Staging Europe: Theatricality and Painting at the Chinese Imperial Court

During the golden age of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), China flourished in peaceful prosperity under the successive Manchu emperors Kangxi (ruled 1661–1722), Yongzheng (ruled 1723–1735), and Qianlong (ruled 1736–1795). Artistically, of these emperors ruling China’s long eighteenth century of the High Qing era, Qianlong proved the most influential and innovative. In addition to promoting the aesthetic of luxurious color and detail that instantly distinguishes High Qing court painting from all other Chinese painting, he also encouraged the incorporation of European pictorial techniques alongside the traditional Chinese modes. During Qianlong’s reign, foreign trade bustled in the port of Guangzhou (Canton), nations from around the world regularly offered diplomatic gifts, and a large coterie of European Jesuits served the court as scientific advisors, translators, and most famously, as artists. The Italian Jesuit lay brother and trained professional painter Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766, who adopted the Chinese name Lang Shining), the best known of all the European painters at the Qing court and who served the three High Qing emperors successively over five decades in China, was essential to the evolution of the High Qing court style and its incorporation of European illusionistic painting techniques and linear perspective.¹

The most unexpected result of Castiglione’s service at court may well be the “European Palaces” (Xiyanglou, Fig. 1), located at the northern

Figure 1.

The European Palaces with English and Chinese names, lead on paper by A. Durand, 1985. After Régine Thiriez, Barbarian Lens: Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor’s European Palaces (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998), fig. 15, p. 36.

Figure 2.

Ilantai, Plate 20, “Perspective Paintings East of the Lake” (Hudong xianfa hua), Pictures of the Waterworks in the European Palaces (1781–1787). Engraving, approx. 90 × 50 cm. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London 8

margin of the Eternal Spring Garden (Changchunyuan), one of the imperial gardens comprising the Perfect Brightness Garden (Yuanmingyuan) complex in northwest Beijing. This “Europeanoiserie” fantasy garden of structures and fountains reserved exclusively for the emperor and his guests brought a fanciful vision of the West to eighteenth-century China. A small European village (Fig. 2) marked the culmination of a visit to this garden—or so it seemed, until the viewer recognized that this exotic view was only an illusion created by perspectival paintings on massive masonry walls. Although the walls have long disappeared and the paintings presumably lost with them, the Pictures of the Waterworks in the European Palaces (Xiyanglou shuifa tu, 1781–1787), a series of twenty perspectival copperplate engravings produced by Castiglione’s Manchu student Ilantai (act. c. early 1750s-late 1780s), recreates a walk through the European Palaces garden in its heyday. This print series not only provides visual evidence for the unusual view of the “European village,” but also the psychological experience of recognizing and enjoying the deception: the caption on the final print reads “perspective paintings east of the lake” (hudong xianfahua), unmasking the view as a painted illusion.

While the printed image offers visual evidence for the original paintings, the textual mediation of its caption demonstrates the viewer’s sequential experience of viewing the scene, his or her recognition of the view as painted, and ability to see the reality of the paintings and the illusion of the village simultaneously. Appreciating both the view and the paintings together required a sophisticated viewer capable of holding reality and illusion in balance, a key feature of seventeenth-century Chinese conceptions of theatricality and spectatorship. Although the use of both perspectival outdoor paintings and large-scale stage scenery were unprecedented in China, these paintings were arranged in a pattern derived directly from European stage technology to enhance their perspectival effects, thereby also incorporating European ideas of theatricality. In this essay, I explore the eighteenth-century Chinese imperial vision of painted “Europe” and its engraved representation within the context of cross-cultural theatricality, which renders Qianlong’s role on the “stage” of the European Palaces far more...