Glass Exchange between Europe and China, 1550–1800: Diplomatic, Mercantile, and Technological Interactions (review)

Emily Byrne Curtis is an independent scholar, whose Pure Brightness Shines Everywhere: The Glass of China was published by Ashgate in 2004. She is also the author of papers on Chinese glass in Arts Asiatiques, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, and other scholarly journals. In this, her most recent publication, Curtis focuses on glassmaking in China and its debt to innovations in Europe, especially Venice. The book includes notes, a bibliography, and a glossary of names rendered in Chinese characters and the Latin alphabet. The text is illustrated, but not as generously as readers might wish.

Rather than a continuous narrative, Glass Exchange between Europe and China is a collection of essays, some containing sections that are only loosely articulated. Chapter 1 sets the scene. Glassmaking in China, long subordinate to the manufacture of porcelain, jade, and bronze objects, became well established during the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), notably after the creation of a glass workshop at the imperial court in 1696. Europeans played a major role in this development, and the author sets out to reconstruct the “commercial, social, and political influence exerted by Venetian glass” on glassmaking in China.

The remaining nine chapters describe episodes in this interaction between Europe (principally but not exclusively Venice) and China. Five chapters focus on the export of glass and glassmakers from Europe to China, and on the transfer of technology, mainly in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Chapter 3, for example, is concerned with mirrors and spectacles. Pope Clement XI sent spectacles to the Kangxi Emperor in 1717 and Kangxi’s successor Yongzheng gave spectacles to some of his ministers. In chapter 4 we read how, a little earlier, in 1699, the French Compagnie de la Chine sent glass and glassmakers to establish a factory in Guangzhou. By 1703, buildings in the garden palace of Kangxi had glazed windows, presumably made of flat glass imported from Europe or made in Guangzhou.

Chapters 5 and 6 survey the diplomatic background of contacts between Europe and China. Chapter 5 is about Clement XI and Kangxi, conflict between Jesuit and Dominican missionaries, and the Catholic Church’s attitude toward Chinese converts performing ceremonies in honor of Confucius and their ancestors. Chapter 6 takes us to the court of Louis XIV and his desire to establish cultural and scientific exchanges between France and China.

The centerpiece of chapter 7 is a transcription and translation, with annotations, by Paolo Zecchin of a hitherto unpublished document in the Archivio di Propaganda Fide in Rome. Written in 1719, this document provides a detailed list of four crates of Venetian glass sent by Pope Clement XI to the Chinese emperor and members of his court. The arrival of Venetian glass in Beijing led to the production of Venetian-style vetro a retorti and vetro a reticello in the imperial workshop.

In chapter 2, the author notes that in the early sixteenth century, Venetian glassmakers were producing opaque white porcellana contrafacta in imitation of Chinese porcelain, and in chapter 8 she provides a short account of Johann Böttger’s discovery in 1708 of how to manufacture “hard paste” porcelain—the first true porcelain made in Europe. These are Curtis’s only instances of Europeans imitating the accomplishments of China.

The author returns to the theme of the transfer of European glass technology to China in chapter 9, and states the case for believing that the technique of decorating porcelain with overglaze enamels, which began in the early eighteenth century, was introduced from the imperial glass factory, where local or European enamels were used. The final chapter contains a note on the fate of an East Indiaman, the Albion, which was bound for China but sank off the English coast in 1765. Among its cargo were ingots of colored lead glass, which may have been used to produce enamels for porcelain or cloisonné metalwork.

I cannot vouch...