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‘ T R U E ’ B LU E & ‘ MO N S T RO U S ’ W H I T E : G E T T I N G AC Q UA I N T E D W I T H C H I N O I S E R I E I N T H E 1 8 T H C E N T U RY

by David Chia Jun Weng

The juxtaposition of Robert Southey’s letter and Joseph Carton’s satirical article lends

us insight into the paradoxical nature of England’s 18th century “China craze” for chinoiserie.

On one hand, Southey believes chinoiserie “better acquaints” British people with the

“Chinese”, bridging a cultural gap between Britain and China, while on the other, Carton

satirises this commodity craze as a “monstrous offspring of wild imagination” which perverts

Classical aesthetics. In the 18th century, English taste for chinoiserie approached a popularity

that unmatched that of any other eras: Chinese plays were adapted and widely performed;

chinoiserie furniture and architecture redefined sitting rooms and gardens across the country,

causing backlash from satirists like Joseph Carton . As such, chinoiserie provides a fitting 1

arena on which to examine the collision of European consumerism with four-thousand years

of unbroken Chinese lineage. Can we say, therefore, that the British obsession with

chinoiserie trivialises classical Chinese culture? Or does it narrow cultural divisions? How

was chinoiserie looked at by 18th century England?

Connecting aesthetic imagination, consumerism, classicism, and gender, I will frame

my argument within the two waves of English China craze— in the 16th and 18th centuries. I

will reject the Saidian Orientalist paradigm, and instead argue that chinoiserie challenged the

Some background readings that contributed to this research are Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (New York: 1

Dutton, 1962), and Dawn Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon Press, 1993).

“Plates and tea wares have made us better acquainted with the Chinese than we are

with any other distant people.”–

Robert SoutheyLetters from England, 1807

“No genuine beauty is to be found in whimsical and grotesque figures, the

monstrous offspring of wild imagination, undirected by nature and truth.”

– Joseph Carton

The World 26, June 28 1753

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British’s Classicist conception of aesthetics (from the Greco-Roman tradition, including the

golden ratio, etc.). Rather than “better acquainting” the British with the Chinese, chinoiserie

did the opposite— it became a gendered commodity, mostly appreciated by English women,

and ultimately retained no elements of authentic Chinese culture. In essence, I will argue that

Classicist satire such as that written by Joseph Carton is a criticism not of the China craze

(that is to say, Chinese culture), but rather a criticism of new fashionable social mobility, and

a consumer culture driven by women overtaking the realm of High art i.e. Classical space.

According to historian David Porter, there are two waves to the China craze in Europe:

the first prevailed at the end of 16th century when Jesuit missionaries brought reports on

Chinese culture back to Europe, while the second occurred in the 18th century over

chinoiserie. The first wave, Porter writes, "gradually evolved from the fairy-tale fascination

with distant images of unimaginable grandeur, wealth, and strangeness evoked by the

romances of Marco Polo and John de Mandeville into an informed curiosity about an

increasingly variegated geographic and cultural identity.” Unlike the second wave, the first 2

wave demonstrated a scholarly interest in the wisdom of Confucian ethics and government,

speculating on the origins of the Chinese people and language. Often, European interpreters

of the signs and emblems of Chinese culture, along with its linguistics, theology, and politics,

ascribed to them a groundedness and authenticity derived from their great antiquity and

apparently unchanging nature. The non-alphabetic script of the Chinese served as living

evidence of the perfectibility of a language grounded in a rational and universally valid

semantics. Indeed, the first wave of the China craze provided Europeans a reassuring 3

narrative of stability and legitimacy during a period of unstable conflict and upheaval.

Porter, David. "Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy." Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 28.1 (1999): 27-282

For a deeper analysis of Chinese written language during this period, see David Porter, "Writing China: Legitimacy and 3

Representation 1606-1773," Comparative Literature Studies 33 (1996): 98-122.

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The second wave, in contrast, was focused primarily on the “aesthetic offerings and

consumer goods of the Far East.” The 18th century Chinese craze, rid of a genuine 4

antiquarian study of Chinese culture, was instead a commercialist European condition:

Chinese porcelains, lacquerware, furniture and wall hangings were imported, stimulating not

only the manufacture of local porcelain but an entire industry of designers and producers of

chinoiseries. What used to be scholar fascination became mere exotic design motifs, which

eventually led to Beauvais tapestries, Chippendale furniture and Chinese-inspired temples

and pagodas of the English landscape garden. Chinoiserie embodied an aesthetic of unstable

fashion, whimsical and constantly changing as opposed to the 16th century of rational

stability. 5

The European impression of Chinese stability and authority over the preceding

century was reversed in the aestheticising of it in chinoiserie. Both the Chinese written

language and the Confucian belief-system, previously venerated as emblems of stability,

shattered into a motley collection of blue and white ornaments. This transition from stable

authority to unstable exoticism is represented in the depiction of the Chinese emperor— a

symbol of authority representing not only 4,000 years of untampered royal lineage, but also a

paramount link in the rigidly hierarchical Confucian chain of being. Firmly centred on a

weighted throne raised atop a platform, the Emperor on the frontispiece of Nieuhof’s Embassy

to China (fig. 1) has his right arm extended nonchalantly over a large globe as he gazes out at

the world with a magisterial aura. The Son of Heaven is surrounded by an army of guards, 112

on each side, armed in various weaponry. Kneeling at his feet, a number of chained servants

venerate him while a monk with his head locked in a wooden stock exemplifies punitive

order. Akin to Queen Elizabeth in Atlas of England and Wales (fig 2.), the Manchu warrior-

king is surrounded by regal opulence in the decor, isolated and made the focal point of

Porter, David. "Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy." Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 28.1 (1999): 27-284

Both waves are well researched by David Porter; refer to his works in the bibliography.5

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Figure 1. Frontispiece to Johan Nieuhof, Embassy to China (London, 1669)

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Figure 2. Frontispiece to Christopher Saxton, Atlas of England and Wales (London, 1579)

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worship. Johan Nieuhof, a member of the Dutch East India Company's embassy to Peking in

1655 writes:

The King or Emperour of China, commands the Lives and Estates of all his Subjects, he alone being the Supream Head and Govenour; so that the Chinese Government, as we have said, is absolutely Monarchical, the Crown descending from Father to Son. Their Emperour is commonly called Thienfu, which signifies the Son of Heaven.

The emphasis on the “Emperour" as the “Supream Head” and its Chinese terminology

“Thienfu” is indicative of the first-wave narrative of stability and rationality. The sense of

admiration in his writing is one where the monarch and lineage is made the focus, instead of

hollow aesthetics. The success of Nieuhof’s richly-illustrated account first appeared in Dutch

in 1655 and was immediately translated into Latin, French, and English. It became the source

of information on China through the end of the 17th century, and from it engendered

reproductions of engravings by the first creators of European chinoiserie.

By the second wave during 18th century, however, the visual representations of the

Chinese monarch devolve into a distraction of exotic meaningless symbols. The Emperor in

Beauvais’s tapestry The Audience of Emperor (fig. 3) assumes the similar centrality, raised on a

throne with supplicants at his feet and attendants behind him. Inspired by Nieuhof’s imperial

portrait, Beauvais has adapted Nieuhof’s Emperor and his gestures— the position of the hand

upon the waist, the same necklace, head position, and dropping moustache. The stylistic

similarities, nonetheless, end there. Instead of being protected by soldiers as in Embassy to

China, the Emperor in Beauvais’s tapestry is distracted and cluttered by a menagerie of

whimsical creatures: winged dragons and peacock feathers adorn the intricately carved

throne while a domesticated elephant peers out from behind the throne. The parasol that

shades Nieuhof’s Emperor is replaced by a red and white mushroom-like form. The soldiers

have retreated into the background; a lone guard to the Emperor’s right poses over his

dropping head, while the second attendant seems to be distracted childishly by the animal

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display. Several other guards adorned in clownish caps joke among themselves in front of an

extravagantly ornamented pavilion on spindly columns and luxurious oriental carpets. A stork

struts across the foreground over a peacock that looks on attentively, as a dozen exotic birds

flutter above. Indeed, the emperor is upstaged by a circus of domesticated aesthetics. Amidst

all the clutter, the emperor’s impressive pose is distracted by his own glory of overwhelming

decadence. The focal point is dispersed into a spectacle of hilarity and fun. His once absolute

authority is parodied into a pastiche of exotic splendour. Instead of valuing stability and

rationality, chinoiserie has romanticised Chinese imperialism and lineage into a hollow

architectural shell.

Concisely written by Porter, the pan-European condition of chinoiserie “was an

aesthetic of the ineluctably foreign, a glamorisation of the unknown and unknowable for its

own sake.” As such, the 18th century China craze, far from “better acquainting the Chinese” 6

with Europe, was ironically and deliberately distanced into unknowability, retreating

Chinese-inspired goods into domesticity instead of valuing stability and lineage. Eventually,

the image of the emperor is murdered from chinoiserie altogether. In England, the China

craze began in the 1690s when Queen Mary was renowned for her magnificent porcelain

collection; by the 1730s, a Chinese room, decorated with imported paper and screens, plump

figures of the laughing buddha (‘b’ intentionally uncapitalised), porcelain vases on the

mantlepiece and blue and white plate lining the wall, was de rigueur in respectable country

houses. The style seems to have reached its peak by the 1750s when even modest London

quarters featured Chinese bed and chest drawers. As such, the diffusion of fashion, like in

many other cases, originated in the royalty, seeping into the upper rungs of British society,

and eventually democratised into the growing middle class.

Porter, David. "Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy." Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 28.1 (1999): 286

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Figure 3. The Audience of the Em

peror, tapestry from

The Story of the Em

peror of China series, French (Beauvais)

before 1732. Courtesy of the Fine A

rts Museum

of San Francisco, Roscoe and Margaret O

akes Collection, 59.49.1.

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Historians of consumer culture have alluded to a dramatic shift in the dominant modes

of status display and legitimation in early modern England. During the first wave, social 7

elites had derived honour from visible manifestation of venerable age or patina. Elizabethan

customs mandated a probationary period of multiple generations before a solidified upward

mobility. By the early 18th century, however, during the second wave, rapidly changing

economic conditions permitted luxurious displays and performances to displace hallowed

antiquity as the pre-eminent marker of social status; self-fashioning became a quality most

highly prized in the possessions of the wealthy. Multiple entries in Samuel Pepys’s diary

elucidate the early modern condition in his fixation on self-fashioning for status, adorning

himself in a “fine Camlett cloak, with gold buttons, and a silk suit.” Chinoiserie has likewise 8

been embedded by creating a new form of aesthetic subjectivity within this new mode of

status display.

The monstrosity of chinoiserie is therefore in its commercialism, and mere

materialistic exchange, tainting the cultivated old Classical taste. Yet, paradoxically, the

Chinese style, unlike the latest fashions in dress, inspired Western observers to redefine the

cultural meaning Western consumers attached to its exports, or even the imitation they

inspired. Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins interweaves this paradox rather neatly: British people

“were not [merely] consumers but the proprietors of a new category of objects, aesthetic

preferences, and practices of acquisition, arrangement, and display situated at the crossroads

of female domestic work and male connoisseurship.” Chinese goods were valued not only as 9

a new fashion statement or status symbol but simultaneously as enchantingly unfamiliar

tokens of a well-established cultural value. David Porter recognises this paradox as a

Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and 7

Activities. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1988. 31-41.

Samuel Pepys Diary. Sunday 1 July 1660.8

Jenkins, Eugenia Zuroski. "Nature to Advantage Drest": Chinoiserie, Aesthetic Form, and the Poetry of Subjectivity in Pope 9

and Swift." Eighteenth-Century Studies 43.1 (2009): 76.

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“reassuring synthesis of a the old standard and the new, a bold statement of fashionable

iconoclasm tempered by a virtual patina of cultural legitimacy accorded by the object’s

association with Chinese antiquity.” 10

As such, the synthesis of temporal and aesthetic registers of chinoiserie lend deeper

complexity within the historical context of the East India trade and the imperialist

perspective towards emblems of ‘Otherness’. Ownership confers mastery; and by owning the

chinoiserie trade, a pan-European phenomenon, Europeans are able to own, and hence

trivialise, figures of Confucius, the Chinese emperor, and other recognised symbols of

Chinese authority. The celebration of the surface splendour of chinoiserie embeds it into the

colonial drama of purchasing and possessing exotic commodities, furthering the pride of the

empire. The subjugation of millennia of Sino-classicism into the domestic routine of tea

serving is a colonial desire for possession. Nonetheless, the Orientalist Saidian framework

does not apply within the historical context in which the Chinese taste first took hold. Both 11

centuries of the China craze operated within a context where China was not a British colony,

nor was it etched in the narrative of becoming one. Foreign trade in Canton was conducted

entirely on Chinese terms, and under conditions that the British found deeply humiliating

but were in no position to change. The blue and white teapot that adorned tables of Britain’s

elite illustrated a scene not of her proud domination but of a complex servile obeisance. So,

while chinoiserie may present a form of colonial subjugation of the Other, it clearly also

presents a lot more complexity than silk or tea from India (a British colony). Chinese and

Chinese-style goods evoked a range of responses far more complex than did other

contemporary fashions and commodities. In fact, the ubiquity and pervasiveness of the

Chinese style, transcending into architectural and high art visual realms such as gardens, and

Porter, David. "Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste." Eighteenth-10

Century Studies 35.3 (2002): 399

For a more comprehensive understanding of the Orientalist framework as proposed by Edward Said, refer to .Said, Edward 11

W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Print. Historical context was supplemented by background readings.

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Figure 4. Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks (1864) James Abott McNeil Whistler Oil on Canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art John G. Johnson Collection

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museums, rival the similar ubiquity of Roman classicism. Be it in temples or the rock gardens

of a wallpaper design, the Chinese-style’s pervasiveness clearly evoked an aura of cultural

legitimacy constantly in tension with the aesthetic trivialisation perpetrated by a woman-

dominated trade.

In so saying, how much was the trivialisation a gendered construct rendered by the

“untutored” female eye? Jenkins herself recognises the tensions within chinoiserie as being

the “crossroad of female domestic work and male connoisseurship.” The fashion of

chinoiserie, tied to its feminised rituals of the tea table, tended to be associated with largely

female consumers of the upper and upper-middle classes. I would argue, thus, that the

relegation of fashion, inextricably tied to consumerism, as an effeminate condition poses a

symbiotic relationship between the decorative object of chinoiserie and the female subject.

Such a relationship is visually captured in the full-length portrait of Purple and Rose: the Lange

Leizen of the Six Marks (1864) when the artist James Whistler dresses his Irish mistress,

Joanna Heffernan as a Chinese vase-painter in a studio. Dressed in silk with dragon insignias,

Heffernan gains agency and representation by dominating the domestic sphere of chinoiserie

while at the same time is framed by the male medium of the visual arts. Lord Shaftesbury

reveals the patriarchal subjugation when he writes:

Effeminacy pleases me. The Indian figures, the Japan work, the enamel strikes my eye (added emphasis). The luscious colours and glossy paint gain upon my fancy . . . But what ensues? . . . Do I not ever forfeit my good relish? How is it possible I should thus come to taste the beauties of an Italian master, or of a hand happily formed on nature and the ancients? 12

The aforementioned classicist-consumerist tension is thus also a gendered one. British

men saw women’s obsession for chinoiserie as trivial for it being far from the Classical

tradition. Lord Shaftesbury mention of the “beauties of an Italian master” suggest that true

Lord Shaftesbury, “Advice to an Author” Character etc., ed. John Robertson, 2 vols. (London, 1900), 1: 219. 12

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beauty - that is to say, masculine beauty - is the one closest to Roman Classicism; whereas any

other Asiatic commodities are deemed effeminate luxury. The untutored sensuality

encouraged by chinoiserie therefore offended polite taste in its supposed aesthetic vacuity,

disturbing moral grounds that demanded knowledge neither of Latin poetry nor the

architectural marvels of the Grand Tour. In so saying, women’s dominance in the chinoiserie

domain of licentious desires and delights subverts the narrowly defined Roman classical

notions of beauty through the matrix of female domestic work and male connoisseurship. Its

subversive power lies therefore in its paradoxical tensions.

It goes without saying that the prevalence of chinoiserie in today’s still-desired

Wedgwood, arguably rid of any Sino-antiquarianism, troubles us with a boundary between

cultivated and vulgar taste, fine art and the flippancy of fashion. On one hand, Southey

claims it “better acquaints” the British with the Chinese while on the other it is “whimsical”

monstrosity. Fusing both these tensions, chinoiserie in the 18th century has contributed to an

aesthetic bricolage through its very domesticity and effeminacy. Indeed, chinoiserie’s

transformative power intersects at the crossroads of female domesticity and male

connoisseurship. Operating under new modes of status display and legitimisation, the second

wave of the Chinese style aestheticised the stability of the first and becomes the aesthetic

bricoleurs of the new commercial society; and through its prodigious exports of porcelain,

lacquerware, silk wall coverings and the artistic architecture they embodied, China

undermined the status of classical Western civilisation i.e. Greco-Roman as the sole source of

British aesthetics. As Jenkins writes, consumers of Chinese-style objects were “proprietors of

a new category of objects.” The marriage of the culturally alien commodity of chinoiserie

with British taste forms a synthetical and symbiotical relationship.

A flippant fashion that originally began in the sitting room of Queen Mary eventually

became incorporated into public parks, and Kew gardens. A gradual transformation, Sino-

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Classicism challenges Greco-Roman Classicism in the realms of painting, poetry, and

architecture. Chinese works are regularly compared by other writers with counterpoints

from the Western tradition. Even if Buddhist temples fail to conform to the Golden Ratio, or

Chinese paintings fall short for their lack of chiaroscuro, these works do occupy a conceptual

category worthy of comparison. The dual status of chinoiserie - too, a gendered one -

embraces the oppositional spaces both of high art and fashionable commodity, and sets it

apart from other classes of luxury goods, embodying a challenge to the Greco-Roman

aesthetic. Effeminacy was fashionable temporal consumerism to the 18th century British,

whereas masculinity was moral universal classicism. Chinoiserie’s effeminacy of ritual, fused

with its 4,000 years of Chinese masculine lineage, Confucianism, and universal language

codes, engenders a paradoxical distinction of novelty and tradition. The enchanting and

disenchanting, distancing and narrowing, masculinising and feminising possibilities of

chinoiserie in 18th century England, beyond a lust for the Other, is venerated into a new

aesthetic of truth: one where the emblems of dragons, elephants, and peacocks (fig. 3) defile

that of lions, cherubs and gargoyles (fig. 2).

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WO R K S C I T E D

1. Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1988. 31-41.

2. Honour, Hugh. Chinoiserie; the Vision of Cathay. London: J. Murray, 1961. N. pag. Print.

3. Impey, O. R. Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration. New York: Scribner's, 1977. Print.

4. Jacobson, Dawn. Chinoiserie. London: Phaidon, 1993. Print.

5. Jarry, Madeleine. Chinoiserie: Chinese Influence on European Decorative Art, 17th and 18th Centuries. New York, NY: Vendome, 1981. Print.

6. Jenkins, Eugenia Zuroski. "Nature to Advantage Drest": Chinoiserie, Aesthetic Form, and the Poetry of Subjectivity in Pope and Swift." Eighteenth-Century Studies 43.1 (2009): 75-94. Web.

7. Joseph Warton, The World 26 (June 28, 1753).

8. Pepys, Samuel. "The Diary of Samuel Pepys." The Modern Language Review 1.2 (1906): 162.

9. Porter, David. "Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy." Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 28.1 (1999): 27-54. Web.

10. Porter, David. "Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste." Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.3 (2002): 395-411. Web.

11. The World, no. 26 (June 28, 1753).