This July, the famous London department store, Liberty, opened a new shop in partnership with a Japanese chain selling no-label everyday household goods. The products are well-designed, durable and reasonably priced and have brought new life to the recently deserted shopping street. However, it has also raised a new "fear of the East" among concerned people.
"It is disconcerting to realize that it takes a country like Japan to market a chain of everyday goods . . . what has happened to native retailers?" complained a columnist in the London Daily Telegraph. It is just like the new Japanese entry to the executive car market which threatens to overtake Mercedes and Jaguar: on the outside it looks like a careful hybrid of European designs, and even its name, Lexus, is vaguely European, she warned, admonishing her readers to beware this "commercial colonialism by charm and stealth."
Having just celebrated the anniversary of commissioner Lin's burning of British opium which triggered the Opium War, Chinese readers might be smiling quietly to themselves at the fact that neighboring Japan is not only supplying the British with cheap and attractive household goods, but is also spending a large amount of money on their cultural education. lt is difficult not to conclude, however, that the only way to avoid accusations of "charm and stealth" might be to send in gunboats selling heroin under the flag of free trade.
The flood of goods from the East into Europe has a long history. It might be at a high point today, but Liberty established its reputation by importing Chinese and Japanese goods more than one hundred years ago. And if you look at the display in the Victoria and Albert Museum, you can see "durable and well-designed" goods from the East that came to England more than two centuries ago. There are "imports" to Europe from China dating from as early as 1680 on display. They might appear rather vulgar when compared to the treasures in the National Palace Museum but each one has its own eye-opening history.
An eight-storied porcelain pagoda from the early nineteenth century stands out in the collection. Measuring nearly three meters high, it looks like a wedding cake, while movable tiny figures can be seen looking out from inside the separable layers piled one on top of another (making preparation for display a complicated task). Although it is a guest from afar, the pagoda is not alone but has the company of brothers in Buckingham Palace and the Royal Pavilion at Brighton on the south coast.
An intricate carving of a Chinese boat in ivory has lifelike figures and small window shutters that can be opened and closed. There is even a small vase of flowers on the desk inside the pavilion on top! In 1803 the little ship followed its owner all the way from Canton over rough seas to England until it eventually arrived here. Now the curators long to wind up its clockwork motor and let it run around.
Apart from the obviously Chinese blue and white porcelain, silk bed-spreads, flower-and-bird wallpaper, and lacquer furniture, many of the forms that can be seen are European and seem to be disguising the fact that they are actually Chinese goods. When Craig Clunas once gave some of these Western-style objects to a Chinese scholar to look at, the scholar found it hard to believe that they were from the hands of Chinese craftsmen. Yet never mind the fact that a Chinese person might find it hard to recognize one of these prodigal sons; after being so many years abroad the English also tend to forget the Chinese lineage of these objects, considering them to be just traditional English ornaments.
Craig Clunas explains that because Chinese crafts are found spread throughout English country houses and play an indispensable part in traditional English interior decoration, most English people naturally assume that they are "honorary British objects." Moreover, past researchers into Chinese export art more often than not place them in the history of English furniture and interior decoration, focusing on the connoisseurship of consumers rather than on their production.
If you were to point at an exported cabinet and ask a scholar of English furniture or country houses what it is, he would probably answer that it is eighteenth-century English and remark on how such lacquer was treasured by the ladies and gentlemen of that period. If you pressed them on where it was made they would think about it and say "China," adding, "but how ingenious were those poor Chinese craftsmen!"
How can these ingenious Chinese craftsmen suddenly be so pitiable in the eyes of the descendants of the British empire? This is, of course, related to the nineteenth-century image of the extreme weakness of China. Yet, if we go back further, was the reason that Western merchants risked the seas to sail to the East three hundred years ago really only so as give a few orders to the poor "cheap" Chinese laborers? In 1680 the Honourable East India Company was importing no less than fourteen per cent of England's total imports by value and was paying an annual dividend of twenty per cent on its stock as well as being extremely profitable for its individual employees. Braving the high seas to go all the way to China to make their purchases and, after the expenditure of so much time and effort, still making a large profit on their return, one wonders what had become of the "native retailers" at that time?
"We must not forget that they started the sea trade because the majority of things that were bought were things that could not be made in Europe," points out Craig Clunas. Porcelain lacquer could not be made in Europe; silk could but it was much more expensive. Moreover, long before trading with Europe, China was producing things for the Asian and Middle Eastern markets. Chinese textiles and mirrors from the Han dynasty are even found in Hsiung graves in the Soviet Union. "So the Chinese had been doing this very successfully for thousands of years. Europe is only one small part of the story."
The earliest things to come to Europe from China were seen as rare treasures, according to Clunas, while in the eyes of the Chinese they were just everyday cups and saucers. Wan Li period porcelain, for example, while being mass produced at Ching Te Chen, was so rare in Europe that it was clothed in gold and silver by its owners to such an extent that items become hard to recognize. In fact, Chinese products of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were of amazingly high quality, while the Chinese economy and nation was strong and prosperous. So it is probable that Chinese craftsmen were not so pitiable at that time after all. But by the K'ang Hsi period in the eighteenth century Chinese exports had lost something of their rarity.
Clunas points out that by this time the China trade was in fact linked with "cheap labor." Take the Aberdeen mug, for example. Obviously the person who ordered it did not care much whether it had a Chinese flavor or whether it was from China at all. He only wanted a mug with a picture of Aberdeen on it.
By the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, England was passing through its Industrial Revolution and to travel all the way to China to buy porcelain was not really profitable. Facing new competition in the European market, Chinese goods could no longer remain just everyday things but had to become something special.
It was at this time that the European craze for Chinese things in the shape of chinoiserie seems to have become the main stream of ornamentation. On the face of it, it looks like Chinese forms were again back in vogue whereas, in fact, it signaled in the area of design China's increasing political and economical subordination to the West. In such circumstances the taste for China could not but fall into mysterious stereotyping and debased exoticism.
The garish coloring and gross ornamentation of the export art of this period, in which "everything has got to have dragons and pagodas on it," has continued down to the present for Clunas. If you go to Chinatown, he says, "there are shops selling things that have to scream 'China' at you."
"People easily confuse Chinese export art with chinoiserie. For me it is important to make a distinction," he explains. What Europeans call chinoiserie is, in fact, in the eye of the beholder and includes anything that an artist or consumer considers to have a relationship with "the Orient." Such things could have a Chinese or Indian flavor, or a Turkish or Arabian influence. Yet most of them are actually products of the eccentricities of European craftsmen.
In fact people in eighteenth-century England did not use the word chinoiserie but just generalized under the label "Indian Style," which was used to categorize anything that came from the Arab world east. So in inventories you will find that when something is listed as decorated with "Indian" wallpaper, what is actually meant is Chinese export wallpaper. "India" was just a word that meant "exotic" really, in much the same way that many Chinese people today like to call all Westerners "Americans."
Because the fashion of chinoiserie was so widespread there tends to be much confusion about just what was the input of Chinese export art into this European tradition. Clunas says that one of the things they want to force people to confront by drawing together the collection in the Chinese Export Art Gallery, is that the objects on display are in fact Chinese, that Chinese craftsmen made extremely good things for the West at that time, and that they covered a wide variety of crafts for a very long period. Moreover, this China "is a real place with a real history, not a kind of chinoiserie fantasy."
Nevertheless, waking up people in the West to the fact that Chinese export art is actually from China can be as hard as trying to tell Chinese people that chinoiserie is not actually a Chinese style; such distinctions are also as difficult to make as persuading Westerners that Chinese craftsmen were not actually that "poor," or telling Chinese that chinoiserie does not necessarily represent a Western admiration for Chinese art.
For the history of this intercourse between East and West has produced its own style: Chinese craftsmen produced porcelain in foreign forms for export to the West while Westerners combined such products with their own modes to create their own fantasies. There is a bit of East here and a bit of West there. So mixed up does it become that it really is difficult for people to distinguish between them.
This is not then a field in which one is dealing with clear-cut divisions. Clunas describes it more as a great long spectrum. At one end you have very pure Chinese art, such as calligraphy and painting; at the other you have things which have no relation to the real China at all, such as Chippendale furniture, pictures by Watteau, or the flying dragons and herons so popular in European interior decoration. In between are a lot of objects which are really freely defined by whoever is looking at them.
It is easiest to explain this in terms of food. You can go to a restaurant in London's Chinatown and have some very authentic Chinese duck or chicken; you could also go into a supermarket and buy some "Chinese Drumsticks" for the microwave. You cannot say that the latter has no relationship with China at all, although it is very far removed from a Chinese taste. But to say of a piece of chinoiserie, "he tried to draw a tiger but ended up with t dog," is like feeling sorry for a Westerner who is enjoying his turkey because you think he must have tried to cook a Peking duck. Someone like Watteau is a mature artist and his chinoiserie art shows his own style. His works are full of "Orientals," but it is not right to say he is trying to imitate the Chinese.
Whether Chinese export art or chinoiserie, all are a past fashion, but there remain traces and form as part of the tradition of cultural intercourse between East and West. Although the pavilions of the willow pattern appear to be Chinese, who could doubt that they are part of the tradition of English blue and white porcelain; and on the other hand it has never been denied that the scenic enamel vases in the National Palace Museum are Chinese. Clunas adds that the influence on China of the mixture of Eastern and Western artistic culture that took place at the Pearl River delta can be no less than that of the small number of Western experts who worked at the Ming court.
"You see there was no such thing as a workshop that only made things for export," he explains, "because the Europeans were only there from December to about March. For the rest of the time they were at sea." The rest of the year the workshops in China must have been making things for the domestic market as well, which led to a kind of cross-fertilization. This can be seen, for example, in the flower and bird painting of the ling-nan school, where there is a relationship with the flowers and birds we often see on export wallpaper. Then there are other important influences on China, such as the spread of fixed-point perspective and the idea of design as a graphic two-dimensional representation of a three dimensional thing.
This gives rise to another interesting question: when a Western merchant went to Canton to make his order, did he give the Chinese craftsman a drawing and say he wanted something modeled on it? Or did he bring the actual thing and say "make one of these?" Or did he bring a little model? Exactly what happened is still quite mysterious.
Just think about it, some two hundred years ago a design was taken from Aberdeen to London, then sailed over the sea and around the world to Canton; a merchant in Canton would then take it north to Ching Te Chen to be manufactured, then back down the river to Canton; from Canton it goes back on another sailing ship, and arrives in London again; finally, after numerous changes of owner it ends up in the museum. Who can say that this is not a miraculous story?
What Clunas finds slightly mysterious, though, is why this all suddenly came to an end. Whereas Chinese craftsmen once made things of such high quality, recent attempts by European museums to send people to China to try to obtain reproductions have failed since the level of quality has fallen well below that of two hundred years ago.
Why? If you visit the Chinese Export Art Gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum and see the porcelain wedding-cake pagoda, the ivory ship and the many refined works combining Eastern and Western culture, then we can only be left asking more questions.
Why did it all suddenly stop? Why have Chinese humanism, meritocracy and the mandarin system, which once so impressed and enlightened European thinkers, been replaced by images of Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, Bruce Lee, and recently the bloodshed of Tienanmen Square? Why has the arrogance of two hundred years of industrialization led to such short memories and the selling out of the past for the present? Why does national pride always lose itself between self-importance and Westernization?
Then we might also ask how the great empire that brought its gunboats to China, after glorying over the whole world, can now get so flustered about Orientals selling them a few high-quality and durable everyday goods? Why has the famous Jaguar automobile factory been bought by America and why has Rover fallen into the hands of the Japanese. . .?
People say that the museum is a cathedral of knowledge, with history frozen within its walls and the splendors of the past assembled. Yet people are preoccupied--who takes the time now to go and take a careful look at these things which left home so young, yet refuse to grow old so long as they bear witness to the past?
[Picture Caption]
Craig Clunas set up the gallery of Chinese Export Art and Design which is the first permanent display in Europe to be devoted to artifacts made in China for Western customers.
This porcelain mug decorated in underglaze blue, overglaze enamels and gilding added in Canton, shows a view of Aberdeen harbor which was probably copied from a banknote. (photo courtesy of V&A)
This exquisite silk shawl embroidered with figures, pavilions and boats was a gift to the museum from Queen Mary. (photo courtesy of V&A)At nearly 2.8m in height, one wonders at the difficulties of transporting this porcelain pagoda by ship nearly two centuries ago. (photo courtesy of V&A)
This kind of wallpaper, seen here in Munich's Old Palace, is very popular in Europe's great buildings.
The decoration inside this "Indian" house in Dresden is in fact in the Chinese style.
A lacquered cabinet made in China around 1700 with a stand added by English craftsmen a hundred years later. (photo courtesy ofV&A)
Bedecked in silver and very hard to come by, this pair of ru vases at Versailles was a gift of the K'ang Hsi Emperor.
A Western merchant from the hand of a Chinese craftsman, measuring 29.5cm in height. (photo courtesy of v&A)
The typical elements of the traditional willow pattern are the willow, pavilion, bridge, boat and pair of "love birds"; along with what one person has called a pair of "socialists" on the bridge because they are always moving to the left!
With a great reputation in Europe, soft-paste and enamel Delftware was an attempt to imitate Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. Down to today it remains as Dutch as tulips.
This porcelain mug decorated in underglaze blue, overglaze enamels and gilding added in Canton, shows a view of Aberdeen harbor which was probably copied from a banknote. （photo courtesy of V&A）
This exquisite silk shawl embroidered with figures, pavilions and boats was a gift to the museum from Queen Mary. （photo courtesy of V&A）
At nearly 2.8m in height, one wonders at the difficulties of transporting this porcelain pagoda by ship nearly two centuries ago. （photo courtesy of V&A）
This kind of wallpaper, seen here in Munich's Old Palace, is very popular in Europe's great buildings.
The decoration inside this "Indian" house in Dresden is in fact in the Chinese style.
Bedecked in silver and very hard to come by, this pair of ru vases at Versailles was a gift of the K'ang Hsi Emperor.
A lacquered cabinet made in China around 1700 with a stand added by English craftsmen a hundred years later. （photo courtesy ofV&A）
The typical elements of the traditional willow pattern are the willow, pavilion, bridge, boat and pair of "love birds"; along with what one person has called a pair of "socialists" on the bridge because they are always moving to the left!
A Western merchant from the hand of a Chinese craftsman, measuring 29.5cm in height. （photo courtesy of v&A）
With a great reputation in Europe, soft-paste and enamel Delftware was an attempt to imitate Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. Down to today it remains as Dutch as tulips.
@List.jpg?w=522&h=410&mode=crop&format=webp&quality=80)
