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 thing. With an unimaginable six-decade-long reign through 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, army and ceremonial regalia, and, notably, tapestries. The Qing court docket proactively engaged with such Western textiles to say its political legitimacy in China, an alternate on the heart of artwork historian Mei Mei Rado’s outstanding, if not probably the most fleet-footed, new e-book, The Empire’s New Fabric: Cross-Cultural Textiles on the Qing Courtroom.
There are two main strengths of this publication. Rado strikes away from an Orientalist viewpoint, which may manifest as a limiting binary in techniques of fabric exchanges. As an alternative, she pulls again the lens to help a world strategy 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 people story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” subtly correcting the file of the advanced 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 Courtroom by Mei Mei Rado (Yale College Press, 2025)
Within the e-book, Rado identifies two forms of textiles: “silk and ornamental” and “wool and pictorial.” In China, these types emerged as repurposed aesthetic objects beneath the textile-savvy emperor because of adept Qing artisanship at workshops in Jiangning (present-day Nanjing), Suzhou, and Hangzhou. Lots 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 not often displaying or loaning items in its assortment, resulting in nearly no present-day research of those textiles.
Objects just like the emperor’s attire, tapestries, and weapon furnishings are the writer’s major investigative sources — the e-book’s second key high quality. Like an artwork historical past detective, Rado exhibits that textiles and their strategies of constructing, akin to warp and weft strategies, 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 present imported luxurious weaves bearing the French foliage of self-patterns in gold and silver threads, in style English botanical Rococo designs, Russian silk lampas, and even German embellished paper admired and tailored by the Qing court docket.
Each as patron and connoisseur, Qianlong took a rare curiosity within the designs of his clothes and tapestries via 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 court docket 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 court docket 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 alternate notably properly. Evocative of “idealized exoticism” and “monumentality,” these European tapestries replicate how French artisans seen and represented the Qing court docket, 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, akin to “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 information, making for exhausting studying. The e-book’s minuscule font and lack of group don’t assist, both. However the rewards will seemingly outweigh the overwhelm for severe readers. This type 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 international political histories.
The Empire’s New Fabric: Cross-Cultural Textiles on the Qing Courtroom (2025) by Mei Mei Rado is revealed by Yale College Press and is accessible on-line and thru impartial booksellers.
