There is much to delight the eye at the current British Museum blockbuster exhibition “China’s Hidden Century (1796-1912)”, on in London until October 8.
On show are vivid vermilion and imperial yellow textiles that are two centuries old yet look brand new, minutely decorated fans, intricately woven tapestries, beautiful objets from ceramics to silverware, photography and even early moving pictures.
And one exhibit of exceptional historical significance is tucked away in a corner.
Encased within a small, glass-fronted cabinet, it is a roughly A3-sized document across two pages, embossed with a black wax seal, the red chops of the Daoguang emperor (Xuanzong), and the signature of British plenipotentiary in China, Henry Pottinger.
This is the actual Treaty of Nanking, signed on board HMS Cornwallis on August 29, 1842, at the conclusion of the first opium war. The treaty forcibly opened a number of Chinese ports, including Guangzhou and Shanghai, to foreign trade, mandated the Qing dynasty to pay a vast sum to the British as an indemnity and, of course, ceded control of the island of Hong Kong to the British.
Brought to the British Museum from the National Archives, in Kew, London, this is the original “unequal treaty”, and it has proved a crowd-puller with Chinese visitors.
It also, perhaps, suggests that the British Museum’s chosen title – “China’s Hidden Century” – is primarily for a domestic audience. For many in Hong Kong, the long Chinese 19th century is anything but hidden.
Rather it surrounds them every day, from Pottinger Street in Hong Kong’s Central neighbourhood, to the legacy of a century and half of British control, and, of course, life since the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997.
Julia Lovell, professor of modern China at London University’s Birkbeck College, is a significant academic partner of the exhibition.
She says that deciding titles is rarely easy, and there was a long process of internal debate, with focus groups held across the country. Two major strands came out of that process.
The narrative of foreign interference, humiliation and suffering that precipitated the decline of the Qing dynasty through opium wars, the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Uprising and the eventual collapse of dynastic rule, is well known in China.
These are distinctly less known in Britain – this is China’s “hidden century” because it is simply not taught in British schools.
Despite the general long-term decline over the period, it was also a time of improvements and innovations – whether in engineering, technology, society, the arts – which are often forgotten or overlooked.
The exhibition’s curator, head of the China Section at the British Museum, Jessica Harrison-Hall, stresses the advent of modern banking, universities, railways, ironclad gunboats and steamships, photography, medicines, as well as many things perhaps not so obvious to the untrained eye – new ceramic glazes, brighter dyes for textiles, painting and calligraphic styles.
Harrison-Hall notes that in London you are surrounded by the Victorian world; it is omnipresent.
Londoners are born in Victorian-era hospitals, live in Victorian houses, are educated in Victorian-built schools, commute on a partially Victorian underground railway system, grab a pint from a Victorian-founded brewery served in a Victorian pub, travel through beautifully restored Victorian railway stations, yet the Victorian connection to China is little understood or appreciated.
That “Unequal” Treaty of Nanking was ratified by Queen Victoria barely five years into her 63-year reign.
She traverses both opium wars, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the reign of Empress Dowager Cixi; and she was to hear of the Boxer Uprising at the turn of the 20th century, just before her death.
Victoria, as Harrison-Hall notes, “bridges and underpins” Britain’s relationship with China’s 19th century.
The British Museum has created a set of emblematic shadow images to illustrate the key characters and themes explored within the exhibition, designed by students from the London College of Fashion.
They include an unknown Manchu woman of the imperial household, a Bannerman, the Guangzhou comprador Mouqua, the iconic figure of Cixi, and the artist Ren Xiong (1823-1857), who declares, “With the world in turmoil, what lies ahead of me?”
Alongside them is the figurehead of the exhibition (currently to be seen gracing just about every Tube station, bus shelter and billboard in London), the quite remarkable portrait of Lady Li, wife of a successful Guangzhou businessman, Lu Xifu.
Little is known of her life, although she was reputedly a Buddhist who maintained a strict vegetarian diet. At first we are drawn to her obvious finery – a brilliant blue robe with its intricate pattern of golden flowers at the neckline and cuffs, her green jade earrings and jade brooch.
The artist, whose name is unfortunately lost to history, elegantly captured her somewhat stern, penetrating gaze.
Lady Li is emblematic of the exhibition not just because she represents the female side of China, but also because she is a Guangzhou woman whose life spanned much of the “hidden” century.
She appears resolute, gazing directly at us across a century and a half. And interestingly the portrait, dated from around 1876, is stunningly realistic.
This was a new style for Chinese artists faced with the innovation of photography and its ability to capture real life, just as everything would change around Lady Li – from portraiture styles to the quality of clothes dyes, to the very city she inhabited as it expanded rapidly over the course of her lifetime.
How to encapsulate an exhibition as varied as China’s Hidden Century? Quite simply, it’s impossible. We move from Bannermen costumes, snuff bottles embossed with photographic images, silverware tea sets from Shanghai, the intricate floral design of a hand painted fan (lent by Hong Kong’s own Teresa Coleman Fine Arts), delicate northern Chinese paper gods, elaborate Manchu ladies’ headdresses, to a portrait by Friedrich Wilhelm Keyl given to Victoria showing the unfortunately named “Looty”, a Pekinese lion dog, presented to Victoria after the looting of the Summer Palace – the queen reputedly had the picture hung in the kennels at Windsor Castle.
The exhibition does not deny Britain’s imperial past, the opium trade or repeated interference in China, but it does look to see points of contact, crossover and cultural or technological transfer. China’s interactions with the world – both hostile and curious – are represented.
While this was a century of European, Japanese and American imperial designs on China, it was also one where many a Chinese with means went abroad, whether to seek their fortunes in the North American gold rush, or to gain a university education at Harvard or Cambridge, to bring back the latest, the new, the useful.
China’s regionalism is also represented. There are recordings of the Zhejiang dialect, the Cantonese dialect of Lady Li, the Manchu language of the Bannermen. Among the wealth of exhibits there are some rarely noted and scarcely seen – for instance, from the vast Hakka-led Taiping Rebellion against the Qing, intended to establish their “Heavenly Kingdom”.
The most destructive civil war in global history, which raged between 1850 and 1864, left millions dead and the rebellion ultimately failed. It is (unlike the American civil war of 1861 to 1865) all but forgotten – there are few monuments, no hit television shows.
It is also not a conflict that left much in the way of material or visual culture. Yet here we have Taiping minted coins, an extremely rare (only four are thought to survive) Taiping imperial riding jacket worn by a King of the Heavenly Kingdom, and embroidered hoods and boots in yellow and white silk with five-clawed dragon symbols (the Taiping appropriating the traditional symbols and colours of their enemies the Qing).
Lovell points out that so much of the material culture of the Taiping was destroyed that it’s only these few items that help us to visualise this vanished world, which once had its capital at Nanjing and gained control of a significant part of southern and eastern China.
Similarly, the Boxers left few objects by which to remember them. The exhibition sees the Boxer Uprising (1899-1901), as it does the Taiping, as a key turning point in the “Hidden Century”.
On display is a rare painted wooden placard warning of the harm that will come to those who fraternise with foreign enemies and a vivid colour woodblock print (by unknown artists) of the rout of foreign troops by the Boxer army near the city of Tianjin.
By the latter decades of China’s Hidden Century we encounter the discernibly modern. Remarkable footage of dancer Yu Rongling, a daughter of a Manchu official who trained with contemporary dance pioneer Isadora Duncan in Paris, runs on a loop.
A French clock in the form of a steamship is a novelty, perhaps once owned by Cixi, but also represents the impact of the new technologies partly ushered in by Chinese statesman Li Hongzhang’s Self-Strengthening Movement (1861-1895), which oversaw the country’s first modern arsenals and shipyards.
And eventually, despite the calls for reform and change within the late Qing, the country moved inexorably towards that other modern phenomenon sweeping the globe at the time: revolution.
Central to the final rooms of the exhibition is Qiu Jin, a woman who posed in photographs as a cross-dressing, weapon-bearing warrior.
A turn-of-the-century champion of female emancipation, a radical, a student in Japan (then highly unusual for Chinese women), with role models from Mulan to Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, she presages the final days of the Qing.
The 267-year-old dynasty would collapse in 1912, overthrown by the Republican movement … but that’s another exhibition all to itself.
In all, the curators began with roughly 3,000 items for possible inclusion. These they whittled down to 300. The exhibits come from the British Museum’s own collection, of course, but many were also loaned from private collections and smaller, regional museums and galleries.
Looty’s portrait is from the Royal Collection Trust while other items come from the National Maritime Museum, the Victoria and Albert, the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, as well as military regimental museums.
Lady Li is on loan from the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, Canada, Cixi’s steamship clock from the Palace Museum in Beijing, the Taiping riding jacket from the Cincinnati Art Museum, in the US, the accompanying boots and hoods from the Royal Engineers Museum, in Kent, in the UK, to name but a few.
Having found, looked at, studied and then conducted extensive due diligence on so many items around the world it seems only fair to ask the co-curators, Lovell and Harrison-Hall, which items have especially captured their imaginations.
For Harrison-Hall it is the textile costumes, many of them from the large collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As the 19th century progressed, so dyes became more varied and vibrant, shades more multitudinous.
That Chinese fashion was a riot of colour we may not always sense from black-and-white photography. These bright hues appeared not just on the sumptuous court robes worn in the Forbidden City, or the opera costumes worn in theatres and at rural temple fairs, but also on the everyday utilitarian clothing of 19th century Chinese women.
Her favourite is a stunning straw farmer’s coat made from palm and rice fibres, a cape composed of folding layers of straw. To display it the British Museum conservation team individually cleaned the thousands of straw stalks that make the cape waterproof.
Lovell, too, is entranced and fascinated by the textiles, but also by the rare items from the Taiping. She points to an official document forbidding destruction, affixed to properties in towns and villages occupied by the advancing rebel army to show that these houses were now protected by the Heavenly Kingdom.
Lovell also cherishes those objects that reveal the religious sensibilities of the time, mixing and matching elements of Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism and local beliefs, and creating a pantheon of local deities.
Perhaps most bizarre and interesting among these deities are those that reveal encounters with foreign communities.
The Cantonese speaker and author James Dyer Ball, who ran a school and dispensary in Guangzhou, was deified as a household statue complete with Western clothing – a blue jacket, white waistcoat with brass buttons, and breeches. Once again, highly ephemeral items that rarely survive.
Having the opportunity to range freely through the British Museum’s China collections, Lovell was surprised at just how extensive they were. And though it didn’t make the final cut for the exhibition, she was surprised to come across some 200-year-old preserved deer sinew, apparently used to make soups, loitering deep in the archives.
Despite the official treaties, the imperial treasures, the artefacts of the Qing administration, the true strength of “China’s Hidden Century” is in giving us insight into the lives of the great multitudes of Qing dynasty China – the merchants, scholars, soldiers, students, peasants; those in the major metropolises, the countryside and at the outer fringes of the empire.
To British audiences, and to many visiting tourists this summer, the exhibition will be a revelation of a China little known or taught. To others, more familiar with the history, it will offer a rare chance to see an incredible variety of objects and curiosities, on display in one place, telling the widely varied stories of China’s long, very long, 19th century.