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63 Chapter 3 Artful Collecting The set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe. The fiction is that a repeated metonymic displacement of fragment for totality, object to label, series of objects to series of labels, can still produce a representation which is somehow adequate to a nonlinguistic universe. Such a fiction is the result of an uncritical belief in the notion that ordering and classifying, that is to say, the spatial juxtaposition of fragments, can produce a representational understanding of the world. —Eugenio Donato, “The Museum’s Furnace” Sometime in the 1750s, if his still youthful face is reliable evidence, Qianlong had Giuseppe Castiglione and his associates paint him in the role of a connoisseur of the arts (Plate 9). The portrait was intended as a clever triple entendre that played on both language and images. The emperor appears seated in a garden, surrounded by objects from his many collections, as an attendant unfurls a hanging scroll before him for his appreciation. Castiglione’s bland but pristine technique allows us to see that the scroll is none other than the Ming-dynasty master Ding Yunpeng’s version of Washing the Elephant (Xixiang tu), a Buddhist theme that was already ancient by the time Ding became entranced with it.The original composition plays on the pun of “xiang” as meaning both “elephant” and “form.” In Ding Yunpeng’s version, we see the bodhisattva Mañjußrî in his almost unornamented guise as meditation master (a role he takes in Chan monasteries where he serves as an exemplar to monks), observing a crew of workers and officials scrubbing down a white elephant. The first pun intended is linguistic: As the elephant is washed (or in some versions “swept”), so too is the notion of the permanence of form washed away. Even such a bulky creature as an elephant has no permanent existence ; its form is still contingent upon conditions. But there is another intertextual reference here as well, this one visual. Probably around the same time Castiglione set to work on this portrait of the connoisseur-emperor, Qianlong had himself interpolated into the same scene of Washing the Elephant in a painting by another Ding, his favorite painter of the moment, Ding Guanpeng (Figure 17). In this second portrait, the emperor assumes the role of Mañjußrî (a role he also played in different form around 1758 in his portrait as cakravartin and Mañjußrî’s worldly emanation). The implication of this pair of uninscribed portraits seems to be that the emperor is witness to the impermanence of the grandest and most exotic of forms, even as he uses the mechanism of form and the act of appreciative collecting and viewing as supports to make his point. A Brilliant Scheme The intersection of these self-representations with the reality of Qianlong’s many collections of things alters our understanding of his collecting practice. Qianlong’s two portraits are particularly relevant to the imperial collections of religious and secular painting, texts and textiles, which were collated and cataloged by his command between 1744 and 1745. The emperor laid out explicit instructions for the catalogs of both collections and went to great lengths to tie both projects to great imperial efforts of the past, especially in his choice of titles. For the collection of Buddhist and Daoist works he chose Bidian zhulin, “The Beaded Grove of the Secret Hall,” a title that is layered with references —particularly when read against the title he chose the next year for his collection of secular calligraphy, painting, and textiles: Shiqu baoji, “Precious Book Box of the Stone Drain.” For both collections Qianlong relied on ample precedent, deliberately playing with an arresting, historically resonant phrase. The Shiqu Ge—Stone Drain Pavilion—was the library of the Western Han emperors and the site of imperially sponsored scholarly debates on the classics, memorialized in poetry in the first century by Ban Gu (32–92) in his preface to the “Two Capitals Rhapsody,”1 recorded in the same author’s official history of the Western Han dynasty (Hanshu),2 and mentioned in such standard classical references as the fifth-century Shuijing zhu (Commentary on the Water Classic).3 Qianlong owned a renowned inkstone made of a fragment of this stone drain, which once belonged to the great Northern Song literatus Su Shi and, in the emperor’s words, still “had the mustiness of Old Po’s...

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