, watch-houses, and opium-eating establishments. It was in one of the horrid opium-dens that he gathered the incidents which he has related in the opening pages of “Edwin Drood.” In a miserable court we found the haggard old woman blowing at a kind of pipe made of an old penny ink-bottle. The identical words which Dickens puts in the mouth of this wretched creature in “Edwin Drood” we heard her croon as we leaned over the tattered bed on which she was lying. There was something hideous in the way this woman kept repeating, “Ye’ll pay up according, deary, won’t ye?” and the Chinamen and Lascars made never-to-be-forgotten pictures in the scene.77

The novel directs the reader’s understanding of the lived scene, which can be understood as a never-to-be-forgotten picture precisely because Dickens’s fiction has provided the grounds to make such a scene pictureable. This urban picturesque aesthetic operates in reverse of the eighteenth-century rural picturesque; now the scene initiates the observer where once the observer initiated the scene. In seeking to gain this initiation for themselves, readers of Edwin Drood sought not only to visit but also to own the elements of Dickens’s narrative. One American reader of Edwin Drood found the novel’s opening description of the misplaced bed so intriguing that he decided to search it out for himself. In a letter to Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster he describes the process: “I went lately with the same inspector who accompanied Dickens to see the room of the opium-smokers.€.€. . Then a fancy seized me to buy the bedstead which figures so accurately in Edwin Drood, in narrative and picture. I gave the woman a pound for it, and have it now packed and ready for shipment to New York. Another American bought a



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pipe.”78 Here again, as in the previous chapter, possessions help to constitute the subject. But unlike Rossetti and Whistler, the subject being constituted does not channel the cultural and visual capital of the possession into new creative production, but rather returns each object’s value to establish further the accuracy of the originating narrative and picture that bestowed worth in the first place. In all these post-Drood accounts, the obsessive way that travelers detailed their search for the setting of the novel’s opening scene indicates the intense desire to discover such narrative space to be true. In time, Dickens’s account became enough of a standard of authenticity that disclaimers from urban explorers began to be the norm. Writes one Gentleman’s Magazine reporter: “Even Charles Dickens attained a very slight degree of [Chinatown’s] confidence, judging by the confusing account of the process of opium smoking which he gave to the world in the last chapter of his last work, Edwin Drood.”79 The irritation that “even” the master of fabrication, Dickens himself, could not produce an adequately realistic den suggests the magnitude of the project at hand, and the competitiveness with which this reality was constructed. London journalists began to downplay the peculiar intrigue of the East End opium den once accounts of such dens became a feature of the American periodical press. An account of “An East End Parish” appearing in All the Year Round in 1880 describes the life not of “the lowest and most picturesque stratum of the east” but of “the steady, toiling, unromantic and respectable classes,” repudiating vision’s figurative effects for its progressive and morally substantive ones.80 The author of this account includes in his description a fellow clergyman’s retelling of these “pictures of profligacy, crime, discord, and misery,” which “describes the court in which, in Edwin Drood, Jasper used to take his opium smoke.€.€. . The old crone who received him .€.€. lived .€.€. in a court just beyond the end of our churchyard.” But, even as he transforms Dickens’s characters to the status of real people, he also insists that “the novelist, the clergyman, and the Member of Parliament would withal allow that, while what is abnormal and exaggerated yields the readiest and most picturesque material for the writer, yet perhaps deeper and more intense interest belongs to the ‘simple annals of the poor,’ their constant struggle for existence, and the means that are taken to relieve the monotony of their dark lot, and to gild it with the halo of a better hope hereafter.”81 In yoking the clergymen and the member of Parliament to the novelist’s profession, this writer makes religious and gov-

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ernmental intervention both subject to narrative’s work of producing social order. The moral contrast between the ready picturesque and the “simple annals” demonstrates not only how thoroughly writing on the British urban landscape now duplicates the visual artifice understood to be a part of Chinese aesthetics; this contrast also shows how dangerous that duplication can be, both for the work of fiction and for the work of social and political reform. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” gets updated; now readers neglect the “simple annals” that Gray describes not for the allure of power and wealth, but for the degenerate charms of an alien aesthetic and the visual narrative it produces.82 Opium den visions so effectively write urban space as the space of foreign narrative, in fact, that only the decentering entry of the voice of these den’s residents into these narratives can return the space to an environment of moral uplift. The author of “Travels in the East,” published in 1884 in All the Year Round, begins with evocations of Drood-ian authenticity familiar from earlier excursions. “[T]hough I have not been to China, I have visited a house where a Chinaman is living,” he writes, explaining that this Jack Chinaman “was really the Jack Chinaman described as not endowed with ‘the true secret of mixing,’ by the opium smoking hag who kept the den described in ‘Edwin Drood.’ ” He adds: “The court where we were standing might very well have been the original, in fact, of the ‘miserable court’ where Mr. Jasper, on awaking from his narcotic trance, mistook the spike upon the bedpost for his cathedral spire.”83 Once the interview with the Chinese inhabitant begins, however, the narrative takes a different turn. First, the man is named—either Ah See, as the uncertain transliteration has it, or Johnson, as locals have named both him and his court—and second, he is given his own voice, however broken its representation. Ah See’s autobiographical statement allows him both to acknowledge his own fictionalization and to contextualize his history: I sixty-two .€.€. . I come London forty-five ye-ar. Come as cook abo-ward ship that time. Go home some ye-ar after. Live he-ar twenty-nine ye-ar. In this hoouse. Yes. Mr. Dic-kens come see me one ni-ight. No, I not know him at a-all. Sergeant tell me—that Mr. Cha-arles Dic-kens. Sergeant a poli-ice, ye-es. I preetty well off then. Plenty ship in do-ocks. Have taken some time five pound, sometime ten pound in a we-ek. Sa-ave it, O yes. Put by plenty money then. Wi-ife fi-ind where I ke-ep it. Messed it all awa-ay in dri-ink. Wi-ife pretty ba-ad then. Gave her good sha-awl came from for-eign. Was soon put awa-ay. Ye-es, that’s it, paw-awned for drink.84



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Though turning away from the celebrity author, Ah See nevertheless inscribes himself decisively into a sober and respectable domesticity in keeping with the moral and sentimental rhetorics popularized both by Dickens and the temperance movement the article promotes. In contrast to the foreign luxury goods that Ah See bestows on his wife, and that she wastefully converts into liquor, Ah See’s traffic in addictive substances, as well as his own lifelong addiction, has productively gained him a “clean, and even pretty” parlor. Of this room, the author notes, “there was no specimen, either ancient or modern, of any Chinese artist; not even so much as a real china teapot or a willow-pattern plate.”85 Instead, in the “highly-coloured portrait of Little Red Riding-hood” and the table “strong enough to bear a joint of Christmas beef,” Ah See’s lodgings are deliberately posed as counterevidence to the fictional narrative of the opium den, a contrast that the article makes explicit in its closing lines: But the truth is pretty certain that some ugly tales are extant, of sailors lured, and drugged, and robbed, and found at last half-dead.€.€. . Mr. Ah See has, of course, no recollection of these stories, which probably have sprung from the invention of an enemy, and might be told to the marines, or by the wags of Tiger Bay. But it is possible that Mr. Ah See may find it worth his while to close his tempting little den, if he lays claim to be a Christian, real and sincere; and if he would fain win sympathy, not to speak of some stray shillings, or even sovereigns, it may be, which for so interesting a convert might by certain weak-kneed people be most piously subscribed.86

In this conclusion, Chinese immigrants like Ah See now find themselves offered participation in a different kind of narrative economy. If the opium den fictions relied for their economic and cultural value on the authenticating stereotype of a single space, the Christian and temperance conversion narrative depend on the replacement of the space of the opium den with the sober site of the parlor. The architectural measure of the Chinese immigrant remains relational, accruing value through the disconnect between its past and present states. In fin-de-siècle fiction, however, no versions of Ah See come forward to bridge the gap between opium den and Christian parlor. Oscar Wilde’s description of Dorian Gray’s opium possession in The Picture of Dorian Gray instead borrows the structure of Drood’s displays with all of their allure but none of their pleasant cohesion.87 The Florentine cabinet housing Dorian’s opium, unlike Crisparkle’s “welcoming closet,” both fascinates and terrifies. So too does the opening of the cabinet both mirror and contradict the syn-

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optic command of Tartar’s spring-loaded cabinets. Wilde writes: At last he .€.€. having unlocked it, .€.€. touched some hidden spring. A triangular drawer passed slowly out. His fingers moved instinctively towards it, dipped in, and closed on something. It was a small Chinese box of black and gold-dust lacquer, elaborately wrought, the sides patterned with curved waves, and the silken cords hung with round crystals and tasselled in plaited metal threads. He opened it. Inside was a green paste waxy in lustre, the odour curiously heavy and persistent.88

Instead of remaining at home, however, Dorian puts the box of opium away in favor of a trip to an East End opium den, where “where one could buy oblivion .€.€. where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new” and so where he can more thoroughly “cure the soul by the means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.”89 Here the public space of the consumption enhances the opium’s familiar effect. Arriving at the den, “a small shabby house .€.€. wedged in between two gaunt factories,” Dorian finds lurid interest in this familiarity. [He] looked round at the grotesque things that lay in such fantastic postures on the ragged mattresses. The twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes, fascinated him. He knew in what strange heavens they were suffering, and what dull hells were teaching them the secret of some new joy. They were better off than he was. He was prisoned in thought. Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away.90

Dorian recognizes the addicts not just from personal experience but also from his conditioned understanding of the narrative and aesthetic tropes under which he operates. If Dorian Gray’s experience claims an antirealism more generally by proposing biological form as itself a copy image, as Nancy Armstrong has argued, this brief scene in the opium den brings another location and history to this inversion of the real.91 Dorian’s identification with the fantasies of the opium addicts emerges directly from his visual recognition of their contorted forms, but this identification gets immediately blocked by Dorian’s consciousness that his own actions have incurred no such physical transformations. That these contortions are not just bodily effects occurring within the narrative but fictional tropes existing beyond and through a whole genre of narrative, shifts the terms of Dorian’s recognition. While John Jasper’s vision of the den was both enabled and fatally confined by the terms of the den’s own representation, Dorian’s den visit demonstrates the misdirecting effects of any physical evi-



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dence in understanding narrative representation within a text so devoted to the defiance of realist narrative. By contrast, Doyle’s “Man with the Twisted Lip,” published in The Strand in 1891, offers the master-observer Sherlock Holmes as counterevidence to such destabilizing claims. Yet Doyle also enfolds and perpetuates the den’s fictive disruptions through the story’s Watson-centric prologue and Holmes’s initial lapse in detective acumen. Watson, describing his progress “eastward in a hansom on a strange errand,” explains that he has been charged with retrieving the wayward husband of his wife’s old school companion from an opium den in Old Swansea. Between a slop shop and a gin shop, approached by a steep flight of steps leading down to a black gap like the mouth of a cave, I found the den of which I was in search. Ordering my cab to wait, I passed down the steps, worn hollow in the centre by the ceaseless tread of drunken feet, and by the light of a flickering oil lamp above the door I found the latch and made my way into a long, low room, thick and heavy with the brown opium smoke, and terraced with wooden berths, like the forecastle of an emigrant ship. Through the gloom one could dimly catch a glimpse of bodies lying in strange fantastic poses, bowed shoulders, bent knees, heads thrown back and chins pointed upwards, with here and there a dark, lack-lustre eye turned upon the new-comer.92

The striking similarity between Doyle’s description and Wilde’s exactly contemporary writing demonstrates the solidity of the den as a received fictional category. Doyle’s descriptive gestures—the black cavelike opening, the rickety staircase leading downward, the lack of light, the windowless room, the multiplicity of beds, the body parts both contorted and divorced from individual forms—each make familiar elements of the den’s fictional regime. But Watson’s utter inability to identify with the addicts defies Dorian’s disturbed self-recognition. For Watson, the figures evince both a Chinese global diaspora and overseas mobility as well as a containing rhetoric of display; the beds are both berths for lodging and shelves for exhibition. The sudden revelation that Holmes himself is among these strange figures introduces a more involving but equally conventional reading of the den, as Holmes’s opening declaration of the mystery to Watson doubles as an indictment of the den’s foreign space: “We should be rich men if we had a thousand pounds for every poor devil who has been done to death in that den. It is the vilest murder-trap on the whole river-side, and I fear Neville

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St. Clair has entered it never to leave it more.”93 Yet Holmes’s first impression proves false. When it is revealed that the middle-class St. Clair is both alive and well and has been, through his knowledge of theatrical disguise, pursuing a lucrative though socially unsupportable career as a street beggar, Holmes castigates his own lapse in judgment: “I think, Watson, you are now standing in the presence of one of the most absolute fools in Europe. I deserve to be kicked from here to Charing Cross.”94 Note Doyle’s careful deployment of geographical knowledge here, as Holmes’s deduction marks also his return to a named London geography from the performative space of the “murder-trap.” The progress of the mystery does not work, however, without that initial central characterization of the opium den as a fundamentally misrepresented and misrepresenting space, both spatially and textually. Doyle relies on these misdirections to do both intra- and extranarrative work; not only is Sherlock Holmes fooled by his received understanding of the den’s immoral nature, but the reader must be as well, or the affective weight of St. Clair’s disappearance will be lost. By contrast, when St. Clair’s mystery is revealed to be unrelated to the den’s degeneracy, the characters and readers must be equally willing to abandon their concerns about this shadowy space. In reading the den’s representations under the tutelage of the new century’s master-observer, we come to understand how in detection fiction, as Elaine Freedgood has argued, “metonymy can be ‘solved’ in that it can be social and semiotically stabilized.”95 Yet as the next chapter will show, the broader implications of British incorporation of aesthetics imagined to be Chinese into representations across many media defied this solution. In particular, the photograph embeds the representational contest that these opium den fictions have described and resituates it both temporally and geographically. Travelers writing about their photographic practice in China must somehow bring together their assertions of photography’s visual immediacy with the long-standing effects of Chinese aesthetics on the development of their own eyes.

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“What a prospect is hereby opened up to us,” declared the Illustrated London News in 1861, reporting on the British victory in the Second Opium War.1 The newspaper intended this exclamation figuratively, as a way to herald the return of Lord Elgin to Britain and the new possibilities for commercial and cultural intercourse enabled between Britain and China in post–Opium War relations. But the visual implications of the word “prospect” are difficult to ignore in the pages of Victorian Britain’s premier pictorial weekly. And indeed, after the military, political, and economic incursions of the Opium Wars, China was literally more visible than ever before. The onceexclusive grounds of the Yuanming Yuan, looted, burned, and in many places leveled by Elgin and the British and French forces in October of 1860, were now open to all comers. The 1858 Treaty of Tianjin had already opened China’s interior to foreign explorers, missionaries, scientists, and traders, added another eleven multinational coastal treaty ports to the five established by the Treaty of Nanjing to facilitate global trade, and granted Britain, France, Russia, and the United States the right to station foreign legations in the previously closed city of Beijing. Thus despite the passive phrasing of the ILN’s exclamation, the prospect that was opened up throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century did not get exposed by chance or happenstance. Yet neither was its visual value as unitary as the ILN’s singular construction implies. China’s newfound openness, for British readers, signaled not only the territory’s commercial and political acquiescence but also the availability of China’s land and people for military survey, scientific interpretation, religious conversion, and

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general tourism. What made post-1861 vision of China truly such a new prospect, in a material sense, however, was a European development: the appearance of (relatively) portable cameras following the invention of the collodion process of exposing and developing photographic plates in 1851. Thanks to this newfound portability, the practice of photography and the penetration and representation of China’s mainland geography by British observers could develop concurrently and interdependently. China became, or was made, photographic in the mid to late nineteenth century by photographers such as Felice Beato, John Thomson, and Isabella Bird, whose images and writings I examine in this chapter.2 This photographic transformation of China could not have occurred, however, without the preparations by other media that the preceding chapters have described. In considering the photograph, then, the argument that I have been following throughout this book reaches both its apotheosis and its undoing. I say undoing not because the conditions I have been describing vanish, but because they are so effectively absorbed into the discourse on photography’s role in modern life that their continuing presence gets obscured. Yet the photographic medium did not take primary claim to the territory between material representation and lived experience without precedent. It is a central contention of Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer that photography, rather than being a driving force in the production of modern visual practice, is rather a symptom of a change in ways of seeing that had already occurred some years prior to photography’s rise to power.3 The sheer volume of discourse concerning photography and modern vision, then, indicates not the success of the photographic intervention but the thoroughness of the preceding visual revolutions, located in the rise of scopic apparati that redirected visual practice away from the priority of the human form. Crary’s work is a foundational piece of this book’s argument. This chapter, however, will consider the diagnosis of photography as symptom rather than cause in a different fashion. I have worked throughout this book to show the ways that Chinese places and objects carried with them their own sets of conventions and expectations about how to see and be seen, and I have argued that these effects continued far past material ends, into narrative epistemology and beyond. My closing attempt to register these trajectories will be to note the points at which they rejoin practices of material representation—that is, moments when British eyes imbued with the effects of Chinese aesthetics turn those eyes once more to photograph China.



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In that moment, the visual production of both the land and the people of China, as well as the British observer himself, becomes fraught practice, setting the photographer’s visual memory of his long-held atemporal aesthetic view of China against a new way of seeing China claimed to be direct, immediate, and real. Descriptions of both the exposure and the development of photographic plates in China in the nineteenth century therefore become particularly important because they offer a symbolic moment in which the act of seeing can be made narratable. In this symbolic moment, the historical process of making visual sense of China gets revised; now the camera’s lens substitutes for the British eye as a site where China could be “framed, frozen and fixed,” this time, without the vagaries of human perception. 4 Yet this revision fails both generally and on more particular terms. Cameras remained subject to the visual framings of their operators, and the vision of China continued entrenched in the history of its difference. I have argued that the garden, the willow pattern plate, the display case, and the opium den all served as visual media that came to direct not only British visions of China but British visions of themselves as well. Now I conclude that the camera took over but did not fundamentally alter those acts of direction. This chapter, therefore, focuses on verbal descriptions of the making of photographs in China as much as the images of those photographs themselves: descriptions that have merited varying degrees of critical attention in the past. Although Felice Beato did not himself write about his images of the British forces during their final attack on the Taku Forts and the Yuanming Yuan, surrounding soldiers and journalists recorded their impressions of his innovative wartime camera-work in accounts of the Second Opium War.5 John Thomson, a celebrated documentary photographer of London and of Asia, produced three popular and well-received travel narratives read widely in the nineteenth century and today—Illustrations of China and Its People (1873–74), The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China (1875), and Through China with a Camera (1898)—describing the difficulties and triumphs of photographing China. And Isabella Bird, renowned “lady traveller,” though far better known for her prolific authorship than her technical proficiency with the camera, produced ample photographic illustrations in her Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899) and Chinese Pictures (1901). I include all of these differently received narratives because writing about the making of photographs allows these authors to best explain how that making has consequences for understanding visual practice in China across the board.

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This is true not only in moments when British photographers describe superstitious Chinese reactions to their camera but also in descriptions of these photographers’ own rationales in composing, capturing, and developing images. In demonstrating how the act of photographing China can be made narrative, then, these three photographers all show how the rhetorical construction of the photographic image of China depends on historical precedent even as it denies temporal engagement. The camera’s operation, held to be so direct and immediate as to exist outside of time, repictures China as a land whose corresponding atemporality will be returned to contemporary history once it becomes a photographic subject. Whether in Beato’s photographs of Chinese war dead, Thomson’s images of the destroyed Summer Palace, or Bird’s images of a depopulated Chinese interior, these images seek to show China as physically and historically removed. That is, rather than understanding China as a geography already in the midst of great systemic and internally motivated change, British writers and readers could through these images imagine the Chinese nation as still poised on the brink, ready for a move into modernity that could be possible only with the aid of foreign influence. The British camera and the photographs it produced of China’s interior made key evidence in this imposition of stasis; by depicting China as a still and depopulated landscape, the Chinese nation’s absence from historical agency might more easily be supposed, and the camera’s influential role in directing China’s entry into international affairs could more naturally be assumed. As the Academy commented in a review of Alicia Little’s Intimate China, after excerpting Little’s description of a traditional Chinese fire-god festival: “This is pleasant, but it is no longer remote. The Englishman .€.€. [with] the camera aimed at the fire-god, make all the difference. The picture becomes definite as Western daylight slowly suffuses the scene.”6 James Ryan has shown that the shift to a supposedly purely formal critique of vision as directly recorded by photography was thought to make unnecessary the cultural commonplaces that had informed earlier depictions of foreign and subjugated territories. Nineteenth-century photographers theorized the camera’s act of perception outside the bounds of any human subjectivity, whether of colonizer or colonized.7 But Ryan also makes clear that the light-dependent process of photography fit naturally within a pre-existing “geographical discourse .€.€. whereby the mutual extension of Christian civilization and scientific knowledge represented a



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transference of ‘light’ into the ‘dark’ recesses of the globe.”8 Light from the West, as in the Academy review above, makes China visible to modern eyes both photographically and nationally. That the photograph stands both as privileged alternative and logical continuation to previous rhetorics of the improving effects of European formal and informal empire is a contradiction noted by many theorists. 9 Scholars of the nineteenth century in particular have linked debate on the parallel roles of image and text in depicting the colonial encounter to larger visual and verbal debates structuring photographic and literary theory in practices of the past. Carol Armstrong, in calling to “re-inscribe the nineteenth-century photograph in its textual surround,” has argued for a historically situated and particularly materialist interpretation of this debate, while critics like Jennifer Green-Lewis, in reading the Victorian photograph within and alongside contemporary discourses of realism, theorizes the inextricability of photography from language within a conceptually heterogeneous framework.10 At issue here is not just a reconstruction of Victorian photographic approaches, then, but also an acknowledgment of the interlocked priorities of verbal and visual practice in any historicized account of the eye. Yet even nineteenth-century understandings of photographic practice, of course, questioned the idea of a camera truly independent from subjective influence. Even as nineteenth-century practitioners imagined their camera as a device incapable of anything but absolute reproductive truth, they struggled to reconcile such fidelity with an ongoing obligation to what was variously referred to as “art,” “spirit,” “idealism,” or other terms challenging the indexicality of the photographic practice. John Tagg has shown how these struggles arose from social practice and were resolved through systems of social control in the early British context, while Christopher Pinney has documented the place of photography in asserting British colonial rule in India in ways that both incorporate and complicate the processes that Tagg describes.11 More recently, Jennifer Tucker has demonstrated the complex evidentiary status of the photograph in the context of Victorian science.12 Photography of China in particular, I argue, makes this tension between the artistry of the photographer’s eye and the faithful transcriptions of the camera—a “pencil of nature,” as Henry Fox Talbot had influentially termed it in 1844—still more challenging. To maintain the standards of authentic account that the travel narrative meant to convey, the camera needed to reproduce China with perfect visual accuracy. But to control the

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intrusions of Chinese observers, whose visual practices conflict with British soldiers and photographers alike, the Briton behind the camera had to do more than simply operate the photographic device. Such difficulties could partly be resolved through aesthetic theory. Bird, for example, proposes that a truly accurate representation requires both spiritual as well as technical resemblance, an evocation that Chinese observers could not, in her estimation, master. But it also received material resolution. In making their photographs commodities that could be sold as individual views, packaged as albums, pasted in photographic art books, reproduced as wood cuts or steel engravings, or exhibited as art works—not to mention rewritten into textual descriptions—these photographers returned narrative control to the British observer, whether that observer was the photographer or the viewer of the photograph or both. To maintain this British control, photographic narratives of China relied on a shared knowledge of an imagined Chinese visual past while at the same time denying that imaginary vision modern influence.

Felice Beato and the Second Opium War In recounting the British understanding of photography in China as a spectral visual contest between British and Chinese observers, then, it makes sense to begin with the photographer best known for recording Britain’s victories in Sino-British military contests. Reflecting on Beato’s close association with British troops abroad, Helmut Gernsheim comments: “Beato, more than any other nineteenth-century photographer, concentrated on the documentation of violent events.”13 David Harris argues that Beato’s carefully arranged photographs of the final engagements of the Second Opium War and its aftermath constitute the first complete photographic record of a military campaign.14 In particular, Beato’s work in China marked the first time that dead bodies—albeit exclusively Chinese ones, selected and positioned by Beato—were included in photographic representations of the postbattle scene. Yet despite Beato’s significance for the early history of professional photography in China and war photography in general, many aspects of his biography remain unknown, including details of his birth—which is supposed to have been sometime in the 1820s in Venice or Corfu.15 After partnering with his brother-in-law, James Robertson, to document the Crimean War,



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Beato struck out on his own to photograph British troops amid key sites in the Indian Mutiny. The work gained him acquaintance with many British officers, including Sir James Hope Grant, lieutenant-general of the British forces, who notes in a letter sent from the China front that the “very good” photographs enclosed “are taken by an Artist—Mr. Beato who was sent from India with me.”16 Grant’s endorsement of Beato—“whom I had specially allowed to accompany the expedition,” as Grant writes in another letter—demonstrates Beato’s close association with the British army.17 As the Daily News correspondent in China reports: “[T]he indefatigable M. Beato has made his appearance, and will, I have no doubt, ere long add a volume of Chinese views to those of the Crimea and India. He has obtained permission to accompany the force, so that you folks at home need not despair of seeing a photographic panorama of the Great Wall of China, on which you will (in the foreground) see John Jones scratching his name.”18 The literal inscription of the common British soldier into the landscape, here comically described, paralleled the symbolic command over the Chinese landscape that Beato’s photographs allowed to military men and their families. The London Times reports on Beato’s “golden harvest” in China reaped by the ease of photographic reproduction, which meant that “the photographer could multiply his copies as fast as he pleased, and every one could send home his image .€.€. for a few shillings.”19 As David Harris points out, Beato’s status as a commercial photographer meant that he needed to choose photographic subjects ideologically supportive of the British military cause to guarantee his sales.20 The availability of photographic images of the war was increasingly felt as a necessity for journalism as well, though such images still were seen to be in competition with artists’ sketches and verbal descriptions. Thus Beato’s regular appearances in newspaper articles about the war, requesting “steadiness” while taking his photographs, always come subordinate to long descriptive passages that have already made visual representation of the scene about to be photographed.21 Beato’s friendship with the Illustrated London News artist of the China campaign, Charles Wirgman—the two established a commercial art and photography studio in Japan in 1864—belies this constant contemporary sense of generic competition in making representation of the war.22 One photograph that did come to the fore in representing British military success is Beato’s portrait of Prince Gong, the brother of the deposed Qing emperor left behind as representative of that dynasty to meet the British in Beijing and concede to their treaty terms after the destruction of

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Fig. 6. Felice Beato, “Prince Kung: Brother of the Emperor of China, Signer of the Treaty” (1860). British Library OIOC Photo 353/2. © All Rights Reserved. The British Library Board. Licence Number: UNIMIS05.

the Summer Palace (Figure 6). The photograph stands as a key document in the British victory in Beijing, deployed repeatedly alongside or within verbal narratives of the war: an engraving of the photograph serves as the frontispiece for Robert Swinhoe’s Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860 (1861), for example.23 Yet it was not an easy image to create. Beato’s first attempt to photograph Gong on 24 October 1860 failed, and the session had to be repeated on 2 November to capture the image Beato and documentarians of the war required. The initial attempt at a photograph is described by Sir James



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Hope Grant: In the midst of the ceremony, the indefatigable Signor Beato, who was very anxious to take a good photograph of “the Signing of the Treaty,” brought forward his apparatus, placed it at the entrance door, and directed the large lens of the camera full against the breast of the unhappy Prince Kung [Gong]. The royal brother looked up in a state of terror, pale as death, and with his eyes turned first to Lord Elgin and then me, expecting every moment to have his head blown off by the infernal machine opposite him—which really looked like a sort of mortar, ready to disgorge its terrible contents into his devoted body. It was explained to him that no such evil design was intended, and his anxious pale face brightened up when he was told that his portrait was being taken.24

Unlike Beato, Grant did not stand to profit financially from this photograph, and so could be more open about the multiple visual contests staged within this single scene. The first contest is the already lost struggle for sovereignty, recaptured in Grant’s description through the clash between Gong’s “devoted” body and the threat of the “evil designs” that will both delineate and destroy that body’s signifying presence. Grant’s status as an observer keeps this process conditional, as does his passive phrasing, and yet, despite his repudiation of physical violence, he is acutely conscious of possibilities for this photograph’s visual effect. His very designation of a full-face posed portrait by the performative title “the Signing of the Treaty” proposes that the photographic portrait somehow encodes a semiotics of concession in the way of more conventional icons like pen and parchment. But aside from the military concessions expected of Gong, the Qing prince must also accommodate a form of visual representation threateningly akin to the weapons that the British had already deployed. Grant’s amused tone, deprecating but not diminishing his relatively sympathetic identification with Gong as a photographic subject, suggests his own suspicions of the camera’s recording capacity. In reiterating that the camera “really looked like” a mortar, Grant relocates the perceptual challenges of this photograph from Gong to the camera itself; in Grant’s reading, Gong is not so much visually ignorant as the technology of the camera is itself epistemologically blurry. It is a technophobia common to early observers of photography in China, who had not yet learned to privilege the reports of the British camera’s eye over other pictorial and verbal representations. The two visions of the photograph—as either a repicturing of an individual Chinese body or a repicturing of the Chinese imperium as a whole— eventually overlap. Of all the ceremonial self- and imperially-abnegating

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actions Gong was to perform that day, his participation in the staged “good photograph” that Beato was so reportedly anxious to acquire cannot be said to have been the most immediately materially injurious to the Chinese government. And yet the circulation of the second, successful version of this photographic portrait as part of an album of images of the treaty concessions as well as in later historical assessment has come to define the prince’s character not only at that moment but through time. Beato’s photographs become, as Harris puts it, “the permanent and ‘public’ visual memory of this campaign.”25 Though, as Grant points out, “The treaty was signed, and the whole business went off satisfactorily, except as regards Signor Beato’s picture, which was an utter failure, owing to want of proper light”; the final image of Prince Gong succeeded admirably in producing, and reproducing, an image of Chinese acquiescence through the movements of its reception and circulation.26 Yet the acts of staging necessary to produce such an image elicited discomfort from other observers besides Grant. Dr. David Rennie, a medical officer serving with the British troops, disapprovingly recounts Beato’s photographic processes during the siege of the Dagu forts on 21 August 1860. I passed into the fort and a distressing scene of carnage disclosed itself; frightful mutilations and groups of dead and dying meeting the eyes in every direction. I walked around the ramparts on the west side. They were thickly strewed with dead—in the north-west angle thirteen were lying in one group around a gun. Signor Beato was here in great excitement, characterising the group as “beautiful,” and begging that it might not be interfered with until perpetuated by his photographic apparatus, which was done a few minutes afterwards.27

Here the contrast between the temporal experiences of writing and image-making seem to be most on display, for the horror of Rennie’s description comes especially in his slow passage into and around the fort’s postbattle landscape. As each new group of dead is revealed, the violence of the conflict becomes more clear. Beato’s photograph, however, disrupts the measured composition imposed by the movements of the physical eye and instead imposes an alternate, aesthetic order on the evidence of British victory (Figure 7). Rennie’s choice of the verb “perpetuated” further suggests the contrast between of the work of photographers and authors. Beato’s photographs of the “dead and dying” Chinese create a visual lineage along which his camera’s view of China can endlessly self-replicate. This reproduction, however, must be contradictory: the displacement of agency from Beato to the “photographic apparatus” points to the camera’s dispassion-



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Fig. 7. Felice Beato, “Interior Angle of North Fort Immediately after Its Capture” (1860). Wellcome Library, London.

ate eye, even as Rennie’s use of quotes around the term “beautiful” signals his disapproval of Beato’s overly emotional and aesthetic construction of the field of war. Photography is here, as it is elsewhere in contemporary debate, understood to be at once excessively and insufficiently embodied. Although the photographic equipment preserves a particular composition of Chinese for later reference, it also insinuates a mediatory aesthetic filter that contrasts the direct disclosure of the scene conveyed to Rennie’s moving eye. Yet the upstart status of the photographer complicates both his technical limitations and the later perpetuation of his photographs. In the few minutes between first witnessing the group of dead Chinese and recording that group as a photographic image, the particular work of the camera’s eye in making the image of China is revealed to be not nearly as hegemonic as one might suppose. Beato’s “great excitement” and “begging” mark a viewerphotographer possessed of an eye uncertain of its own continuing presence

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on the field of battle, and even more uncertain of its priority as a maker of representations—an uncertainty only enhanced by Beato’s non-English origins. Rennie’s scene-making is understood as both more accurate and more indexical than Beato’s, both in the moment it is experienced and in its later circulations, because Rennie’s verbal description establishes an image without competing visual or material referent. Unlike the photographer of China, whose images can either support or undermine the effects of any companion narrative, the writer on China claims an accuracy authorized through rhetoric and referent. The balance between narrative and photograph began to shift, however, as China became more available to the camera’s eye. With Prince Gong’s concessions to the British and French forces pragmatically stabilizing Qing foreign relations for a time, the decade of the 1860s allowed both a reconsolidation of power within the Qing government and an increased flexibility of travel for Britons throughout China’s interior—conditions of which John Thomson took full advantage. While Thomson is frequently remembered today for his collaboration with Adolphe Smith in Street Life in London (1877), a pioneering work of domestic documentary photography, Nancy Armstrong and Thomas Prasch have both shown that Thomson’s experiences photographing the Chinese helped develop his ideas on the ways Londoners could also be represented as photographic and ethnographic types.28 In addition to their anthropological focus, however, Thomson’s photographs and narratives also seek to assert compositional and narrative control over the landscape and architecture of China. In all cases, however, we can read traces of remembered British accommodations to Chinese aesthetics in his accounts of viewing China; the Chinese garden and the willow pattern plate remain constant in his visual memory and direct his later photographic practice. Thomson asserts control over these intrusions both by privileging the material and technical processes by which his photographs are made and by displacing his own inherited sense of China’s visual difference back onto the native Chinese who are his observers.

Through China with John Thomson’s Camera The opening to The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China and China restages the narrative of Western enlightenment that James Ryan more generally describes. Thomson writes: “At last the light of civilization seems indeed to



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have dawned in the distant East; with its early rays .€.€. penetrating to the edges of the great Chinese continent, where the gloom of ages still broods .€.€. and yields unwillingly to the daylight that now floods the shore.”29 The already clichéd terms of this introduction reinforce contemporary critical conceptions of Thomson as a gifted photographer and pedestrian prose stylist; his biography also supports this assessment. Born in Scotland in 1837, Thomson joined his brother (also a photographer) in Singapore in 1862 and spent much of the early 1860s traveling and photographing in Southeast Asia—publishing his first book, The Antiquities of Cambodia, in 1867.30 After settling in Hong Kong in 1868, he again spent the next four years traveling, visiting Fuzhou province, Taiwan, Shanghai, Beijing, the Yangtze River, and Szechuan, among others. He returned to England in 1871 and took only one more extended voyage abroad. During his time in Asia, however, Thomson gathered ample material to support a long publishing career. He first circulated his photographs through several privately subscribed albums, including one documenting his travels accompanying General Gordon’s “Ever-Victorious Army” (1868) as it fought in the Taiping Rebellion. Other albums include “The Visit of H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh to Hong Kong” (1869), “Views on the North River” (1870), and “Foochow and the River Min” (1873). His photographs then appear repeatedly in book form: first in the four-volume 1873–74 Illustrations of China and Its People, an expensive, large, leather-bound text accompanied by collotype reproductions, then the 1875 Straits of Malacca, Indo-China and China, illustrated with wood-cut reproductions of Thomson’s photographs, and the 1898 Through China with a Camera, which took advantage of the new method of half-tone reproduction of photographs to reprint much of the material published in Illustrations of China and Its People in a cheaper single volume.31 Indeed the text in these works, despite the distance between their publication dates, shares striking similarities; as Thomson writes in Through China with a Camera: “[In] China and in Chinese institutions there is no well-defined change to place on record.”32 Although reviewers frequently objected to the lack of new material, they universally praised the contributions his photographic narratives made to general British understandings of China. As the Athenaeum asserts in a review of Illustrations of China and Its People, “China is a country eminently fitted for the photographer’s arts,” because fine artists, by contrast, tend too easily either to exaggerate or suppress China’s visual difference. On the other hand, “Photography necessar-

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ily avoids both these extremes, and if any one wishes to verify our assertions in this respect, he cannot do better than to compare the sort of illustrations common to works on China with Mr. Thomson’s photographs.”33 Photography here becomes the antidote to other kinds of representational inexactitude. This is one step along the way to the rhetorical interchange of word and picture that occurred particularly clearly in the territory of China. As the terrain once held to be most challenging to direct and authentic representation, China can also be explained to be the best location to demonstrate the new capacity of visual technology to make plain an experiential vision of the real. Considering Through China with a Camera some twenty-five years later, the Speaker comments on the same images: “A marvel of distinctness, lifelikeness, and outstandingness, the plates bring the reader into immediate eye-to-eye communication with the Far East, such as no words alone, however graphic, could effect.€.€. . This volume suggests how ill-equipped is the traveller into the unknown which he would make known if he neglect to engage the sun as his constant “camera-de” and co-reporter.”34 The Speaker makes equivalent the movement from unknown to known and unreal to real in the Chinese context, but these changes are not in fact identical. This is made evident by the equally incorrect proposition that the traveler is the sun’s “attendant.” In rewriting the selective process of image-making as instead the universal experience of exposure to light, the Speaker rhetorically produces as natural and inevitable a parallel between photographic process and visual modernity that was in fact both deliberate and carefully staged. Thomson, in a similar fashion, insists in Straits of Malacca that his project is “to hold the mirror up” to the reader’s gaze. As Prasch points out, this metaphor fails; for a mirror held in front of the reader’s face will reflect not Thomson’s views of Asia, but the reader’s own image.35 Thus, Thomson’s claims to absolute accuracy constantly contrast with the more mediated experiences of aesthetic enjoyment and benefit. As he writes in his introduction to Through China with a Camera: The camera has always been the companion of my travels, and has supplied the only accurate means of portraying objects of interest along my route, and the races with which I came in contact. Thus it came about that I have always been able to furnish readers of my books with incontestable pictorial evidence of my “bona fides,” and to share with them the pleasure experienced in coming face to face for the first time with the scenes and the people of far-off lands.36



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Despite Thomson’s insistence on photography’s physical immediacy and absolute novelty, his reliance on a pre-established picturesque framework grounds his photographs in the long-standing tradition of seeing China through eyes within which a vision of the country has already been composed. Offering the camera as his companion seems to be his way of disavowing this habituated vision; his phrasing in describing the territory through which he traveled as the “regions in which the camera frequently made its first appearance” in a lecture delivered to the Royal Geographical Society in 1907 goes still further in suggesting that the camera itself, more than its operator, ought to be considered the traveler of note here.37 Yet in our reading, his emphasis on the camera’s companionship makes clear the machine’s connection to the social world of images as much as Grant’s comparison of the camera to a mortar reminded the reader of its destructive effects. Thomson continues his lecture by recalling his initial struggles with the wet collodion process: “[T]he enormous weight of dark tent, instruments, and chemicals, combined with the technical difficulties of instruments, and chemicals, rendered a photographic equipment a very doubtful addition to the burden of the explorer bent on a long journey into unknown or un-photographed lands.”38 Speaking in an era four decades beyond the rudimentary practices and theories of travel photography of the 1860s, Thomson easily equates unphotographed geographies with geographies unknown. But his historical perspective also allows him another temporal and epistemological realignment. As he notes, there was one “special virtue” in the collodion printing otherwise “hedged round with difficulties”: “[T]he plate had to be exposed, developed, and finished on the spot, so that one was enabled to judge of success or failure before striking camp.”39 Thomson’s qualification is particularly relevant to a professional audience, but it echoes his popular self-construction as a photographer as well. In both cases his narrative reminds us of the ways that his travel was mediated by its material visual representation. These daily development sessions symbolically stood in for the successful photograph’s conversion of the landscape’s past visual condition to the photograph’s present visual technology, in a way that becomes even more clear as Thomson looks back at the primitive days of photographic practice. One photograph judged unsuccessful by these standards emerges from his visit to a “typical” Chinese garden (Figure 8). He writes:

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Fig. 8. John Thomson, “The Willow Pattern Bridge.” Published in The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China (London: S. Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1875), facing page 256. Once arrived inside, we seem for the first time to realize the China pictured to us in our schoolboy days. Here we see model Chinese gardening; drooping willows, shady walks, and sunny lotus pool, on which gilded love barges float. Here too, spanning a lake, stands the well known willow pattern bridge, with a pavilion hard by. But we miss the two love-birds; there is no dutiful parent, with the fishtail feet, leisurely, and with lamp in hand, pursuing his unfilial daughter as she, with equal leisure, makes her way after the shepherd with the crook. I photographed this willow-pattern bridge, but when I look at my picture I find it falls far short of the scene on our soup plates. Where, for example, is the pavilion which is all ornaments, the tree above it which grows nothing but footballs, and that other tree too, on which only feathers bloom? Where is the fence that meanders across the platform in the foreground?40

Thomson’s disappointment at the inadequacy of the real garden to match his “schoolboy” memories of the willow pattern story demonstrates how complicated it is to photograph a country already deeply imbued with an established formal aesthetic that both anticipates and challenges photography’s innovations. Although Thomson expresses his dismay facetiously, the



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terms of his comparison point to an imagined Chinese aesthetic’s domination of China’s realistic representation. The willow pattern here projects such a powerful afterimage onto Thomson’s vision that it dictates the very occasion of his photograph, as Thomson, a British photographer, seeks visual evidence in a Chinese garden of a British pattern plate extrapolated from a Chinese design. The visual document of the photograph here must play catch-up to the popular plate widely dispersed throughout British households, while the physical space of the garden drops out entirely. Thomson, conscious of the willow pattern plate’s comparatively richer cultural status, seeks to elevate the photograph’s position by making the narrative lack of the photographic image a token of its value; his descriptive context emphasizes that the power of the documentary photograph rests in its limited pretensions. By claiming to represent solely what is present, without fripperies of ornament or trees with feathers or footballs for leaves, the photograph of the real garden makes productive benefit from its deficiencies. The developing genre of the documentary photography here gains primacy by challenging the influence of the formal elements of this Chinese design on a modernizing British vision. Yet looking at the woodcut reproduction of the image provided in Thomson’s text, the insisted upon equivalency with the willow pattern plate seems more surprising. It simply does not resemble the willow pattern, both for the reasons Thomson describes and for more basic compositional conditions: Thomson’s camera is positioned very close to and below the central bridge; the Chinese man on the bridge is alone and engaged in contemplation, not motion; there are no doves. All these reflect restrictions of the camera’s capacity as much as deliberate revisionings of a well-known image. The slow process of the camera cannot capture flying birds or moving people, nor can the camera’s bulk allow it to be lifted high above the ground. As much as the willow pattern defied spatial and temporal perspective to earlier readers, here it also points out the liberating possibilities of visual compositions unhitched from both the camera and the body that operates it. Thomson is by no means the only author carrying an imagined willow plate around China. Thomas Blakiston, the first Briton to travel extensively up the Yangtze, exhorts his readers in 1862: “We must believe in mountains, in inland seas, and all the usual physical features of other parts of the world, and cast from us the ‘fertile valley’ notion, and the ‘willow pattern,’ before

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we can even begin to realize China.”41 Likewise William Gill, a member of the Royal Engineers and independently wealthy explorer, self-mockingly describes his early notions of China prior to his noted travels there in the 1880s as “crude in the extreme: dim ideas of pigtails, eternal plains, and willow trees; vague conceptions of bird’s-nest soup and puppy pies.”42 And Isabella Bird records of her travels through China’s interior in the 1890s: “[E]very day I dropped some preconceived ideas of what Chinese scenery and buildings must be like, and I hope that my readers will drop theirs, if they are of willow-plate origin, before they have finished this volume.”43 In acknowledging the persistence of preconceived notions of the country of China, Bird’s exhortation also solidifies the willow’s prior presence in visual histories of Chinese aesthetics. Here as elsewhere, willow pattern representations of China exist in the past but exert influence in the present; with the camera’s development, however, the photograph seeks to overwrite that modern influence by divorcing visual effect from the vision that produces it. Even when recording a scene familiar from a willow pattern plate, the photograph claims to support a modern vision grounded in the camera’s impartial way of seeing. Such impartiality, however, cannot be nearly as assured as Thomson or Bird might claim. This is because not only do visual memories direct the ways that British observers see Chinese landscapes, but these memories also control British understandings of Chinese ways of seeing as well. British accounts of the viewing practices of Chinese observers make plain their own cultural assumptions about what vision should be, even as they claim neutral anchor for these assumptions in the camera’s technology. Thomson writes everywhere of the negative Chinese reaction to his camera. One mandarin, Thomson recounts, wished to see a demonstration of the photographic instrument but grew anxious upon being shown the completed picture and wondered “by what possible means a drawing could be so perfectly completed in so short of space of time; and then, without waiting for an answer, and casting an anxious glance at me to make sure I had neither horns, hoofs, nor tail visible, .€.€. hurrie[d] off.”44 This upsets the local villagers, who, Thomson observes, no doubt have “heard the popular fiction that pictures such as mine were made out of the eyes of Chinese babes.”45 The subjects of Thomson’s pictures are equally superstitious about their own participation in the process as they are about the techniques of photography itself. Thomson notes: “It is a widespread Chinese belief, from which men of the highest intelligence are by no means free, that, in taking a photograph, a



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certain portion of the vital principle is extracted from the body of the sitter, and that thus his decease within a limited period is rendered an absolute certainty.”46 This openly scoffing portrayal of “native” suspiciousness of photographic technology, so familiar to us from a multitude of travelers’ accounts, here becomes harnessed to the unspoken project of disavowing the alternate visual aesthetic that the British understood to be the Chinese way of seeing. The idea of pictures like Thomson’s being literally created from the eyes of Chinese babies is more than a gruesomely specific variation of the general belief in photography’s soul-stealing powers. Instead, the anecdote represents for Thomson a juncture point between the historical framings of an alternate Chinese kind of vision and the technology of his own photographic practice. Indebted to the pre-existing discourse on aesthetic attributes that allowed a piece of ornament or a plot of space to be understood to look Chinese, Thomson nevertheless substitutes a discourse on technical process for that older aesthetic conversation in order to distinguish his own representations of China and the Chinese from those already in circulation. Attempts by the Chinese subjects of his photographs to control the nature of their representation and to bring that representation into line with their own established traditions of portraiture are revised by Thomson as evidence of the literal inability of the Chinese to believe their own eyes. Of Chinese who demand that their portraits be taken face on, without shading, he writes: Shadow, they say, should not exist, it is an accident of nature; it does not represent any feature of the face, and therefore should not be portrayed and yet .€.€. [shade is] the element—though they fail to recognize it as such—to which, in conjunction with light, they are indebted for the visible appearance of all things animate and inanimate which make up the Chinese Empire.47

The erasure of shadow from the scene becomes a point of epistemological lack, not aesthetic convention. Thomson presents the Chinese failure to understand the scientific principles underlying the photographic process and their inattention to the medium’s particular aesthetic hallmarks as two aspects of a single whole. In describing Chinese portraits, both painted and photographic, Thomson complains that they are “mere charts of humanity” with “no attempt to pourtray character, to idealise the subject, and to hand down to posterity the tokens of the higher nature that shine through the human face.”48 Though this charting reminds us of the contemporary efforts

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of British photographers such as Francis Galton and Jones H. Lamprey to visually codify racial difference, Thomson uses his critique to insist on the distinction between British and Chinese visual practice. The grounds of the comparison, however, make unconsciously clear the priority of cultural effects—the “tokens of the higher nature”—in the British camera’s authenticating vision. The terms of this visual contest come clear in landscape photography as much as in individual portraiture. Of his attempt to photograph a bridge in Amoy empty of human subjects, he writes: I had just time to show myself and take a photograph, when a howling multitude came rushing down to where I stood near my boat on the shore. Amid a shower of missiles I unscrewed my camera, with the still undeveloped photograph inside, took the apparatus under my arm, and presenting my iron pointed tripod to the rapidly approaching foe, backed into the river, and scrambled on board the boat. I lost the cap of my camera, and the bright lens received a black eye of mud in exchange. However the picture turned out a good one.49

In the final development, the bridge appears alone and the howling multitude invisible. Thomson’s camera’s resemblance to a gun allows him to board a boat and escape in relative safety. (As Thomson puts it more pointedly in his earlier description of the same event in Illustrations of China and Its People, “For myself I sustained but little damage, while it may be fairly said that the bridge was taken at the point of the tripod.”) Although the eye of the camera is blacked out, the already recorded image of the incident remains, allowing Thomson to print retrospectively a vision of the moment that excises Chinese objection. Using the mechanism of his camera, Thomson can repicture the Amoy bridge as it “ought” to be, empty of inhabitants, and so reorder the timeline of events. The final document of this encounter, then, is not the image of Thomson in ignominious retreat, but the photograph of a China rich in architecture but empty of inhabitants—a China of the past, not the present or future. Straits of Malacca’s final iteration of this visual repicturing comes, appropriately enough, in Thomson’s account of his visit to the now-destroyed Summer Palace. He writes: There we found a wilderness of ruin and devastation which it was piteous to behold. Marble slabs and sculptured ornaments that had graced one of the finest scenes in China now lay scattered everywhere among the débris and weeds.€.€. . Enough yet remained, however, to give some faint notion of the untold wealth and labour that must have been lavished on this Imperial retreat.50



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Fig. 9. John Thomson, “Wang-Show-Shan.” Published in The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China (London: S. Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1875), facing page 526.

Thomson’s accompanying photograph (Figure 9) depicts both the monuments that remain standing—“spared, let us hope, on account of their beauty,” he explains—and the ruins scattered below.51 His regret at the extensive devastation echoes the rhetoric of other British travelers concerned by their government’s heavy retributions, but it also allows him to project onto the landscape the effects of the visual contest that he has heretofore kept implicit within his camera. Imagining the preservation of certain ornaments as evidence of the aesthetic selectivity of the invading troops makes little practical sense. As a description of the self-contradictory practices of the British observer in China at the dawn of the era of photography, however, the vision seems clearer. More dramatically than any other Chinese geography, the Summer Palace, before its destruction, demonstrated the ways that the antique and static past of China could be viewed in the present landscape by agents of modern empire. The military devastations brought physical change to this antique vision by tangibly removing the monuments that were the landscape’s past referents. Photographic repicturing, on the other

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hand, conveys modernity by its own image-making process, without the need for physical destruction, through the contrast between timeless subject matter and modern representational technique. This was already clear in Thomson’s photograph of the Amoy bridge, but is even more true here, where physical and abstract visual revisions come together most closely. Photographing the ruined Summer Palace “just as it was looted and left” pits physical attempts to make modern the Chinese landscape against visual attempts to do so.52 It also, by offering evidence of what remained intact, seeks to offer a relayed vision of what other British viewers could see in this landscape. As Thomson repeatedly republishes his images of China from the early 1870s throughout the remainder of the century, his images of a Chinese past continue to carry influence. Periodical reviews of Through China with a Camera, his 1898 republication of his 1860s photographs, reassert the relevance of the old photographs even as they offer new contexts for reading such images. The Bookman asserts: “Now that the Chinese question is so much to the fore there are many who wish to obtain some really reliable information regarding a strange country and a strange people. ‘Through China with a Camera’ is the best book we know of for the purpose.”53 The events bringing the Chinese question to the fore, in British minds at least, consisted especially of the growing number of antiforeign riots throughout China that preceded the full-fledged outbreak of the Boxer attack on the foreign legations in Beijing in 1900. The instability of the Qing empire was in those years conventional wisdom, and discussions of Chinese difference centered around the presupposition that China was about to undergo enormous change, for good or ill. Famines, unrest among ethnic and religious minorities, economic disparities, the idiosyncratic actions of the empress dowager, and internal divisions between Qing ministers all offered supporting evidence to that claim. That Thomson’s photographs, taken some twenty-odd years earlier, could continue to offer the best illustration of a country where it is “impossible to convey a clear and vivid description in words, and which can only be really understood by personal observation or by reproduction in photographs,” shows us that the verbal-visual debate remains especially inescapable in the Chinese context.54 In the case of Isabella Bird, the balance of this debate gets shifted. As a well-known travel writer but not a noted photographer, the inclusion of photographs and description of photographic practice in her narrative of travels in China occasion little remark in the periodical press. Yet, like



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Thomson, Bird uses China’s visual difference to form the core of her rhetorical efforts: not only in moments when she advises readers to abandon their willow pattern preconceptions but also in moments in which she seeks to assert the grounds of a more modern way of seeing. By the time Bird voyaged to China, cameras had advanced well beyond the difficult days of collodion process that Thomson described and were a common accessory; as the Photographic Art Journal advised in 1887: “Nothing in modern times has added a greater charm to travel in foreign lands than the Portable Camera. The ease with which photographic reminiscences of noted places and picturesque scenes may be brought home makes a Photo travelling case almost as natural a part of the tourist’s baggage as his portmanteau.” Yet despite Bird’s advantages, the disadvantages of her gender and amateur position weighed more heavily on her in her travels around the Yangtze Valley than they had in earlier volumes. Whereas in the 1883 Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither Bird had described a visit to Canton as “intoxicating from its picturesqueness, color, novelty, and movement,” her later volume takes a sober and scientific view immune to China’s visual disorder.55 This must be understood to be linked to the presence of a camera in her baggage; the photographic process, for Bird, legitimized the British photographer as an observer of China understood to be more acutely perceptive than the Chinese themselves.

“A Truthful Impression of the Country”: Isabella Bird In the opening pages of Isabella Bird’s The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899), which recounts Bird’s travels through central and western China in the years 1895–97, the reader meets with a verbal description of the author deprecating the volume’s careful construction. Explaining the genesis of the text that follows, she writes: “These journeys in China .€.€. were undertaken for recreation and interest solely.€.€. . I had no intention of writing a book, and it was not till I came home, and China came very markedly to the front .€.€. that I began to arrange my materials in their present form.”56 Later in the narrative, Bird recounts a conversation with a Chinese village headman suspicious of Bird’s reasons for travel who “attached no value to my statement that it was to see the country. I wished then and elsewhere that I had been able to say that it was in order to write a book.”57 The shifting tense of Bird’s refusal to claim her authorial status seems especially puzzling when

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Fig. 10. Isabella Bird, “The Author in Manchu Dress,” J. Moffat, Photographers. Published in The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (London: J. Murray, 1899), facing page 353.



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we read of it in the book that Bird did end up writing of her travels, for of course Bird’s identity as both a “lady-traveller” and a popular author was by this time well established; beginning in 1856 with The Englishwoman in America, she had published a series of travel narratives describing her travels in America, the Pacific, and the Far East.58 Her distinction between seeing a country and writing a book about a country, however, does make clear the difference that her text claims between the immediate physical experience of China and its revised written record. Absent in this dichotomy is the photograph, a text which Bird imagines to mediate between the two. Critics have diagnosed Bird’s textual self-dismissals as manifestations of anxieties about her generic status as author and her professional status as geographer, or as psychological misgivings about so much solitary traveling more generally.59 Lila Matz Harper suggests that later in her life Bird sought out a new, more professional authorial status and reading audience to match, focusing on “geographers, explorers, and colonial government officials rather than .€.€. readers of ladies magazines” and studied nursing and photography as part of that effort.60 Her anxiety about her reception as a serious scientist is perhaps amplified by Lord Curzon’s efforts to rescind her status as fellow of the Royal Geographical Society subsequent to her election to that body in 1892. There is certainly a traceable rhetorical concern in Bird’s work about focusing on matters of scientific interest. Speaking of the “pleasurable excitement” attendant on her travel into areas of far western China where no “English traveller has given any description,” she nevertheless qualifies that “I only regret that my lack of scientific equipment should make my account of it meager, and in some respects unsatisfactory.”61 Despite the freedom she openly enjoys in being far distant from forms of imperial civilization throughout the narrative, Bird is careful to emphasize also her strict adherence to appropriate behavioral codes throughout the narrative, and especially to downplay any consciousness of her gender. Complicating all of these rhetorical disavowals and generic directives, however, is the fact that before reading them the reader must first pass over the frontispiece portrait of the author in Manchu dress, a full-length posed portrait taken by the photographer John Moffat of Edinburgh (Figure 10). This image, reproduced again without explanatory context in the body of the narrative, establishes the author’s claim to status as a serious and involved negotiator of both Chinese geography and culture and offers a visual contradiction to the self-deprecating author described in the preface.

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Unlike the racial disguise adopted under duress by Robert Fortune and early missionaries, this race-costume makes no attempt to absorb the photographic subject into an alien ontology expressed in visual terms. Instead, her proudly self-assertive staging in the photograph—one hand at waist displaying a ceremonial belt, one silk-shod toe protruding from beneath the hem of the robes—performs in essence Bird’s general practice of impressionistic ethnography, even if the costume in no way echoes the practical dress Bird chose for her regular traveling attire. Bird’s portrait brings together several different visual traditions of selfrepresentation at the end of the century. In one way, Bird echoes the theatrical self-presentation of the urban explorers, whose photojournalistic explorations of “Unknown England” and “Darkest London” had included visits to opium dens and other scenes of foreign intrusion into British metropolitan society. Yet while turn-of-the-century lady reporters like Olive Christian Malvery used photographic representations of themselves in foreign dress as an opportunity to theatrically stage demonstrations of racial and class difference, Bird makes no concession to the Orientalist picturesque in her facial expressions or bodily posture.62 Nor do her physical presentation, hairstyle, or other accessories connect her to photographic portraits of aristocratic Qing women in similar clothing taken earlier by John Thomson as part of his series of Illustrations of China and Its People. Her portrait in Chinese dress does connect contextually to her photograph of the missionary J. Heywood Horsburgh in “Travelling Dress” that follows her own portrait in the body of the text. Horsburgh, as a member of Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission (CIM), followed Taylor’s controversial practice of adopting Chinese dress for proselytizing in the interior. Whether Protestant missionaries should wear the Chinese costume for their conversion work had occasioned serious debate between the more established London Missionary Society, whose members only rarely assumed native dress, and Taylor’s newer group of delegates, who regarded such costuming as a necessary orientation to life in China. Posed photographs of CIM missionaries in Chinese dress abound, but usually feature more practical and affordable plain cotton clothing typical of the ethnic Chinese the missionaries lived and worked with, as in Horsburgh’s portrait.63 However, the CIM’s central contention—that adoption of Chinese dress physically demonstrates the wearer’s attention to Chinese visual standards—matches Bird’s visual rhetoric. The specification in the portrait’s caption of “Manchu,” rather than “Chi-



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nese,” dress helps to indicate the higher-status affiliation that Bird claims for herself, while it also links her to the Manchu government’s crumbling and internally divided regime. Identifying in her authorial self-portrait with the class of non-native rulers who had governed China for the previous three centuries allows her to proactively counter any dismissals of her authority as a traveler and as a photographer. The body of her text reinforces this self-assertion; later in the narrative, Bird describes her encounter with a mandarin who asks her to “take” his family. Bird responds in the negative, for, as she writes, “I did not wish to pose as an itinerant photographer, and had grave doubts as to what my reception might really be in the women’s quarters, and I dreaded the stifling curiousity succeeded by the stagnation of dullness, so I excused myself.”64 This incident recounts in narrative form the right to free observation that the frontispiece portrait also illustrates, for no one could confuse Bird’s elegant Manchu dress with the garb of an itinerant photographer; it also asserts Bird’s refusal to make her direct gaze subject to the boredom and suppression of the women’s quarters. But the blank background of Bird’s portrait changes the context of this selfauthorization. Like John Thomson, who traveled with a plain backing that he used to block out the surrounding scenery when making portraits on Chinese streets, Bird erases the supporting visual evidence of the land that surrounds her. Visual direction, and visual control, rest solely in Bird’s costume and physical stance. Unlike Jo Hiffernan in Whistler’s Lange Leizen, Bird needs to gaze at no accompanying Chinese object to authorize her authentic vision of China. Bird makes clear the priority of her perspective in the text of the book’s preface as well. She writes: I have dwelt at some length on “Beaten Tracks”—i.e., treaty ports and the Great River,—though these have been described by many writers, for the reason that each one looks at them from a different standpoint, and helps to create a complete whole. The illustrations in this volume, with the exception of the reproductions of some Chinese drawings, and nine which friends have kindly permitted me to use, are from my own photographs.65

Bird’s shift from many writers to many illustrations emphasizes the narrative’s contested engagements with the visual history of China, as recorded both by British travelers and by the Chinese themselves. The “truthful impression,” stated aspiration of explorers throughout the scientific age, gains new resonance in the indexical era of the photograph. Bird’s photographs here will render individual what her text must synthesize; the “many writ-

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ers” who have rendered the “Beaten Tracks” such textually and physically overdetermined locations can be replaced by the proprietary claims to transcriptive reproduction of her “own photographs.” Bird’s claims to visual authority, however, do not always yield easily to such possessive claims. Despite the evidence of the frontispiece—which was, after all, not one of Bird’s own photographs—the descriptions of the photographic processes that take place within the text are fraught with the compromises and difficulties occasioned by the competing techniques of Chinese observers and the land of China itself. Bird’s text spends far more time describing the difficulties of extracting images in China than it does reflecting on her reasons for making them. Of two days spent confined solely to her riverboat, for example, Bird writes: Yet somehow I did not feel the least inclined to grumble.€.€. . [T]here were photographic negatives to develop and print, and prints to tone, and the difficulties enhanced the zest of these processes and made me think, with a feeling of complacent superiority, of the amateurs who need “dark room,” sinks, water “laid on,” tables, and other luxuries. Night supplied me with a dark room; the majestic Yangtze was “laid on”; a box served for a table: all else can be dispensed with.66

China, here portrayed as a naturally occurring photographic studio, still manages to leave a detectable mark of its presence in several ways, however. Bird continues: I lined my “stall” with muslin curtains and newspapers, and finding that the light of the opium lamps still came in through the chinks, I tacked up my blankets and slept in my clothes and fur coat .€.€. . [W]ater was the great difficulty .€.€. [;] unless filtered, [the Yangtze water] deposits a fine, even veil on the negative .€.€. as the critic will see from some of the illustrations.€.€. . When all these rough arrangements were successful, each print was a joy and a triumph, nor was there disgrace in failure.67

Bird’s difficulties come only partially from her lack of modern technology. More significant blocks to her efforts come from the Chinese that surround her themselves. The light from opium lamps that clouds her photographs makes a visual trace on her prints much as does the physical sediment of the Yangtze; and the interfering superstitions of her servants—who remain convinced, Bird explains, that “I kept a black devil in the camera, and that I liberated him at night”—challenge her recordings of the country as much as the river’s forbidding rapids.68



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As with Thomson, Bird reframes and simplifies this contest of visual wills as a matter of technophobia. She is less able to resolve the open visual challenges staged by Chinese onlookers on her physical privacy, and so is more violent in fantasizing her response. Like travel writers throughout the century, Bird finds herself particularly scrutinized during nights in village inns, and she writes with irritation of the incessant “scraping of holes in the plaster partition .€.€. between my room and the next .€.€. and .€.€. the application of a succession of eyes to the hole.€.€. . It was always a temptation to apply the muzzle of a revolver or a syringe to the opening!”69 Rather than acting on those temptations, however, Bird interprets it to her readers as a vexing technical problem: “I developed my negatives in my room at night, as it was almost always a perfect ‘dark room,’ and the greatest of my annoyance, was when a flash of white light showed that my neighbours had successfully worked a hole in the wall, and that my precious negative was hopelessly ‘fogged.’ ”70 Chinese vision and British visions of China are mutually destructive—for the Chinese to be able to see, the British representation must be destroyed, and, conversely, British viewers often express a wish to literally blind Chinese observers with the military and medical paraphernalia of advanced European technology. In Bird’s description of China, these visual challenges can eventually be overcome through the evidence of the photographs themselves. She recalls the acceptance granted to her by her bearers: “[We] gradually came to understand each other a little; and I found my cloak put over my shoulders for me, a wooden stool brought for my feet, sundry little comforts attended to, and a growing interest in photography, reaching the extent of pointing out objects at times ‘to make pictures of!’”71 The punctuation captures the whole of Bird’s response to such compositional directives, as Bird reveals no inclination to follow or even describe her bearers’ suggestions for images worth of reproduction. Bird persists in presenting her own vision of China to the Chinese she encounters, however; of another encounter in a “lofty hamlet,” she writes: “[H]aving learnt much caution as to the use of my camera, I asked if I might ‘make a picture’ of a mill worked by a blindfolded buffalo-cow.€.€. . [T]hey were quite willing, and stopped the cow at the exact place I indicated.€.€. . After seeing the mills I showed the people a number of my photographs taken en route, to show them that I was not doing anything evil or hurtful, but they said, though quite goodnaturedly, that it was ‘foreign magic.’ ”72 If the good-natured response of the mill workers demonstrates the possible eventual accommodation of the

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Chinese to the fact of photography in general, it does not grant them in Bird’s account the capacity to compose their own representation. Bird still needs to tell the cow where to stop. Paradoxically, this is true in large part for Bird because what passes for Chinese artistry hews too close to transcriptive representation. Describing a decorative arch erected outside of Szechuan, Bird writes: “The depth and sharpness of the cutting and the undercutting are remarkable, and the absolute realism. I never saw a bit of sculpture which showed a trace of imagination. The superb friezes .€.€. represent in a most masterly fashion .€.€. many .€.€. scenes of official and stately life, all rendered with photographic accuracy.€.€. . It is impossible not to admire the skill of the artists, and at the same time to wish for a trace of ideality in their art.”73 And, in her concluding prognostications on the fate of China in the twentieth century, which, Bird asserts, “depends very largely on the statesmanship and influence of Great Britain,” she notes the positive effect of many transplanted British technologies: “Chinese now work telegraph lines, own and run steam launches in large numbers, enter our hospitals as medical students, and take admirable photographs, nearly perfect in technique, only lacking in artistic feeling.”74 In Bird’s assessment, technological, scientific, and artistic advancement come hand in hand, all collectively signaling China’s potential entry into the family of modern nations. Realism is here framed as an experientially deficient technique rather than the modern capacity to constitute experience it once was, and photography, as a process, exists only as a corollary operation of that technique. Thus for Bird, like for Thomson, the camera alone cannot institute a revolution in viewing practices for the Chinese; an accompanying shift in conceptual capacity—to be imposed from the outside—must occur as well. This, as we have seen, is by no means a new conclusion. Although Bird emphasizes the Chinese as efficient operators of machinery, her assessment matches John Barrow’s rhetoric a century earlier in condemning the Chinese artist as merely a facile copyist, and, for that matter, Hegel’s insistence that the Chinese empire is essentially prosaic. We may read Bird’s subsequently published companion volume to Yangtze Valley as an even more heavily weighted rebuke to Chinese visual difference. Appearing just two years later, Chinese Pictures: Notes on Photographs Made in China (1901) was presented as “the outcome of talks with Mrs. Bishop over some of the photographs which were taken by her in one or other of her journeys into and across China” with the explicit purpose of



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rendering intelligible a people and a country that contains “possibilities which make it a terror to all other nations.”75 Yet though it is presented as a response to the attacks of the Boxer Rebellion, Chinese Pictures devotes equal attention to representations of Chinese architecture and landscape beyond the context of the storming of the British legation. The captions to the photographs come not from Bird’s own pen but from condensed transcriptions of her lectures, and the photographs themselves bear no direct witness to the woman who made them. Chinese Pictures instead inscribes Bird in and around the static scenes that the volume preserves. In understanding China as a “very difficult problem” that can be resolved in part through the “real information” conveyed by Bird’s China photographs, the connections between geopolitical challenges and aesthetic dilemmas come together.76 Chinese Pictures, even more so than Yangtze Valley, specifically presents the architectural monuments of Chinese imperial power as examples not only of the decaying political conditions of China but also of the decayed moral and cultural values of the Chinese people themselves. Of a photograph entitled “The Great Imperial Stone Road from Peking to Chengtu, the Capital of Sze Chuan,” the accompanying text observes: “Made more than a thousand years ago, it must have been a gigantic work at the time of its construction.€.€. . It is very much out of repair, as are most things in China.”77 Likewise, on a photograph called “The Temple of the Fox, Mukden,” the text annotates: “The temple is situated close to the city wall, which is shown in process of decay, the descending roots of the trees stripping off its facing, which lies and will continue to lie on the ground. It is an admirable illustration of the way things are allowed to go to ruin in China.”78 This indifference to the work of preservation and maintenance clearly extends to the Chinese as a social body. In the volume’s most sentimental portrait, “The Dying Coolie,” the supporting description observes: “The coolie in the picture was one of Mrs. Bishop’s carriers, who fell sick by the way, and though he had been a companion of the other men for many days, they had no care for him when he fell sick, and Mrs. Bishop was laughed at for taking the trouble to wet a handkerchief to lay on the feverish forehead of a man who was of ‘no more use.’ ”79 The accompanying photograph depicts not only the pure white square of Bird’s handkerchief on the emaciated coolie’s forehead but also a crowd of Chinese onlookers arranged behind the coolie’s collapsed body. That the onlookers all appear to be looking at the camera, not the coolie, and that the coolie’s enervation

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Fig. 11. Isabella Bird, “Fort on the Peking Wall.” Chinese Pictures (London: Cassell: 1900), facing page 86.

apparently comes directly from his labors carrying Bird’s equipment are both not mentioned. Instead, the efforts of the editors are everywhere to confirm very longstanding beliefs in the stagy inauthenticity of the Chinese gaze, extending even to the portrait of “Fort on the Peking Wall,” whose visual interest is located “in the fact that the guns showing in the embrasures are dummies, being simply painted wood” (Figure 11).80 This photograph, not included in either Yangtze Valley or Korea and Her Neighbours, figures Qing military capacity as visually ineffectual in two ways: not only do the painted guns fail to deceive outside viewers, but the round eyelike paintings themselves become a set of multiple unseeing eyes arrayed across the windows of the fort. This particular visual deception, along with similar stories of mounds of earth painted white to resemble the tents of a nonexistent army and intimidate passing British warships, has been a staple of accounts of techno-



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phobic Chinese military practice since at least the eighteenth century, and so doubly confirms Qing stasis and foreign perspicacity. The immediate context of the defeat of the Chinese in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) gave further confirmation to this understanding of Qing stagnancy.81 While the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s smoothed the way for Japan to become a powerful modern nation, the Qing Self-Strengthening movement failed to achieve similar goals. For Euro-American observers, the diversion of funds intended for naval forces to the construction of a summer palace for the empress dowager and the consequent defeat of the underprepared Qing navy by the Japanese symbolized a broader Qing denial of the terms of modern warfare that would result in the inevitable subjugation of China to the rule of other nations, including Japan. Rendered in photographic language, the Qing military complex is revealed to be inadequate in metavisual terms. The concentric circles of the false armaments, then, model the reader’s response to the gazing eyes of the Chinese subjects in the volume’s photography as a whole—neither possessing a perceptive nor a perceptual rigor adequate to engage with a British observer. Comparing this act of symbolic portraiture with Beato’s photograph of Prince Gong taken forty years earlier, we find the field of visual uncertainty has shifted. Now it is not the camera that appears to resemble a weapon, but the guns themselves that only appear to be weapons. And while the physical eye, as conceived by the Chinese observer, is meant to be deceived by these painted images, the camera making these Chinese Pictures cannot be misled. In the first years of the twentieth century, despite the efforts by Qing ministers to impose a program of New Policies meant to reform the imperium while maintaining central control, China moved further toward dynastic overthrow, a revolution achieved in the 1912 establishment of the Chinese Republic. Britain continued to hold exterritorial claims in Chinese coastal cities, as it would through the end of World War II, while Britons continued to travel extensively throughout all parts of China. The prospect lying open to the British gaze had expanded in both form and substance for British observers from the view the Illustrated London News once heralded, and this transformation could be accounted for in part through the exposing movements of the photographer’s eye. Even as the possibilities of what the Victorian camera could achieve in China seemed to diminish, new technologies arose to carry on and expand the visual possibilities that China—and in particular the Boxer Rebellion—

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allowed. Many of these were facetious: the American James Ricalton proposes in his illustrated guidebook China through the Stereoscope (1901) that perhaps even the embodied viewing of the stereoscope cannot adequately convey experience. In looking at the infamous British legation, a place already imbued with mythic importance as the site most famously attacked by angry Chinese engaged in antiforeign riots and most famously rescued by British and American forces, he suggests: “Could there have been present some sort of cardioscope, if I may coin a word, to register heart-beats and emotions, what a picture we would have had! .€.€. But we must be satisfied to merely look upon the place.”82 While the possibilities of Britain’s cardioscopic eye must remain elusive, the advances of other visual technologies continue to emphasize China as a site of representational crisis while at the same time resisting any resolution to that crisis. The most major of these new visual technologies, of course, is the medium of film. Like many other newly formed film production companies, the British firm of Mitchell and Kenyon used current events as the content for their earliest films. Faithful re-creations of domestic and foreign happenings gave documentary verisimilitude to cinematic productions, and events in China proved of particular interest.83 Accounts of the Boxer Rebellion were dramatized in July 1900 by four separate films: Attack on a Mission Station, Attempted Capture of an English Nurse and Children, The Clever Correspondent and The Assassination of a British Sentry.84 It is Attack on a China Mission—Or Bluejackets to the Rescue, made by James Williamson, first issued in November of 1900 but revised and reissued in 1903, that has become particularly notable for historians of cinema, however, because of the revised version’s landmark use of the technique of shot/reverse shot.85 That device, later a staple of Hollywood narratives, creates a sense of chronological continuity by juxtaposing two successive scenes of individual looking in such a way that the subjects appear to be sharing a mutual gaze. In Attack on a China Mission, a missionary’s wife is first seen waving a handkerchief on a balcony; in the next scene, the bluejackets are shown advancing on the mission and firing directly into the camera.86 The question of what Williamson intended to achieve through this editing has been greatly debated—does he indeed intend to imply that the wife is waving “directly” to the approaching bluejackets, as arguments for the innovation of this film have proposed? In the end it may not matter. As Martin Sopocy explains, while the appearance of a last-minute rescue was a familiar technique, the fact that the rescue could be implied and dramatic energy generated solely



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through the juxtaposition of two images, intended or not, was a first in the history of motion pictures.87 The evidence of Williamson’s film, staged in the garden of a rented house in Sussex with an all-English cast playing the roles of both missionaries and Boxers, does not prove that such visual innovation could only have occurred in the context of a British representation of China. But neither should we find this union of cinematic advance with the Boxer Rebellion wholly coincidental. If we take the viewing position that the film grants us as an embodied space, we place ourselves in the same position as the attacking Boxers. Only by proposing the connection between the missionary’s wife and the rescuing troops as an unconscious linkage can we preserve the implied viewing space as a neutral position. And so in film, as in preceding visual technologies, both the content and the form of the representation remind us of the distancing effects imposed by our own perception. Thus the fantasy of a fully embodied, and therefore fully real, vision of China continues to be deferred. This remains a dilemma of vision a century later, though a much more self-conscious one, as the work and reception of the modern American photographer Lois Conner demonstrates. In a review of a 2000 exhibition of Conner’s work for the New York Times, the photography critic Vicki Goldberg notes the contradictions elided in one of Conner’s Chinese landscapes: In one vertical photograph .€.€. we look down on a small, hump-backed bridge, familiar from willow plates, and willow branches hang down from the top of the frame like repeated scratches of a pen. It turns out that this image was taken in a park in Beijing, a small fragment of old China in the midst of a highly developed area. (Figure 12)88

Conner has gained recognition both for the substance of her photographs and for their form: her preferred technology is a 7 by 17 inch banquet camera developed in the nineteenth century to photograph large groups of people simultaneously. The resulting elongated prints, Conner has said, seem to her particularly reminiscent of Chinese landscape paintings executed on lengthy scrolls. Of Chinese landscape painters, she comments, “Studying the paintings made me wonder if there was something about the land that had inspired them to use this form.”89 Her later essays on her photographic practice continue this questioning; she describes her shift from the 8- by 10-inch-view camera to the banquet camera as a move that “allowed for a different narrative framework, and permitted a horizon that stretched out,

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Fig. 12. Lois Conner, “Beihai Yuan, Beijing” (1984). Photograph by Lois Conner.



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encompassing the curvature of the earth. My interest in the extended frame contributed to my growing obsession with China.”90 Here Conner’s return to an antiquated photographic technology becomes linked to her efforts to inhabit a foreign visual form. Yet again, we find that a seeing into China is held to be a seeing across time. Her linkage of form to content and vision to culture earns praise from her Times reviewer, who writes: The tendency to convert an unknown experience into an artistic echo of safe cultural practices was a corollary of colonialism and in itself a kind of appropriation of the territory. Lois Conner .€.€. has taken an almost opposite route. She tries to approximate a Chinese mode of viewing by adopting a photographic format that relates to the experience of ancient scrolls.91

This is a project which, while opening Conner to possible critique, demonstrates to Goldberg a salutary bravery in the face of a world where intimations of culture have become insular and territorial. Goldberg continues: It must take sympathy, determination, zeal, and an active spirit of inquiry to try to approach a foreign culture through its own mind’s eye. Or maybe just hubris. Maybe it can’t be done. Photographers can’t win. If they see through the lens of their own culture, they’re appropriating, imperialistically, whether as military or cultural colonizers. Today’s self-consciously critical world, anxious about having remade life as a spectacle, may not allow photographers—or maybe anyone at all—to believe in the possibility of a clean life. In the end everyone has dirty hands.92

It is not my intention here to propose a critique of Conner’s work in the way that Goldberg fears, or necessarily to challenge the workings of the centuries-long development of this Chinese aesthetic that it has been my project to describe. Instead, I am interested in the underpinnings of Goldberg’s understanding of our contemporary visual culture as it accommodates visions of China. In imagining an approach to another culture “through its own mind’s eye,” Goldberg depends on her received experiences of Chinese scroll paintings to gesture toward a shared understanding of how that mind’s eye ought to see, and to suggest that photographic format can relate an experience of the real. It is an imperative made pointed by the review’s title, “Allowing the Chinese to Look Chinese.” The convergence of her history of the imagined transference of perceptual capacity in general with the example of China in particular is no coincidence. Rather it is very much through the specific history of seeing China that Goldberg’s understand-

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ing of the cultural variances of vision can begin to be articulated. As Conner concludes, acknowledging the long Western history of “romanticizing Asia”: “[P]hotography is always fiction; it cannot, nor do I want it to, stand in for the real world. Over the years the fictions I have created through photography have expanded to describe a veritable, as well as a mythical China, both of which are integral to my vision.”93 Reading Conner’s artist’s statements in conjunction with Goldberg’s broader articulations of the artist’s challenges demonstrates how strongly the dilemmas of nineteenthcentury visual realism in the global context persist today. China, for Conner, Goldberg, the countless nineteenth-century writers, artists, and critics that preceded them, plus many others in between, makes an idea of the real necessary yet forever unachievable. Forever fragmented, static, left behind, hostile, exotic, antique, and illusory, China seems to assume for these readers the burden of the ephemeral antireal that contradicts modern experience, even as experience claims that such contradictions can no longer occur under modernity’s growing expanse. The explanatory value of China’s visual difference, we come to understand, accrues to the perpetuation of the non-Chinese eye. For the nineteenth-century British observer and for the observer today, then, to see and be seen with Chinese eyes showed the evolution of their own ways of seeing.

Conclusion

At the end of the nineteenth century, China was understood to become ever more alienated from the conditions that made it visible to British eyes. Realignments among the global powers changed the place of China in the British imagination. Japan and, later, Africa took up China’s role in the minds of many modern critics as the preeminent visual and geographical counterpoints to Euro-American visual and literary modernism. Yet even as those influences now seem to outweigh China’s, they could not have done so without the foundational structure that China provided. This book has followed both British celebrations and British repudiations of China’s familiar exotic across the nineteenth century with the simple contention that such receptions mattered greatly in the history of British visuality. They mattered as opposing examples that helped define by antithesis the capacities of the British visual and narrative real—definitions that have been the subject of this book. They continued to matter, albeit largely implicitly, when the revolutions of modernism revised visual realism and claimed supposedly foreign and antithetical aesthetic terms as their own founding conditions. And they matter still. A sense that the Chinese somehow see differently, and that certain differences in visual representation can therefore be identified specifically as Chinese, makes unspoken substance for current rhetorical formations that describe relative differences between China and the West in essentialized terms. Although differences in modes of perception are now the terrain of cognitive neurologists as well as writers and artists, this broadening of inquiry has not altered the initial parameters of the questioning.1

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When I say that such receptions mattered, I mean that very literally. Material objects, physical spaces, and the narrative evocations of that materiality and spatiality explained Chinese visual difference to British observers through all the permutations of visual engagement: looking, being looked at, seeing others looking, and directing others how to look in turn. These engagements change with changing economic conditions; production and trade make objects available to view, but they also make subjects capable of seeing them in meaningful ways. When Lord Macartney entered the Qing emperor’s pleasure grounds to partake of their “rural vicissitudes,” he did so under very different circumstances than his secretary, John Barrow, who was reduced to peeking over the edge of the garden wall. The political authority that granted Macartney a clearer perspective on the garden’s views, however, expired with the failure of his mission; the narrative authority that Barrow gained as author of the widely read Travels in China continued onward throughout the century. Thus while the gap between Barrow and Wordsworth is broad—and the gulf between Barrow and Whistler (to take one of many possible examples) nearly unbridgeable—it is their shared interest in China’s representational (rather than direct) effects that justify this study’s connections. A precondition of this study has been the sense that these arguments can be generalized beyond the Chinese example; by thinking about how racial difference is imagined to make certain differing kinds of perception possible, we can also understand how other categories—class, gender, sexuality, and more—can be imagined to do the same thing. But I want to insist upon the specific value of China as an example. Economic histories of the past decades have shown China’s role in the globalization of the world economy to occur both earlier and more significantly than was previously believed. Even as Britons were following the story of China’s resounding defeat in the First and Second Opium wars, they were filling their lives with the material effects of China’s economic significance. Though some of China’s emblematic products—tea, porcelain, and even opium—were by the end of the century produced domestically or in British colonies, they retained their symbolic status as pieces of China. Whistler’s painting Purple and Rose: Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, discussed in Chapter 2, makes a useful point to return to here in considering how we ought to understand China’s place in Victorian creative consciousness. Critical reception of Whistler’s painting can be compared with the far more famous and more controversial scene of modeling of foreign influence



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demonstrated in a later artwork: Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907). In Picasso’s Cubist masterpiece, two of the five nude prostitutes depicted wear faces deeply evocative of African tribal masks. How to talk about Picasso’s use of these artifacts, which may be based on objects he saw during a memorable visit to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1907, is a problem that has consumed art critics for many decades. On the other hand, questions about what the Chinese objects in Purple and Rose mean to Whistler are only beginning to be asked by postcolonial scholars. Yet much of the inquiry that scholars have directed to Picasso’s masterwork, in particular Simon Gikandi’s recent probing study, can be aimed at Whistler’s work as well.2 In both pieces, and indeed in the larger careers of both artists, non-European aesthetics have been highlighted as influences and then simultaneously dismissed as mere fetishes or decorative effects. Gikandi proposes that such efforts to at first acknowledge and then immediately remove the presence of the Other from works of high modernism must be understood as a necessary component of the practice of modernism itself: “How else,” he wonders, “can we explain the paradox that runs throughout the history of modernism, the fact that almost without exception the Other is considered to be part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be considered constitutive?”3 It is in part the argument of this book that these efforts of modernism to assert its essential cultural relevance both within and beyond its external influences root backward into the nineteenth century, well before the moment when Picasso began painting Les Demoiselles or Virginia Woolf wrote of Lily Briscoe’s Chinese eyes in To the Lighthouse.4 Picasso, indeed, drew specific comparison between his connection to Africa and the Impressionists’ ties to Asia in his much-cited interview with André Malraux: “Everyone always talks about the influence of the Negroes on me. What can I do? We all loved fetishes. Van Gogh said: ‘Japanese art, we all had that in common.’ For us it was the Negroes.”5 In his introduction to the catalogue of the controversial 1984 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” MoMA director of painting and sculpture William Rubin repeats Picasso’s comment that “[t]he African sculptures that hang around .€.€. my studios are more witnesses than models” in order to argue a similar point.6 Rubin explains that the African works “more bore witness to [Picasso’s] enterprise than served as starting points for his imagery. Like the Japanese prints that fascinated Manet and Degas, Primitive objects had less to do

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with redirecting the history of modern painting than with reinforcing and sanctioning developments already underway.”7 Most of the many critiques launched at the MoMA after the opening of this exhibition took issue with the genealogy of influence asserted here.8 As the exhibition’s subtitle implies, the efforts of the curators went not only toward providing historical evidence of specific material encounters between artists and primitive objects—at what moment, in what studio, an African mask was first observed—but also toward evoking a more general sense of “affinity” that connected modernist paintings with visually similar tribal objects from around the globe. Anthropologist James Clifford in particular criticized the exhibition’s emphasis on this looser global relationship of visual influence for its imposition of an “allegory of kinship.”9 This allegory inevitably places the tribal in a subsidiary and elemental relationship to the modern even as it insists on the depth of that relationship as a founding condition. Given the history of interchanges of Chinese aesthetics that I have reviewed in this book, we can begin to put similar pressure on Picasso’s and Rubin’s invocation of the relationship between Japanese prints and Impressionist art. This must occur both when we are thinking about this relationship as a model for the later development of modernism’s global influence and also when we are focusing only on the Impressionist movement itself. For of course what is troubling in these relationships between European artists and foreign art objects is that the definitional emphasis is placed neither on the work’s medium—be it wood-block print or wooden sculpture—nor on its representational content. Rather, the foregrounded term is always the country of origin, to best emphasize the distance that must be maintained between two formally affinitive works. As Gikandi, Clifford, and others have pointed out, this distance is necessary in order for European art communities, whether modernist or Impressionist, to maintain their paradoxical histories of self-constitution despite broad evidence of global influence. China, I contend, plays an unremarked but formative place in this problematic history. As we have seen, modernism’s story of its own origins uses the template of Impressionism’s self-discovery to tell a history that both confirms and denies the effects of imagined foreign visual regimes. Picasso authorizes his connection to the tribal object by invoking Van Gogh’s Japanese precedent. So too does Impressionism’s story of its own transformation invoke the art objects it means to supersede. The anecdote of



Conclusion

how the French artist Félix Bracquemond in 1856 “discovered a volume of Hokusai prints in a crate of porcelain .€.€. and carried it around with him in his pocket until his death,” introducing his friends Whistler, Manet, Degas, and others to these ukiyo-e for the first time, is often told in older histories of Impressionism as acknowledgement of Japan’s influence.10 But it is an anecdote less often told today, for the clear reason that it rehearses the same difficult “allegory of kinship” that troubles the history of Les Demoiselles. In art histories from any period, however, the crated porcelain that the prints were meant to protect goes largely unnoticed. And with the effacement of that porcelain, the rich and long-standing history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chinese visual and material influence is removed from the genealogy of modern artistic genius. China’s familiar exotic, which as I have shown in this book permeated the lives of a range of British subjects through landscapes, texts, and objects, became replaced by first a Japanese exotic and subsequently a tribal primitivism; with each replacement the routes of visual influence became ever more striated in time and space. Whistler’s painting shows one way to repudiate that critical removal. In the abstracted gaze of Jo Hiffernan beholding the painted porcelain in Purple and Rose, we also see a possibility for dynamic and contemporary exchange not yet reified into the binary of past/primitive and present/ modern that so troubles Picasso scholars. Both Hiffernan and the vase can be considered to be both witnesses and models, in Picasso’s sense of the terms, as both register and reflect the other’s artistic transformation. Thus Whistler’s performative engagement with his blue china, stagy and stylized as it is, demonstrates a functional repudiation of the “allegory of kinship” model by foregrounding the ongoing aesthetic influence of such objects rather than subsuming their originary influence entirely, as modernists like Picasso and T. S. Eliot would later do. This was true more generally as well. Even as writers like Charles Lamb and John Thomson emphasized the long-standing presence of Chinese aesthetic objects in their visual memories, they also very much admitted—happily or unhappily—the influence of these objects as a present effect. Our current critical understanding of the nineteenth century’s relationship to China as a relationship of connoisseurship therefore makes a crucial misunderstanding. It takes the nineteenthcentury fiction of China’s temporally-distanced difference from Britain—a story that Charles Dickens, in particular, told with great effectiveness—and substitutes it for the constitutive evidence of China’s contemporary connections to Britain. It must be recognized that modern criticism, even as

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it distances itself knowingly from the conception of China’s stasis, has also trafficked in such usefully static terms. This is not to deny that nineteenth-century authors and artists constantly wrote about and represented China as an empire both static and temporally removed. The context in which they did so, however, was a cultural field teeming with the effects of Chinese visual influence. Studies of the nineteenth century that do not attend to these visual effects thus only get at part of what energized Britons to speak, write, and think about China as a way of speaking, writing, and thinking about themselves. Thus, in making the case for a different, visually dynamic history of relations between Britain and China in the nineteenth century, I have sought to fill out the invisible connection formed between the female subject of Whistler’s Purple and Rose and the Chinese art object that she holds. It is here, in the space of a gaze that was contemporarily understood to be reciprocal, that we begin to understand how objects can be capable of making people as much as people are capable of making objects. The objects and spaces that I describe therefore speak out for China in a way that is not realistic but is important for understanding what the real can be. In making plain the bounds of realism through negative example, Chinese objects and spaces in the British nineteenth century act as both witnesses and models, and yet something more. They are understood to be active visual agents, capable of changing eyes, tastes, forms of narrations, and even the shapes of nations.

reference matter

Notes

Introduction 1. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 2. For a broader consideration of Chinese aesthetics, see Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). See also Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao, eds., Sinographies: Writing China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 3. Leigh Hunt, “The Subject of Breakfast Continued—Tea-drinking,” London Journal 9 (July 1834): 113–14, 113. 4. William Rossetti, “The Royal Academy Exhibition,” Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. 71, (July 1865): 57–74, 67. 5. As Colleen Lye reminds us, “We easily recognize the presence of race in visual media because of its identification with a set of phenotypical traits and a relative absence of interiority. Yet the visuality of the Asiatic racial form has a distinctive character insofar as the sense of its deceitfulness or mystery always points to the presence of something not shown. To put it another way, we recognize the Asiatic as a figure for the unrepresentable. Yet how is the unrepresentable to be visualized? Does it have a human body? If not, what shape, as a whole or in part, does it take? These are the kinds of questions that are bypassed if our study of racial figuration begins by supposing the anthropomorphism of Asiatic form.” America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature 1893–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 7. 6. See Martin Jay’s critique of such cultural differentiations in “Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 1 (2002): 267–79. On the stereotype, see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 7. On earlier explications of particular kinds of eyes, see Michael Baxandall,

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Notes to the Introduction Painting and Experience in the Fifteenth Century: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); and Peter De Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 8. See Charles Dickens and R. H. Horne, “The Great Exhibition and the Little One,” Household Words 3 (5 July 1851): 356–60. 9. On visual culture and British realism, see Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 10. In Erwin Panofsky’s seminal account Perspective as Symbolic Form, he argues: “Perspective creates distance between human beings and things .€.€. but then in turn it abolishes this distance by, in a sense, drawing this world of things, an autonomous world confronting the individual, into the eye. Perspective subjects the artistic phenomenon to stable .€.€. rules, but on the other hand, makes that phenomenon contingent upon human beings, indeed upon the individual: for these rules refer to the psychological and physical conditions of the visual impression, and the way they take effect is determined by the freely chosen position of a subjective ‘point of view’ ” (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 67. See also Hubert Damisch’s reconsideration of Panofsky in his The Origin of Perspective (trans. John Goodman, Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1991). For explorations of the priority of the eye and the image among Western viewers in general, see Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 11. Patricia Laurence’s Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003) gives a rich survey of the connections between Chinese writers and artists and the British writers and artists that made up the Bloomsbury group, while also acknowledging the Victorian roots of this interchange. As Laurence explains, Virginia Woolf ’s designation of her To the Lighthouse character Lily Briscoe’s “Chinese eyes” “suggests then not only the incorporation of the Chinese aesthetic into the ‘English’ artist, but also European modernism’s .€.€. questioning of our cultural and aesthetic place or ‘universality.’ Chinese spaces are then mapped onto British modernism to enlarge the Eurocentric discourse that presently surrounds this movement” (10). Laurence’s work intersects fruitfully with my own, beginning with our mutual but independently established interest in the concept of “Chinese eyes” that Woolf proposes. 12. “Amazing China,” Academy 1413 (June 1899): 599–600, 600.



Notes to the Introduction

13. Tennyson’s Poetry, ed. Robert W. Hill, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 100 (l. 184). 14. On global temporal disjunctions, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 15. John Barrow, Travels in China (London: Cadell and Davies, 1804), 238. 16. See David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 220. 17. See, esp., chapter three of his Ideographia (ibid.), “Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegibility.” 18. The project of describing how colonial and racial others looked to the colonizing eye is a large one, and has been contributed to by many notable post-Saidian scholars. See, for example, Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995); Beth Fawkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 19. On new perspectives on British imperial history, see, among many others, Linda Colley, “What Is Imperial History Now?” in What Is History Now? ed. David Cannadine (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 132–48; and Dane Kennedy, “Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24, no. 3 (September 1996): 345–63. On the new Qing history, see Joanna Waley-Cohen’s helpful bibliography in her review essay of the same name: “The New Qing History,” Radical History Review 88 (2004): 193–206. 20. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). See also Tani E. Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); and Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 21. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 25. 22. The foundational definition comes in John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review (2d series) 6, no. 1 (1953): 1–15, in which they declare: “The conventional interpretation of the nineteenth-century [British] empire continues to rest upon study of the formal empire alone, which is rather like judging the size and character of icebergs solely from the parts above the water-line” (1). On subsequent controversies over the GallagherRobinson thesis, see Anthony Webster, The Debate on the Rise of British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 23. Jürgen Osterhammel, “Britain and China,” in the Oxford History of the Brit-

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Notes to the Introduction ish Empire, ed. Wm. Roger Louis, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–), Vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter, 148. See also Osterhammel, “Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis,” in Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuties, ed. Osterhammel and Wolfgang Mommsen (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986). 24. Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 63. Robert Aguierre’s Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), offers a helpful model of how this might take place in another geographical context. 25. On Indians and the British empire, see Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also the range of works describing the differences between British ideas of China and India during the era of the Great Exhibition, including Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Peter Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Catherine Pagani, “Chinese Material Culture and British Perceptions of China in the NineteenthCentury,” in Material Culture and the Museum, ed. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (London: Routledge, 1998), 28–40 and “Objects and the Press: Images of China in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie F. Codell (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 147–66. On the influence of Indian and other Oriental aesthetics in Britain more generally, see Julie Codell and Dianne Satchko Macleod, eds., Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture (Hants: Ashgate, 1998). 26. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 27. It is important to differentiate the Manchu imperium from the Chinese ethnicity, though, of course, this was a frequent nineteenth-century error. 28. In writing this summary, I have relied on the following general histories of China: The Cambridge History of China, ed. Denis Twichett and John King Fairbank, 15 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978–): in particular Vol. 10, Late Ch’ing 1800–1911, Pt. 1, and Vol. 11, Late Ch’ing 1800–1911, Pt. 2; Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990); and John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History, enl. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); as well as Osterhammel, “Britain and China.” 29. Lydia Liu suggests that “the will to retaliate against the Chinese for the humiliations of the British on the symbolic front were very real.€.€. . Such psychic investment often exceeded the calculated political and economic objectives of the British and led to costly and fanatical destruction of human lives and property in



Notes to the Introduction

military campaigns.” The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 217. See James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 30. See John King Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports 1842–1854 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953). 31. My summary, because composed from the British perspective, downplays many factors significant to the Qing perspective. Fuller histories of the Opium Wars include Glen Melancon, Britain’s China Policy and the Opium Crisis: Balancing Drugs, Violence and National Honour 1833–1840 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Peter Ward Fay, The Opium War 1840–42, Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–61 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); and J. Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism, and the Arrow War (1856–1860) in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On the Taiping Rebellion, see Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); and Elizabeth J. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980). 32. See Shên-tsu Wang, The Margary Affair and the Chefoo Agreement (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). 33. By 1894, thirteen hundred Protestant missionaries from Britain, Canada, and the United States maintained 500 mission stations in 350 Chinese cities and towns (Fairbank and Goldman, China: A New History, 222). 34. Two major, and greatly distinct, works describe this history: Joseph Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 35. See Ross Forman, “Peking Plots: Fictionalizing the Boxer Rebellion of 1900,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27, no.1 (1999): 19–48. 36. Lord Byron, Don Juan, ed. Leslie Marchand (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 317 (canto 11, st. 7, l. 53). 37. For various major considerations of this idea, see George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography. 38. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). See also Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Colum-

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Notes to the Introduction bia University Press, 1993); Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 39. Charles Lamb, “Old China,” in Elia and the Last Essays of Elia, ed. Jonathan Bate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 281. 40. [Charles Dickens], “The Chinese Junk,” The Examiner (24 June 1848): 403. 41. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Bert Hornback (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 221. 42. William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 276 (l. 164). 43. On studies of early modern consumption in general, see John Brewer, Neil McKendrick, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); and John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993) for two major contributions to the field. See also Craig Clunas, “Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West,” American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (1999): 1497–1511, for a transnational critique. For a Victorian perspective, see, among many others, Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 44. On this field, see Bill Brown, ed., Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), among others. 45. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). See also Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 46. For recent considerations of the implications of Victorian interior decor, see Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 47. For the former, see Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); for the latter, see Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things. 48. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 8. 49. On the way this dynamic worked in more general terms of British empire, see Joseph McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). 50. See Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); and Julia Thomas, Pictorial Vic-



Notes to Chapter One

torians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004). 51. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), xv. 52. See Borges: A Reader, ed. Emire Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid (New York: Dutton, 1981). Jonathan Spence’s The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: Norton, 1998) cogently analyzes another Borges story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” extensively involved with a vision of China. See Chan’s Great Continent, 232–37. Zhang Longxi uses the work as a touchstone for a broad-ranging survey in “The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988): 108–31. 53. Foucault, Order of Things, xv. 54. In anthropology, for example, the anecdote was a touchstone for polemical debates between Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere. Marshall Sahlins’s How “Natives” Think cites the encyclopedia as revelatory of a profound difference in global cultural epistemologies as part of a rebuttal of Gananath Obeyesekere’s critique of Sahlins’ work. In response, Keith Windschuttle’s polemical The Killing of History contends that such privileging of cultural relativism erodes possibilities for universal humanism, arguing that “there is no evidence that any Chinese person has ever thought about animals in this way. The taxonomy is fictitious.€.€. . It deserves to be seen .€.€. as evidence of the degeneration of standards of argument in the contemporary academy” (255). To trace the key texts in what Windschuttle calls “the most publicly contested debate in anthropology of recent times” (253), see Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 55. Foucault, Order of Things, xix. 56. Ibid.

Chapter 1 1. The Yuanming Yuan was chiefly occupied by the father and son Yongzheng (1722–35) and Qianlong (1735–96), emperors of the Qing dynasty. For more on the history of the gardens’ construction, see Young-Tsu Wong’s A Paradise Lost: The Imperial Garden Yuanming Yuan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), which calls the garden “the greatest .€.€. the Chinese have ever built.” (9). 2. Joseph Spence translated Attiret’s account into English under the pseudonym of Harry Beaumont as A Particular Account of the Emperor of China’s Gardens Near Pekin: in a Letter from F. Attiret, a French Missionary, now employ’d by that Emperor to paint the apartments in those gardens, to a friend in France. See Jean Denis Attiret, “A Particular Account of the Emperor of China’s Gardens Near Pekin,” trans. Jo-

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Notes to Chapter One seph Spence, in The English Landscape Garden, ed. John Dixon Hunt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982 [1752]), 5. The letters were published originally as Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères par quelques missionnaires de la compagnie de Jésus. See Jean-Denis Attiret, Lettres Édifantes et Curieuses (Paris: Guérin, 1749), in particular the letter to M. d’Assaut of 1 November 1743. 3. Attiret, “A Particular Account,” 36. 4. For studies of this connection in the eighteenth century, see Osvald Sirén, China and Gardens of Europe of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Ronald Press, 1979); David Jacques, “On the Supposed Chineseness of the English Landscape Garden,” Garden History 18, no. 2 (Autumn 1990): 180–91; and Yu Liu, Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008). 5. For primary accounts of the English garden, see John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, eds., The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620–1820 (New York: Harper, 1975). For secondary studies see the field-shaping works of John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). For English language studies of the classical Chinese garden, see, among many others, Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). 6. Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 300; emphasis in original. 7. See, in particular, the work of John Dixon Hunt. As he suggests in Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000): “Place-making is fundamentally an art of milieu; it creates a ‘midst’ in which we see or set ourselves.€.€. . The milieu involves not only inhabitants and users but the history of the place that is made or remade, the story of the site over time” (3). 8. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 9. 9. Matteo Ricci’s illustrations of the imperial gardens had circulated in Europe as early as 1713. See Jacques, “On the Supposed Chineseness,” 190. 10. See R. C. Bald, “Sir William Chambers and the Chinese Garden,” Journal of the History of Ideas 11, no. 3 (1950): 287–320; and David Porter, “Beyond the Bounds of Truth: Cultural Translation and William Chambers’s Chinese Garden,” Mosaic 37, no. 2 (2004): 41–58. 11. See his “Beyond the Bounds of Truth,” as well as his “From Chinese to Goth: Walpole and the Gothic Repudiation of Chinoiserie,” Eighteenth-Century Life 23, no. 1 (1999): 46–58.



Notes to Chapter One

12. See Stephanie Ross, What Gardens Mean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 45–46. 13. For an account of the picturesque’s function in other foreign locations, including India, Egypt, and Mexico, see Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘From an Antique Land,’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 14. Attiret, “A Particular Account,” 47. 15. John Loudon, An Encyclopaedia of Gardening; Comprising the Theory and Practice of Horticulture, Floriculture, Arboriculture, and Landscape Gardening, Including all the Latest Improvements, A General History of Gardening in all Countries, and a Statistical View of its Present State; with Suggestions for its Future Progress in the British Isles, New Ed., ed. Jane Loudon (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1860), 317. 16. Review of “Sir Uvedale Price on the Picturesque, with an Essay on the Origin of Taste, and much Original Matter by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, Bart,” Quarterly Review 98, no. 195 (December 1855): 189–220, 198. 17. Hunt and Willis, eds., The Genius of the Place, 98. 18. Ibid. 19. See Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London: John Murray, 1961); Oliver Impey, Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); and Dawn Jacobsen, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon, 1993). For an analysis of chinoiserie’s contrast to other prevailing aesthetic styles, see David Porter, “Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (2002): 395–411. 20. For a general account of this interest, see Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: Norton, 1998). See also Julia Ching and Willard Oxtoby, eds., Discovering China: European Interpretations in the Enlightenment (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1992). 21. On the shift in attitudes, see, among many others, Joanna Waley-Cohen, “China and Western Technology in the Late Eighteenth Century,” American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (1993): 1525–44. 22. Recent assessments of Chambers’s life and works can be found in John Harris, Sir William Chambers: Knight of the Polar Star (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970); and John Harris and Michael Snodin, eds., Sir William Chambers: Architect to George III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 23. Quoted in Dorothy Stroud, Capability Brown (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 157. See also Roger Turner, Capability Brown and the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape (New York: Rizzoli, 1985). 24. William Chambers to William Chapman, 28 July 1772, British Library ADD MSS 41133. 25. The nineteenth-century German garden theorist C. C. L. Hirschfeld reasons

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Notes to Chapter One that Chambers “planted British ideas in Chinese soil to give them greater prominence and to make them more forceful.” C. C. L Hirschfeld, Theory of Garden Art, trans. Linda B. Parshall, Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture, ed. John Dixon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 107. 26. William Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, ed. John Harris (London: Gregg International, 1972 [1772]), v. 27. Ibid., 93–94. 28. See John Dixon Hunt, “Emblem and Expressionism in the EighteenthCentury Landscape Garden,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 4, no. 3 (1971): 294–317. 29. Chambers, Dissertation, 11. 30. Ibid., 19. 31. Ibid., 49. 32. Ibid., 68. 33. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 34. 34. Chambers, Dissertation, 93. 35. The “Epistle,” first published anonymously, was later attributed to Mason, but through the evidence of Walpole’s letters can be identified as actually a joint project of the two. Both men were reworking familiar terrain. Walpole had previously couched national satire in the form of observations made by a Chinese man in his 1757 “Letter from Xo Ho.” Also recently completed had been Walpole’s “Hieroglyphic Tales,” privately printed in 1785, which skewered the English taste for Chinese fancies. 36. Walpole’s “History” originally appeared in the 1771 edition of his series Anecdotes of Painting in England. This series has a very complicated composition and publication history. I have found John Dixon Hunt’s modern edition of the “History” most helpful. See Horace Walpole, History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, ed. John Dixon Hunt (New York: Garland, 1982). See also the earlier edition, Horace Walpole: Gardenist, ed. Isabel Chase (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943). 37. Walpole, History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, 260n. 38. George Mason, “Heroic Epistle,” in Satirical Poems Published Anonymously by William Mason with Notes by Horace Walpole, ed. Paget Toynbee (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), 45. See also Isabel Chase, “William Mason and Sir William Chambers’ Dissertation on Oriental Gardening,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 35, no. 4 (1936): 517–29. 39. Walpole, History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, 277. 40. Mason, “Heroic Epistle,” 46 (ll. 1–4). 41. Ibid., 50–51 (ll. 97–104). 42. Ibid., 52 (ll. 139–40). 43. Chambers borrowed his narrator’s name from a Chinese artist known as Tan Chitqua, then resident in London.



Notes to Chapter One

44. Tan Chet-qua announces: “I am firmly persuaded, that your English Gardening would now have been much more perfect, had any one ever dared to dispute its excellence: but to dissent, is an unthankful business; a dangerous task, that few have spirits to undertake, particularly where party-rage is violent, as it now and then seems to be amongst you” (Sir William Chambers, An Explanatory Discourse by Tan Chet-Qua, of Quang-Chew-fu, Gent. [1773], ed. Richard E. Quaintance, Jr. [Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California at Los Angeles, 1978], 123). 45. Chambers, Explanatory Discourse, 133–34. 46. See James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); and Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 47. William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 274 (ll. 119– 28). 48. The complications in terminology here are multiple. See the introduction to Phillipe Fôret’s Mapping Chengde: The Qing Landscape Enterprise (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000) for a fuller genealogy of the names for the palace sites in both English and Chinese. Here I will follow Wordsworth in referring to the site as “Gehol” for the sake of simplicity; elsewhere I will refer to the site as “Chengde” despite the limitations of that designation, also for the sake of simplicity. 49. John Barrow, Travels in China (London: Cadell and Davies, 1804). 50. Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1800–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13. 51. See Prelude, Book 12: “I speak in recollection of a time/When the bodily eye, in every stage of life/The most despotic of our senses, gained/ Such strength in ‘me’ as often held my mind/In absolute dominion (ll. 127–31). 52. Ibid., 274 (ll. 131–33). 53. Ibid. (ll. 121, 144). 54. Ibid., 276 (ll. 159–72). 55. Ibid., 274 (ll. 134–35, emphasis added). 56. Ibid. (l. 149). 57. Ibid. (ll. 152–53). 58. For a broader consideration of this topic, see Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 59. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 102 (l. 8); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (New York: Penguin, 1988). The Austen reference comes as the Crawfords and Edmund prepare to stage the ill-fated theatricals

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Notes to Chapter One while Fanny reads Barrow’s 1807 volume of Lord Macartney’s journals. Edmund, embarrassed by Fanny’s displeasure, notes her reading material and asks “You in the meantime will be taking a trip into China, I suppose. How does Lord Macartney go on?” (130). 60. See Karen Fang, “Empire, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb’s Consumer Imagination,” Studies in English Literature 43, no. 4 (Autumn 2003): 814–43; Nigel Leask, “Kubla Khan and Orientalism: The Road to Xanadu Revisited,” Romanticism 4, no. 1 (1998): 1–21; Peter Knox-Shaw, “Fanny Price Refuses to Kow-Tow,” Review of English Studies 47 (1996): 212–17; and Susan Allen Ford, “Fanny’s ‘Great Book’: Macartney’s Embassy to China and Mansfield Park,” Persuasions On-Line 28, no. 2 (2008). 2 June 2009. http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol28no2/ford.htm. 61. See one standard history in Alan Peyrefitte, The Immobile Empire (New York: Knopf, 1992). 62. James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar. 63. Ibid., 25. 64. Ibid., 28. Hevia’s reconsideration of the historical record has been criticized by some China scholars. See Joseph Esherick’s “Cherishing Sources from Afar,” Modern China 24, no. 2 (1998): 135–62; Hevia’s “Postpolemical History: A Response to Joseph W. Esherick,” Modern China 24, no. 3 (1998): 319–27; and Esherick’s “Tradutore, Traditore: A Reply to James Hevia,” Modern China 24, no. 3 (1998): 328–33. 65. Fôret, Mapping Chengde, 23. 66. Barrow, Travels in China, 133. 67. ibid., 123; Aeneas Anderson A Narrative of the British Embassy to China in the Years 1792, 1793, and 1794 (London: J. Debrett, 1795), 259. 68. Barrow, Some Account of the Public Life, and a Selection from the Unpublished Writings, of the Earl Macartney (London: Cadell and Davies, 1807), II:377n. 69. Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy to China; George Leonard Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, 2 vols. (London: G. Nicol, 1797); Samuel Holmes, The Journal of Mr. Samuel Holmes, Serjeant-Major of the XIth Light Dragoons, during his attendance as one of the guard on Lord Macartney’s Embassy to China and Tartary, 1792–3 (London: W. Bulmer, 1798); and William Jardine Proudfoot, Biographical Memoir of James Dinwiddie .€.€. embracing some account of his travels in China (Liverpool: E. Howell, 1868). Only in 1962 did an independent and complete edition of Macartney’s Journal appear as An Embassy to China, Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney During His Embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-Lung, 1793–1794, ed. J. L. Cranmer-Byng (London: Longman, 1962). 70. See Erasmus Gower, “A Journal of his Majesty’s Ship Lion, 1 Oct. 1792– 7 Sept. 1794” (London: British Library Add. MSS 21106); William Alexander, “Journal of a Voyage to Pekin in China, on board the Hindostan E.I.M. which accompanied Lord Macartney on his embassy to the Emperor, kept by William Al-



Notes to Chapter One

exander, draughtsman to the embassy, 1792–1794,” (London: British Library Add. MSS 35174); and in the papers of George Leonard Staunton and George Thomas Staunton, father and son, held in the special collections of Duke University Library. 71. Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy to China, viii–ix. 72. Ibid., 230–31. 73. The official painter to the embassy, Thomas Hickey, was (according to John Barrow) chosen for his friendship to Macartney rather than for his skill with a paintbrush. Only two known sketches of Hickey’s exist from his journey to China. See Susan Legouix, Image of China: William Alexander (London: Jupiter Books, 1980), 10. 74. Alexander, Journal of Voyage to China, 2 September 1793. Alexander met with further frustration when he was similarly deprived of traveling overland with most members of the embassy and was instead order to sail around the Chinese coast, missing most of the scenery. He complains: “His excellency saw my sketches and he applauded my industry, but I cannot reconcile this with preventing the exercise of my pencil, in passing through such an extent of country as from hence to Canton, through the intention of the Empire.” Journal of Voyage to China, 7 November 1793. 75. William Alexander, The Costume of China (London: William Miller, 1805), and Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manner of the Chinese (London: J. Murray, 1814). See also Frances Wood, “Closely Observed China: From William Alexander’s Sketches to His Published Work,” British Library Journal 24, no. 1 (1998): 98–121. 76. Susan Legouix has also shown how Alexander’s illustration of the embassy’s crucial moment, The Approach of the Emperor of China to his tent in Tartary to Receive the British Ambassador, though ostensibly copied from another Parrish sketch, in fact is largely derived from a design made in the 1760s by the Jesuit painter resident at the Qing court, Guiseppe Castiglione, entitled The Emperor Giving a Victory Banquet in Peking to the Officers and Soldiers Who Distinguished Themselves in Battle (Image of China, 15). 77. See Henry and Sidney Berry-Hill, George Chinnery 1774–1852: Artist of the China Coast (Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis, 1963). Thomas and William Daniell published several volumes under the title Oriental Scenery between the years 1789 and 1816 and were active in both India and China. See Hermione De Almeida and George H. Gilpin, Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Felix Driver and Luciana Martins, eds., Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 78. Barrow, Travels in China, 122. 79. Staunton, An Authentic Account, II:306. 80. Barrow, Travels in China, 92. 81. Staunton, An Authentic Account, II:129.

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Notes to Chapter One 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., II:136. 84. Ibid., II:303–4. 85. “Macartney’s Embassy to China,” London Times, 29 July 1794, 3. 86. Barrow, Travels in China, 130. Macartney specifically compares the views “to the magnificence of Stowe, the softer beauties of Wooburn, and the fairy-land of Paine’s Hill” and remarks that “had China been accessible to” the landscape designers Capability Brown and Charles Hamilton, “I should have sworn they had drawn their happiest ideas from the rich sources which I have tasted this day” (130). 87. Ibid., 132–33. 88. On the prospect view, see Barrell’s The Idea of Landscape; on the imperial explorer, see Pratt’s Imperial Eyes. 89. Barrow, Some Account of the Public Life, II:322. 90. Barrow, Travels in China, 134–35. 91. Ibid., 134. 92. On Amherst, see Patrick J. N. Tuck’s introduction to George Thomas Staunton, Notes of Proceedings and Occurrences during the British Embassy to Pekin in 1816, ed. Patrick J. N. Tuck, 10 vols.: Vol. 8, Britain and the China Trade 1635–1842 (London: Routledge, 2000). 93. See John King Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports 1842–1854 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953). 94. See Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 95. See Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson, Literature, Science, and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 96. On the former, see John Ellis, Directions for Bringing over Seeds and Plants from the East Indies and Other Distant Countries (London: L. Davis, 1770); on the latter, see, among many others, Ernest Wilson, A Naturalist in Western China, with Vasculum, Camera and Gun (London: Methuen and Co., 1913). 97. Robert Fortune, A Residence among the Chinese (London: John Murray, 1857), 173. Throughout this section I use the following abbreviations for the titles of Fortune’s works: TYW for Three Years Wandering in the Northern Districts of China, Including a Visit to the Tea, Silk and Cotton Countries (London: John Murray, 1847), JTC for Journey to the Tea Countries of China (London: John Murray, 1851), RC for A Residence among the Chinese: Inland, on the Coast, and at Sea (London: John Murray, 1857), and YP for Yeddo and Peking (London: John Murray, 1863). 98. RC, 173–74, emphasis in original. 99. The London Missionary Society delegate William Medhurst also wrote of his travels in Chinese dress. See his A Glance at the Interior of China, Obtained During a Journey through the Silk and Green Tea Countries (London: J. Snow, 1850). I discuss Medhurst’s passing further in “Converting Chinese Eyes: Rev. W. H. Med-



Notes to Chapter One

hurst, ‘Passing,’ and the Victorian Vision of China,” in A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays from the 1840s to the 1940s, ed. Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007). 100. JTC, 160. 101. For earlier works surveying Fortune’s collections, see E. H. Cox, Plant Hunting in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Alice Coats, The Quest for Plants: A History of the Horticultural Explorers (London: Studio Vista, 1969); Kenneth Lemmon, The Golden Age of Plant Hunters (South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1969); Charles Lyte, The Plant Hunters (London: Orbis, 1983) and Toby Musgrave, et. al., The Plant Hunters: Two Hundred Years of Adventure and Discovery around the World (London: Seven Dials, 1998). 102. Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 92–93; David Mackay, “Agents of Empire: The Banksian Collectors and Evaluation of New Lands,” in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 42. 103. See Lisbet Koerner, “Purposes of Linnaean Travel: A Preliminary Research Report,” in Miller and Reill, eds., Visions of Empire, 134. 104. Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China. 105. Clarke Abel, Narrative of a Journey in the Interior of China (London: Longman, 1818), 122. 106. Fortune Papers, Royal Horticultural Society Archives, London, Vol. 15. 107. Ibid. 108. E. H. Cox gives Fortune both credit and implicit criticism for this, writing: “Above all he had a marvelous eye for a plant, and his technique in packing and shipping his introductions was beyond all praise. There is no man in the history of plant introduction who has lost fewer plants. There have been greater plant collectors, but no plant introducer has excelled Robert Fortune” (92). 109. For a detailed summary of Fortune’s plant introductions, see E. Bretschneider’s History of European Botanical Discoveries in China (London: Sampson Low Marston, 1898). For a history of the Chinese trade in tea, see Robert Gardella’s Harvesting Mountains: Fujian and the China Tea Trade, 1757–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 110. Susan Schoenbauer Thurin, Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842–1907 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 29. 111. TYW, 252–53. 112. Letter to Royal Horticultural Society, 10 August 1844, Fortune Papers, Royal Horticultural Society Archives, Vol. 15. 113. Ibid. 114. TYW, 258. According to Gilbert Lewis, Fortune’s excursions led to some unwanted consequences. Lewis writes that “Mr. Fortune’s success in gratifying his

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Notes to Chapter One curiosity has been of bad example: and the several excursions since made to Soochow and other places beyond our boundary, may easily lead to unsatisfactory results, public as well as private” (“Fortune’s China: Gardening,” Edinburgh Review 88 [October 1848]: 403–29, 407n). The description of the poor reception received by a party of Europeans who sought to emulate Fortune also points to the level of influence his memoirs enjoyed. 115. In describing the reader of Fortune as “consuming” him, I am here following in a long-standing tradition. As the London Times comments in its review of Three Years Wandering: “When readers will have recovered from the intoxication produced by the exciting drink of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we seriously recommend them, by way of healthy sedative, to ‘try Fortune’s mild Bohea’” (“A Tea Gatherer in China,” Times, 6 October 1852, 6). 116. TYW, 5. 117. Ibid., 4. 118. See Jacobsen, Chinoiserie, 177. The Fortune citation begins a chapter on the nineteenth-century backlash against chinoiserie. 119. Lewis, “Fortune’s China: Gardening,” 429. 120. Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) offers an insightful account of the processes by which eighteenth-century colonial botanical gardens made possible theoretical advancements in the study of environmental management and ecological consciousness. See also Donal P. McCracken’s Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire (London: Leicester University Press, 1997). 121. For more on the development of the Victorian garden, see Anne Helmreich’s The English Garden and National Identity: The Competing Styles of Garden Design, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 122. JTC, 212. 123. TYW, 260. 124. JTC, 331–32. 125. Ibid., 18. 126. Ibid., 204. 127. J. G. Wolseley, Narrative of the War with China in 1860 (London: Longman, 1862), 280. 128. Ibid., 287. 129. Cumming, C. F. [Constance Frederica] Gordon, “The Summer Palace, Peking,” Belgravia 55, no. 129 (January 1885): 294–306, 298.

Chapter 2 1. Mark Lemon, “A True History of the Celebrated Wedgewood Hieroglyph, Commonly Called the Willow Pattern,” Bentley’s Miscellany 3 (1838): 61–65, 62, 63.



Notes to Chapter Two

2. Ibid., 62. 3. Ibid., 63. 4. See the introduction to Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 5. Lemon, “A True History,” 64. 6. The literature on the design and material history of porcelain is extensive. Some particularly helpful critical and historical works include John Carswell, Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and Its Impact on the Western World (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Gallery, University of Chicago, 1985); Robert Copeland, Spode’s Willow Pattern and Other Designs after the Chinese (London: Cassell, 1980); Howard Coutts, The Art of Ceramics: European Ceramic Design, 1500–1830 (New Haven: Bard Graduate Center for Studies in Decorative Arts and Yale University Press, 2001); Julie Emerson, Jennifer Chen, and Mimi Gardner Gates, eds., Porcelain Stories: From China to Europe (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum in association with University of Washington Press, 2000); Rosalind Fischell, Blue & China: Origins/Western Influences (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987); Duncan Macintosh, Chinese Blue and White Porcelain (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collector’s Club, 1994); Sarah Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics: Products for a Civilised Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 7. Lydia Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 728–57. 8. Emerson, Porcelain Stories, 253. 9. John Gay, “To a Lady on Her Passion for Old China,” in John Gay: Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 1:292–94, 292, 293 (ll. 7–10, ll. 31–36). 10. Ibid., 293 (ll. 47–50). 11. As critics like Beth Kowaleski-Wallace have noted, this appraisal of the insatiable female consumer is tempered by a pride in the successful trade economy that feeds her collecting habits. See Kowaleski-Wallace’s Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 12. See Joanne Tong, “Romantic c/China: The Literature of Chinoiserie,” Literature Compass 6, no. 3 (2009): 599–614. 13. The construct of the Letters, which use a foreigner’s observations to cloak more trenchant critiques of one’s own country, had already been popularized by such works as Walpole’s Letter from Xo Ho (1757) and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762), both told from the point of view of a Chinese writer. 14. Robert Southey, Letters from England (London: Cresset, 1951), 192. 15. Ibid., 191. 16. Ibid. 17. Barrow, Travels in China (London: Cadell and Davies, 1804), 326. Barrow further comments: “Neither the Chinese nor the Japanese can boast of giving to

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Notes to Chapter Two the materials much elegance of form.€.€. . And nothing can be more rude and illdesigned than the grotesque figures and other objects painted, or rather daubed, on their porcelain, which however are generally the work of the wives and children of the labouring poor. That they can do better we have evident proof; for if a pattern be sent out from England, the artists in Canton will execute it with scrupulous exactness; and their colours are inimitable” (306). 18. Robert Southey, “Travels In China,” in The Annual Review, and History of Literature, for 1804, Vol. 3 (1805), 69–83, 69. The review concludes by nevertheless expressing a political divergence from the staunchly royalist Barrow: “[We] have not, like [Barrow], that horror of the enlightened doctrines of the rights of man, which he expresses in a manner so little consistent with his usual good sense and good manners. We .€.€. will .€.€. only repeat our hope, that a system, which, like that of the Chinese government, and indeed all the Asiatic governments, totally prevents all improvement, all increase of knowledge and happiness, may be radically destroyed” (81). 19. Charles Lamb, “Old China,” in Elia and the Last Essays of Elia, ed. Jonathan Bate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 281–86, 281. The essay was first published in London Magazine 7, no. 39 (March 1823): 269; it was collected in The Last Essays of Elia (1833). The text used in Bate’s edition is the 1823 version. 20. Mark Parker argues that Lamb’s private “strategies of personal consolation .€.€. can be read as public strategies for resolving the contradictions and pressures of the current political crises,” which also include for Parker the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre and the trial of Queen Caroline. See Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 50. 21. It is worth restating here, as Fang also reminds us, that Coleridge was able to write independently because of financial support from Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood. 22. Thomas Manning, according to his later biography, was the first Englishman to visit Lhasa and meet the Dalai Lama, which he did in 1810 despite the dissuasions of Lamb, who wrote to Manning: “Pray try and cure yourself.€.€. . Read no more books of voyages; they are nothing but lies.” Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet, and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa, ed. Clements Markham (London: Trübner, 1876), clx. 23. Lamb to Thomas Manning, 5 December 1806, in The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marks, 3 vols. to date (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975–), 2:244–50, 244. 24. Lamb to Thomas Manning, 10 May 1806, in ibid., 2:225–27, 225. 25. Lamb, “Old China,” 281. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 282. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 283.



Notes to Chapter Two

31. Ibid., 285. 32. Ibid., 286. 33. Lamb’s friend Thomas Manning served as interpreter on this mission. 34. Clarke Abel, Narrative of a Journey in the Interior of China (London: Longman, 1818), 174. See also Henry Ellis, Journal of the Proceedings of the Late Embassy to China (London: John Murray, 1817). 35. Thomas Hood, Whims and Oddities (London: Lupton Relfe, 1826), 78. 36. Leigh Hunt, “The Subject of Breakfast Continued—Tea-drinking,” London Journal 9 (July 1834): 113–14, 113. 37. Ibid, 113. 38. Ibid., 114. 39. Ibid. 40. Thomas Hood, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Walter Jerrold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920), 295 (ll. 13–16). 41. See Coutts, The Art of Ceramics, 153–54. Coutts also points out that the underglaze blue used to manufacture British pieces of Chinese design was the cheapest of all the colored glazes. 42. Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics, 181. 43. For an expanded version of this history, see Copeland, Spode’s Willow Pattern, 33–39. 44. “More Celestial Intelligence,” Chambers’s Journal 328 (April 1860): 237–40: 237. 45. See, for example, James A. W. Heffernan’s Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 46. J. F. Blacker, Nineteenth-Century English Ceramic Art (London: S. Paul, 1912), 342. 47. The Mandarin’s Daughter, British Library ADD MSS 43038A, British Library, London. 48. Compton Mackenzie, The House of Coalport 1750–1950 (London: Collins, 1951), 35. 49. “The Story of the Common Willow Plate,” Family Friend I (1849): 124–54, 124. 50. “The Pryor’s Bank, Fulham,” Fraser’s 32, no. 192 (December 1845): 631–46, 636. 51. See Lara Kriegel, “The Pudding and the Palace: Labor, Print Culture, and Imperial Britain in 1851,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), as well as John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Catherine Gallagher also describes Dickens’s practice of animating the inanimate in the context of Great Expectations; see Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 189. 52. “A Plated Article,” Household Words 5, no. 109 (24 April 1852): 117–21, 120.

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Notes to Chapter Two 53. Ibid., 120. 54. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Penguin, 1981), 67–68. 55. Ibid., 68. 56. Ibid. 57. George Meredith, The Egoist (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 286. 58. Ibid., 288. 59. Ibid., 168. 60. Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 11. 61. Alison Byerly, Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 6. 62. Patricia O’Hara, “ ‘The Willow Pattern that We Knew’: The Victorian Literature of Blue Willow,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 4 (1993): 421–42, 431. See also her “Primitive Marriage, Civilized Marriage: Anthropology, Mythology, and The Egoist,” Victorian Literature and Culture 20 (1992): 1–24. 63. Robert Mayo, “The Egoist and the Willow Pattern,” English Literary History 9, no. 1 (1942): 71–78, 78. 64. Meredith, The Egoist, 35. 65. Carolyn Williams, “Unbroken Patternes: Gender, Culture, and Voice in The Egoist,” Browning Institute Studies 13 (1985): 45–70; Jonathan Smith, “ ‘The Cock of Lordly Plume’: Sexual Selection and The Egoist,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50, no. 1 (1995): 51–77; Anna Maria Jones, “Eugenics by Way of Aesthetics: Sexual Selection, Cultural Consumption, and the Cultivated Reader in The Egoist,” LIT 16, no. 1 (January–March 2005): 101–28. 66. Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 25. 67. Meredith, The Egoist, 36. 68. Riffaterre, Fictional Truth, 26, 28. 69. Meredith, The Egoist, 212. 70. Richard Brilliant, Visual Narratives: Storytelling in Etruscan and Roman Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 19. 71. Meredith, The Egoist, 4. 72. William Rossetti, “The Royal Academy Exhibition,” Fraser’s Magazine Vol. 71, (July 1865): 57–74, 67. 73. “Fine Arts: Exhibition of the Royal Academy, Third Notice,” Illustrated London News, 21 May 1864, 494. 74. “The Royal Academy,” Art Journal, Vol. 26, (1 June 1864): 165–66. 75. Nigel Thorp, ed., Whistler on Art: Selected Writings and Letters of James McNeill Whistler (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 23. 76. Rossetti, “The Royal Academy Exhibition,” 67. 77. Nigel Thorp, ed., Whistler on Art, 26. 78. Paula Gillet, Victorian Painter’s World (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1990).



Notes to Chapter Two

79. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism: Or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 228. See also his longer contextualizing discussion of these paintings, 222–32. 80. Ibid., 228–29. 81. Ibid., 391ff. 82. “Fine Arts: Exhibition of the Royal Academy, Third Notice,” Illustrated London News, (May 21, 1864): 494. 83. On the cultural status of the collector, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 84. E. R. Pennell and J. Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1919), 98. 85. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), 45. 86. Henry Treffy Dunn, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and His Circle (London: Elkin Mathews, 1904), 24. 87. D. G. Rossetti to his mother [Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti], 12 November 1864, in Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 2:526–27, 527. 88. Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 85. 89. G. C. Williamson, Murray Marks and His Friends (London: The Bodley Head, 1919), 33. 90. Ibid., 52. 91. For more on this, see Gillet, Victorian Painter’s World, 49; and Oswald Doughty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Victorian Romantic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 313. Doughty describes Rossetti’s disgust at making “pot-boilers and replicas” “for filthy lucre’s sake.” Dianne Sachko Macleod points out that this practice of replications was not problematic for most middle-class Victorian art purchasers, as they were more concerned with the amount of labor invested in the making of the art object. See her Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16. 92. On the history of The Blue Bower, see Paul Spencer-Longhurst, The Blue Bower: Rossetti in the 1860s (London: Scala Publishers in association with the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, 2000). 93. William Rossetti, Some Reminiscences (London: Brown Langham, 1906), 1:283. 94. Dante Gabriel Rossetti His Family Letters, with a Memoir, ed. William Rossetti (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895), 1:263. 95. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 2:501. 96. Rossetti His Family Letters, 1:263. 97. Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford Madox Ford], Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections: Being the Memories of a Young Man (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911), 143.

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Notes to Chapter Two 98. Linda Merrill, The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 99. Charles L. Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1878), 223. 100. William Rossetti, Rossetti Papers 1862–1870 (New York: Charles Scribners, 1903), 59.

Chapter Three 1. See Catherine Pagani, “Objects and the Press: Images of China in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie F. Codell (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 147–66, and “Chinese Material Culture and British Perceptions of China in the Nineteenth-Century,” in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, ed. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (London: Routledge, 1998), 28–40. 2. In following a submerged notion of China through Dickens’s writing, I am indebted to the work of Wenying Xu, who points out the necessity of thinking about China in novels where it receives little direct mention. See Wenying Xu, “The Opium Trade and Little Dorrit: A Case of Reading Silences,” Victorian Literature and Culture 25, no. 1 (1997): 53–66. For other work on Dickens and China, see Jeremy Tambling, “Opium, Wholesale, Resale, and for Export: On Dickens and China,” Dickens Quarterly 21, no. 1 (March 2004): 28–43, and “Opium, Wholesale, Resale, and for Export: On Dickens and China (Part Two): Charles Dickens, Jr. in Hong Kong: 1860,” Dickens Quarterly 21, no. 2 (June 2004): 104–13; Susan Schoenbauer Thurin, “China in Dickens,” Dickens Quarterly 8, no. 3 (September 1991): 99–111. On thematics of empire more generally in Dickens, see most recently Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race, and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), and Dickens and the Children of Empire, ed. Wendy S. Jacobson (New York: Palgrave, 2000). 3. On Jardine and Matheson, see Edward Le Fevour, Western Enterprise in Late Ch’ing China: A Selective Survey of Jardine, Matheson, and Company’s Operations 1842– 1895 (Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1968). 4. See James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in NineteenthCentury China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 5. On this history see Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 6. The number of Chinese in the East End remained consistently low throughout the decades in which these narratives were written. An 1851 census indicated 78 Chinese living in London, and although the number rose significantly to 202 by the time of the 1871 census, the percentage of Chinese in the London population as



Notes to Chapter Three

a whole appeared negligible. (See Ng Kwee Choo, The Chinese of London [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968], 5.) Walter Besant, writing at the end of the century, dismisses the impact of the population as slight: “[The Chinatown] of London is a small thing and of no importance.€.€. . There are not, I believe, more than a hundred Chinese, or thereabouts, in all; they occupy a few houses in this street” (East London [London: Chatto and Windus, 1899], 204). See also John Seed, “Limehouse Blues: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks 1900–40,” History Workshop Journal 62, no. 1 (2006): 58–85; and The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, ed. Lynn Pan (Richmond: Curzon, 1999). 7. On acts of opium consumption, see Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995). 8. This becomes even clearer in the twentieth century with Sax Rohmer’s influential Fu Manchu series. 9. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 28; Barbara Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 4. 10. See, in addition to Barringer’s and Flynn’s Colonialism and the Object the following: Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and Peter Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 11. Robert Aguierre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xv–xvii and passim. 12. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Andrew Miller, Novels behind Glass: Commodity, Culture, and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 13. Christopher Hobhouse, 1851 and the Crystal Palace: Being an Account of the Great Exhibition and Its Contents (London: Murray, 1950), 133. See also Patrick Beaver, The Crystal Palace 1851–1936: A Portrait of Victorian Enterprise (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1970), 54. 14. “Ten Thousand Things related to China and the Chinese,” Court Magazine and Monthly Critic and Lady’s Magazine, Vol. 27 (June 1843): 102. 15. A similar collection was assembled by John Peters in 1845 and shown in Boston with the motto “Words may deceive, but the eye cannot play the rogue” at its entrance; parts of the Peters collection were also exhibited in New York in 1850 by P. T. Barnum as part of his Chinese Collection. On Dunn in America, see Steven Conn, “Where Is the East?: Asian Objects in American Museums from

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Notes to Chapter Three Nathan Dunn to Charles Freer,” Winterthur 35, nos. 2–3 (2000): 157–73; R. J. and Mary Zboray, “Between ‘Crockery-dom’ and Barnum: Boston’s Chinese Museum, 1845–7,” American Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2004): 271–307; and John Haddad, “The Romantic Collector in China: Nathan Dunn’s Ten Thousand Chinese Things,” Journal of American Culture 21, no. 1 (1998): 7–26. 16. “The Chinese Collection, Hyde Park Corner,” Illustrated London News, 6 August 1842, 112. 17. “China” [Enoch Cobb Wines], Gentleman’s Magazine 4, no. 2 (February 1839): 118–19, 118. 18. William Langdon, Ten Thousand Chinese Things: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Chinese Collection Now Exhibiting at St. George’s Place, Hyde Park Corner (London: G. M’kewan, 1844), 1. 19. Ibid. 20. “Ten Thousand Things related to China and the Chinese,” Court Magazine (June 1843): 102. 21. Langdon, Ten Thousand Chinese Things, 5. 22. “Wan Tang Jin Wuh: By a Barbarian Eye,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 27 (1843): 176–84, 177. 23. “The Chinese Collection, Hyde Park Corner,” London Saturday Journal 4, no. 85 (August 1842): 89–91, 91. 24. Quoted in C. R. Fay, Palace of Industry, 1851: A Study of the Great Exhibition and Its Fruits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 47–48. 25. The painting is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum. 26. Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 460. 27. “The Chinese Junk, Keying,” Illustrated London News, 1 April 1848, 220–22, 220. 28. “The Chinese Junk in the East India Docks,” Illustrated London News, 20 May 1848, 331–32, 332. 29. A Description of the Chinese Junk Keying: Printed for the Proprietors of the Junk and Sold Only on Board, 4th ed. (London: J. Such, 1848), 1. 30. “The Chinese Junk in the East India Docks,” Illustrated London News, (20 May 1848), 332. 31. “Visit to the Chinese Junk,” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 10 (1848): 40–42, 40. 32. Paul Gavanari and Albert Smith, Gavanari in London: Sketches of Life and Character (London: D. Bogue, 1849), 60; Max Schlesinger, Saunterings in and about London (London: N. Cooke, 1853), 34. 33. H. G. Clarke, London in All Its Glory; Or, How to Enjoy London during the Great Exhibition (London: H. G. Clarke, 1851), 157. 34. [Charles Dickens], “The Chinese Junk,” The Examiner (24 June 1848): 403. 35. Ibid.



Notes to Chapter Three

36. Ibid. 37. To Mrs. Richard Watson, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1880), 428. 38. Horne was himself an author, noted especially for his epic poem “Orion,” first published in 1843. 39. “Turkey in London,” Chambers’s Journal 37 (September 1854): 179–82, 179. 40. “The Great Exhibition and the Little One,” Household Words 3, no. 67 (5 July 1851): 356–60, 357. See also Sabine Clemm, “ ‘Amidst the Heterogeneous Masses’: Charles Dickens’s Household Words and the Great Exhibition of 1851,” NineteenthCentury Contexts 27, no. 3 (2005): 207–30; and Deborah Wynne, “Response to the 1851 Exhibition in Household Words,” The Dickensian 97, no. 3 (Winter 2001): 228– 34. 41. See David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 42. “The Great Exhibition and the Little One,” 358. 43. William Whewell, “The General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science,” in Lectures on the Progress of Arts and Science, Resulting from the Great Exhibition in London (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1856), 12. For more on mechanical reproduction and global order, see Joseph Bizup, Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). 44. Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 20. 45. Hevia, English Lessons, 102. 46. See Robert Hart, The I.G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868–1907, ed. John King Fairbank et al., 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975–), and Entering China’s Service: Robert Hart’s Journals 1854–1863, ed. Katherine F. Bruner et al. (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986). On Gordon, see Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (New York: Putnam, 1918). 47. See Lillian Nayder, Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). 48. “Dickens’ Life: Conclusion,” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature 534 (March 1874): 177–80. 49. For other perspectives on Drood and empire, see Hyungji Park, “ ‘Going to Wake up Egypt’: Exhibiting Empire in Edwin Drood,” Victorian Literature and Culture 30, no. 2 (2002): 529–50; Miriam O’Kane Mara, “Sucking the Empire Dry: Colonial Critique in The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” Dickens Studies Annual 32 (2002): 233–46; Tim Dolin, “Race and the Social Plot in The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” in The Victorians and Race, ed. Shearer West (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996); and John DeWind, “The Empire as Metaphor: England and the East in The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” Victorian Literature and Culture 21 (1993): 169–89.

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Notes to Chapter Three 50. “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” London Times, 2 April 1870, 4. 51. Among the most startling of these has been Howard Duffield’s, which suggests that Jasper killed Edwin Drood in adherence to the Indian murder cult of Thuggee; see Duffield, “John Jasper—Strangler,” Bookman 70 (1930): 581–88. More recently interest in solving the mystery was revived after a staging of the novel as a musical offered audience members the opportunity to vote on several possible endings; see Frank Rich, “Drood: A Musical in the Park,” New York Times, 23 August 1985, C3. 52. Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (New York: Penguin, 1974), 52. 53. Ibid., 37. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 48. 57. Ibid., 43. 58. Ibid., 272. 59. “Lazarus Lotus-Eating,” All the Year Round 15 (1866): 421–25, 422; “In an Opium Den,” Ragged Union School Magazine 20 (1868): 198–200, 199. 60. Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 37. 61. “East London Opium Smokers,” London Society 14 (1868): 68–72, 69. 62. “Lazarus Lotus-Eating,” 422. 63. Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 123. 64. Ibid., 64. 65. Ibid., 252. 66. Ibid., 247–48. 67. Ibid., 215. 68. Ibid., 38. 69. Milligan, Pleasures and Pains, 93–94. 70. Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 38. 71. Ibid., 39. 72. Ibid., 267. 73. Ibid., 269. 74. John Forster’s account of what was to be Edwin Drood’s conclusion in his biography of Dickens fits here with ease: “The story, I learnt .€.€. was to be that of a murder of a nephew by his uncle.€.€. . The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which his wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had brought him” (Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens [Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1864], 463). Removed to yet another close, confined space, Jasper will tell his own story “as if told of another,” in keeping with the doubled narrative his opium hallucinations have constantly supplied. 75. Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 101. 76. Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, London: A Pilgrimage (London: Grant, 1872), 148. 77. James T. Fields, Yesterdays with Authors (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 202–3.



Notes to Chapter Four

78. Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, 464–65. 79. “Chinese London and Its Opium Dens,” Gentleman’s Magazine,279 (1895):273-82, 273. 80. “An East End Parish,” All the Year Round 25, no. 606 (July 1880): 206–12, 212. 81. Ibid., 212; for the fellow clergyman’s account, see Harry Jones, East and West London: Being Notes of Common Life and Pastoral Work in Saint James’s, Westminster, and in Saint George’s-in-the-East (London: Smith Elder, 1875). 82. “Let not Ambition mock their useful toil/Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;/Nor Grandeur hear with disdainful smile/The short and simple annals of the poor.” Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” in Selected Poetry of Thomas Gray. Accessed 6 June 2008, http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/138. html, l. 29–32. 83. “Travels in the East,” All the Year Round (12 April 1884): 492–97, 492. 84. Ibid., 493. 85. Ibid., 494. 86. Ibid. 87. On the opium den in Dorian Gray, see also Timothy L. Carens, “Restyling the Secret of the Opium Den,” in Reading Wilde, Querying Spaces, ed. Marvin J. Taylor and Carolyn Dever (New York: NYU Press, 1995). 88. The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Andrew Elfenbein (New York: Longman, 2006), 181. 89. Ibid., 182. 90. Ibid., 185–86. 91. Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 159 and following. 92. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie Klinger (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 162–63. 93. Ibid., 168. 94. Ibid., 185. 95. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 152.

Chapter Four 1. “The Return of Lord Elgin,” Illustrated London News, 13 April 1861, 328. 2. In keeping with critical practice I will refer to Bird Bishop by her maiden name throughout. 3. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 4. The phrase is Celia Lury’s in Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity (New York: Routledge, 1998), 3. 5. Robert Swinhoe, Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860 (London:

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Notes to Chapter Four Smith, Elder, 1861); Henry Knollys, Incidents in the China War of 1860, Comp. from the Private Journals of Sir James Hope Grant (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1875). 6. “Amazing China,” Academy 1413 (June 1899): 599–600; 600. See also Alicia Little, Intimate China: The Chinese as I Have Seen Them (London: Hutchinson, 1899); and Susan Schoenbauer Thurin’s analysis of Little’s text in her Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842–1907 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999). Little herself was an amateur photographer of China. 7. See James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See also his Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, ed. Joan M. Schwartz and James Ryan (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003). 8. Ryan, Picturing Empire, 26. Ryan here is drawing on David Livingston’s articulation of the “providential theology of colonial praxis.” See David Livingston, The Geographical Traditions: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 9. See, for example, W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies,” in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 10. Carol Armstrong, Scenes from a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book 1843–1875 (Cambridge, MA: October/MIT Press, 1998), 3; Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 11. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 12. Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 13. Helmut Gernsheim, The Rise of Photography 1850–1880, The Age of Collodion (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 100. 14. See David Harris, Of Battle and Beauty: Felice Beato’s Photographs of China (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1999). Although Harris acknowledges that the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny (also photographed by Beato) both predated the North China Campaign, he argues that this war offered the first opportunity to photograph scenes both before and after battle (38). 15. Ibid., 20. 16. Quoted in ibid., 25. 17. Ibid. 18. “The Expeditionary Force in China,” Daily News, 28 August 1860, 5. 19. “American Photographs,” London Times, 30 August 1862, 11. 20. Harris, Of Battle and Beauty, 27. 21. For example, see “The British Expedition to China,” London Times, 17 October 1860, 8.



Notes to Chapter Four

22. Harris, Of Battle and Beauty, 36. See the Morning Chronicle’s report: “Some of Mr. Wirgman’s sketches are quite gems of art, and his exquisite skill in hitting off Chinese peculiarities found abundance of occupation in Pekin and on the way to it.” 16 February 1861, 2. 23. See also George Allgood, China War 1860, Letters and Journal (London: Longmans Green, 1901), which contains twenty-one Beato photographs. 24. Knollys, Incidents in the China War of 1860, 209–10. 25. Harris, Of Battle and Beauty, 36. 26. Knollys, Incidents in the China War of 1860, 210. 27. David Rennie, British Arms in Northern China and Japan: Pekin 1860, Kagosima 1862 (London: John Murray, 1864), 103. 28. For a modern reissue of this originally serially published text, see John Thomson and Adolphe Smith, Street Life in London (Yorkshire: EP Publishing Limited, 1973). See also Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 103 and following; Thomas Prasch, “Mirror Images: John Thomson’s Photographs of East Asia,” in A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s, ed. Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007). 29. John Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China and China; or Ten Years’ Travels and Residence Abroad (London: Samson Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1875), vi. 30. Thomson, The Antiquities of Cambodia: A Series of Photographs Taken on the Spot, With Letterpress Description (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1867). 31. See Thomson, Illustrations of China and Its People, 4 vols. (London: Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1873–74), and Through China with a Camera (Westminster: A. Constable, 1898). 32. Thomson, Through China with a Camera, v. 33. Review of Illustrations of China and Its People, Vol. 2378, Athenaeum, May 1873, 659. 34. Review of Through China with a Camera, in The Speaker, Vol. 17, (16 April 1898), 485–86; 485. 35. Prasch, “Mirror Images,” 53. 36. Ibid., vii. 37. The lecture is reprinted as “Geographical Photography,” Scottish Geographical Magazine 23, no. 1 (1907): 14–19, 14. 38. Ibid., 14. 39. Ibid., 16. 40. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 256. 41. Thomas Blakiston, Five Months on the Yang-Tsze: With a Narrative of the Exploration of Its Upper Waters and Notices of Present Rebellions in China (London: John Murray, 1862), 162.

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Notes to Chapter Four 42. William Gill, The River of Golden Sand: The Narrative of a Journey through China and Eastern Tibet to Burmah (London: John Murray, 1880), 1. 43. Isabella Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China (London: J. Murray, 1899), I:327. 44. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 451. 45. Ibid., 452. 46. Ibid., 463. 47. Ibid., 190. 48. Thomson, The Land and the People of China (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1876), 171–72. 49. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, 284. 50. Ibid., 526. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. “Review of Through China with a Camera,” Bookman 14, no. 80 (May 1898): 53. 54. “Review of Through China with a Camera,” Athenaeum,Vol. 3677 (April 1898): 495–96; 495. 55. Bird, The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (London: John Murray, 1883), 64. 56. Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, I:v. 57. Ibid., II:138. 58. Although her last actual travels were through the Middle East, Yangtze Valley stands as her last completed volume. In order of publication, her major works are: The Englishwoman in America (1856), The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875), A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879), Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (1883), Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (1891), Among the Tibetans (1894), Korea and Her Neighbors (1898), and Yangtze Valley. 59. See Lila Matz Harper, Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001); Monica Anderson, Women and the Politics of Travel, 1870–1914 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006); Nicholas Clifford, A Truthful Impression of the Country: British and American Travel Writing in China 1880–1949 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Susan Morgan, Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women’s Travel Books about Southeast Asia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996); and Thurin, Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China. Popular biographies include Anna Stoddart, The Life of Isabella Bird (London: J. Murray, 1906); Evelyn Kaye, Amazing Traveler: Isabella Bird (Boulder, CO: Blue Penguin, 1994); and Pat Barr, A Curious Life for a Lady (New York: Doubleday, 1970). 60. Harper, Solitary Travelers, 148. 61. Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, II:145. 62. On Malvery, see Judith Walkowitz, “The Indian Woman, the Flower Girl,



Notes to Chapter Four

and the Jew: Photojournalism in Edwardian London,” Victorian Studies 42, no. 1 (1998–99): 3–46. 63. For more on Taylor’s practices and reproductions of these photographs, see Geraldine Guinness, The Story of the China Inland Mission, 2 vols. (London: Morgan and Scott, 1897–1900); and A. J. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century, 7 vols. (Sevenoaks, Kent: Hodder and Stoughton and the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1981). 64. Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, I:336. See also Thurin, Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 148, for further discussion of this moment. 65. Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, I:vii. 66. Ibid., I:228–30. 67. Ibid., I:230. 68. Ibid., I:177. 69. Ibid., I:305. 70. Ibid., I:308. 71. Ibid., I:302. 72. Ibid., II:29–30. 73. Ibid., I:290. 74. Ibid., II:347, II:337, emphasis in original. 75. Bird, Chinese Pictures (London: Cassell, 1904), [1]. 76. “Literary Gossip,” Outlook 6, no. 147 (November 1900): 537. 77. Bird, Chinese Pictures, 16. 78. Ibid., 72. 79. Ibid., 64. 80. Ibid., 86. 81. On Qing relations with Britain in these years, see E. W. Edwards, British Diplomacy and Finance in China, 1895–1901: A Study in Economic Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). For a general history of this era, see Pamela Crossley, Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 82. James Ricalton, China through the Stereoscope: A Journey through the Dragon Empire at the Time of the Boxer Uprising, New York: Underwood and Underwood, 1901, 273. 83. On the history of early British cinema, see Rachael Low, The History of the British Film (London: Allen and Unwin, 1948); and Michael Chanan, The Dream that Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain, 2nd. ed. (London: Routledge, 1996). 84. Martin Sopocy, “A Narrated Cinema: The Pioneer Story Films of James A. Williamson,” Cinema Journal 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 1–28, 6. 85. I am indebted to Ross Forman for drawing my attention to this film. 86. Sopocy, “A Narrated Cinema,” 7. See also Chanan, The Dream that Kicks, 241–43. 87. Sopocy, “A Narrated Cinema,” 8. See also Kenneth MacGowan, “The Story

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Notes to Chapter Four Comes to the Screen: 1896–1906,” Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television 10, no. 1 (Autumn 1955): 64–88. MacGowan proposes that Attack on a China Mission “was one of the earliest films that told a continuous story in a number of scenes.” 88. Vicki Goldberg, “Allowing the Chinese to Look Chinese,” New York Times, 29 October 2000, sec. 2:37ff., 37. 89. Lois Conner, Panoramas of the Far East (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 7. 90. Conner, China: The Photographs of Lois Conner (New York: Callaway, 2000), 148. 91. Goldberg, “Allowing the Chinese to Look Chinese,” 37. 92. Ibid. 93. Conner, China, 149.

Conclusion 1. I am thinking specifically here of the work of the University of Michigan Culture and Cognition Laboratory. See Hannah Faye Chua, Julie E. Boland, and Richard E. Nisbett, “Cultural Variation in Eye Movements during Scene Perception,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 102, no. 35 (2005): 12629–12633; as well as Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently—And Why (New York: Free Press, 2003). 2. Simon Gikandi, “Picasso, Africa and the Schemata of Difference,” MODERNISM/modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 455–480. 3. Ibid., 457. 4. See Patricia Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), esp. chapter five, “Developing Modernisms.” 5. André Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, trans. June Guicharnaud (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), 10. 6. William Rubin, “Modernist Primitivism,” reprinted in Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art: A Documentary History, ed. Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 315–34, 322. 7. Ibid. 8. See, esp., Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 45–70. 9. See James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,” reprinted in Flam and Deutch, eds., Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art, 351–68, 352. 10. Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London: John Murray, 1961), 210. See also E. R. Pennell and J. Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1919): “Whistler was in Paris in 1856, when Bracquemond ‘discovered’ Japan in a little volume of Hokusai, used for packing china” (84).

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Works Cited ———. Rossetti Papers 1862–1870. New York: Charles Scribners, 1903. ———. Some Reminiscences. London: Brown Langham, 1906. “The Royal Academy.” Art Journal, Vol. 26, (1 June 1864): 165–66. Rubin, William. “Modernist Primitivism.” Reprinted in Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art: A Documentary History, ed. Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Ryan, James. Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Schlesinger, Max. Saunterings in and about London. London: N. Cooke, 1853. “Sir Uvedale Price on the Picturesque, with an Essay on the Origin of Taste, and much Original Matter by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, Bart” [Review]. Quarterly Review 98, no. 195 (December 1855): 189–220. Sopocy, Martin. “A Narrated Cinema: The Pioneer Story Films of James A. Williamson.” Cinema Journal 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 1–28. Southey, Robert. “Travels in China” [Review]. In The Annual Review, and History of Literature, for 1804, ed. Arthur Aikin. Vol. 3. London: Longman, 1805, 69–83. ———. Letters from England. Ed. Jack Simmons. London: Cresset, 1951. Staunton, George Leonard. An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China. 2 vols. London: G. Nicol, 1797. “The Story of the Common Willow Plate.” Family Friend 1 (1849): 124–54. Stroud, Dorothy. Capability Brown. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. “A Tea Gatherer in China.” London Times, 6 October 1852, 6. “Ten Thousand Things Related to China and the Chinese.” Court Magazine and Monthly Critic and Lady’s Magazine, Vol. 27 (June 1843): 102. Tennyson, Alfred. Tennyson’s Poetry. Ed. Robert W. Hill, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. Thomson, John. The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China and China; or Ten Years’ Travels and Residence Abroad. London: Samson Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1875. ———. The Land and the People of China. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1876. ———. Through China with a Camera. Westminster: A Constable, 1898. ———. “Geographical Photography.” Scottish Geographical Magazine 23, no. 1 (1907): 14–19. “Through China with a Camera” [Review]. Speaker, Vol. 17, (16 April 1898): 485– 86. “Through China with a Camera” [Review]. Bookman 14, no. 80 (May 1898): 53. “Through China with a Camera” [Review]. Athenaeum Vol. 3677, (April 1898): 495–96. Thurin, Susan Schoenbauer. Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842–1907. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999. “Travels in the East.” All the Year Round 12 (April 1884): 492–97.



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“Turkey in London.” Chambers’s Journal 37 (September 1854): 179– 82. “Visit to the Chinese Junk.” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 10 (1848): 40–42. Walpole, Horace. History of the Modern Taste in Gardening. Ed. John Dixon Hunt. New York: Garland, 1982. “Wan Tang Jin Wuh: By a Barbarian Eye.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 27 (1843): 176–84. Whistler, James McNeill. Whistler on Art: Selected Writings and Letters of James McNeill Whistler. Ed. Nigel Thorp. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Andrew Elfenbein. New York: Longman, 2006. Williamson, G. C. Murray Marks and His Friends. London: The Bodley Head, 1919. [Wines, Enoch Cobb.] “China.” Gentleman’s Magazine 4, no. 2 (February 1839): 118–19. Wolseley, J. G. Narrative of the War with China in 1860. London: Longman, 1862. Wong, Young-Tsu. A Paradise Lost: The Imperial Garden Yuanming Yuan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Wu, Duncan. Wordsworth’s Reading, 1800–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

227

Index

Abel, Clarke, 58–59, 83 Act of Union (Great Britain), 13 Aesthetics, 146, 152; artists and, 101–3, 106–7; Chinese, 4–5, 7, 14–15, 17; foreignness and, 96–97; French vs. Chinese, 13–14; of garden design, 24–25, 30–32, 49–50; non-European, 181–83; perspective in, 33–34; of porcelain, 73, 77–79, 80, 98; of space, 127–34; viewing positions and, 52–53 Africa: as artistic influence, 181–82 Ah See, 136–37 Alexander, William, 199n74; Costume of China, 45; illustrations by, 45–47, 78; Journal of the Lord Macartney’s EmbassyÂ� to China, 43, 199n76, “View in the Eastern Side of the Imperial Park at Gehol,” 47 (fig.) “Allegory of kinship,” 182, 183 “Allowing the Chinese to Look Chinese” (Goldberg), 177–78 Americans: opium paraphernalia and, 134–35 Amherst, Lord, 54, 59, 83 “The Analytical Language of John WilÂ� kins” (Borges); Foucault’s use of, 20–22 Anderson, Aeneas, 42, 43–44 Architecture, 29; and construction of,

power, 48–49; and imperial power, 171–72 Army: British, 69, 114, 125, 147 Arrow (ship), 67 Arrow War, see Second Opium War Art, 74, 103, 104, 194n7; foreignness and, 97, 180–82; landscape gardening as, 29–31; photography as, 145–46; porcelain as, 89–90, 92–93 The Artist in His Studio (Whistler), 101–3 The Assassination of a British Sentry (film), 174 Attack on a China Mission-Or Bluejackets to the Rescue (film) (Williamson), 174–75, 217–18n87 Attack on a Mission Station (film), 174 Attempted Capture of an English Nurse and Children (film), 174 Attiret, Jean Dénis, 193n2; on Qing imperialÂ� garden, 23, 24–25, 27, 42 Austen, Jane: Mansfield Park, 40, 197–98n59 An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (Staunton), 43, 45, 48, 50 Baber, Edward, 16 Bailie, Joanna: “Lines to a Teapot,” 76

230

Index Banks, Joseph, 58 Barrow, John, 16, 41, 203–4n17; on Gehol gardens, 50–51; restrictions on movements, 46–48; Travels in China, 7, 38, 42, 43, 45–46, 47 (fig.), 52–53, 76–78, 180, 204n18 Beato, Felice, 142, 143; “Interior Angle of North Fort Immediately after Its Capture,” 151 (fig.); portrait of Prince Gong, 147–50; “Prince Kung: Brother of the Emperor of China, Signer of the Treaty,” 148 (fig.); war photography of, 146–47, 150–52 Beijing, 11, 41, 141; architecture in, 48– 49; Second Opium War in, 147–48 Benoit, Michel, 24 Bird, Isabella, 142, 146, 158, 162; “The Author in Manchu Dress,” 164 (fig.); Chinese Pictures: Notes on Photography Made in China, 143, 170–73; “Fort on the Peking Wall,” 172 (fig.); Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither, 163; portrait of, 164 (fig.), 165–67; The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, 143, 163–70 Blacker, J. F.: Nineteenth-Century English Ceramic Art, 88 Blakiston, Thomas, 157–58 The Blue Bower (Rossetti), 106 Borges, Jorge Luis: “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” 20–22 Boxer Rising/Rebellion, 8, 12, 16, 171, 173; films of, 174–75 Bracquemond, Félix, 183 “Broken Dish, The” (Hood), 85 Brown, Ford Madox, 107 Brown, Lancelot “Capability”: landscape design by, 29–30, 200n86 Byron, Lord, 13 Castiglione, Giuseppe, 24 Catholicism, 13 Caughley manufactory, 86 Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, 20–21

Chambers, William, 15, 42, 58, 195–96nn25; Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 5, 17, 25, 26, 27, 29–34, 35; Explanatory Discourse by Tan ChetQua of Quang-Chew-Fu, Gent., 36, 196n43, 197n44 Chambers’s Journal, 16, 87, 119, 123 Cheefoo Convention, 12 Chengde, 41, 197n48; see also Gehol China (tableware), see Porcelain China Inland Mission (CIM), 12, 166 China through the Stereoscope (Ricalton), 174 Chinese Collection, 123; in Hyde Park, 116–17 Chinese Pictures: Notes on Photographs Made in China (Bird), 143, 170–73 Chinnery, George, 46 Chinoiserie, 5, 7, 26, 28, 29, 195n9 CIM, see China Inland Mission The Clever Correspondent (films), 174 Clifford, James, 182 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: “Kubla Khan,” 40, 79 Collections: ethnographic, 16, 19, 116– 18; horticultural, 61–62, 64, 65–66; opium paraphernalia, 134–35; porcelain, 74, 75–76, 82, 104–10, 207n91 Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone, 114, 126 Colonies: British, 10–11, 54, 113, 119, 145; see also Hong Kong Colonization: reverse, 112 Commerce: British, 7, 10–11, 52, 54, 123, 126, 203n11 Commodities, 10–11, 18, 69, 80, 180; decorative, 100–101; exhibitions of, 115–16, 121 Confessions of an English Opium Eater (De Quincey), 114 Conner, Lois: “Beihai Yuan, Beijing,” 176 (fig.); photographs by, 175–78 Convention of Peking, 11 Corn Laws: repeal of, 11 Costume of China (Alexander), 45

Crary, Jonathan: Techniques of the Observer, 3, 142 Crystal Palace: Chinese exhibit in, 118, 123 Culture(s), 3, 24, 31, 113, 193n54; consumer, 79; domestic, 91, 100–101; material, 78 Daguerreotypes, 19 Daniell, Thomas, 46 Daniell, William, 46 Darwin, Charles: The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 93–94 Davis, John Francis, 16 Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (Picasso), 181 De Quincey, Thomas: Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 154 The Descent of Man and Selection in RelaÂ� tion to Sex (Darwin), 93–94 Despotism, 34, 53, 54, 79; in landscape design, 38, 39–40, 52 Dickens, Charles, 4, 15, 111, 183, 205n51, 208n2; “The Great Exhibition and the Little One,” 122–25; on Ke-Ying, 120–22; The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 113, 126–33, 134, 135, 212nn51, 74; “A Plated Article,” 89–90 Diplomatic missions, see Embassies Disguise: travel in, 58, 60–61, 200– 201n99 Display case, 112, 113 Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (Chambers), 5, 17, 25, 26; and CapaÂ� bility Brown, 29–30; on garden designÂ�, 30–32; on viewing perspectives, 33–34; on visual manipulation, 32–33 Domesticity: porcelain and, 73–74, 87; Victorian, 18–19, 100, 113, 137 ; and willow pattern, 16–17, 87, 91, 109 Doré, Gustave: London: A Pilgrimage, 134 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 111; “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” 17, 113, 139–40 Dunn, Nathan: “Ten Thousand Chinese Things,” 116–18

Index “An East End Parish,” 135–36 East India Company, 10, 11, 54, 58, 76, 79, 113 Eastlake, Charles: Hints on Household Taste, 109 The Egoist (Meredith), 17, 74, 91–92; criticism of, 93–94; visual realism of, 95–96 “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (Gray), 136, 213n82 Elgin, Lord, 67, 68, 141 Eliot, George: Middlemarch, 16–17 Embassies,: Lord Amherst’s, 54, 83; Lord Macartney’s, 37, 38, 40–42, 49–52, 199n73; records of, 42–45; restrictions on, 45–47 Emperor: and architecture, 48–49; and garden design, 27, 34, 50 Empire, 7, 189n22; garden design’s reflection on, 35, 36; informal, 9, 10, 13, 55, 115, 126, 189n22, 189–90n23 “Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit” (Meredith), 95 An Essay on Design in Gardening (MasonÂ�), 34 Europe: Chinese porcelain, 75 “Ever Victorious Army” (Thomson), 153 Exhibitions, exhibits, 112–13, 115, 209– 10n15; Dickens on, 122–25, 131–32; Dunn’s, 116–18; of ethnographic collections, 16, 19; Ke-Ying, 118–21 Explanatory Discourse by Tan Chet-Qua of Quang-Chew-Fu, Gent. (Chambers), 36, 196n43, 197n44 Exploration, 54; narratives of, 55–56 Family Friend (journal), 88 “Fancies on a Tea-Cup” (Hood), 83 Fashions: Chinese, 7, 19 Feminine: and porcelain, 76, 78–79, 94 Fieldes, Luke, 127 Films, 174–75, 217–18n87 First Opium War, 54, 66, 67, 113, 180 “Foochow and the River Min” (Thomson), 153

231

232

Index Foreign legations, 141 Foreignness, 97; art and, 180–82; of China, 6–7 Fortune, Robert, 25, 27, 116, 201– 2nn108, 114, 115; Journey to the Tea Countries, 57, 66–67; narratives of, 55–56; as plant hunter, 58, 59–60, 61–62, 64–66; A Residence among the Chinese, 56–57; Three Years Wandering in the Northern Provinces of China, 57, 62–63, 64, 202n115; use of disguise, 60–61 Foucault, Michel: The Order of Things, 20–22 France, 11, 13, 114, 126, 141 Fraser’s Magazine, 89

Gordon-Cumming, Constance, 69 Governance, 4, 24, 35; commentary on, 52–53 Gower, Erasmus: Journal of the H.M.S. Lion, 43 Grant, James Hope, 147; on portrait of Prince Gong, 148–49 Gray, Thomas: “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” 136, 213n82 “Great Exhibition and the Little One, The” (Dickens and Horne), 122–25 Great Exhibition of the Works of IndustryÂ� of All Nations, 115–16, 120; Dickens on, 122–23 Greenhouses, 64 Gros, Jean-Baptiste-Louis, 67, 68

“Gardening in China” (Loudon), 27–28 Gardens, 18, 28, 65, 81, 180, 202n120; William Chambers on, 29–31, 195– 96n25; destruction of Qing, 15, 67– 69; European aesthetics in, 24–25; narratives of, 69–70; as nation, 35– 37; political power in, 26–27, 40–41; Qing imperial, 23, 41–45, 47; viewing perspectives of, 33–34, 45–46, 48–53; and visual realism, 20, 155–58; and visual truth, 31–32; walled, 56–57; Wordsworth on, 37–40 Gay, John: “To a Lady on Her Passion for Old China,” 76 Gehol, 197n48; comparisons to, 53–54; illustrations of, 45–47; imperial gardens of, 37–39, 40–41; power expressedÂ� in, 50–51 George III, 35 Giles, Herbert, 16 Gill, William, 16, 158 Goldberg, Vicki, 175; “Allowing the Chinese to Look Chinese,” 177–78 Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (Bird), 163 Gong, Prince: portrait of, 147–50 Gordon, Charles George “Chinese Gordon,” 126, 153

Hart, Robert, 12 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 54 “Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers” (Mason and Walpole), 17, 26, 34–36, 196n35 He-Sing, 118 Hevia, James, 40–41 Hierarchy: visual representations of, 48 Hifferman, Jo, 2, 97, 183 Hints on Household Taste (Eastlake), 109 “History of the Modern Taste in Gardening” (Walpole), 34, 196n36 Holmes, Samuel: Journal of Mr. Samuel Holmes, 43 Hong Kong, 10, 11, 54, 113 Hood, Thomas: “The Broken Dish,” 85; “Fancies on a Tea-Cup,” 83 Horne, Richard Henry: “The Great ExhiÂ�bition and the Little One,” 122–25 Horsburgh, J. Heywood, 166 Horticulture: collections, 61–62, 64, 65–66; explorations, 55–56, 58–59, 64–65 Human body: and garden design, 27 Hunt, Leigh, 1, 73, 75; “Tea-Drinking,” 83–85

Hyde Park: Chinese Collection exhibit in, 116–17 Illustrated London News: on Second Opium War, 141, 147 Illustrations of China and Its People (Thomson), 143, 153–54, 160 Imperial city: garden simulacra of, 35, 50 Imperialism, 9; architecture and, 171–72; British, 40, 189n22; Chinese military and, 172–73; gardens as expressions of, 41–42 Imperial Maritime Customs, 12 Impressionism, 5, 109; Asian influences, 103, 182–83 India, 59; British in, 9, 10, 145; opium trade, 11, 114 Indian Mutiny: photography of, 147, 214n14 Informal empire: Great Britain’s, 9, 10, 12–13 Inner Mongolia, 41 Intimate China (Little), 144 Japan, 104, 173, 183 Jardine and Matheson, 113 Jardin anglo-chinois, 18, 23 Jerrold, Blanchard: London: A Pilgrimage, 134 Journal of Lord Macartney’s Embassy to China (Alexander), 43, 199n76 Journal of Mr. Samuel Holmes (Holmes), 43 Journal of the H.M.S. Lion (Gower), 43 Journey to the Tea Countries (Fortune), 57, 66–67 Kangxi emperor, 41 Kew Gardens, 29, 50 Ke-Ying: Dickens on, 120–22; in London, 118–20 Knowledge, 9, 84; of porcelain, 78, 79; scientific, 55, 144 Kow-tow, 49–50 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge), 40, 79 Kuhn, Franz, 21

Index Lamb, Charles, 14, 73, 74, 75, 83, 183, 204n20; “Old China,” 78–81; souvenirs for, 79–80 Lamb, Mary, 81 Landscape, 27, 28, 51, 61, 67; British, 53–54; despotic tyranny in, 38, 39–40, 52–53; photography and, 160–62, 175–78; visual reality of, 155–58; visual narratives of, 44–46 Landscape design, 18, 200n86; Capability Brown’s, 29–30; Chinese, 23–24, 28; despotism in, 39–40, 52–53; political systems and, 38–39; power in, 26– 27, 50–51; visual effects in, 45–46, 48 Langdon, William: Dunn’s Chinese Collection, 117–18 Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, see Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks “Lazarus, Lotus Eating” (Dickens), 129 Legge, James, 16 Lemon, Mark: “A True History of the Celebrated Wedgewood Hieroglyph, Commonly Called the Willow Pattern,” 71–72, 74 Letters from England (Southey), 203n13; on porcelain patterns, 77–78 Leyland, Frederick, 108 On Liberty (Mill), 90 “Lines to a Teapot” (Bailie), 76 Linnaeus, 58 Little, Alicia: Intimate China, 144 “Locksley Hall” (Tennyson), 7 London, 208–9n6; Chinese Collection in, 116–17; exhibitions in, 112–13; KeYing in, 118–21; opium dens in, 16, 127–40 London: A Pilgrimage (Jerrold and Doré), 134 London Missionary Society, 12, 166, 200n99 Looty, 125 Loudon, John: “Gardening in China,” 27–28 Lowther, Lord, 53 Lowther Hall: comparisons to, 53–54

233

234

Index Macartney, Lord, 58, 75; diplomatic mission, 37, 38, 40–42, 45–47, 52, 199n74; and Qing court, 7, 8, 10; on Qing imperial gardens, 25, 27, 49–51, 180, 200n86; on travelers’ narratives, 42–43 Mackenzie, Compton, 88 Macpherson, C. B., 18 Manchu government, 167, 190n27 “The Mandarin’s Daughter” (play), 88 Mansfield Park (Austen), 40, 197– 98n59 “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (Doyle), 17, 113, 139–40 Maps: gardens as, 51 Margary, Augustus Raymond, 12 Marks, Murray, 106, 107 Mason, George: An Essay on Design in Gardening, 34; “Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers,” 17, 26, 34–36, 196n35 Meredith, George: The Egoist, 17, 74, 91–92, 93–96; “Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,” 95 Middlemarch (Eliot), 16–17 Migration: Chinese, 114, 139 Military: British, 54, 63, 67, 146–52; Chinese, 67, 172–73 Mill, John Stuart: On Liberty, 90 Missionaries, 12, 166, 191n33; see also London Missionary Society, China Inland Mission Mitchell and Kenyon, 174 Modernism, 17, 181–82, 183 Moffat, John, 165 MoMa, see Museum of Modern Art The Moonstone (Collins), 114, 126 Monarchy: British, 35–36 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 181–82 Museums, 115; ethnographic, 16, 19; Keying as, 118–21; see also Collections; Exhibitions The Mystery of Edward Drood (Dickens), 113, 126–33, 135, 212nn51, 74; opium den as focus of, 127–34; reviews

of, 126–27; urban description and, 134–37 Napier, Lord, 54 Napoleonic Wars, 13 Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860 (Swinhoe), 148 Narrative of the War with China in 1860 (Wolseley), 67, 68, 69 Narratives, 10, 14; of exploration, 55–56; of Macartney’s diplomatic mission, 42–44; photography and, 145–46; Romantic era, 54–55; travel, 12, 32, 38, 77, 163–73; visual, 44–45, 94–95 Nation: garden as, 35–37 Naturalists, 9, 83; travel, 55, 58–59; see also Horticulture Nature, 33, 39; Chinese views of, 18, 69; Macartney on, 42–43; and political power, 50–51 Nemesis, 54 Newman, Cardinal, 88 Nineteenth-Century English Ceramic Art (Blacker), 88 Novels, 14, 16, 208n2; porcelain as theme in, 91–92; visual realism in, 95–96 Objects: animation and personification of, 89, 205n51 “Old China” (Lamb), 78; social ritual and identity in, 80–81; souvenirs in, 79–80 Opening of the Great Exhibition, The (Selous), 118 Opium, 180; trade in, 11, 54, 113–14 Opium dens, 17, 19, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115; as literary theme, 113, 127–35; London, 16, 134–40 Opium Wars, 9, 11, 54, 66, 113, 141, 180 The Order of Things (Foucault), 20, 21–22 Painting: as profession, 100 Palmerston, Prime minister, 13

Parks: pleasure, 51 Parodies: of Chinese aesthetics, 17–18 Parrish, William Henry, 45; “View of the Emperor’s Park at Gehol with Pong-cho-chong in the Distance,” 46 (fig.) Peacock Room, 108 Periodicals, 14, 16 Perspective, 27, 188n10; construction of visual, 33–34, 48 Philadelphia: Dunn’s Chinese Collection in, 116, 117 Photography, photographs, 16, 19–20, 151, 214n14; architecture and power in, 171–72; authenticity of, 145–46; in China, 143–44; Chinese accommodation of, 169–70; Chinese reaction to, 158–59; landscape, 160– 62, 175–78; travel, 152–58, 163; visual control in, 167–69; as way of seeing, 142–43, 144–45; see also individual photographers by name Picasso, Pablo: Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, 181 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 5, 114, 137–39 Picturesque, 17, 28 Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese (Alexander), 45 Plantations: tea, 59 Plant exchange, 18, 66; Fortune’s role in, 58–60 64–66 “A Plated Article” (Dickens and Wills), 89–90 Political rights: nature and, 50–51 Politics, 3, 9–10, 136; in garden and landscape design, 26–27, 34, 38–39 Pope, Alexander: The Rape of the Lock, 76 Porcelain, 11, 18, 64, 180; aesthetics, 77– 79; blue and white, 15–16, 203–4n17; British, 88–90; collection and display of, 75–76, 82, 104–10, 207n91; domestic culture and, 91–92, 100–101; domesticity and, 73–74; social life

Index of, 72–73; social ritual and, 80–81; souvenirs, 79–80; status of, 103–4; in Whistler’s paintings, 97–98, 99 (fig.), 101–3; willow pattern on, 19, 71–72, 85–87 Portraits: Isabella Bird, 164 (fig.), 165–67; photographic, 159–60; Prince Gong, 147–50 Post-Impressionism, 109 Potteries: British, 76, 85–87 Pottery manufacture: British, 76, 85–87, 88–90 Power: architectural, 48–49; in landscape design, 26–27, 34, 35–36, 50–51; political, 40–41 Prelude (Wordsworth): Book 8, 53; GeholÂ� gardens in, 37–39, 40 Primitivism: aesthetics of, 181–82 “‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” 181–82 Private space: home as, 19 Progress: visual and temporal, 32–33 Public space: opium dens as, 127–40 Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen (Whistler), 100 Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks (Whistler), 2, 97–98, 99 (fig.), 103, 180–81, 183, 184 Qianlong emperor, 10, 24, 40, 41, 44, 49, 62 Qing dynasty/court, 8, 11, 12, 54, 59, 152, 162; declining power of, 171–73; imperial gardens of, 15, 23, 24–25, 27, 41–44; Macartney’s diplomatic mission and, 7, 8, 10, 49–50, 199n76, 200n86; opium trade, 113–14; reterritorialization of empire, 125–26 The Rape of the Lock (Pope), 76 Realism, 5–6, 15, 20, 143, 170; challenges to, 17, 43–44, 121–22; opium den and, 124; photography and, 182; visual codes in, 92–93, 95–96; willow pattern and, 155–58

235

236

Index Rennie, David, 150, 151, 152 Residence among the Chinese, A (Fortune), 56–57 Ricalton, James: China through the Stereoscope, 174 Ricci, Matteo, 7 Riots: antiforeign, 12; see also Boxer Uprising Roads: Qing emperor and, 50 Romantic era, 40; periodical essays, 78–85; prose and travel narratives, 54–55 Rose and Silver: La Princesse du pays de la Porcelaine (Whistler), 101 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 4, 16; The Blue Bower, 106; porcelain collection, 74, 104, 105–8, 109, 207n91 Rossetti, William, 2, 109; on Whistler’s Purple and Rose, 97, 98, 100 Royal Horticultural Society: and Fortune’s trip, 58, 59, 60 Russia, 141 Ryan, James, 144–45 Satire, 15, 26; on porcelain, 78–85, 87; on travel narratives, 77–78; on willow pattern, 71–72 Schlesinger, Max, 120 Science, 145; exploration and, 54, 55 Second Opium War, 11, 13, 16, 141, 180; photography of, 143, 146, 147–52 Selous, H. C.: The Opening of the Great Exhibition, 118 Sepoy Rebellion, 9 Sharawadgi, 28 Silk, 11 Sino-Japanese War, 12, 173 Smith, Adolphe: Street Life in London, 152 Smith, Albert, 119–20 Social status: and visual representation, 166–67; willow pattern and, 91–92 Southey, Robert, 73, 75, 87, 204n18; Letters from England, 77–78, 203n13 Souvenirs: porcelain, 79–80 Space, 7–8, 81; domestic, 18–19, 100–

101; opium den as Chinese, 127–34; public v. private, 107–8 Spode, Josiah, 86; Willow Pattern plate, 86 (fig.) Spode pottery, 87 Staffordshire potteries, 76 Staunton, George, 41, 49, 58: An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, 43, 45, 48, 50 “The Story of the Common Willow Plate,” 88 The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China (Thomson), 143, 152–53, 160, 161 (fig.) Street Life in London (Smith and Thomson), 152 Studio: painter’s, 100, 101 Summer Palace, 160; looting and destruction, 69, 114, 125; photographs of, 161–62; see also Yuanming Yuan Swedish East India Company, 29, 58 Swinhoe, Robert: Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860, 148 Taiping Rebellion, 11, 67, 114, 126, 153 Taylor, Hudson, 166 Tea, 11, 58, 180; cultivation of, 25, 55; drinking of, 84–85; export of, 59, 66–67; and opium trade, 113–14 “Tea-Drinking” (Hunt), 83–85 Techniques of the Observer (Crary), 3, 142 Technology: film, 174–75; Chinese military and, 172–73; photographic, 158–59, 168, 169, 177 Temple, William: “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, or Of Gardening in the year 1685,” 28 Tennyson, Alfred Lord: “Locksley Hall,” 7 “Ten Thousand Chinese Things” (Dunn), 116–18 Thomson, John, 142, 156–57, 183; Illustrations of China and Its People, 143, 153–54, 160; on Chinese beliefs

about photographs, 158–59; The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China, 143, 152–53, 160, 161 (fig.); Street Life in London, 152; Through China with a Camera, 143, 153, 154–55, 162, 164; “Wang-Show-Shan,” 161 (fig.); “The Willow Pattern Bridge,” 156 (fig.) Three Years Wandering in the Northern Provinces of China (Fortune), 57, 64, 202n115; modes of seeing in, 62–63 Through China with a Camera (Thomson), 143, 153, 154–55, 162 “To a Lady on Her Passion for Old China” (Gay), 76 Tourism, 15, 69, 142; Isabella Bird’s, 163–73 Trade, 10–11, 12; British-Chinese, 36–37, 54, 64, 75, 76, 80, 113, 180 Transferware: British production of, 86, 89–90 Travel, 54, 199n74; in disguise, 58, 60–61, 200–201n99; free, 11, 12; photography, 152–62 Travels in China (Barrow), 7, 38, 42, 43, 52–53, 180; illustrations in, 45–46, 47 (fig.); porcelain patterns and, 76–77; Southey’s reference to, 77–78, 204n18 “Travels in the East,” 130–31 Treaties: negotiation of, 12–13; signing of, 149–50 Treaty of Nanjing, 11, 54, 141 Treaty of Tianjin, 11, 67, 141 Treaty ports, 11, 58, 126 Tribal objects: aesthetics of, 181–82 “A True History of the Celebrated Wedgewood Hieroglyph, Commonly Called the Willow Pattern” (Lemon), 71–72, 74 Truth: visual, 31–32, 48, 73 Turner, Thomas, 86 United States, 114, 116, 141 “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, or Of Gardening in the year 1685” (Temple), 28

Index Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony (Whistler), 100 Victoria, Queen, 125 Victorian era, 188n11; home in, 18–19; museums and exhibits in, 115–125, 207n91; photography in, 19–20 Viewing position: aesthetics and, 51–52 “Views on the North River” (Thomson), 153 Visibility: through photography, 142–43, 145 Vision, 1–2, 3, 7–8, 146; British, 6, 43–44, 63–64, 179–80; Chinese, 4, 5, 62–63; Chinese landscape and, 44–45, 158; photography’s, 144–45, 155–57; restrictions on, 45–48 “Visit of H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh to Hong Kong” (Thomson), 153 Visual authority: in photographs, 167–68 Visual codes: in realism, 92–93 Visual effects/tricks, 18; in Chinese gardens, 27, 32–33, 43–44, 45–46, 48 Wade, Thomas, 16 Walpole, Horace: “Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers,” 17, 26, 34– 36, 196n35; “History of the Modern Taste in Gardening,” 34, 196n36 Wanshu Yuan, 37–38 War: photography of, 146–52, 153, 214n14 Wealth, 35, 81; and porcelain, 75–76, 82 Wedgwood, Josiah, 74, 76 Westmorland, 53–54 Wet collodion plates, 19, 155 Whewell, William, 124 Whistler, Anna, 100 Whistler, James McNeill: The Artist in His Studio, 101–3, 102 (fig.); Peacock Room, 108; porcelain collection, 15–16, 74, 104, 105, 106, 109; Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, 2, 97–98, 99 (fig.), 100, 103, 180–81, 183, 184; Rose and Silver: La

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Index Princesse du Pays de la Porcelain, 108; Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, 100;Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony, 100; The Woman in White, 101 Wilde, Oscar, 105, 111; The Picture of Dorian Gray, 5, 114, 137–39 Williamson, James: Attack on a China Mission-Or Bluejackets to the Rescue, 174–75 Willow pattern, 19; British domesticity and, 73–74, 87, 91–92; British use of, 85–87; photographs and, 156–57; references to, 16, 17; satire of, 71–72; reality of, 155–58; Spode Willow Pattern plate, 86 (fig.); ubiquity of, 88–90; as visual narratives, 94–95 Wills, H. W.: “A Plated Article,” 89–90 Wirgman, Charles, 147, 215n22

Wolseley, J. G.: Narrative of the War with China in 1860, 67, 68, 69 Woman in White, The (Whistler), 101 Women, 76; in Whistler’s paintings, 100–101 Wordsworth, William, 17, 53, 197n48; Prelude, Book 8, 37–39, 40 Xiyang Lou: design of, 24–25 Yangtze Valley and Beyond, The (Bird), 143, 163; Bird’s portrait in, 164–67; Chinese accommodation in, 169–70; photography in, 167–69 “Yellow peril” narratives, 12 Yuanming Yuan, 23, 27, 41, 42, 48; destruction of, 67–69, 141; restricÂ� tions on movement in, 46–47; repictured, 161–62