In giving the very first lecture that first-year History of Art undergraduates at Oxford will hear, I usually employ the practice of giving them a sheet of paper with nothing on it but the outlines of the land masses of the globe, and ask them to draw a line round ‘the West’. The idea was inspired by a reading of Lewis and Wigen's 1997 book The Myth of Continents (‘justly celebrated’, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam says), and remains a useful pedagogic act, up to a point, for the reasons so clearly laid out in that book;Footnote ¹ also, it breaks the ice, it gets a buzz of conversation going in the room, it certainly foregrounds the topic, central now to art historical enquiry, of the way in which ‘representations are social facts’.Footnote ² But the reason I do not ask them to draw a map round ‘the East’ is that I suspect it would be too easy, or at least done too quickly, and indeed the boundaries of both ‘East’ and ‘Orient’, as ‘Europe's Other’, can be shown to have fluctuated much less than have the boundaries of what, for most Oxford students, is still, if somewhat tenuously, ‘us’ or ‘here’. Wherever ‘the East’ is, it all lies (as Subrahmanyam points out in his lecture) in that assuredly -etic part of the world called Asia. I might, in the privacy of my own hard drive, choose to categorize those European images which I need for teaching as ‘Non-Eastern’ (to balance the ‘Non-Western’ rubric on which my specialist options appear in the syllabus). But that is not a category widely used, or at least not in my own discipline of art history.

The ground is, however, not really that much firmer when as a historian one comes to deal with ‘China’. The term Zhongguo 中國, although it certainly existed, is not in my experience widely seen in the texts of the Ming period (1368–1644), although it must have circulated, since its standard literal translation as ‘Middle Kingdom’ was first used in English in 1662 (the Latin term medium regnum was in learned European usage somewhat earlier in the mid-seventeenth century at the latest). In the extensive textual accounts of the early fifteenth-century voyages led by the eunuch admiral Zheng He 鄭和 (1371–1433), it is the dynastic term ‘Great Ming’ (Da Ming 大明), or else some variant of the terms Hua 華 or Xia 夏, which is used to differentiate the Chinese ‘us’ from a whole range of possible ‘thems’, usually described as a number of ‘kingdoms’ (guo 國).Footnote ³ This onomastic question today takes on a much more heated aspect when talking about the use of the term Zhongguo in the succeeding Qing dynasty (1644–1911), where it has become tied up in the on-going and increasingly intemperate controversy over the ‘New Qing History’. This historiographical trend is seen by its Chinese nationalist opponents as an attempt to delegitimize the inclusion, under the sovereignty of the People's Republic of China, of territories first incorporated by the Qing dynasty (a claim equally vehemently denied by the historians targeted for attack). When and how the Qing rulers used Zhongguo, or its Manchu calque Dulimbai gurun, is a matter of considerable polemical intensity.Footnote ⁴

This should remind us, as we discuss the issue of singular or multiple Asias, and the ‘many, shifting systems’ which Subrahmanyam discusses in his lecture in this volume, that the component parts of those systems (‘India’, ‘China’, Southeast Asia’) are themselves shifting, in definition and in perception as much as in outline. The many shifting scholarly systems in which the study of these areas is carried on also needs to be accounted for. It seems to me that those of us in the field of Chinese studies have until recently lagged some way behind our South Asianist colleagues in an address to ‘integrative’ or ‘connected’ histories. It is not so much that we have refused to accept their existence, but that in coming late to this topic we have perhaps been enthralled by the possibilities they offer for escape from a too strictly bounded Chinese exceptionalism. It is even possibly the case that we have leaned too far in the other direction, to the point where the many crucial but utterly unconnected manifestations of the past come to seem dangerously ‘sinological’ and inward-looking, and correspondingly neither fashionable nor easy to fund. Certainly connectedness has been the master-theme of much recent work. An exhibition held at the British Museum from 2014–2015 (for which I served as co-curator), entitled Ming: 50 Years that Changed China, had as one of its central aims the bringing before a wide public the recent revolution in scholarly perception of the early Ming. This sees it not as some nativist reaction to the Mongol conquest, pulling down the shutters on the outside world—a ‘turning away from the outside world [which] was accompanied by a growing introspection within Chinese life’—but rather as, to a significant degree, another Chinggisid successor state, captured by the cosmopolitan glamour of Mongol hegemony.Footnote ⁵ It is to avoid any hint of the introspective that Chinese studies as a discipline has perhaps become rather over-excited about connectivity, but this may well be a necessary corrective phase—corrective to both the Hegelian and Cold War discourses of China's indifference to the wider world.

If in fact there is not one system but many shifting systems in the history of Asia, it remains the case that some are remembered after the shifts which decentralize them, and some are less well remembered, or not remembered at all. In fact, there seems to me to be an important distinction between remembered (or even imagined) and unremembered connections, that is between those connections which still have a discursive presence in the imagination, even if that is backed up by little in the way of substantive fact. There is no necessity for the participants in what are in fact connected systems to have any conscious awareness of each other. Thus the huge spike in the price of pepper on European markets between 1410 and 1414 (which, for instance, saw the price of pepper in England increase eightfold from 1410 to 1411), has been attributed by economic historians to the huge amounts of the spice purchased (or extorted) by the fleets of Admiral Zheng He at precisely this time. It has been argued that ‘Thus, any impact of Zheng He in deflecting pepper and other spices away from the Levant and Europe would have taken place mainly between 1411 and 1422. It is only a correlation, of course, but this exogenous Asian supply-side shock seems to offer the most likely explanations for the European pepper price spike in the early fifteenth century.’Footnote ⁶ The steward in an English medieval aristocratic household fretting about the rise in the price of pepper will have been totally unaware of its ultimate causes in Ming imperial policy, in much the same way as thieves today targeting the copper wire of the contemporary British railway system, or the lead on church roofs, will not necessarily be au courant with the role of China's economic growth in setting global commodity prices.

An instructive case in this regard might that of sixteenth-century Chinese and Japanese connections with the Latin American world. The flow of silver from the mines of Mexico and Peru to China has long been identified as one of the key drivers of late-Ming economic growth; more recently, scholars have turned their attention to the flow of Chinese goods into the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru.Footnote ⁷ Measurably large communities of Chinese artisans were to be found in Lima and in Mexico City by the early 1600s, and one of the very few loan-words from Japanese into a European language before the late nineteenth century is the Spanish biombo, from the Japanese byōbu 屏風, for the folding screens which became an important artistic medium in colonial New Spain.Footnote ⁸ Yet there is almost no evidence in the textual records of Chinese awareness of Spain's New World possessions, to match the concern felt for its conquest of the Philippines, which did very much reside within Chinese elite consciousness (and doubtless more firmly in Chinese merchant consciousness, though we have less evidence for that).Footnote ⁹ Does the visual culture of the period point to types of awareness of connectivity which the written record occludes? A painting from around 1600 which shows the urban scene of the Ming secondary capital of Nanjing pictures the numerous shop signs of its bustling streets, one of which advertises very clearly, ‘All the Goods of Both the Eastern and Western Oceans’.Footnote ¹⁰ The existence of specialist shops for imported exotica from far away, to match those of the ‘Chinamen’ of eighteenth-century London, suggests perhaps that some sort of awareness of connectedness through oceanic trade existed in the minds of those on the streets of the Ming capital. These might be elite figures, like the diarist Li Rihua 李日華 (1565–1635), who records purchases of Japanese lacquer and metalwork (Japanese screens and swords were also popular among the tastemakers of Ming China), as well as what may well have been vessels of Islamic or even Venetian glass (‘brought by barbarian ships from the south seas, things transformed by fire in a barbarian country’), and even on one occasion an ostrich egg from distant Africa, which must have involved Portuguese intermediaries at some point.Footnote ¹¹ Thus Li's awareness of oceanic geopolitics, especially of the conflict between Dutch and Portuguese over the profits of trade with the Ming, was matched by an exposure to its actual material products. It was not just things but also technology transfers that provided the locus through which systems of connectivity made and remade themselves. This remaking could be a very rapid process. A recent essay by Tonio Andrade makes the convincing case that it was the extreme speed with which Chinese military forces adopted the firearms technology of their Portuguese adversaries that turned an advantage for the latter in an initial 1521 armed clash into a much more level playing field by as early as the following year, when Chinese forces prevailed against their European enemies.Footnote ¹² The ‘Frankish’ guns (folangji 佛郎機) which so rapidly became part of the Chinese arsenal were being proposed for deployment on the fortifications of the North against the Mongols as early as 1529, and they rapidly became a standard part of Chinese armaments, their name (like ‘China’ itself for porcelain in the West) the only reminder of a moment of violent connectedness when systems clashed. Later on in the century, the adoption of New World food crops, most particularly of maize but also of chillies or tomatoes, was an event of equally if not more substantial moment in China's recent history (imagine ‘Chinese food’ without chillies). But in this instance the names for the things retained no trace of their foreign origins, as they were adopted and naturalized in both new cultural and horticultural contexts.

Material and visual culture may on occasion stand as evidence for the persistence in memory of connections that were no longer active but certainly not forgotten. One striking example in this case might be found in the world of Iranian courtly collecting, in an album of paintings held in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, in what was once the collection of the Ottoman sultans. The album (Topkapı Palace Museum H. 2154) is known as the ‘Bahram Mirza Album’, after its first owner Bahram Mirza (1517–1549), brother of the Safavid Shah Tahmasp (r. 1524–1576) of Iran, for whom it was assembled in the years 1554–1555 by the court artist Dust Muhammad (fl. 1531–1564). This album has a good claim to be better known as the first ‘world history of art’, since in addition to a quantity of works from different regions and different periods of the Islamicate world, it includes one European piece (described as farangī or ‘Frankish’), and a rather larger number of pictures from China. Prominent among these are two fragments of an early fifteenth-century work showing a mighty steed and its two attendant grooms, painted on silk by an anonymous master of the early Ming imperial court. The picture may have formed part of a diplomatic gift exchange between the Ming emperors of China and the other Eurasian superpower of the day, the Timurid rulers of what are now Iran and Afghanistan. There is a possibility that it is a picture of the very animal given as a gift to the Ming emperor in 1412 by the Timurid aristocrat Sayyed-Ahmad Tarhan, which was then brought back to China by a returning Ming embassy, with a painting of the horse then travelling in its turn to Herat in 1417.Footnote ¹³ An inscription in Persian above the heads of the grooms, which presumably dates from the picture's mid-sixteenth-century remounting reads, ‘These paintings are from the collection of good works by the Chinese masters’.Footnote ¹⁴ Using the Persian word for ‘Chinese’—khaţā’ī (cognate with ‘Cathay’ in the European languages)—the inscription identifies these as literally the first Chinese paintings, or rather the first paintings to be called ‘Chinese’.Footnote ¹⁵ By the time the Bahram Mirza Album was assembled in the mid-sixteenth century, the regular diplomatic intercourse between Ming and Timurid courts, which had lasted from 1387 to 1504, had come to an end and private trade had slumped accordingly.Footnote ¹⁶ The Ming and the Iranian Safavids (never mind the Indian Mughals) were undoubtedly much less connected in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the album is evidence for a memory of connection, at least in Safavid courtly circles, the sense that there was a China, and the products of its skilled painters were real things which might be collected and appraised in the present.

The Ming state's abandonment of the Zheng He voyages, whether on the grounds of unsustainable cost or because the issues of shaky legitimacy that they were designed to address had been successfully overcome, provide one of the great ‘What ifs’ for contrafactual histories and fictions alike.Footnote ¹⁷ But it can be demonstrated that Zheng He was never forgotten in China. This was true in the realm of popular culture, where the miraculous exploits of the ‘Three Jewel’ Eunuch were at the heart of late-Ming novelistic rewritings of recent history.Footnote ¹⁸ It was also true in the case of that quantity of geographical knowledge (surely once much more than the surviving sparse evidence) which survived the deliberate destruction of official records of the voyages at the hands of the Ming state. Thus both the ‘Laud Rutter’ and the ‘Selden Map’, unique items coincidentally preserved in Oxford's Bodleian Library, contain evidence for commercially based memories of what Zheng He had done and where he had gone, long after Chinese sea captains themselves had given up sailing further west than Melaka, a point beyond which, after the 1430s, ‘private Chinese traders rarely went’.Footnote ¹⁹ The Selden Map, studied in detail by Timothy Brook who places its creation around 1608 in the Javanese port of Bantam, is unique in that it shows actual sailing routes, stretching from more than one port in China, to the southeast as far as the Moluccas and west to the northern end of the Melaka Strait.Footnote ²⁰ The very left edge of the map does identify one port, however, as Guli 古里, Calicut or the modern Kozhikode, the crucial nodal point where eastern and western Indian Ocean networks intersected. It had been one of the key destinations of the Zheng He voyages, its rulers (whether willingly or not) entering into the network of courtly gift exchange with the Ming emperors though the exchange of precious objects. In the ‘Overall Survey of the Ocean Shores’ (Ying ya sheng lan 瀛涯勝覽) by Ma Huan 馬歡 (born circa 1380), we learn how the king of Calicut: ‘wished to send tribute; [so] he took fifty liang of fine red gold and ordered the foreign craftsmen to draw it out into gold threads as fine as a hair; these were strung together to form a ribbon, which was made into a jewelled girdle with incrustations of all kinds of precious stones and large pearls . . .’Footnote ²¹ By 1608, when the Selden Map was drawn, no Chinese ships of any kind, and certainly not the imposing fleets of the early Ming, ever put in at this still-important point of contact. However, as Brook has shown, a colophon on the map indicates that an awareness of its importance, and its role as a jumping-off point for voyages to destinations much further west, survived at least two centuries after the peak of Ming imperial intervention in the region. The Selden Map colophon gives sailing directions for three regions: for Aden, on the south coast of the Arabian Peninsula; for Dhofar, in modern Oman; and for the port of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf.Footnote ²² Thus a memory of the connection between China and the Persian Gulf does persist in this unique manuscript source, but who is to say that it does not represent what was once a widely distributed body of knowledge, which the enormous Chinese textual record, so heavy in the concerns of certain elites and so deficient in those of others, particularly mercantile ones, simply did not care to preserve and transmit? Given the lack of direct contact between them after the early fifteenth century, were the Indian Ocean and the Sinosphere then totally separate? Or does this persistence of the former in the memory of the latter (and probably vice-versa as well) mean that a connection remains?Footnote ²³ It seems to come down to the degree to which an awareness can be thought to equate to a significance. No Japanese visitor set foot in China for centuries after the early seventeenth-century Tokugawa state's policy of sakoku 鎖国 (‘closing the nation’), but surely no-one would argue that this meant that China had ceased to matter in Japan, for it surely did so, not only to Japanese intellectuals who eagerly consumed its imported products, but to a much wider and more diverse audience of urban and aristocratic consumers as well.

The Qing period (1644–1911), and particularly its apogee in the reigns of the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors from 1662 to 1795, has long been seen as one marked by a courtly cosmopolitanism in which the visual and material cultures of the wider world attested to imagined if not actual connections at the very apex of the imperium. As work proceeds in this area, we get a stronger and stronger sense of the ways in which the old orientalist trope of a China uninterested in the outside world is simply not sustainable. To give just one example of the kind of careful work which is uncovering previously unsuspected connectivities, Lai Yu-chih has demonstrated that recent European innovations in natural history, the fruits of the ‘voyages of discovery’, were being consumed in China in the century or so after their publication. Subrahmanyam is able to point to ‘extensive borrowing from European knowledge’ in the Ottoman context, but this knowledge had in addition a much wider circulation. The cassowary, an impressively large flightless bird found in New Guinea, was first introduced to European audiences when a specimen was brought to the Netherlands in 1597. Another specimen was given to Louis XIV in 1671; the bird died after four years, but was then dissected by the French savant and anatomist Claude Perrault (1613–1688), who published his Mémoires Pour Servir à l’Histoire Naturelle des Animaux between 1671 and 1676. It can be demonstrated that this text then provides the immediate source for the ‘Imperial Inscription for the Picture of Emo Birds’ of 1774, by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–1795). In an annotation to one of the poems which the Qing emperor wrote on these natural marvels it states, ‘Westerners have an illustrated book which describes this bird's appearance and anatomy in great detail. The King of Folangji ordered the creation and circulation of the book. . .’, making it clear (as indeed does the correspondence of the texts themselves) that Perrault's volume was in circulation at the Beijing court.Footnote ²⁴ As Lai makes clear, while the Qing imperial court, and in particular its visual culture, ‘was beyond doubt a constituent part of the early modern world’, this is not to say that this early modern world was one, rather it is the case here that ‘we see how information from the globalized world, manifested in the form of the cassowary, was rewritten into a Chinese political narrative; or to look at it from another perspective, how Qianlong viewed the globalized world from within the perspective of the Chinese political rhetoric’.Footnote ²⁵

The incorporative aesthetics (not to speak of the incorporative political ideology) of the Qing imperial formation leads to some extremely eloquent images and objects, which are becoming increasingly central to our understanding of the period and which go way beyond the older formulations of ‘China and the West’. The courtly interest in fixed point perspective, mediated by Jesuit members of the imperial court workshops, has long been a topic of art historical study, but more recent scholarship takes it in a very different direction from merely seeing it as a ‘Chinese response’ to a set of pictorial conventions often assumed (if in an unspoken way) to be in some sense more advanced in the pursuit of mimesis, the ultimate aim of all picturing in the influential overview of Ernst Gombrich.Footnote ²⁶ The sack by British and French troops in 1864 of the Qing ‘Summer Palace’ destroyed or dispersed a great deal of the imported exotica that were housed there, but there do still survive telling artefacts like the bow case of the Qianlong emperor, this supreme talisman in the construction of ‘Manchu’ identity being covered in a French silk textile.Footnote ²⁷ And there are tantalizing hints that this taste for wrapping objects of great symbolic importance in imported textiles may not have been restricted to the imperial court. A surviving volume of the ‘Chunhua Era Rubbings’, a treasure of Chinese calligraphy (the most prestigious of all visual cultural practices) which does not have a provenance in the imperial collections, is nevertheless also wrapped in a French eighteenth-century silk.Footnote ²⁸ How are we to understand this practice of covering things we might see as essentially ‘Manchu’ or ‘Chinese’ in imported fabrics? How widespread was it (the survival rate of textiles is in inverse proportion to their importance in the early modern world in all sorts of contexts)? And finally, do such material presences speak of any sort of ‘connection’, or are they more properly to be understood as a way of keeping connections at bay? The work of David Porter would certainly see appropriations, in carefully controlled circumstances, of a Chinese aesthetic as being central to constructions of cultural, national, and gender identities in eighteenth-century England.Footnote ²⁹ Would we not be justified in seeing the many Chinese appropriations of foreign things and images, for example clocks and mirrors, as being equally constructive? Footnote ³⁰

In terms of the study of China's past, the advantage of Subrahmanyam's injunction to see Asia not as one but as many, while at the same time paying attention to the material and visual traces of connected histories (the plural here is particularly important), is that it directs our attention to those moments of connection which link the Ming and Qing empires to parts of the world other than simply Europe. Subrahmanyam's identification of the thirteenth century as ‘a moment when India and China turned their backs on each other’, following the failure of the Mongol attempts on the territories of the Delhi sultanate, may be true in the larger sense, but we still need to factor into the account the eighteenth-century Qing understanding of Hendusitan 痕都斯坦 as materialized in the ‘Hindustan jades’ so valued at court and celebrated in the poetry of the Qianlong emperor, who wrote no fewer than 74 poems on this topic from 1768 onwards.Footnote ³¹ As Matthew Mosca has meticulously demonstrated, the Qing emperor's Hendusitan was not the same as ‘India’, and at the conceptual level the degree of confusion was considerable. But at the level of the objects themselves, a story is told of a whole range of poorly documented (or rather totally undocumented) connections with a whole range of areas beyond the Qing frontiers, since the category ‘Hindustan jades’ can be shown to include objects that were made not only in workshops in the Mughal realms but also in Central Asia and even in the Ottoman empire.Footnote ³²

Very recently, a special issue of the journal Art History has been given over to the theme of ‘Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World’, its 13 articles giving a snapshot of some of the innovative scholarship now looking at the ways in which the ‘social lives’ or ‘cultural biographies’ of objects and images track a range of different connectivities of the period 1500 to 1800.Footnote ³³ In one of these articles, Sandy Prita Meier re-examines the taste for Chinese porcelain on the part of the Swahili patricians of coastal east Africa, who from at least the thirteenth century were incorporating these ceramic wares into houses, mosques, and tombs. She cites Robert Finlay's argument that ‘the globalization of material culture initially came to pass under Chinese auspices’, so pervasive was ‘China’ on the early modern world market.Footnote ³⁴ It is tempting to see the prominence of ceramics as again materializing the memory of direct connections between China and East Africa which had once existed with a brief intensity. But rather than point in the direction of China (in either sense) ushering in a global or even an Asian-centred or an Indian Ocean-centred realm of uniformity, her work draws attention to the specific contingent history of Chinese porcelain in East Africa, and to the removal in the colonial period of the great majority of old specimens of ceramics to European collections, where the African stage in their biography became totally effaced and forgotten through the operations of the museum and the art market. She points to the ways in which ceramics acted not just as markers of an elite status, of the ability to deploy goods from far away in space and time which is such a common feature of wealth and power in so many societies, but also how the accumulation of great quantities of the material ‘acted as a tangible presence of mercantile power in Swahili spaces of daily life’, manifesting ‘mercantile materiality in its “pure” form as a commodity’.Footnote ³⁵ This and its companion articles constitute work that goes much further than a simple interest in ‘encounters’ between relatively undifferentiated entities called ‘Asia’, ‘Africa’, and ‘the West’. It stands as a materially grounded counterpart to other kinds of integrative history such as the work of Johan Elverskog (cited by Subrahmanyam), which acts as a continuation of the ideas of Joseph Fletcher, and indeed goes even further than Fletcher in its willingness to deconstruct religions as bounded entities.Footnote ³⁶

But this work may not be welcomed everywhere, as those with an investment in the conceptual integrity of ‘Islam’, ‘Buddhism’, ‘the West’, ‘China’ are certainly willing to loudly proclaim. Subrahmanyam rightly draws our attention to ‘the limits of [these] networks and circuits’, and reminds us that, ‘Not everything was connected and not all the time.’ This is undoubtedly true, and salutary, and worth remembering, especially in the present age when historical connections are deployed very specifically in pursuit of contemporary aims, as with the modern Chinese party-state's deployment of an eirenic, trade-centred picture of the actually rather bellicose Zheng He voyages. In a more nuanced picture, the fact of material persistence, and the study of the way in which an object or image that resulted from a past connection can continue to exist in the physical space as well as in the speech and imagination of those who encounter it, should, if we do it right, be able to play a helpful role.