Visual Arts Journals from Routledge

32:1 Februory 2OOq

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Front Cover: Detail from Thomas Demand, Glass,2OO2.

Chromogenic print on Diasec, 58 x 40cm. Private Collection.
Photo: @ DACS 2009.
 THn UNrvERSrruqfu-
Anglo-American: Artistic Exchange between Britain and the USA
An lnternational Gonference to be held at the University of York, UK 23-25 July 2009
Organizers: David Peters Corbett & Sarah Monks
in association with the Department of History of Art, the Centre for Modern Studies &
the Centre for Eighteenth Century Sludies, University of York
,*"'å0,äi'iJ:Ë'"",i'fl il,f #å'^iiå?fl íÍ33l,ii;,.",''
This conference will explore the significance of Anglo-American cultural relat¡ons for the visual arts
produced in Br¡tain and lhe United States since 1776. Although some isolated moments in this history
have been studied, this conference will be the first systematic attempt to consider the implications of
a highly charged relationship for the histories of both British and American art. lt aims to identify the
important issues at the heart of the concept of 'Anglo-American' art and investigate the very idea of
artistic 'exchange' across different cultures. At a moment when the utility of national schools as an
organizing principle is being increasingly held up to scrutiny in the scholarship on both American and
British art, a systematic examination of the detail of the fluid, and somet¡mes volatile, Anglo-American
relalionship and of the invested interests that have sought to define it is important and timely.
l
Confirmed speakers include Wanda Corn (Stanford), Jennifer Greenhill (lllinois),
1
Michael Hatt (Warwick), David Lubin (Wake Forest), Alexander Nemerov (Yale),
Jennifer Roberts (Harvard), Cécile Whiting (California, lrvine).
Further information, including conference programme: http://www.york,ac,ulddepts/h¡starU
Booking:
To book a place on the conference, which will be held in the historic King's Manor in the centre of
York, please write to Dr Philip Kerrigan,'Anglo-American'Conference, Department of History of Art,
Universily of York, YORK, YO10 sDD, UK (prsk101 @york.ac.uk). Places are Ê75 (full-price) or
€20 (students). Please make cheques payable 1o'The University of York'.
Supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art & the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
t"E*R RA The Paul Mellon Cente;tå r Studi¿s i¡ Briti.thArt
@ DOI:10 I I 11/'t146783ó5 2008 00ó52 x
YUANMI NG YUAN/VERSAI LLES :
INTERCULTU RAL INTERACTIONS BETWEEN
CHINESE AND EUROPEAN PALACE CULTURES
GREG M. THOMAS
INTRODUCTION
This is a studyofthe reception ofChinese visual arts in Europe and ofEuropean
visual arts in China during the eighteenth century. It asks in essence how and
why each society was able to communicate culturally with the other. If each
perceived the other's visual culture to be so absolutely exotic, so utterly different
in form, content and meaning, then how could each transform those exotic
differences into something meaningful at home? The article argues that such
intercultural appropriation and translation depended essentially on the existence
of underlying similarities between the particular agents of intercultural
communication within the two societies. Speciflcally, the flrst section of the
article demonstrates that the dissimilar appearance of visual arts in Europe and
China obscured underþing similarities between their respective court societies
and the functioning of art systems deployed to produce similar ideologies of
monarchic rule at the palaces of Versailles in France and Yuanming Yuan in
China. The second section argues that the taste for Chinoiserie in France and
England depended as much on these systemic similarities as on the more obvious
exoticism of their formal appearance. This section further demonstrates that
China perfectly mirrored Europe in appropriating exotic Western visual arts in
the same way - and for the same reasons - at Yuanming Yuan, a phenomenon
fully deserving the syrnmetrical epithet 'Européennerie'. This reversibility of
intercultural translation conflrms the compatibility of art systems that underlay
exotic appropriation in the visual realm.
Such underlying compatibility suggests a model of intercultural commu-
nication very different from subsequent Orientalist modes of appropriation and
description. rvVhile Orientalist theoryhas inspired some of the biggest advances in
art-historical analysis of intercultural interaction, its applicability is limited.
Edward Said's founding model describes a unique interconnection among
rePresentation, knowledge construction and power relations in the historically
speciflc context of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth{entury Western imperialism
in the Ottoman empire.l This has proved very productive for art historians
ARTHISTORY. ISSN0l4l-óZ90 VOL32NO I FEBRUARY2009pp ìì5 ì43
O Associotion of Art Hístorions 2009 Published by Blockwell Publishing, 115
9óO0 Gorsington Rood, Oxlord OX4 2DQ, UK ond 350 Moin Street, Molden, MA 02 l48, USA
 -T

YUANMING YUAN/VERSAILLES: INTERCUTTURAL INTERACTIONS YUANMING YUAN/VERSAILLES: INTERCULTURAL INTERACTIONS

analysing speciflcally Orientalist forms of art. But other regions and other following the Revolution. In this context, the palace acted as a pivotal gateway of
periods, having different contexts, require adjusted or alternative approaches, cultural imaginings, transmitting ideas both inward and outward about what the
and the present study suggests one such alternative model. Rather than a other culture was like, what it meant, and how it related to the home culture.
unilateral model of Western society imposing representations on an inferior Yuanming Yuan proved equally pivotal in diplomatic embassies of the 1790s, in
Other, the palace exchange described here constitutes a bilateral and symmetrical the Franco-British military expedition of 1860, and in the resulting dissemination
model of mirroring and inversion - a mirroring of similar cultural systems of Chinese loot in Europe, but the present article will focus only on the first phase
underþing a mutual appropriation of dissimilar visual forms. The article shows of contact.4 It examines several kinds of artistic interaction at the site, examining
in what ways Europe and China viewed each other as equals, at a speciflc various ways in which its architecture, gardens and art practices affected
historical moment of balanced power and mutual intercultural curiosity. And Europeans both on-site and abroad, as well as on ways in which China's emperors
while most Chinese and European agents at this time essentialized China and used the site to structure their reception of Europe. The central theme
Europe as exotically distinct and homogeneous cultures, the article suggests that throughout will be that the mutual appreciation of difference in some dimen-
the particular agents examined here - cultural practitioners of the elite ruling sions was only made possible through the recognition of similarity in others.
classes - actually shared more in common with each other than with the majority
of their own populations.2
The key to this model is to consider individual art events in relation to the THE ROYAL PALACE CULTURES OF VERSAILLES AND
broader cultural systems in which they occur. This means recognizing a number YUANMING YUAN
of complexities that tend to be overlooked when art historians focus on YuanmingYuan, often translated as the Garden of Perfect Brightness, was a palace
comparing the visual appearance of individual works of art. Art systems are and garden complex situated twelve lcilometers northwest of central Beijing (plate
multidimensional networks of fluid practices, ideas and modes of communica- 1).s The extant imperial palace in Beijing, known as the Forbidden City, was
tion, reception and material usage. Each of these elements varies widelywithin a begun in 7403-24 during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) as the emperor's home
society and over time, such that there is never any fixed canonical entity that can and the main seat of government. But the rulers of the Qlng Dynasty (7644-79771,
be deflned as a single local 'culture', whether the unit be as broad as European art hailing from Manchuria and keen to distinguish themselves from their ethnically
or Chinese art, or as narrow as nineteenth<entury French painting or impres- Han predecessors, disliked the conflning Forbidden City and thus built palace
sionism.s Nor is any individual actor fully commensurate with the cultural complexes outside the capital and closer to their native lands. From 1703 Emperor
system in which he/she operates; particular agents of interaction - artists, Kangxi (r.7662-7723) established an enormous 564hectare (1,410-acre) hunting
patrons, critics, spectators, dealers and so on - share only some characteristics retreat called the Bishu Shuanzhuang (Summer Mountain Retreat), also known as
with other practitioners around them. Finally, artistic influence is not merely Jehol or Rehe, at Chengde, 250 kilometres northeast of Beijing, across the Great
osmosis, the passive absorption of a foreign style or technique, but a dynamic
process of selecting, rejecting, translating, transforming, even ignoring alien art
styles, techniques, ideologies, discourses, processes ofproduction and consump-
tion, and modes of disseminating, interpreting and evaluating art objects. All of
this means that even the simplest static comparison between two artists or two
images from relatively distant cultural networks opens up an endless web of
factors to measure. When the two interact, the dimensions of possible interven-
tion and influence are exponentially multþlied.
With such complexities in mind, the present article examines a single site of
artistic interaction between France and China in the eighteenth century. It
centres on China's greatest imperial palace complex, the Yuanming Yuan, built
near Beijing in the eighteenth century and destroyed by the British army in 1860
to bring the Second Opium War to a decisive end. On the surface, visual influence
of Europe on Yuanming Yuan and Yuanming Yuan on Europe was slight. No
famous European artist ever depicted the site, and only a few images of the palace
were known in Europe. Yet it was the source of one of Europe's most massive and
complex cases of intercultural interaction at the time, with important contacts
and mutual influences not only in the arts but in religion, politics and science as
well. For France, in particular, contact with Yuanming Yuan, facilitated by the
Jesuits stationed there, was one of the country's biggest encounters with non- 1 Chu Zong Gang, Overview of YuanmingYuan,1999. Oil on canvas. Beijing: Yuanming Yuan Park.
Western civilization before its military interventions in Egypt and Algeria Photo: the author.

t16 @ ASSOCTATTON OF ART HTSTORTANS 20O9 o AssoclAroN ot ART HtsToRtANs 2009 777
 YUANMING YUAN/VERSAIILES: INTERCUTTURAL INTERACTIONS
Wall. Though mostly forested, it included various building complexes, elaborate
lakes and gardens, a Tibetan lamasery and, eventually, twelve large temples
outside the perimeter. Closer to the capital, in 1709, he began building up what
would become Yuanming Yuan on a site of pre-existing Ming Dynasty gardens,
lakes and waterways. Kangxi began holding court here, and his son, the Yinzhen
emperor (r.7723-7736), expanded the complex and formally established it as a
second off,cial court equivalent to the Forbidden City. The complex peaked in
grandeur and importance under the long reign of Yinzhen's son, Qlanlong
(r.1736-95), who completed the Yuanming Yuan proper in 7744, offlcially desig-
nated the so-called 'Forty Scenes' of special sites it encompassed, and then went
on to double the complex's size with the addition of the ChangchunYuan (Garden
of Prolonged Springtime) in 1751 and the Qlchun Yuan (Garden of Variegated
Springtime) it 1772. The resulting 35O-hectare ensemble of man-made hills,
waterways and gardens, encompassing 3,000 structures in all and collectively
known as Yuanming Yuan, was further augmented by the adjacent Yihe Yuan
(Garden of Clear Ripples), the 29O-hectare 'Summer Palace' visited by tourists
today, which developed in the Ming Dynasty and was expanded by Qlanlong for
his mother's use. Still farther west lay the Xiangshan (Fragrant Hills) park and
temple complexes.
Numerous parallels existed between these Chinese imperial palaces, built up
from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, and the French monarchic palaces
developed during the same period. As the ruler's home and seat of governance,
the Forbidden City in Beijing was functionally and symbolically similar to the
Louvre in Paris, which was begun by Francis r in 1546 and became the seat of
France's monarchy. Outside the capital cities, Jehol and Yuanming Yuan func-
tioned much like the French palace complexes at Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain-
en-Laye, Versailles, Marly, Compiègne and others; all provided for the needs of the
court, official business, religion and entertainment in a rural setting, providing
hunting and leisure gardens. Louis xv may have moved to Versailles - over his
ministers' objections - for its Bourbon roots, just as Qianlong insisted on visiting
Chengde for its Manchu identity.6 These parallel architectural functions
stemmed from parallel forms of political organization under autocratic emperors
and monarchs, but I want to trace more particular similarities in the way art
systems functioned within palace space to enact royal power and prestige. For
easy reference, I will call these networks of display, representation and signifl-
cation 'palace cultures,' and while they encompass music, fashion, literature and
other modes of representation, I will focus on visual arts, architecture and garden
landscapes.
This idea of palace cultures aligns closely with the structuralist model of
Norbert Elias, whose classic book on The Court Society argues that dynastic China
shared vøt}r ancien réglme France a particular 'social flguration', a pattern of
relations between individuals and society that underpinned the organization of
class distinction, home life, rules of etiquette and artistic production and
consumption among political elites.T Calling this social configuration and its
attendant system of cultural expression 'court society', Elias fills out his theory
with empirical details about the lifestyles and values of Louis xrv and his courtiers
at Versailles. Yet his overall claim is that these particulars derived from an
underþing pattern of power and status that remained similar under Louis xvand
118 O ASSOCIATION OF ARI HÌSTORIANS 2OO9
YUANMI NG YUAN/VERSAIU-ES: INTERCULTURAT INTERACTIONS
Louis xvr and, more to our point, was similar to other pre-industrial court societies
in China and India, whose particular forms of behaviour and culture appear on
the surface so exotically different from France's. John H. Kautsky makes a similar
argument, based similarly on Max Weber's notion of ideal types. Kautsþ claims
that 'uniform and recurrent patterns' ofpolitical relations, social distinction and
economic organization underlie all human societies, and he deflnes 'aristocratic
empires' as a stage of political development between primitive and modern
commercial societies, characterized by the domination of an aristocratic class
that blocks economic development by controlling property and consuming
workers' surplus production.s Ancien régime France and Qlng Dynasty China both
appeil in his model as examples of transitional, semi-commercialized aristocratic
empires, with merchants challenging aristocratic power - but with social and
cultural life still deeply structured by aristocratic politics. 'vVhile this kind of
structuralist generalization risks prioritizing politics over culture, thereby
trivializing the patent visual diversity of global cultural practices, it can be
productive in refining our understanding of the speciflc similarities and differ-
ences in art systems that make art sometimes a barrier, at other times a facil-
itator, of intercultural communication.
In the case of China and France, within this general symmetry of court society
and the palace culture that accompanied it, a number of more precise cultural
similarities existed between Yuanming Yuan under Qlanlong (r.1736-1795) and
Versailles under Louis xw (r.7643-7775) and Louis xr (r.7715-1774). These two palace
systems developed along different chronologies, with little direct contact between
them; I do not want to claim that either system influenced the other. Rather, I
want to show that, structurally, the two systems logically developed similar
modes of operation as an outgrowth of the similar underþing court societies they
served. First, just as Louis xrv had moved his offlcial court to Versailles in 1682,
Yuanming Yuan became a second offlcial court under Yinzhen and at times the
primary imperial residence under Qlanlong.e Versailles and Yuanming Yuan thus
both equalled or surpassed their urban counterparts as major physical sites of the
ruler's residence and governance.
Each also became the primary symbolic site of rulership, visualizing and
embodying the ruler's cosmologically ordained authority through a number of
parallel strategies. Most fundamentally, the very idea of a combined palace-
garden complex presents the ruler as lord of both the human and natural worlds.
The extensively worked gardens in particular convey the impression at both sites
that the ruler is simultaneously in harmony with, and controlling, an idealized
realm of 'nature'. At the same time, both landscapes were culturally codified so
that nature carried political and cosmological meaning. Qjanlong's residential
quarter at Yuanming Yuan included nine islands with palaces representing the
'Nine Realms' of the empire and evoking nine stars and the nine mountains of the
Buddhist cosmos, while other sections of the grounds evoked magical realms of
immortals or replicated historical gardens he had visited around China (plate
2).10 Versailles likewise included symbolism of eight rivers of France, along with
gods, planets and seasons.ll Cast on a vast scale, these divine and geographical
symbols suggested royal power extending over the entire earthly realm and
sanctioned by the heavens, as similarly (yet inversely) implied in the east-west
alignment of the 'Sun King' at Versailles and the north-south alignment of the
o AssoctATtoN oF ART HtsloRrANs 2009 779
 YUANMING YUAN,/VERSAIILES: INTERCUI-TURAL INTERACTIONS
2 Map of the Yuanming Yuan proper with numbers corresponding to the forty scenes depicted in
Qlanlong's album, adapted from Che Bing Chiu, YuanmingYuan, Le jardin de 1ø C'lørté pørfaite, Les
Editions de I'Imprimeur, Besançon, 2000, 184-5.
'Son of Heaven' at Yuanming Yuan and the Forbidden City (plate 3).12 Both these
systems of cosmological semiotics emanated ultimately from the ruler's body,
inscribed in real space by the pervasive iconography of the immortal dragon at
Yuanming Yuan and the sun god Apollo at Versailles. Parallel strategies of mystery
and remoteness in the spatial sequencing of the two complexes combined with
elaborate court rituals to fetishize the royal body as a locus of magical, divine
authority and a model for emulation by subjects.l3 Finally, the deployment of
massive displays of the most precious fine and decorative arts augmented this
aura of power by casting the ruler as the chief patron and personal vessel of
national culture.
In light of such symmetrical discursive strategies, Geremie Barmé's char-
acterization of the mythic cultural symbolism underþingYuanmingYuan applies
equally to Versailles: 'The Yuan Ming Yuan ... drew on elements of fantasy, of
garden and scenic design, of cultural myth and imaginative practice. It was a
receptacle for the achievements of élite Han civilization, an imperial museum,
storehouse and abode.'14 Yuanming Yuan served, like Versailles, as a quintessen-
tial embodiment of classical culture and authority. By the same token, Louis
Marin's equation of representation with power at Versailles applies equally to
YuanmingYuan, as does his implication that the entire palace culture embodied a
dominant ideology binding subjects together in an hierarchical relation of
720 O ASSOC ATION OF ART HISIORIANS 2OO9
YUANMING YUAN/VERSAII-LES: INTERCULTURAT INTERACTIONS
3 Pierre Le Pautre, Map of the City and Palace ofVersailles,1777. Engraving on paper, 116 x 82 cm.
Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo: BnF.
deference to the ruler.ls Both palaces embodied and represented the combined
physical, divine, geographical, historical and artistic faces of the ruler's power.
'vVhile these two palace cultures were thus symmetrical in deploying
equivalent systems of royal representation as instruments of power, the specific
forms of representation and the precise ideological content created by those forms
differed markedly. In technique and style, they were near opposites. Versailles's
centralized multi-storeyed stone architecture, decorated with stone carvings,
oil paintings and frescoes, contrasted with the multiple single-storey wooden
pavilions, wood carvings and watercolour paintings on papff or silk at Yuanming
Yuan. Where Versailles's baroque style included white exterior walls, Greco-
Roman figural traditions and geometric gardens, Yuanming Yuan deployed red
columns and bright polychrome roof decorations, ink-brush painting styles, and
irregular gardens set among twisting waterways. Qianlong wore yellow silk
dragon robes, Louis xlv blue velvet with Bourbon fleurs-de-lis. There were simila-
rities - a liberal use of bronze and gold, for one - but the two systems can easily
be characterized as technically and stylistically dissimilar, mutually alien or
inverted.
From a structuralist perspective, such disparity could be dismissed as super-
flcial, explained away by the contingencies of environment and historical evolu-
tion; what meaningful historical analysis can we generate, after all, from the
difference betvyeen an upholstered throne and a lacquered one? Yet it is precisely
in such formal divergence that individual art systems create divergent ideologies,
rendering intercultural understanding opaque. Form carries meaning, and the
G) ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2OO9
 YUANMING YUAN/VERSAILLES: INTERCUtTURAt INTERACTIONS YUANMING YUAN/VERSAILLES: INTERCULTURAL INTERACTIONS

visible disparity between two thrones operates within divergent modes of logic,
valuation, communication and meaning. It is in this regard that art history
becomes essential for differentiating the way two similar social political struc-
tures produce two very different sets of cultural meaning and identity. Tracing
these visual differences helps to clariflr exactlywhy, and in what regard, European
and Chinese agents perceived each other as culturally exotic when the court
societies being represented shared so many characteristics.
Chandra Mukerji has shown that at Versailles the French formal gardens
enacted a unique 'territorial' politics, not only representing and naturalizing
royal power but physically creating the effect of power through material trans-
formations of land derived from war and engineering.lG Philippe Forêt has shown
the gardens of Chengde to carry a similar territorial signiflcance, as a micro-
cosmic amalgamation of the Han and Manchu regions making up the unified
Qlng empire, but even there, as at Yuanming Yuan, the gardens emphasize the
emperor's cultural and literary, rather than military and scientiflc, prowess.lT
This in turn points to a deeper, fundamental difference in the way gardens were
conceived, experienced and interpreted. David Hall and Roger Ames see Chinese
garden design as rooted in a particular view of space, time and cosmology, sharply
different from Western views; space is essentially temporal and human-centred
rather than static and pragmatically scientific, time itself is curving and embo-
died rather than one-dimensional and abstract, and the cosmos is a borderless
intertw'ining of body, mind and energy, rather than a distinct realm related to
humanity by metaphor.ls The effect of continually shifting perspectives of 4 Pierre Patel, le Père, View of the Chãteau ofVersailles in 1668,1668. Oil on canvas, 115 x 161 cm.
imaginative and memory-laden focal points in a garden such as Yuanming Yuan Versailles: Musée du Château de Versailles. Photo: Gérard Plot, RMN.
thus creates a fundamentally different kind of meaning than does the bounded,
Cartesian space at Versailles, which emanates from, and refers back to, a static,
abstract geometric order. Where Versailles evokes a viewer's outwardly reaching nation reflects the totality of the king's simultaneously divine and rational
command over a distinct outer world, Yuanming Yuan evokes an inward-turning control.
alignment with a cosmological continuum of humans, spirit and universe. Yuanming Yuan was represented very differently. In 1736 Qianlong ordered
These divergent meanings of the palace complexes are reinforced in the sketches of the various palaces of the Yuanming Yuan proper, and commissioned
different representational systems through which palace imagery was dissemi- the Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione and fellow court painters Tang Dai and Shen Yuan
nated. Marin analyses in detail how a 1652 map of Paris lays claim to universal, to paint an overall view. This panorama, likely executed in isometric rather than
scientiflc truth while inscribing Louis xv's absolute legitimacy in viewers' linear perspective, was mounted in the Qfnghui Ge building, in the central living
physical experience ofthe city. He links this representational order to the royal complex directly behind Yuanming Yuan's main audience hal1.21 In 1860 looters
palaces and ultimately the royal body. At Versailles in particular, he suggests, described a similar sort of panorama - 'a single painting on silk depicting views of
Louis xl's written itineraries for viewing the grounds acted as a narrative rnap, the imperial palaces' - covering the entire left wall of the main audience hall
combining geometric with s)¡mbolic techniques to ffeate a simulacrum of the itself.22 Both images (if, indeed, distinct) are lost. Virtually the only extant image
king. Map, guidebook and the palace itself are all portraits of the king, linked of the complex (other than the engravings discussed below) is an album painted
representations embodying power.le Maps and panoramic prints were a key by Tang and Shen depicting the forty major scenic spots of the Yuanming Yuan
technique ofEuropean knowledge construction from the seventeenth century on, section of the grounds. Commissioned by Qfanlong in 1738 and delivere d in 7747,
and Mukerji emphasizes that Versailles drew heavily on geometry, perspective, the album was taken by the French Lieutenant-Colonel Du Pin in 1860 and now
map-making and military engineering for both its construction and dissemina- resides in France's Bibliothèque nationale. It includes forty loose silk leaves
tion.2o All these systemic techniques of vision and representation are manifest in backed by heavy paper, each folded down the middle to open like a book. When a
the best-known image of Versailles, Pierre Patel's painting of 1668 of the still- leaf is opened, the left and right 'pages' are both squares of about 64 cm, with
young palace and gardens (plate a). The elevated, disembodied viewpoint, map- wide silk borders. On the right is an ink painting of a scene, meticulously detailed
like geometrf symmetrical composition and precise illusionism of the oil- and delicately coloured, while the left bears a poem composed by Qfanlong and
painting technique all act to instantiate Louis's absolute power in a panoramic boldly written by the minister Wang Youdun (plate 5).23 Though the palace and
view emanating from an all-seeing perspectival eye, whose abstract visual domi- album were intended primarily for the emperor, the album was publicly disse-

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'Í}!i
i;i4
5 Tang Dai and Shen Yuan, F orty View s of Yuanming Yuan, 17 47. Vol. 1, scene 1
'Zhengda guangming' (Grand Uprightness and Illumination), including the
main audience hall. Ink and watercolour on silk, 64 x 65 cm. Paris:
Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo: BnF.
minated in woodblock prints flrst issued in 7745, and in painted copies after the
prints.24 The whole project echoed a similil production for Chengde. There,
Kangxi had named thirty-six vistas and irr7717 \,rote thirty-six poems to celebrate
them. Qlanlong added thirty-six poems of his own and in 1756 then doubled the
set with anothff thirty-six vistas and poems of his own design.2s
Like the maps and paintings of Versailles, the Yuanming Yuan album offers
both a visual overview and a narrative script for perceiving and interpreting a vast
cultivated landscape. But where Versailles's images are unitary views, Qlanlong's
album leaves are fragments constituting a kind of sequential panorama. More
than at Versailles, the album mediates visual experience through layers of
metaphor and historical allusion, as is common in Chinese writing and painting.
Some poems link sites to Confucian principles of good governance; others to
Daoist or Buddhist notions of paradise. All emphasize the sensual appreciation of
nature at each site as a means of grasping culturally codifled moral principles.26
In the images themselves, furthermore, the buildings are very realistically
rendered (by Shen), while the landscapes (by Tang) exaggerate the actual scale of
surrounding mountains and lakes, effectively de-materializing each site and
emphasizing imaginative associations with a literary archetype or distant
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original. Thus instead of mythologizing the monarch's rational and military
control of the material world, as at Versailles, the album mythologizes Qlanlong's
literary and artistic cultivation in appreciating the cultured landscape. As Forêt
writes: 'The Qian Long Emperor's interest in gardens was directly linked to his
pretension of acting as a scholar who was equally gifted in poetr¡ calligraphy,
bibliophilia and landscape architecture.'27 The album's distinct mode of
communication - sequentially glimpsing individual microcosmic scenes imbued
with literary references - also reiterates the aesthetics of the gardens themselves.
Taken together, the two palace complexes and their representations amount to
cosmologies similarly flguring the monarch as the centre of a meaningful, hier-
archical universe. Yet the rational materialist aesthetic ideology of Versailles
differs markedly from the poetic imaginative aesthetic ideology of Yuanming
Yuan.
\Mhat does such a cataloguing of similarity and difference tell us? It is
inherently valuable in revealing that visibly unlike art practices can still be quite
alike in other dimensions; we cannot be too quick simply to contrast art forms
from distant cultures without considering the practices, ideologies and modes of
dissemination around them, some of which may be quite similar. But the
comparison of palace cultures is still more important for revealing why and in
what ways Yuanming Yuan became such an influential site of intercultural
interaction. For I believe it was precisely because it shared so much with the art
systems of the French monarchy - and those of the different but structurally
related British aristocratic empire - that Europeans could appropriate certain
elements from Yuanming Yuan's manifest exoticism, while the Chinese court
could do the same in reverse. When agents based in the two distant lands began
meeting and interacting at Yuanming Yuan, their actions show both under-
standing and misunderstanding, adulation and disparagement. Whether positive,
negative, or somewhere in between, their judgements and translations were
based on experiences of both familiarity and strangeness. As explained in the
following section, the unique aesthetic ideology of Chinoiserie was shaped as
much by cultural and political similarities as by extreme stylistic differences, and
in this dlmamism of symmetry and alterity it was perfectly mirrored in China by
an inverse practice of Européenerie.
CHINOISERIE AND EUROPÉENERIE, MIRRORING AND INVERSION
The first and most influential European description of Yuanming Yuan is a
renowned letter written by Jean-Denis Attiret, a French Jesuit missionary who
arrived in China in 1738 and until his death in 1768 served as a court painter for
Emperor Qlanlong. Written in 7743, on the eve of the garden's completion, and
addressed to a Monsieur d'Assaut in Attiret's hometown of Dole, the lengthy
epistle was published in France in a collection of letters in 7749, after which it was
translated into English and published in at least three British magazines in 7752.
Attiret's was the most extensive European description of actual Chinese gardens
to date and remained the most detailed description of the Chinese emperor's
primary garden palace complex for the next f,ve decades.It thus proved pivotal in
making Chinese court culture known to Europeans and greatly influenced the
development of the fîee-flowing English landscape garden, dubbed by the French
t}ae jardin anglais-chinois, and, consequently, the entire flowering of Chinoiserie.2s
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Most important in the present context, the letter reveals the process of aesthetic
translation that was required in order to make China's foreign art intelligible and
thus usable in Europe.
Attiret tells us that he and other Jesuit priests, including the famous Casti-
glione, lived in a church complex next to YuanmingYuan and worked every day in
the palace - painting mostly Chinese style works - during the ten months of each
year that Qianlong resided there. He also mentions that as a court painter, he met
the emperor daily and enjoyed special access to the entire palace, including the
emperor's residence.2e His is thus a unique, insider's perspective from someone
who, although a foreigner, was an actual producer of elite imperial culture,
sharing and in some ways shaping Qlanlong's cultural experience as intimately as
the Mandarin officials in the emperor's innermost circle. Furthermore, unlike the
diplomats, soldiers and journalists who subsequently wrote about Yuanming
Yuan, Attiret was explicitly motivated by a missionary's desire for intercultural
exchange, even though this was in turn motivated, as he conceded, by the more
self-interested aim of promoting China's tolerance for Christianity.to Indeed,
Attiret and his colleagues were central players in a continuous transmission of
observations about China back to Europe, at a time when China was often
sympathetically viewed as a source of potentially progressive social, moral and
political ideas.31
From the many detailed descriptions and comments Attiret makes about
Yuanming Yuan, a number of patterns emerge - ideological assumptions,
aesthetic reactions, narrative strategies - which were reiterated by later visitors
and commentators from Europe, thereby constituting a dominant paradigm in
the understanding of Chinese architecture and gardens. Most striking is his
avowal of the complex's ultimate incomprehensibility. One reason for this is its
overwhelming scale. Comparing the size of the residence area alone to that of
Dole, he cites more than two hundred 'palaces' and as many houses for eunuchs
before declaring that it is impossible to draw a plan because 'to do that, I would
have to have at least three years with nothing else to do.'32 Another over-
whelming feature is the endless variety of the grounds, including building
colours, bridge shapes, plantings and constructions along lake shores, materials
and types of lanterns, window and door shapes, and conflgurations of walkways
and galleries.33 Summing up his astonishment at the 'fecundity of their [Chinese
people's] spirit', he states that this 'admirable variety' exists not only in the total
ensemble of buildings and views, 'but also in the different parts from which this
whole is composed'.34 A third factor of incomprehensibility is a fundamentally
foreign aesthetic, which he underscores at the very beginning of his account: 'I
would gladly try to give you a description that could give you an accurate idea,
but the thing would be too difflcult, because there is nothing in all of it that has
any relationship to our manner of building and our architecture. Onlythe eye can
seize the true idea of it . . ..'35 So unfamiliar is the style and mode of expression
that it becomes impossible to describe through relations of resemblance or
familiarity; one has to see it to believe it.
These assertions of excess, fecundity and difference combine to give Attiret's
otherwise exacting, archive-like inventory an aura of wonder that occasionally
spills over into mystification. Explaining the use of natural rocks to obscure
building entrances and stairways, he states: 'Nothing so resembles those fabulous
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fairy palaces that one imagines in the middle of a desert, raised on a rock . . ..'36
And marvelling that the complex was built in only twenty years (a slight exag-
geration), he says an inflnite supply ofworkmen immediately turns raw materials
into buildings. 'One would say,' he comments, 'that it's one of those fabulous
palaces that suddenly takes shape by magic in a beautiful valley, or on a moun-
tain top.'37 So enchanted is Attiret with the landscaping, architecture and
decoration of the grounds that he is able to state, almost blasphemously, that 'it's
a true earthly paradise.'38
Such magical metaphors, redeployed by Lord Macartney during his embassy
visit in 1793 and by French and British looters in 1860, became a common trope in
sensationalist strains of nineteenth-century Orientalist discourse. But Attiret was
distinctive in pressing beyond this mystical exoticism to forge an unusually
profound understanding of the internal logic of the palace and its aesthetics.
Quite consciously, for example, he appraises his own change in taste, stating that
'I like the manner of building in this country very much: my eyes and my taste,
since I've been in China, have become a bit Chinese.'3e And his view is relativistic:
'Each country has its taste and its customs.'ao rvVhile defending the majesty,
beauty and comfort of European buildings, he nevertheless recognizes that in
Chinese eyes, unaccustomed to such architecture, they resemble enormous rocks
poked with cave-like holes, while European streets seem like narrow valleys cut
through forbidding mountains.al He seems genuinely to appreciate the 'anti-
symmetry' and 'beautiful disorder' that underlies the design of Yuanming Yuan
and that contrasts so greatly with Europe, and his explanation is thoroughly
thought through: 'Everything depends on this principle: It's a rustic and nahral
countryside that is meant to be represented, a solitude, not a palace clearþ arranged in all
the rules of symmetry and reløtion. . .'42 Tied to this principle of natural irregularity
is the variety of forms that Attiret describes in such detail, and he ranks the
expression ofvariety in China notjust equal but superior to that in Europe. After
paragraphs of description, he concludes: 'It is in this, and in the great variety that
the Chinese give their buildings, that I admire the fecundity of their spirit; I
would be tempted to believe that we are impoverished and sterile in compar-
ison.'43 Also superior are the emperor's 'illuminations' and fireworks, which
Attiret says 'inflnitely surpassed anything I had seen of this kind in Italy and
France.'a To Attiret, Yuanming Yuan was no simple, debased exotic Other but a
real, living model of an alternative imperial culture, one logically ordered yet
distinct from Europe's, occupying a kind of parallel aesthetic universe.
Achieving this remarkable state of cross-cultural appreciation required
adjustment on Attiret's part, and he plots that journey of familiarization for his
reader by flrst likening and then contrasting Yuanming Yuan to European taste,
technology and desires. The mirroring underþing this series of comparisons
appears explicitly when sketching geography; in addition to the comparison to
Dole, Attiret compares the size of Beijing's Forbidden City to that of Dijon and says
of Yuanming Yuan: 'One is no farther from Beijing there than Versailles is from
Paris.'as By 7770, more meaningful parallels were so recognized that French
Jesuits repeatedly called Yuanming Yuan 'the Versailles of Beijing.'46 Other
elements of mirroring were unrecognized but more systemic: when noting that
the European regard for architectural symmetry is repeated in the Forbidden City
and other offlcial or aristocratic buildings; when marvelling at how the Forbidden
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City'is decorated and furnished with all the richest and most beautiful things of
China, the Indies, and Europe;' when commenting that only a ruler of a vast
country like China could afford to build such a grand complex, Attiret was .G
reflecting assumptions common to both China and France about court society, À
*,
the meaning of rulership and the cultural expression of political authority.aT sJl

It was this underlying symmetry of cultural aims in the two palace art
systems that was already enabling Europeans to imitate the alien aesthetic
principles outlined by Attiret and to re-deploy them in the broad movement of
Chinoiserie.as As is well established in the scholarly literature, aesthetic influ-
ence was greatest on garden design, especially in England, where royal palaces
and systems of art patronage differed from France's but where the same struc-
tural principles of elite aristocratic culture and politics still applied. England's
earliest innovators, William Temple (1628-1699), Joseph Addison (7672-1779),
Alexander Pope (1688-úaal, William Kent (7684-7748) and Lancelot 'Capability'
Brown (7775-7783), all found in Chinese principles of garden design a welcome
alternative to the symmetry and formality of classicism.ae Irregularity was the
master principle of the new aesthetic system they promoted, and they explicitly
linked it to Chinese principles of as5rmmetry, variety and rusticity, which Temple
first noted in an essay in 1685 and famously referred to as 'sharawadgi'. Whereas
in England, Temple writes, beauty is based on 'certain proportions, symmetries,
or uniformities', the Chinese scorn such planting and achieve an alternative
beauty'without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily
observed ...'.s0 The English use of winding paths, irregular lakes and archi-
tectural ornaments, along with the intention to create a succession of landscape
scenes within a park, were all endebted to, or at least resonated with, Chinese
models as refracted in earþ accounts of Chinese gardens. Arthur Lovejoy went so 6 Anonymous , Forty Views of YuanmingYuan, ir.Yu zhi yuan ming yuan tu yong,, Tianjin, 1887. Vol. 1,
far as to assert that the entire development of the picturesque - that all-pewasive scene 1 'Zhengda guangming' (Grand Uprightness and Illumination). Woodcut on paper, 24.9 x
mode of both seeing and representing - had its origins in the influence of China, 27.5 crlr. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Libraries. Photo: the author.
stretching all the way back to Temple's 1685 essay. As he concludes:
described as half Turkish and half Chinese.In this context, Attiret's essay, drafted
A turning-point in the history of modern taste was reached when the ideals of regularity, in 7743, was in part re-enacting picturesque modes of reception that had already
simplicity, uniformity, and easy logical intelligibility, were first openly impugned .. . And in been discursively established in the literature that he is likely to have read before
England, at all events, the rejection of this assumption seems, throughout most of the eight- leaving for China. People bring preexisting expectations to any intercultural
eenth century to have been commonly recognized as initially due to the influence and the encounter, and Attiret was primed to see and appreciate irregularity in China's
example of Chinese art.s1 gardens. Still, the essay's unprecedented authenticity, as by far the most
authoritative and detailed eyewitness account of China's greatest imperial garden
Fan Cunzhong likewise shows how Chinese gardens were interpreted as a model complex, brought something new to the dynamic, greatly magniSring China's
of nature over artiflce, deployed along with Gothic taste as a counterbalance to influence and validating the picturesque revolution and its Chinese roots. In 1750
geometric classicism.s2 With increased imperialist tensions in the early nine- critic Elie Fréron wrote a poem criticizing the overly wild sections of Claude-Henri
teenth century, Europeans would re-interpret Chinese gardening as artificial and Watelet's renowned gardens as merely imitative and lauding the superior effects
decadent, but it remained inspirational throughout the eighteenth century.s3 of Chinese gardens. 'The Chinese alone are creators', he writes; 'they give a new
A similar shift toward the picturesque garden was taking place in France, order to things.'ss Garden treatises by Blondel in 7752 and Abbé Laugier in 1753
influenced in part by English theories but also by theories and gardens within the Iikewise praised China as a model of correct picturesque gardening.s6
country itself.sa J. F. Blondel's Maisons de plaisance, published irr7736, prornoted a Knowledge of imperial Chinese gardens in Europe was further disseminated
Rococo manner of gardening based on surprise and amusement, and playful in visual images. The woodcut edition of Qianlong's forty views ofYuanming Yuan
irregular gardens were created in France by Charles Dufresny in the 1710s-20s was published in China in7744 (plate 6), and Attiret and others sent sets to France
and Stanislau Leszcynski in the 1730s. Leszcynski, the exiled king of Poland and by the 1760s, where they were collected by Marigny, the Director of the Royal
father-in-law to Louis xv, included in one of his estates a pavilion that Voltaire Academy of Painting, and by Henri Bertin, the Secretary of State, who oversaw

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France's Compagnie des Indes and kept in close touch with the Jesuits.sT The
Bibliothèque nationale has one set mounted in a European album from the duc
de Chaulnes, who died in 7777.It also holds an eighteenth-century album of
gouaches painted on China paper, apparently owned by Bertin, that were
evidently copied from the prints. George Loehr suggested they were painted by a
European before 1750, but their hybrid, semi-Rococo style is also typical of
eighteenth-century Chinese painters in the China trade.s8 Such images comple-
mented a set of thirty-six engravings of Jehol brought to London in 7724 and
partially reprinted there in 7753.se The impact of these images on European
garden design was acknowledged in7786,when Georges Louis Le Rouge included
engraved copies of the fortyYuanmingYuan woodcuts in volumes 15 and 16 of his
Jardins anglo-chinois à la mode (Anglo{hinese Gardens in Fashion), a set of occasional
publications between 7775 and 1789 offering hundreds of views of Chinese and
Chinoisiste gardens throughout China and Europe. In an inscription on the flrst
YuanmingYuan plate, Le Rouge writes that these images are published to advance
'the art of Gardens' because 'everyone knows that English Gardens are nothing
but an imitation of those in China.'6o Though the Chinese garden images contrast
mightily with the plans and perspectival views of their European counterparts,
they are offered as authentic models of an elite modernity.
ln 7757 William Chambers carried things a step further by offering concrete
images of Chinese buildings and gardens as prototypes for designing actual
Chinoiserie objects. Architect to the King and primary founder of the Royal
Academy, Chambers was an authoritative figure and his 1757 treatise, Design of
Chinese Buildings, Furnihre, Dresses, Maclnnes, and Utensils, was translated into French
the same year.61 Although his views derived largely from his own visits as a
merchant sailor to small gardens around Canton in 7748-49, those views echoed
many of Attiret's and his illustrations were reprinted by Ie Rouge in 7776. While
stressing that Chinese architecture was definitely inferior to (the inverse of) modern
and classical Western architecture, Chambers singles out gardens as worthy of
imitation: 'The Chinese excell [sic] in the art of layrng out gardens. Their taste in that
is good, and what we have for some time past been aiming at in England, though
not always with success.'62 In opening his analysis, he restates the master principle
of irregularity, nor'^/ explicitly associated with a picturesque naturalism: 'Nature is
their pattern, and their aim is to imitate her in all her beautiful irregularities.'G3
From this underþing aim devolve two main techniques. One is to compose indivi-
dual, literally picturesque landscape views, based on 'winding passages'punctuated
by buildings and other objects. In asserting that 'the Chinese gardeners, like the
European painters, collect from nature the most pleasing objects' and combine
these elements into an idealized, beautiful whole, he reiterates a classical notion of
idealism.ø But linl<ed to this process is another, anti<lassical technique: the
deployment of 'variety' of many sorts. Chambers describes at length how gardeners
vary the terrain, walkways, shrubbery, rock formations, waterways and so on, as
part of an overall taste for aesthetic contrast, effects of surprise, and the sparking of
one's imagination.6s For those able to view reproductions of Qianlong's album,
Chambers' picturesque principles were fully visualized.
China played another key role in Chinoiserie as well. In addition to suppþing
the new aesthetic paradigm ofpicturesque variety, it also supplied specific exotic
motifs for actual variegated designs. As Fan Cunzhong notes, Chambers found
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Chinese architecture to be unworthy of imitation for public buildings but
'recognized its charm in extensive parks and gardens or in immense palaces,
where classic regularity might well be diversifled by exotic singularity and
simplicity.'66 Chambers's 1767 pagoda at Kew Gardens, inspired by China's famed
Nanjing porcelain pagoda, was especially influential, and Chinese pagodas,
pavilions, bridges and other architectural elements were deployed throughout
Europe as accents to aristocratic gardens and homes, enhancing the effect of
Picturesque variety by maximizing the play of contrast and difference, especially
in relation to the Neoclassicism emerging in the same decades.GT
In stretching this play of difference, European Chinoiserie caricatured China,
exaggerating colours and building shapes, simplifying Chinese faces, distorting
patterns, subverting s5rmbolism.68 Such caricature radically inverted China in the
sense that the building and design types being imitated for antidassical playwere
precisely those constituting China's own classical tradition, originally intended to
represent the most serious of political (imperial) and religious (Buddhist) ideolo-
gies. In draining Chinese classicism of these meanings and reassigning it to
aesthetic play, Chinoiserie also reversed its gender associations. The emperor's
patriarchal semiotics - the Son of Heaven, the dragon to the empress's phoenix,
the master of concubines and eunuchs -was feminized as a decorative rather than
symbolic system, deployed for pleasure rather than power, rendered on a small
rather than grand scale, and used for entertainments, domestic furnishings and
especially gardens (nature being associated with the feminine in Europe).
Such caricature is evident in France's most signiflcant royal Chinoiseries,
which were installed in different eras at Versailles. The 'Trianon de Porcelaine',
designed by Louis Le Vau in 1668, was Europe's flrst Chinoiserie building, erected
in 7670-77, dismantled in 1686, and later replaced by the Grand Trianon. Super-
flcial in its Chinese appropriations, it comprised five European-sryle pavilions
decorated with blue and white tiles, furnished with Chinese-style vases and fabrics,
and set among exotic flowers. The whole was inspired symbolically, though not
formally, by the same Nanjing Pagoda used by Chambers, which had recentlybeen
depicted in Europe's flrst great collection of China images, Johan de Nieuhoffls
1665 account of a Dutch embassy to China.6e Located in a garden precinct aimed at
pleasure rather than business, the pavilion complex was also primarity intended
for use not by Louis xlv but by his mistress, Madame de Montespan. Little of the
Nanjing Pagoda's religious and political signiflcance survived the translation.
Although Louis xrv hosted a Chinese fête at Versailles in 1700 to usher in a
\ Chinese century,7o Versailles's next major Chinoisiste work had to await his
successors. Louis xv maintained a botanical garden behind the Petit Trianon, and
I Chinese and Indian plants were planted there in7770, influenced by an influx of
botanical samples and studies from French missionaries, particularly the influ-
ential Pierre d'Incarville, who lived at Yuanming Yuan. Much of this scientiflc
garden was replaced by an expansive 'Anglo-Chinese Garden', installed ftom7774
to 7782, during the reign of Louis xu. Once again, it was commissioned not by the
king but by his queen, Marie-Antoinette, to whom he had given the Petit Trianon
as a gift. One 1774 plan by her gardener Antoine Richard called for a Chinese
aviary and pagoda, evoking memories of the Porcelain Trianon and links to Kew
(plate 7). However, Marie-Antoinette instead used a design by the Comte de
Camaran and her building supervisor Richard Mique, who had previouslyworked
o ASSOCTATION OF ARf HTSIOR|ANS 2009 131
 YUANMING YUAN/VERSAILLES: INTERCULTURAL INTERACTIONS
7 Antoine Richard, Unrealized Plan for fhe Anglo{hinese Garden q,t the Petit Trianon, Versai\les,1774.
Engraving on paper, 48 x 33 cm. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo: BnF.
for Stanislau Leszcynski. It had no pagoda but instead included a 'Chinese ring
game', a parasol-topped merry-go-round driven by servants below ground. This
was installed next to the Petit Trianon château in 7776, augmented in 1782 by a
semicircular spectators' gallery of colourful Chinese-style pavilions with curved
roofs (plate 8).71 Such ovefily entertaining constructions made Chinese archi-
tecture into something even more playful than the Porcelain Trianon.
It was within the Anglo-Chinese garden, furthermore, that Marie-Antoinette
in 1783 began installing her famous artificial hamlet, with cottages and a working
farm where she enjoyed playing villager. Like the Chinese accents, the rural
hamlet functioned as a playful engagement with extreme otherness at the heart
of France's most elite, classical, royal culture. She was inspired in part by the
Château de Chantilly, where the Prince de Condé installed a hamlet and an Anglo-
Chinese garden in 7774. She may also have drawn inspiration from Yuanming
Yuan, for she probably knew from Attiret's text that Qianlong maintained a
similar artif,cial town there, where eunuchs role-played merchants, craftsmen
and even pickpockets for the emperor's amusement, and where, according to
Attiret, the working farms, labourers, livestock and thatched cottages attempted
to imitate 'as closely as one can, rustic simplicity and all the manners of country
life'.72 rvVhether intended or coincidental, Marie-Antoinette's imitation of the
hamlet again indicates how the systemic mirrorings of Chinese and European
aristocratic court societies, along with the art systems used to maintain them,
made China's alien aesthetic particularly attractive to English and French aris-
tocrats and royalty.
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8 Claudelouis Châtelet, 'View of the Ring Game, Gallery and One Side of the Château', in
Watercolour on paper, 29.4 x 43.2 cm. Modena:
Collection of Plans of the Petfi Trianon,1786.
Biblioteca Estense Universitaria. Photo: Foto Roncaglia.
Furthermore, this systemic s)¡nmetry drew Europe's alien aesthetic into
Yuanming Yuan. For there in the very same decades of the later eighteenth century,
the Chinese emperor was creating an equivalent form of 'Européenerie', precisely
mirroring Europe but in inverse. Qlanlong was especially fond of collecting
elaborate clocks and mechanical toys fiom Europe; the Forbidden City housed an
enormous collection, and observers of the looting at Yuanming Yuan in 1860
described rooms loaded with clocks and music boxes of all kinds.73 The Jesuits
observed that Qlanlong was fascinated by all things Western, and indeed one of the
primary reasons he tolerated the Jesuits was to feed this constant, playful curiosity
(while staunchly limiting Western religious, political and economic inflttration). As
Father Amiot remarked: 'It is incredible how rich the Sovereign is in curiosity and
in magnifi.cences of all kinds coming from the West.'74
When Qlanlong decided to imitate Europe - based on the same appreciation
for the aesthetic play of differences - he did so on a scale that far exceeded
anything in England or France. Castiglione, Michel Benoist and their fellow
Jesuits tn 7747 were marshalled to design a set of palace buildings in imitation of
French, Italian and Austrian models, complete with exterior stonework (though
on wooden frames) and elaborate, animated fountains (previously unknown in
Chinese gardens), ornamented in hybrid patterns of stone carving and fitted out
with European mirrors, chandeliers, paintings and tapestries. The two largest
buildings were the seventeen-room Xieqiqu ('Wondrous Delights'), completed in
1753, and the twenty-tworoom Haiyantang ('Hall of Ocean Pleasure'), completed
ART HISTORIANS 2OO9
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9 Haiyantøng (HølI of Ocean Pleasure\, modern miniature reconstruction at the Yuanming Yuan
Park, 2004. Photo: the author.
in 1759, with an enormous water tank in its middle section (plate 9). Before the
latter stood the renowned fountain clock in which twelve bronze flgures with
animal heads representing the Twelve Earthly Branches successively spouted
water, each for two hours. Upon completion about 1783, the complex had several
smaller buildings as well, a large fountain complex likely based on Versailles's
Arc de Triomphe, and - just like Versailles - an aviary and a maze.Ts It seems
no Westerner was permitted to visit these so-called 'Western palaces' until
French and British soldiers wandered through in 1860, describing Rococo
tapestries, paintings imitating Antoine Watteau and François Boucher (them-
selves practitioners of Chinoiserie), and portraits of beauties from the French
court.76
Qjanlong did not take Western architecture any more seriously than
Europeans took Chinese architecture; Attiret mentions that the emperor was
baffled by Europeans' predilection for multi-storey houses, and he quotes him as
saying that'Europe mustbe avery small and verywretched country, since there is
not enough land for cities to spread out, and people there have to live in the air.'77
The Western palaces we¡e in fact intended purely for pleasure, as a Européeniste
showcase and theme park. At the far eastern end of the complex, across a
rectangular lake, a trompe-l'oeil European town street was added in the form of a
series of receding and diminishing theatrical coulisses painted in Western
perspective.Ts And again mirroring Chinoiserie, Européenerie inverted the
gender associations of European royal architecture; these palaces emblematizing
kingship were positioned in a small, distant corner of the grounds most remote
from the emperor's throne hall and residence and were probably used at some
point as a residence for concubines.Te While it appears only a myth that Qian-
long's favourite concubine, Xiangfei, was housed there, she played another role in
Européenerie. A Rococo-style painting by an anonyrnous court artist shows her
dressed up as a Western shepherdess, part of Qlanlong's interest in dressing up
like Europeans.so Just as the Europeans treated China, so Qlanlong treated
European culture as an exotic accent of variety, distorted and converted from
meaningful symbols to a picturesque play of aesthetic contrast.
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10 Yi Lantai, Western façade of the Haiyantang (Hall of Ocean Pleawre), 17s3-s6. One of twenty Views
of the European Palaces atYuanmingYuan.Engravir'g on paper, 50 x 87.5 cm. Paris: Bibliothèque
nationale de France. Photo: BnF.
To complete the simulacrum not just of art and architecture but of an entire
mode of European visual cognition, Qlanlong in 1783 commissioned a set of
t'wenty large copper engravings to represent these Western palaces (plate 10). These
were the first such prints manufactured wholly in China, and Yi Lantai, apparently
one of the Jesuits' art students, drew the designs in a hybridized style. The example
illustrated here, depicting the Haiyantang, includes Western linear perspective
but few cast shadows while deploying typically Chinese patterning of foliage and
rocks augmented by chiaroscuro shading.sl Awkward yet meticulous in its
blending of competing visual vocabularies, the print translates the building's
multiple levels and irregular curves into a theatrical play of variety, patterning
and counterpoint equally typical ofboth Chinoiserie and Européenerie.
A further material trace of this intercultural dialogue is a unique hand-drawn
diagram of the Western palace precinct, over two metres in length and recently
rediscovered in the collection ofthe Bibliothèque nationale de France (plate 11).
An inscription in ink by the anonymous European owner indicates it was made to
accompany a set of the twenty engravings 'that I received in October 1787 from M.
Bourgeois, French Missionary at the Beijing Residence'.82 Bilingual labels on each
building give the structure's name and its number in the set of plates. While the
French is written in ink directly on the surface (in a different hand from the
inscription), the Chinese labels are written in high-quality Chinese calligraphy
using brush and ink on slips of paper, which have been glued to the surface. The
surface itself is comprised of two large sheets of Chinese paper affixed to a woven
silk or canvas backing, all of which has been mounted as a traditional Chinese
vertical hanging scroll, but with the bottom wooden roll gilded and the top one
both gilded and carved in a classicizing Western manner. As a way of mapping the
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engravings and reconstituting their actual spatial

relationship, the entire scroll seems an exercise in
Western illusionistic documentation (whether the
ov/ner actually saw the buildings or not). Yet its
bicultural format and bilingual text make it a
more complex, hybrid form of representing both
the Western palace complex and the spirit of inter-
cultural dialogue that the entire site embodied.
The irony rooted in these symmetrical rever-
berations and intercultural transfusions is epito-
mized by the fate of the Beauvais (not Gobelins)
tapestries presented to Qianlong in 7767.83
Between the 1690s and 1731 France's Beauvais
manufacture had woven multiple sets of ten
tapestries depicting scenes of the Chinese emperor
and court. Combining reality and fantasy, and
2:1 blending Chinese, Indian and European elements,
these tapestries influenced the general vocabulary
of Chinoiserie in France.ln1742 Beauvais created
another set of six China tapestries, this time more
Rococo in spirit and imagining pastoral rather
than courtly subjects: The Meal,The Fair (plate 12),
The Dance, Fishing, The Hunt and The Toilette.
Cartoons for the set were based on colour sketches
by the great Boucher (designer of a Chinese
T boudoir and other Chinoiseries for Madame de
Pompadour), who based them in part on pictures
Attiret had sent from Yuanming Yuan. In 1763 the
king gave a set of these tapestries to Henri Bertin,
the foreign minister in charge of France's India
Company, who collected so many Chinese works
from the Jesuits. Bertin gave the set to two Chinese
returning to the Jesuit mission in Beijing, and the 12 Jean Joseph Dumons, after a design by François Boucher, The túnese Fair, from the second
mission in turn presented them, on behalf of the
Beauvais tapestry Tenture chinoise, 1742. S1lk and wool tapestry, 322.6 x 372.4 cm. Cleveland: Cleve
fþl: French government, to Emperor Qlanlong in 7767.
'Y land Museum of Art (Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Collection). Photo: Cleveland Museum of Art.
Qlanlong was again delighted to receive them as
examples of Western curiosities, and he them apart before the Western Palaces were put to the torch - along with the rest
constructed a special building for them, the of Yuanming Yuan - by the British army.86
Observator¡ among his Western palaces.8a Father The wanton destruction of Western as well as Chinese objects in 1860 suggests
Amiot in 1789 described this building bedecked soldiers viewed them all simply and equally as signs of royal decadence, even
with mirrors and stuffed so full of expensive when home-grown. One witness, however, viewed this shared excess more
11 Anonj¡mous, Plan of alarge European machines that one could barely walk ambivalently, recognizing the European palaces and tapestries as signs of a
section of the Pørk of Yuanming Yuan, through it.8s Thus honoured and simultaneously bygone era ofshared royal culture. Antoine Fauchery, a French journalist with the
kno\irn to Europeans as the Tersailles marginalized, the tapestries remained in place army, penned the most hostile denunciation of Yuanming Yuan ever published,
of Chinø',7787-95. Ink on paper until 1860, when French and British armies looted characterizing the complex - which he, too, called 'the Chinese Versailles or Saint-
mounted on cloth scroll, 238 x 64 the grounds, Soldiers took plenty of clocks and Cloud' - as aesthetically grotesque and politically decrepit.sT To him, the Western
cm. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale musical toys but, viewing the bulþ old tapestries Palaces were the only redeemable part, because they clearly showed a familiar
de France. Photo: BnF. as further spoils fiom a villainous enemy, ripped link to French culture. The hybrid buildings are bastardized, he writes:
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 YUANMING YUAN/VERSAILLES: I NTERCULTURAL INTERACTIONS YUANMING YUAN/VERSAI LLES: INTERCULTURAI- INTERACTIONS

but the intimate links that exist between the spirit of minuteness and innate taste for little
tÏings among the Chinese, and the affectation, the preciousness, the pursuit ofthe tiny detail -
little verses, little marquises, little suppers - in sho¡t, the unfortunate disease of little t¡ifles
tlat characterized one aspect of the ephemeral era of the Richelieus and the Fronsacs, was
enough to give this pastiche, though imperfect, a relative value tiat is not without merit.88
reinforcing monarchic rule at home and the palace culture that helped to produce
it. This was a mutuality specif,c to the conditions of the eighteenth century one
that would not survive the more imperialist aggressions of the nineteenth century.
Notes

Recognizing a lcinship to his ou¡n French past, he sees Chinese aesthetics as a Research assistance for this study has been provided byValérie Munch, Noel (Kam
mirror of the earþ fancies of Louis xvand xv. Remarkably, this imitation of France Tuen) Mak, Maggie (Mei Kin)Wong and Elaine (Yin Ning) Kwok. Financial support
proves that France itself must have been like China, as he afflrms when first has been provided by two research grants from The University ofHong Kong. I am
introducing the Western quarter: especially grateful to various staff members at the Bibliothèque nationale de
France, Département des Estampes, for their assistance in viewing various works,
Among all these [Chinese] palaces, there is one that stands out ftom the consecrated form. It is a and to Art History's two anon)mous readers for their criticisms and suggestions.
Iouis XV palace, a Rococo palace! Trianon, Luciennes, or Marly - you can choose! A testimony of Translations from the French are the author's. Chinese terms are written with
such great sympatlry paid to France by the most eccentric people of the world could not pirryin Romanization.
decently have come about except in an age when we ourselves, in our customs, arts, etltics, and
politics, tended very closely to resemble Chinese.8e 1 The essential unity of Said's model is stressed, Yuan', is drawn primarily fiorn Geremie R.
for exarnple, by Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg Barmé, 'The Garden ofPerfect Brightness, a Life
in 'The Challenge of Orientalism', in Patrick in Ruins,' in East Asian History no. 11, June 1996,
The mutual mirroring of the two palace cultures, in other words, could onlyhave Williams, ed., Edward Said, vol.2, London et al., 111-158: especially 113-116. More detail is
if
occurred the two very different peoples shared similar underlying cultures and 2001, 3-19. Some of the best recent studies of provided in the most extensive histories of
Orientalism in úre visual arts include Jill Beau- Yuanming Yuan: Hope Danby's The Garden oJ
values. rvVhile this similarity put Yuanming Yuan on an equal footing with lieu and Mary Roberts, eds., Mentaksm's Inter- PerJect Brightness: The Hßtory of fhe Yinn Ming Yünn
Versailles, it appears that by 1860, Versailles itself had become devalued as a locutors: Pøintrng Architecture, Photography ond of fhe Emperors Who Lived There (Inn.dorl.:
leftover of France's own decadent past, a past that would soon come to a deflnitive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, Williams and Norgate, 1950); Che Bing Chiu's
2002); Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Yuanming Yüan: Le jardin de lo Qarté parfoite
end with the fall of the monarchy in 1870. The mutual mirroring of Chinoiserie Colonralism, ond French North Afica, 7880-7930 (Besançon: Les Editions de l'Imprimeur, 2000);
and Européenerie at this time thus served as a visible, bittersweet, nostalgic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Young{su Wong's AParadise Lost: The lmperiol
markff of a premodern royal order, vanishing before the modern economic, and Jocelyn Hacldorth-Jones and Mary Roberts, Garden of Yuawning Yuan, Honolulu, 2001.
eds., Edges of Empire: Onentßlisffi ondvisual Culture
political and cultural pressures ofthe late nineteenth century. Européenerie, like (Malden: Blackwell, 2005).
6 Robert W. Berger, ARoyal Passion: LouÌs x¡v as Patron
oÍ Architecture, Cambridge et al.,7994, 72.
Chinoiserie, had become a sign of aristocratic decadence. 2 ln a 1996 essay exploring the relevance of
Orientalism to the study of China, Arif Dirlik
7 Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edrnund
identifies the defining feahlre of Orientalism as Jephcott, Oxford, 1983, quotations 13, 18.'vVhile
CONCLUSION 'culturalism', the tendency to generalize homo- published originally in German in 1969, tlre text
was d¡afted in 1933.
The intercultural interactions that occurred atYuanmingYuan diverged from later geneous cultural identities. Di¡lik sees intellec-
8 John H. Kautsþ, The Politics of Anstocratic Ernpires,
Orientalism in that they were based on a mutual recognition of equivalence tuals from both the West end China continuing
such essentialism today. See 'Chinese History Chapel Hill, Nortl Ca¡olina,1982, quotation 18.
between France and China rather than of superiority and inferiority.As shown in and the Question of Orientalism,' in Williams, 9 The French Jesuit ,tttiret (discussed below)
my first section, the two countries had royal palace cultures that operated in Edword Said, vol. 2, 247-70. mentioned in 1743 that tlle Jesuits worked at
3 Yuanrning Yuan during the ten montls of each
similar ways, following similar systems of production and dissemination. This In arguing thus against essentialism, I share the
year that Qjanlong resided there. Years later, on
underþing systemic symmetry was enough to enable participants on both sides to
general postcolonial perspective lltat cultural
identities in colonial worlds were essentially fluid the other hand, records for 1780 show Q-ianlong
recognize a mutual mirroring of the two palace art systems, despite emphatic and and hybrid; see, for example, Homi K. Bhabha, Tle spent only fifteen days at Yuanming Yuan,
highty visible disparities or inversions in style and ideological content. For both Locotion of Culture (Inlrdort and New York: compared to ninety-nine at the Forbidden City
Routledge, 1994). But it is equally impoftant not and eighty-eight at Chengde. This year was
China and France, the speciflc artistic interactions that took place at Yuanming to create an opposing unity ofcomplete hybridity. unusual because of a Southern tour t-hat lasted a
Yuan were thus shaped by both mirroring and inversion. Chinoiserie, in which Hence the present article aims to gauge varying hundred and fifteen days, but the dates suggest
Yuanming Yuan's gardens and architecture played a pivotal role, was a dual degrees of isolation and porosity in concrete Yuanming Yuan would normally be occupied no
contacts between distant cultural systems. more thafl three or four months each year. See
process, maximizing the play of exotic formal difference while reinforcing Van J. Symons, 'Qjanlong on the Road: The
4 During Britain's first diplomatic embassy trip to
mutually parallel political/cultural systems. This was perfectly mirrored in inverse China, Lord Macartney presented gifts to Imperial Tours to Chengde', it New QSng Imperíal
by a process of Européenerie, in which the Chinese court transmitted exotic Emperor Qjanlong atYuanmingYuan in 1793. On History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qjng
the 1860 looting and subsequent dissemintation Chengde, ed. James A. Millward et e1., London and
European forms to Yuanming Yuan while embracing a comparable underlying of objects, see my 'The Looting of Yuanrning New York, 2004, 56-8.
political/cultural system. In both processes, the adapting culture inverted the Yuan and the Translation of Art in Europe', 10 For example, Barmé, 'Garden,' 177-21i Ch'i1r,
other's ideology, emptying the exotic forms of their indigenous meanings and Ninetaenthcenw At't Worldwid.e 7 :2, Autumn 2008. YuonmingYuøn,233. On nine, see Philippe Forêt,
feminizing the other's patriarchal semiotics to convert it into aesthetic play. Yet
http ://1 9thc-artworldwide.org 'The intended perception of the Imperial
5 Inforrnation in this paragraph, including the Gardens of Chengde in 1780', Studies in the History
they perfectly mirrored each other in doing so, with the effect of again mutually choice of translation for the name 'Yuanming of Gardens & Designed Land.scaçtes,19: 3/4, Autumn/

138 @) ASSOCIATTON Or ASr l-TSTORTANS 200a G) ASSOCIATION OF ARI HISTORANS 2OO9 139
 YUANMING YUAN/VERSAIttES: INTERCULTURAL INTERACTIONS
Winter 1999, 343-63; 353. Symbolic meanings
a¡e also discussed by Cary Y. Liu, 'Architects and
Builders of the Qing Dynasty Yuanming Yuan
Imperial Garden-Palace', The Unirersity of Hong
Kong Museum Journal, \, September 2002, 38-59,
151-61; and byJean Paul Desroches, 'Yuanrning
Yuan, Die Welt als Garten', in Europa und die
Kaiser lon Chino, eyJrIb. cat., Frankfilrt am Main,
7985,122-8.
11 On Ve¡sailles, see Nicholas d'Archimbaud,
Versøilles, Paris:, 1999, and PierreÁndré Lablaude,
The Gardens of Versoilles, London, 1995.
12 On the geometry of the Forbidden City, see
Angela Zito, OJ Body and Brush: Gtond Sacrifce as
TextlPerformonce in Eighternth-Century China,
Chicago, 7997, 734-44. Chinese th¡ones tradi-
tionally faced south, based on the idea of the
ruler facing the source ofthe yoag principle.
13 On tÏe extraordinary treatment of the Qjng
emperor's body, see especially Zíto, Of Body ond
Brush. On the centrality ofthe royal body in the
reality and representation of Versailles, see
especially Sara E. Melze¡ and Kathryn Norberg,
ed,s, From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incor-
poroting lhe Politicql in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-
Cenlury France, Berkeley et al., 1998; and Louis
Mãrirr,Portraù of the King,ttans.Martha M. Houle,
Minneapolis, 1988.
14 Barmé, 'Garden', 113.
15 Marin, Portrait, 3-75, 169-92.
16 Chandra Mukerji, Terítorial Ambitions and the
Gardens of Versoilles, Cambridge, 1997.
17 Forêt, 'Irnperial Gardens'. See also ltis Mapping
Chengde: The Qng Londscope Enterprise, Honolulu,
2000.
18 David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, 'The Cosmolo-
gical Setting of Chinese Gardens', Sfudies in the
Ihstory of Gardens t Designed Lanà.scopes,18: 3,
Autumn 1998, 175-86.
19 Ma¡in, Portrait,769-92. Marin analyses Félibien's
itinerary; Mukerji (Territorial Arnbitions, 8-781
discusses numerous othe¡s.
20 Mukerji, Taritorial Ambitions, chap.2.
21 Chiu, Yuanming Yuon, 103, 106, 133. Wong (Paro-
dtse Lost,25) has slightly different info¡rnation.
Tlre location is cited by Danby (Garden,50), and
Chiu (133) who also notes (233) that the building
was altered, sometimes due to fire, in 1763, 1831
and 1838.
22 '. . . un seul tableau peint sur soie et représentant
des vues des palais impériaux', in Paul Varin,
Expédition de Chine, Paris, 1862, 233. The same
painting was noted by Robert Swinloei Narratle
of the North China Campaign 0f 1860, london, 1861,
295.
23 Bibliotìèque nationale de
F¡ance, item 89
Résewe. The album and ¡elated images are
tìoroughly documented and reproduced in
Chiu, Yuonming yu6n, 706-721 and 181-265; on
the comrnission, see 106-108.
24 See especially Chiu, Yuanrning Yuan, 118-20.
25 Forêt, 'Imperial Gardens', 360.
740
26 The poems are translated into French and
discussed in Chiu, Yuanfting Yuan, 227-65.
27 Fotêt, 'Imperial Gardens', 360. Some similar
issues are raised byJohn R. Finlay in 'Forry Views
of the Yuanming Yuan', an unpublished paper
which he has generously shared with me (Asso-
ciation of ,{sian Studies annual meeting, 1998).
28 Fot details on r{ttiret and the letter's publica-
tion, see George R. Loehr, 'Lartiste Jean-Denis
Atti¡et et I'influence exercée par sa description
des jardins impériaux', in La mission Jronçaise de
Pékin aux X\qIe et X\LIIe siècle (Actes du colloque
intemotlondl de sinologte, Centre de recherches
interdisciplinaire de Chantilly, 797 4), Paris, 797 6,
69-83, 69 and Fan Cunzhong, 'China's Garden
Architecture and tlle Tides ofEnglish Taste in the
18th Century', Cowrie: A lownal of Chinese
Comporative Literaüße Shtdies, 7i 2, 7984, 27-34,
esp. 25-6. It was first published in the Jesuits'
Lefires édifiantes et ameuse¡ vol. 27, 7749. A
modern French edition (which I use) and some
bad<ground are inLettres édifiantes et cufieuses de
Chine par des ftussionndiïes jésuites,7702-7776, ed.
Jean-Louise Vissière, Paris, 1979, 411-29. iA. trun-
cated French version is also in Chiu, Yuanming
Yuon, 142-7. For a facsimile reprint of Joseph
Spence's 1752 abridged translation, see A Parti-
cular,A,ccount of the Emperor of China's Ga¡dens
near Pekin [sic]', in John Dixon Hunt, ed., Tle
Enghsh Londscape Garden, New Yorl< and London,
1982, not paginated. For a slightly more abridged
translation, see Danby, Garden, 69-78. Osvald
Sirén also quotes extensively fíom the English
ve¡sion in Gardens of úúna, New York, 7949,723-
6. Most scholars who have mentioned Attiret's
influence assert that this letter was widely
known and highlyinfluential; for exarnple, Craig
Clunas, 'Nature and Ideology in Western
Descriptions of the Chinese Garden', in Joachim
WolschkeBulmahn, ed., Nature and Ideology:
Naturol Garden Design h the Twentieth Century,
Washington, DC, 7997, 27-33, 22. Dawn Jacobson
mentions that úe English translation was
reprinted four time by the U60s; Chhoßerie,
London, 1993, 156.
29 Let'ites, 1979, 425-7. C}r'itt (Yuanming Yuan, 7041
mentions that in the 1850s Emperor Xianfeng
also lived at Yuanming Yuan almost ten months
per year.
30 Lefires,7979,427-9.
31 See especially Jonathan D. Spence, The Chon's
Great Continent: Chtna m Western Minds, New York
and London, 1998, 81-100
32 LeLtres,1979; see, respectively, 418, 476 and, for
the quotation, 425.' . . . il faudrait pour cela que
je fusse au rnoins ùois ans à n'avoir autre chose à
faire.'
33 Lettres,1979; see, respectively, 475, 416, 417, 422
anò 424.
34 Lefires,1979, 'fécondité de leur esprit' (422]' aîdi
'Encore un mot de I'admirable variété qui règne
dans ces maisons de plaisance; elle se trouve non
seulement ... dans le total, mais enco¡e dans les
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YUANMING YUAN/VERSAILLES: INTERCUTTURAL INTERACTIONS
parties diffé¡entes dont ce tout est composé.'
(424]'
35 Leltres, 797 9, 473. J'entreprendrais volontiers de
vous en faire une description qui pût vous en
donner une idée juste; mais la chose serait trop
difflcile, parce qu'il n'y a rien dans tout cela qui
ait du rapport à notre manière de bâtir et à toute
notre ârchitecture. Loeil seul en peut saisir la
véritable idée . .'
36 Lel:tres,7979, 415.'Rien ne ressemble tant à ces
palais fabuleux de Íées, qu'on suppose au milieu
d'un désert, élevés sur un roc . ...'
37 Lettt'es,7979, 425. 'On dirait que c'est un de ces
palais fabuleux qui se forment tout d'un coup
per enchantement dans un beau vallon, ou sur la
croupe d'une montagne.'
38 Lettres,7979, 474.'C'est un vrai paradis terrestre.'
39 Lelrres, 7979, 423. '. .. la manière de bâtir de ce
pays<i me plaît beaucoup: mes yeux et mon
goût, depuis que je suis à la Chine, sont devenus
un peu chinois.'
40 Lettres,7979, 423i'Chaque peys a son goût et ses
usages.'
41 Lettres,1979, 422.
42 LelTres,1979,423: 'Tout roule sur ce principe: C'est
une cømpagne tustique et naturelle Et'or veut repré-
senter, une solitude, non pos un palais bien ordonnê
dans toutes les règles de 1ø symétrie et du rapport . . .;
(italics in original)
43 LetTres,7979,422i'C'esleÍ cela, et dans la grande
variété que les Chinois donnent à leurs bâti-
ments, que j'adrni¡e la fécondité de leur esprit; je
serais tenté de croire que nous sommes pauwes
et stériles en cornparaison.'
44 Lettres, 7979, 478: '... car en illurninations, en
feux d'artiflces, les Chinois nous laissent bien
loin derrière eux, et le pel1 que j'en ai vu
surpasse infiniment tout ce quej'avais vu dans ce
genre en Italie et en France.'
45 Lettre s, 197 9, 474, 418, and, for the quotation, 426:
'On n'y est éloigné de Pékin qu'autant
que
Ve¡sailles l'est de Paris '
46 At least two missiona¡ies sent prints of
Yuanming Yuan to France, calling them pictures
'du Ve¡sailles de Pékin'- Loehr, Attiret', 81
(discussed below).
47 Lettres, 197 9, 423, 474 aîd 424 respectively.'. . . est
garni et meublé de tout ce que la Chine, les Indes
et llEurope ont de plus beau et de plus précieux
48 Concerning Chinoiserie, I have relied on
Jacobson, Chinoisetiei Madeleine Jarry, Chinoiseríe:
Chinese lnfluence on European Decorttive Art,1t'h and
78ú Centunes, New York, 1981; and Oliver Irnpey,
Chiroiser¡e: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Westenl
Art ond Decoration, New York, 1977.
49 See, for exarnple, Frances Ya-sing lstt, Lønd,scapte
Design íí Chinese Gø'dens, New York, 1988, 23-30;
Arthur O. lovejoy, 'The Chinese Origin of a life and career, see John Harris and Michael
Romanticism', Essays in the History of ldeas, Balti-
mo¡e, 1948, 99-135; especially 110-14i and Fan
Cunzhong,'China's Garden A¡chitecture . . ..' Fan
O ASSOCIAIION OF ART HISTORANS 2009
notes that Addison was influenced by Père Louis
lÆ Comte's Nouveaux mémoires sur I'étdt présent de
lo Chine, published in French in 1696 and English
iÍ 1697.
50 Information and quotation from lovejoy,
'Chinese Origin', 111, who quotes Temple's 'Upon
the Gardens ofEpicurus', written about 1685 and
published in his Essays of1692.
51 lovejoy, 'Chinese Origin', 135. I am grateful to q.
S. Tong for drawing this essay to my attention.
52 Fan Cunzhong, 'China's GardenA¡chitecture ...'
53 See Clunas, 'Nature and Ideology'
54 Information here is fiom Dora Wiebenson, The
Picturesque Gorden in France, Princeton, 1978, 6-13.
55 Wiebenson, Picùfiesque Gorde'n, 20.
56 Wiebenson, PicturesEte Gorden, 73-75, cititg
Blondel's Architecture françøise, 7752, and
Laugier's Essai sur I'architecture, 7753
57 Loehr mentions one set sent by Attiret (thus
before 1768) and offered for sale to M. de Marigny
in 1770 (,q.ttiret', 75). He also mentions (81) two
other sets sent in 1770 to Hertaut and Henri
Bertin. See also Michèle Pirazzoli-t'Serstevens,
Gravures d.es conquêtes de 7'empereur de Chine Kien-
Inng øu musée Guimet (Paris,1969), 11. The prints
were still being reprinted in book form in China
after 1860.
58 The album of the scientist Michel-Ferdinand
d'Albe¡t d'Aily (7772-77771, d,tc de Chaulnes, is
item Oe21c Réserve (4"). The gouache album is
item Oe21 Réserve It has a note saying 'Loehr'
believed it to be a European copy of the prints,
painted before 1750, an opinion repeated
recently in Vé¡onique Royet et al., Georges Louis Le
Rouge: Jardins onglo-chinois, Paris, 2004, 2O2i blrt
the style also resembles China ûade works.
l,ouis-François Delatour, in Essais sur I'orchitecture
des Chinois.. . (Paris,1803,186-209), also desc¡ibes
six court paintings of buildings at Yuanming
Yuan sent to him by tle Jesuits; their fâte is
unclear.
59 Loehr, Attiret', 76. Fatler Matteo Ripa engraved
these thirty-six views of Jehol in 7772-74 and
brought some sets to London in 7724. One set
was purchased by Lord Burlington, the renowned
builder of Chiswick House, one of the first
examples of neoclassicism. Seventeen of these
prints were also copied and published in colour
in1753. On the woodcuts Qianlong made
depicting Jehol's thirty-six views, see Fo¡êt,
'Imperial Gardens', especially 346 & 362, note 5.
60 Royet, Georges Louis Le Rouge,2O7:'... pour servir
aux progrès de I'art des Jardins; puisque tout le
monde sait que les Jardins Anglais ne sont
qu'une imitation de ceux de la Chine.'
61 William Chambers, Design of Chinese Buildings,
Fltrnitue, Dresses, Mochines, and Utensils (London,
U57) reprinted New York, 1968. On Chambers's
Snodin, eds, Sir William Arnnberl Architect to
George n New Haven and London, 1996, 1-10.
62 Design, preface, notpaginated
747
 YUANMING YUAN/VERSAI LLES: INTERCUTTURAL INTERACTIONS
63 Design,75.
64 Design,75.
65 Design,75-78.
66 Fan Cunzhong, 'China's GardenA¡chitecture ...',
29.
67 Fo¡ a detailed survey of Chinese fancies built in
parks and estates throughout Eu¡ope,
Jacobson, Chinoiserie, chap. 6; Ioehr, Attiret', 77-
80; and Royet, Georges Louß Le Rouge On the
intimate link between exoticisrn and classicisrn
in the English style garden, see Lablaude,
'Ga¡dens', 140-4.
68 Along different lines, some useful points about
miscomprehension are made by Ge Liangyan,
'On the Eighteenth-Century English Misreading
of tlre Chinese Garden', Comparolwe Ciyilizotions
Reyiew,27, Fall 1992, 706-126.
69 Jacobson, Chinoiseríe,35-6; and Berger, ,4 Royal
Possion,68-9. The building was probably also
inspired by the 1670 publication of La Chine, a
F¡ench translatio¡ of a 1667 book on China by
the Jesuit Athanasius Ki¡cher. Wiebenson notes
(hctufesq)e Gmdrn, 8l that the Grand Trianon
included an earþ example of irregular
gardening, ÌheBosrytet
des Sources, designed in the
1680s.
70 Jacobson, Chinoiserie, 38.
71 Information here is fiom d'Archi¡nbaud,
Versûlles, 765, 174-85, aîd 236-47i Iablaude,
Gardens, 145-61; and, on Mique, Wiebenson,
PicturesEte Gorderl,73. Loehr (Attiret', 78-81) also
discusses Jesuit botanical work.
72 Letrtres, 1979, 421: '... et dans tout on imite,
d'aussi près qu'on le peut, la simplicité rustique
et toutes les manières de la vie champêtre.' Ioehr
( Attiret', 78-9) suggests rapport with Qianlong's
village, which was described by Attiret (479-271
and reproduced in Qlanlong's forty views.
73 See Danby, Garden, 49 & 51 ; Chiu, Yuonming Yuon,
u8; and Antoine Fauchery, 'Lettres de Chine", Ie
Morliteur universel,362, 28 December 1860, 1533-
4,1534.
74 Letter of 7789, quoted in Delatour, Essdis, 164-5.
'Il est incroyable combien le Souverain est riche
en cu¡iosité et en magnificences en tout genre,
venues de I'Occident.'
75 Details of construction and Western sources ere
in Michèle Pi¡azzoli-t'Se¡stevens,'The Emperor
Qlanlong's European Palaces', Ortenfaüorß, 79i 17,
November 1988, 61-71; and Chits,YuanmingYuan,
69-76. Building sizes are ftom the guidebook
Yuanmingyuan Park: An Etemal Motrument, Beijing,
1998, 33-61. For archaeological reconstructions,
see Michèle Pi¡azzoli-t'Serstevens et al., Le Yuon-
mingruon: Jeux d'eau et polois européens du x,rue
siècle àla cour de Chine, Paris, 1987. On the mixing
ofChinese and European styles and symbols, see
Victoria M. Siu, 'China and Europe Inte¡twined:
New View of the European sector of the Chang
,4.
Chun Yuan', Studies ín the History oJ Gardens I
Designed Landscapes, 19: 3/4, Autumn/trVinter 1999,
376-93.
742
YUANMING YUAN/VERSAI[[ES: INTERCULTURAI- INTERACTIONS
76 Observations from Varin, Expédition,24O-7t a¡d 82 The full inscription, pasted onto the surface, 87 Fauchery, 'l,ettres', 1533. ' .. le Versailles ou le
Fauchery 'Lettres'. The Dutch ambassador Andre reads (underlines and mistakes in the original): Saint{loud chinois ...'
Eve¡arrd Van-Braam Houckgeest pressed repeat- 'Plan d'une grande partie du Parc d'yuen-ming- 88 Fauchery, 'Lettres,' 1534. '... mais les rapports
edly to see the palaces after purchasing a set of yuen, appellé par les Européens le Versailles de la intimes qui existent entre I'esprit minutieux et
twenty drawings of them in Canton, but was Chine/Et des Palais ou Maisons de plaisance de le goût inné des petites choses chez les Chinois,
consistently refused; see his Voyage delAmbassade l'Empereur Kien-Long,/contenus dans les XX. et l'afféterie, le précieux, la recherche du menu
Planches gravées en taille douce à Peking quej'ai
see
de la compagnie des Indes onentales, vus 7'Empereur détail: petits vers, petites marquises, petits
de la Chine en 1794 et 1795, Garneray and Stras- recues en Octobre 7787. d,e M. Bourgeois soupers; la triste maladie, enfin, des petits ¡iens
bourg, 1798, 377 -18, 324, 326 & 350-1 (discussed Missionnai¡e Francois de la Résidence de Péking.' qui caractérisa un des côtés de l'époque éphé-
The object was recentþ found among odd-format
below). mè¡e des Richelieu et des Fronsac, sufflt pour
in the Bibliothèque nationale de France,
objects
77 Atlilet, 422. ' . . . iI faut que l'Europe soit un pays que ce pastiche quoique imparfait, possède une
Département des Estampes, and does not yet valeur relative qui n'est pas sans rnérite.'
bien petit et bien misérable, puisqu'il n'y a pas
assez de terrain pour étendre les villes, et qu'on have a catalogue number. I am grateful to Mme 89 Fauchery, 'Lettres', 1534. 'Entre tous les palais,
Véronique Royet for enabling me to view iÎ.
est obligé d'y habiter en l'air.' il en est un seul qui ressort de la fo¡me
78 On this stuucíl¡e and its ¡elation to other 83 Details here follow Jarry, Chinoiserie,75-32. consacrée. C'est un palais Louis xv, un palais
perspectival works in China, see especiallyJohn 84 Chiu, Yuorming yuon, 77i Jacobson, Chinoisene, ¡ocaille! Trianon, Luciennes ou Marly, choisissez!
R. Finlay, 'The Qlanlong Emperor's Western 72-5. On the scroll above, the building is labelled Un térnoignage d'aussi haute sympathie payé à
Perspective (Theater)', unpublished paper 'Nouveau batiment Europeen, fait exprès pour la France par le peuple le plus excentrique
placer Les tapisseries des gobelins.' du rnonde ne pouvait décemrnent se produire
presented at'l,es Rendez-vous rnanquées, Chine
qu'à l'époque ou nous-mêmes, par nos moellrs,
1600-2000', Paris, September 2OO4.I am grateful 85 Letter quoted in Delatour, Essais, 165.
nos arts, notre morale et notre politique,
to Mr Finlay for sharing his text. 86 Paul Varin specifically mentions 'Gobelins'
nous tendions à ressembler beaucoup à des
79 Van-Braam Houckgeest was refused permission tapestries hanging in the European buildings in
Chinois.'
to see the palaces on the grounds that'they are }ris Expédinon,240-7.
occupied by a group of the Emperor's wornen.'
('... ils sont occupés par une partie des femmes
de I'Empereur.') 318 and 324; Pfuazzoli-t'Serste
vens, however, states t¡at the buildings were
only ever used to store Western objects (/eøx
d'eou,9-70).
80 On this picture, see Sullivan, The Meeting of
Easterrl andWestern Art,69; the Xiangfei myth is
debunked by Pirazzoli-t'Serstevens lleux d'eou, 9-
10).
81 On the prints, see especialþ Pirazzoli-t'Serste
vens, 'Palaces', 63-4, aîd From Beijing to Ver-
sø¡lles: Artistic Relations lteTween China and France,
exhib. cat., Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of
Art, 7997,45 & 256-65. The last of the twenty
prints depicts the fake súeet. I consulted the set
in the Bibliothèque nationale, itern Oe18a(f),
where catalogue information indicates it was
Iooted fiom tlle Forbidden City by Aust¡ian
troops after the Boxer Rebellion. It also states
that sets the Jesuits sent to Bertin and Louis-
François Delatou¡ in the eighteenth century
have disappeared. Delatour described botï
palaces and p¡ints (and their loss during tlle
Revolution) at some length in his Essais, 740-209.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France also holds
a set of nineteen related drawings - item Oe18
þet. F') - purchased in Canton in 1794 by Van-
Braam Houckgeest (see his Voyage, 317 & 350). The
entire set was inspired by an earlier set ofsixteen
engravings that qianlong commissioned to
depict his military victories; these irnages were
drawn in 1765 by his Jesuits (including Attiret)
and sent to France, where they were engraved by
a team led by Charles-Nicolas Cochin tåe
Younger and returned to China in 1769-75. See
especially Pirazzoli-t'Serstevers, Gratwes d,es
conqrêtes: From Beijing to Versailles, 44-5 & 224-43:
and Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eøstern and
Westem Art, Berkeley eT a1., 1989, 74-7.
O ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2OO9
@) ASSOCTA-flON OF ART HTSTORTANS 2009