Barbarian Lens: Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor's European Palaces (review)

Regine Thiriez' Barbarian Lens: Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor's European Palaces exemplifies the highest level of scholarly curiosity. Her research, conducted from 1987 to 1994, focused on the photographic record of the European Palaces of the Yuanmingyuan, designed in a European style of architecture during the mid-eighteenth century by Jesuit missionaries who were employed by the emperor of China. During the seven years of her research, Thiriez' pursuit of images of the European Palaces took her to libraries and archives in London, Edinburgh, and Belfast in the United Kingdom, and to the German cities of Hildesheim, Uslar, and Hamburg. She also hunted through basements and forgotten shelves in Toronto, Boston, Washington, DC, and Rochester, New York.

The result of this effort is more than a retelling of the story of the Summer Palace. Thiriez includes a historical background, including the circumstances that brought the Western photographers to China, and her detailed account includes descriptions of the walled city of Beijing and the Forbidden City within it and the city of Shanghai, the latter having become an international center by the 1870s. By 1874, Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and the United States were represented in Beijing. The author comments on the differences in lifestyle between Beijing and Shanghai, at one point using the membership of the Asiatic Society to illustrate, parenthetically, that the atmosphere in Shanghai may have been one of internationalism "but not of universalism since, of course, no Chinese was invited to join" (p. 20). Facts of this kind, of course, are well known to all sinophiles, but Thiriez' primary objective was to search for photographs of the European Palaces and not to rewrite the history of the Western entry into China.

The only Westerners who saw the Yuanmingyuan in its original grandeur were the Jesuit priests in China during the eighteenth century who served as astronomers, mathematicians, geographers, painters, or clockmakers. Thiriez' thoroughness in her research is displayed in the way she picks up even the smallest details, such as the "minor incident"—a reference to when the Qianlong emperor noticed a fountain in a European picture in 1747. It was this that inspired the construction of the European Palaces. Thiriez speculates on what one of these palaces may have looked like:

One could not miss its grandeur, its feeling of otherworldliness. Under the Beijing sun, the palace came alive. White marble glittered, glazed tiles sparkled, gray stone and brick in relief against the blue sky. Evergreens completed the frame.

(p. 38)

The retelling of the destruction of the legendary Summer Palace by British and French troops in the dawn of October 6, 1860, is also detailed and supported by footnote references. However, the historical accounts and Thiriez' reconstruction of events, based on her research, are not the featured subject of her book. Rather, they serve to frame the quiet drama of the aftermath of the looting and torching of this legendary Summer Palace during the last of the opium wars. The mute witnesses to this aftermath are the extant photographs taken by nine Western men from seven countries who had entered China for a variety of reasons and whose collective stay spanned some sixty-five years.

Thiriez begins with a general review of the research on early photography in China. At the start of her own project, only five studies had been published on this subject, and only two nineteenth-century photographers had been studied extensively. These were Felice (Felix) Beato and John Thompson, on whom Thiriez provides background information. It is known that Beato was the semiofficial photographer of the British army during the China Campaign, and Thiriez gives an in-depth description of his portfolio. Her analysis of Beato's body of work exemplifies her ability to critique his photographs in the context of their reproduction and distribution. There are 102...