Do European textiles have something to do with Chinese language palaces of imperial energy? Qianlong, the 18th-century Chinese language monarch, would say sure — every part. With an unbelievable six-decade-long reign throughout the Qing Dynasty, Qianlong collected a number of European luxurious textiles. Bearing the time period xiyang, which means “Western” on this context, these objects included palace decorations, navy and ceremonial regalia, and, notably, tapestries. The Qing courtroom proactively engaged with such Western textiles to claim its political legitimacy in China, an change on the heart of artwork historian Mei Mei Rado’s exceptional, if not probably the most fleet-footed, new e book, The Empire’s New Fabric: Cross-Cultural Textiles on the Qing Court docket.
There are two main strengths of this publication. Rado strikes away from an Orientalist viewpoint, which may manifest as a limiting binary in methods of fabric exchanges. As a substitute, she pulls again the lens to help a worldwide method that reveals mutual curiosity and tributary reciprocity of textiles between 18th-century East Asia and Europe. Even the quantity’s title itself is an inversion of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 folks story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” subtly correcting the document of the complicated socio-political motivations behind the Qing authorities’s strategic commerce in European materials tradition.
The Empire’s New Fabric: Cross-Cultural Textiles on the Qing Court docket by Mei Mei Rado (Yale College Press, 2025)
Within the e book, Rado identifies two kinds of textiles: “silk and ornamental” and “wool and pictorial.” In China, these types emerged as repurposed aesthetic objects below the textile-savvy emperor due to adept Qing artisanship at workshops in Jiangning (present-day Nanjing), Suzhou, and Hangzhou. Most of the early fashionable European silks and corresponding Chinese language written data explored within the e book are held by the Palace Museum in Beijing, recognized for hardly ever displaying or loaning items in its assortment, resulting in nearly no present-day research of those textiles.
Objects just like the emperor’s clothes, tapestries, and weapon furnishings are the writer’s main investigative sources — the e book’s second key high quality. Like an artwork historical past detective, Rado reveals that textiles and their strategies of creating, resembling warp and weft methods, can reveal sturdy cross-cultural Chinese language-European liaisons pushed by nationalism and a eager curiosity in textile design. “Western silks used in military rituals acquired deep political significance anchored in the Qing imperial ideology,” she explains. The e book consists of a number of photographs of current imported luxurious weaves bearing the French foliage of self-patterns in gold and silver threads, common English botanical Rococo designs, Russian silk lampas, and even German adorned paper admired and tailored by the Qing courtroom.
Each as patron and connoisseur, Qianlong took a unprecedented curiosity within the designs of his clothes and tapestries by means of strict directions — imperial artisans weren’t permitted to behave exterior of the emperor’s desideratum. For instance, an unnamed French brown silk made in 1710 impressed two textiles on the Qing Imperial Silk Manufactory in Suzhou within the mid-18th century. The 2 variations reveal Qianlong’s evolving preferences for design and dimensions, as indicated by courtroom paperwork.
Qing Imperial Silk Manufactory in Suzhou, “Family Gathering on New Year’s Morning” (1776), tapestry, wool and silk, and silk embroidery for small particulars (© Cleveland Museum of Artwork; Cleveland Museum of Artwork, bequest of John L. Severance)
Three French tapestries despatched to the Qing courtroom as tributary objects — “Tentures Chinoises” (1688) from the city of Beauvais and “Tentures des Indes” (1765) from Gobelins in Paris — illustrate this inventive and financial change notably nicely. Evocative of “idealized exoticism” and “monumentality,” these European tapestries mirror how French artisans considered and represented the Qing courtroom, thriving Chinese language lands, and even animals native to South America. Qianlong was particularly charmed by what Rado calls “the visual experience offered by these textiles.” They impressed a number of artistic endeavors, resembling “Portrait of the Qianlong Emperor” (1736) and the “Qianlong Emperor Hunting Hare” (1755) by Jesuit painter Giuseppe Castiglione, exhibiting the emperor clad in apparel impressed by designs within the Tentures.
However compelling scholarship, The Empire’s New Fabric inundates us with info, making for exhausting studying. The e book’s minuscule font and lack of group don’t assist, both. However the rewards will possible outweigh the overwhelm for critical readers. This sort of artwork historical past methodology ought to encourage extra research exterior established, Orientalist frameworks of inquiry, inviting us to unravel the entanglements between early fashionable visible tradition and world political histories.
The Empire’s New Fabric: Cross-Cultural Textiles on the Qing Court docket (2025) by Mei Mei Rado is revealed by Yale College Press and is on the market on-line and thru impartial booksellers.
