In this lavishly illustrated study, Mei Mei Rado focuses on two types of Western and Western-style textiles held by the Palace Museum in Beijing: 1) polychrome silks featuring metal threads and intricate floral patterns, and 2) large woolen tapestries with complex pictorial designs that were fashioned as wall hangings. From the outset, Rado informs us that the rubric of “Western” (xiyang) textiles encompassed Western-style cloth of both European and Chinese origins and did not distinguish between the two (6 and 33). Such vague terminology makes determinations of provenance impossible and perhaps irrelevant. Instead, Rado treats these heretofore overlooked “Western” textiles as “transcultural objects” (4) that assumed new functions and meanings upon reaching the High Qing court.
In addition to “a core group of previously unknown silks and tapestries” kept at the Palace Museum, the author has also examined “obscure or misidentified objects scattered in European and American collections” and “archives in Chinese and European languages” (2). On the European side, she draws heavily from sources located at the National Archives and the National Library of France, most notably the correspondence and memoirs of Jesuit missionaries and French government officials. On the Chinese side, her key sources are published versions of “work accounts” (huoji qingdang) produced by the Qing Imperial Household Department’s workshops, and of commercial and trade archives maintained by the Ming and Qing courts. Rado supplements these materials with a host of other sources, including Chinese court chronicles and paintings, imperial poetry, collected statutes, and institutional gazetteers, along with a clutch of French travelogues, encyclopedias, bibliographies, and technical treatises. The author’s linguistic abilities, familiarity with the technicalities of textile construction and production, and deep knowledge of both the Chinese and French historical contexts have allowed the masterful realization of this genuinely interdisciplinary and cross-cultural project.
Rado’s central thesis is that “the small number of European luxury silks and tapestries that reached the Qing palaces” in the eighteenth-century ended up spurring the Qing court to produce its own Western-style textiles as an expression of “deliberate hybridity” (7). Although “the Qing court’s xiyang aesthetic came close to the notion of chinoiserie,” in Rado’s eyes “the two were very different,” in part because, unlike the European craze for objects and styles from East Asia, “the Qing imperial passion for displaying and creating Western works exhibited little interest in developing systematic knowledge about the West or even playfully imagining European culture” (6). Instead, “Western” textiles “constituted an unprecedented, innovative force in High Qing arts” and “furnished new visual and material languages for conveying politically charged messages” that were “crucial to maintaining Qing imperial rule” (147).
Chapter 1 begins with an overview of the Qing Imperial Household Department’s system for designing and manufacturing imperially commissioned silks, whether Chinese- or Western-styled. At the Qing court, traditionally patterned Chinese silks were used to make such items as court robes, mountings for paintings, borders on screens, and exterior covers for books. Rado’s primary task, however, is to establish an iconographic baseline by showing how “the majority of the nonpictorial designs” (13) found on Chinese-style patterned silks constituted “a vast web of meaningful symbols that defined the identities of the members of the imperial household” (16).
She then turns to “Western” ornamental (or “figured”) silks and the various ways in which they reached the Qing court. Here Rado simply notes that European silks made their way to the Qing court serendipitously, as occasional diplomatic gifts (“tributary objects”) and as unexpectedly encountered trade goods. A prodigious amount of spadework allows her to elucidate how the Western silks that ended up at the Qing court were subject to the trends of a burgeoning European silk industry. After meticulously reconstructing a “stylistic timeline” of European silk production in the eighteenth-century (18–19), Rado demonstrates how specific examples of Western silks held in Beijing bear distinctive designs (“bizarre” and naturalistic styles, lace and floral patterns, three-dimensional forms, etc.) and material components (gold and silver threads) that mirror the European progression (21–30). The fact that “the small number of European silks at the Palace Museum … [represent] every stylistic phase from circa 1700 to circa 1765” (21) substantiates Rado’s claims about the global dynamics at play in the circulation of early modern textiles and lends weight to her supposition that European-made silks arrived at the Qing court “within a few years of their manufacturing dates” (31).
Whatever the precise timing and routes of their journeys to the Qing court, once European silks left their original socio-cultural milieus, they “lost their original temporality and came to represent a homogeneous, timeless ‘Western’ textile style in imperial eyes” (37). Moreover, unlike the highly symbolic patterns and cues found on conventional imperial silks produced in China, the “semiotic opacity” of Western silk designs made them more amenable to incorporation into the visual and material cultures that permeated Beijing’s imperial precincts (59).
In Chapter 2 Rado trains her attention on the Qing court’s efforts to produce Western-style silks at the Qing Imperial Workshops and the three imperial silk manufactories in Jiangnan. Here she argues that such endeavors are best understood in the context of a competition between Qing and European courts to “demonstrate imperial power through advanced mastery of the art and technology of other cultures” (39). In Chinese sources, the earliest concrete evidence of this competitive ethos is from 1721, when the Kangxi emperor sent diplomatic gifts of glassware and enamelware—both made using a recently mastered European technique—to the Holy See and the court of King João V of Portugal (41). Upon his succession to the throne in 1723, the Yongzheng emperor ordered the Imperial Workshops to manufacture Western-style silks, and thereby inaugurated a decades-long process of aesthetic and technical experimentation, which culminated in the full incorporation of Western silks into the Qing court’s propagandistic repertoire during the Qianlong period. Documentary court paintings commemorating the Qianlong emperor’s annual autumn hunts (c. 1750s) and Grand Military Reviews (c. 1739 and 1758) show that Western silks were used as embellishments to imperial quivers and saddle cloths (38 and 64–70, figs. 57–66) and as decorative appointments for temporary structures within the imperial encampment, especially Mongolian ger or “yurts” (59 and 62, fig. 56). Additionally, “floral patterned silks in the Russo-French style” (72) were deployed as valances and wall hangings in Tibetan Buddhist spaces such as altars and alcoves in the inner sanctums of the Forbidden City and larger court-sponsored temple complexes in the capital and beyond.
Standard treatments of Qing court paintings and architectural spaces often underscore their “non-Han” dimensions without considering Western-style valences. So, Rado’s fine-grained accounts of Western textiles’ presence and aesthetic effects in such contexts are revelatory. Her analyses of extant objects, archival materials, and visual evidence elucidate how “the illegibility of [Western/xiyang] textiles’ exotic patterns and their lack of specific cultural connotations made them particularly malleable for projecting new meanings” and, more specifically, how their foreign designs and remote geographic origins “complemented or reasserted the non-Han character” of the martial rituals and sacred spaces into which they were integrated (70). In this respect, xiyang silks became an important visual and material element in the formation and projection of the court’s ideological claims to political, technological, and cultural ascendancy.
Many of the same dynamics that characterized the appearance and subsequent utilization of Western silks at the Qing court also pertained to European tapestries, the focus of Chapters 3 and 4. For instance, the classificatory terminology for Western tapestries was as imprecise. Furthermore, immense woolen tapestries wended their way from Europe to the Qing court in much the same manner as Western silks—as both diplomatic gifts and commercial goods.
Of course, amidst such similarities, there were differences. For example, European tapestries seemed to have arrived much earlier. According to the Qing court’s official gift registries, Dutch and Portuguese commercial and diplomatic representatives presented “tributary objects,” including “patterned” and “polychrome” woolen textiles (81), starting in the late-seventeenth century. By contrast, the earliest evidence of Western silks at the Qing court dates to the eighteenth-century. More substantially while Western silks adorned the emperor’s martial regalia and military lodgings, newly introduced European tapestries were “reserved for private rooms with special importance” (105), at least at the Qianlong court.
Indeed, according to Rado, “[i]t took the Qing emperors several decades to gradually acquire knowledge about European tapestries” (83). By the late 1740s, the Qianlong emperor was well informed enough to mount a concerted effort at procuring European tapestries not only via international trading networks centered on Canton, but also directly from Europe. Not surprisingly, Jesuit missionaries residing in Beijing mediated this outreach, funneling Qianlong’s requests to French officials and explaining to Qianlong how sizeable tapestries were hung in European palaces and churches, as well as the allegorical and historical themes of their elaborate pictorial representations. Jesuit correspondence from 1766 reveals that around 1751 the Qianlong emperor sent a commission to Henri-Leonard Bertin (1720–1792), a French Sinophile who was then serving as Louis XV’s Minister and Secretary of State. The order included precise measurements for a group of tapestries that were intended to adorn specific spaces in the “European Palaces” section of the Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuanming yuan), located in the northwestern suburbs of Beijing. Construction of the European Palaces lasted four years (c. 1747–1751), and Imperial Workshop records from 1750 indicate that the European tapestries were conceived as elements in a comprehensive plan for the new palaces’ interior décor. The Qianlong emperor’s initial attempt to obtain French-made tapestries directly from France in the early 1750s failed, so in 1761 he ordered the imperial textile manufactories to produce Western-style tapestries. Thus began the Imperial Workshops’ exploration of European tapestry design and weaving techniques, a process that was still ongoing when French Jesuits finally succeeded in presenting a set of six large woolen tapestries from France to the Qianlong emperor in December 1766.
Rado’s comparative analysis of French and Qing iconography illuminates how the suite of six French tapestries furnished a fresh array of decorative themes and figural forms that designers and weavers at the Qing court could consult and appropriate. The details are fascinating, as from 1768 through the 1770s, Qing imperial textile manufactories were actively pursuing “a series of experimentations in designing Western-style woolen tapestries whose material forms, visual contents, and manners of display integrated European, Manchu, and Han Chinese elements” (105).
The most debatable arguments in The Empire’s New Cloth relate to questions of audience response and reception. According to Rado, the Qianlong emperor’s imperial portrait commissioned for the 1758 Grand Review “best illustrates the preeminence of Western silks in imperial martial rituals” (66). Based on supposed differences in the decorative logic of various patterns found on cloth accoutrements depicted in the portrait, Rado infers that “Western silks would have precluded deeper associations habitually sought by Qing viewers.” Put another way, she supposes that Western silks “would fixate beholders on their surfaces—the patterning, texture, hue, and tactility,” not on “the familiar symbolic visual syntax rooted in the Chinese tradition” (67) irrespective of socio-historical circumstances. But some may wonder: is ascribing a singular “visual experience” to the formal qualities of a painting or textile a properly historical mode of analysis and argumentation?
To the degree that such intractable dilemmas are inherent to the use of formalistic methods, the author can hardly be faulted. On the contrary, Mei Mei Rado deserves praise and applause for her remarkable achievement. The Empire’s New Cloth is an important contribution to an emergent and truly global history of art. Students interested in Sino-European interactions, visual and material cultures, court studies, ritual theory and practice, Qing history, and the construction of imperial ideologies will find much to appreciate and admire in this captivating study.
