90
Ring of jade, from Beijing, China
AROUND 1200 BC, WITH AD 1790 INSCRIPTION
The last four chapters have been about the European Enlightenment project of discovering, mapping and seeking to understand new lands. This object is from China at a time when it was having its own Enlightenment, under the rule of the Qing Dynasty that had displaced the Ming in 1644 and which would rule China right up to the early twentieth century. The Qing ruler of the time, the Qianlong emperor, roughly contemporary with George III, devoted considerable attention to exploring the world beyond China. In 1756, for example, he decided to map the territories he had annexed in Asia, so he sent out a multicultural taskforce, two Jesuit priests trained in map-making, a Chinese astronomer and two Tibetan lamas, which produced such useful geographic data that the knowledge spread across the world, along with the emperor’s reputation.
The object here, a jade ring called a bi (pronounced ‘bee’), is another product of the emperor’s intellectual curiosity, this time about the Chinese past. This bi – a fine, plain disc with a hole in the centre, of a type often found in ancient Chinese tombs – was already more than 3,000 years old when the emperor decided to study it. The emperor took the ancient, unadorned bi and had his own words inscribed all over it. In doing so, he transformed the ancient bi into an object of the eighteenth-century Chinese Enlightenment.
For Enlightenment Europe, China was a model state, wisely governed by learned emperors. The author and philosopher Voltaire wrote in 1764, ‘One need not be obsessed with the merits of the Chinese to recognize … that their empire is the best that the world has ever seen.’ Rulers everywhere wanted a piece of China at their court. In Berlin, Frederick the Great designed and built a Chinese pavilion in his palace at Sanssouci. In England, George III erected a ten-storey Chinese pagoda in Kew Gardens.
The Qianlong emperor in his study
In the fifty-nine years of the Qianlong emperor’s reign, from 1736 to 1795, China’s population doubled, its economy boomed and the empire grew to its greatest size for five centuries, more or less to its modern extent – covering more than four and a half million square miles. The Qianlong emperor was a tough leader, happy to proclaim the superiority of his own territorial conquests over those of his predecessors and to assert for his Qing Dynasty the backing of the heavenly powers – in other words, to claim for himself the Mandate of Heaven:
The military strength of the majestic Great Qing is at its height… How can the Han, Tang, Song or Ming dynasties, which exhausted the wealth of China without getting an additional inch of ground for it, compare to us? … No fortification has failed to submit, no people have failed to surrender … In this, truly we look up gratefully to the blessings of the blue sky above to proclaim our great achievement.
This emperor was also a shrewd intellectual, an adroit propagandist and a man of culture – a renowned calligrapher and poet, a passionate collector of paintings, ceramics and antiquities. The prodigious Chinese collections in the Palace Museums today hold many of his precious objects.
It is not hard to understand why this bi thoroughly engaged the emperor’s attention, for it is a strange and intriguing thing, a pale beige thin disc of jade, about the size of a small dinner plate but with a hole in the middle and a raised edge round it. Nowadays we know from similar objects found in tombs that this bi was made probably around 1200 BC. We don’t know what it was for, but we can see clearly enough that it is very beautifully crafted.
When the Qianlong emperor examined this bi, he also thought it was very beautiful and was moved to write a poem recording his thoughts on studying it. In his collected poems his bi poem is entitled: ‘Verses Composed on Matching a Ding-ware Ceramic with an Ancient Jade Bowl Stand’:
It is said there were no bowls in antiquity / but if so, then where did this stand come from? It is said that this stand dates to later times / but the jade is antique. It is also said that a bowl called wan is the same as a basin called yu, but only differing from it in size.
While modern scholars know jade bi discs are found in tombs but are unsure of their exact use or meaning, the Qianlong emperor didn’t struggle with any doubt. He thinks the bi looks like a bowl stand, a type of object used since antiquity in China. He shows off his knowledge of history by discussing arcane facts about ancient bowls and then decides he cannot leave it without a bowl, even if no antique bowl is to be found:
This stand is made of ancient jade / but the jade bowl that once went with it is long gone. As one cannot show a stand without a bowl / we have selected a ceramic from the Ding kiln for it.
By combining the bi with a much later object, the emperor has ensured that, in his eyes at least, the bi now fulfils its aesthetic destiny. This is a very typical Qianlong, eighteenth-century Chinese way of addressing the past. You admire the beauty, research the historical context and present your conclusions to the world as a poem, so creating a new work of art.
The bowl in the Palace Museum, Beijing, that the Qianlong emperor matched with the bi
In this case the bi itself became the new work of art. The emperor’s musings were incised in beautiful calligraphy on the wide ring of the disc, so fusing object and interpretation, as he saw it, in an aesthetically pleasing form. Chinese words, or characters, are spaced so they radiate out from the central hole like the spokes of a wheel, the very words I have been quoting. Most of us would see that as a defacing – a desecration – but that’s not how the Qianlong emperor saw it. He thought the writing augmented the beauty of the bi. But he also had a more worldly, political purpose in making his inscription. The historian of China Jonathan Spence explains:
There was very much a sense that China’s past had a kind of coherency to it, so this new Qing Dynasty wanted to be enrolled, as it were, in the records of the past as having inherited the glories of the past and being able to build on them, to make China even more glorious. Qianlong was, there’s no doubt about it, a great collector; and in the eighteenth century, when Qianlong was collecting, China was expanding. There is a bit of nationalism about his collecting, I think; he wanted to show that Beijing was the centre of this Asian cultural world … And the Chinese, according to Voltaire and other thinkers in the French Enlightenment, did indeed have things to tell Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, important things about life, morality, behaviours, learning, genteel culture, the delicate arts, the domestic arts …
And politics. The Qing Dynasty had one major internal political handicap. They were not Chinese – they came from modern Manchuria, on the north-eastern border. They remained a tiny ethnic minority, outnumbered by the native Han Chinese by about 250 to 1, and were famous for a number of un-Chinese things – among them, an appetite for large quantities of milk and cream. Was Chinese culture safe with them? In this context, the Qianlong emperor’s appropriation of ancient Chinese history is a deft act of political integration, but only one act among many. His greatest cultural achievement was the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, the largest anthology of writing in human history, encompassing the whole canon of Chinese writing from its origins to the eighteenth century. Digitized, today it fills 167 CD-ROMs.
The modern Chinese poet Yang Lian recognizes the propaganda element in the Qianlong emperor’s lyrical inscription on the bi, and takes a rather dim view of his poetry:
When I look at this bi I have some very complex feelings. On one side I am very much appreciative: I love this feeling of a link with the ancient Chinese cultural tradition, because it was a very unique phenomenon which started a long time ago and never broke, continually developed until today through many difficult times … In that case the jade always represented the great past. But on the darker side, the beautiful things were often used by rulers and powers who had bad taste, so they don’t mind destroying ancient things with bad writing. So they can carve the emperor’s poem on the beautiful piece and also do a little propaganda, which for me is very familiar!
Like his contemporary Frederick the Great, the Qianlong emperor was no master of poetry – he seems to have mixed Classical Chinese with vernacular forms to poor effect. But that didn’t hold him back – he published more than 40,000 compositions in his lifetime, part of his elaborate campaign to secure his place in history.
He was largely successful. Although the Qianlong emperor’s reputation dipped dramatically in the Communist period, it is once again strong in China. And a very satisfying discovery has just been made. As we saw a moment ago, the emperor wrote: ‘As one cannot show a stand without a bowl / we have selected a ceramic from the Ding kiln for it.’ Very recently a scholar in the Palace Museum collections in Beijing found a bowl that carries exactly the same inscription as the one on this disc. It is undoubtedly the very bowl chosen by the emperor to sit in the bi.
As he handled and thought about the bi, the Qianlong emperor was doing something central to any history based on objects. Exploring a distant world through things is not only about knowledge but about imagination, and necessarily involves an element of poetic reconstruction; with the bi, for example, the emperor knows it is an ancient and a cherished object, and he wants it to look its best. He believes it is a stand, and he finds a bowl that seems to be a perfect match – a choice made with his sense of supreme self-assurance that he is doing the right thing. It is unlikely his assumption about the bi being a stand was correct, but I find myself admiring and applauding his method.