Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China (review)

This is an important and innovative book that deals with a body of cultural practices at the court of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795) that have not always been well served by English-language scholarship. The court art of the Qing period has until quite recently attracted more in the way of embarrassed silence than engaged response from art historians, particularly since so many of the artifacts involved are part of the problematic category known as the "decorative arts"—silk tapestry, embroidery, cloisonné enamel, gilt metal, and lacquer—rather than the more highly regarded arts of painting and calligraphy. The enthusiasm of art historians for these things has been in almost directly inverse proportion to their prominence in the art market, for whom any kind of imperial provenance has always carried glamour and who have been less squeamish about obsessively high degrees of technical finish. Even the painting has been problematic, the product of anonymous or as-good-as-anonymous court professionals, men on the wrong side of the theoretical divide between inspired gentleman amateurs and painstaking artisans. Its subject matter has seemed too Buddhist for art history, and too late in date for scholars of Buddhism, for most of whom until the 1990s the interesting parts of Buddhist art came to an end somewhere around the Song dynasty. And then there is the problem of the "Chineseness" or otherwise of the material. Various hyphenations litter the literature: Sino-Tibetan, Sino Mongolian, Tibeto-Mongol. They all display art history's historic dependence on an ultimately Hegelian idea of a national spirit, in which the pure is good and authentic and the mixed is inauthentic and debased.

It has taken the impact of the broad intellectual development of postcolonial studies to shift some of these positions and generate a willingness to look again at the hybrid and the previously hyphenated, to stop asking questions about whether a thing or an image is "really" "more Chinese" or "more Manchu," and to engage fully with the complexities of a context in which religious and ethnic identities are in a process of constant negotiation and fashioning rather than being neat slots into which individual works of art can be fixed. The work of Pamela Crossley, Evelyn Rawski, and Mark Elliott, among others, has made historians properly wary of certain lazily deployed narratives such as that of "sinicization" and more sensitive to the actual nuances of Qianlong-period practice. Now Patricia Berger has built on this work to provide a new level of detail on and insight into the ways in which material culture and visual imagery worked as a crucial part of the politics of culture at this time.

The central message of Empire of Emptiness could be read as admonishing us for a failure up to now to take seriously enough the role of religious—and specifically Buddhist—practices in the Qianlong emperor's art of rulership. There has long been an awareness of the scale of these practices and of the identification of emperor-as-bodhisattva in certain striking images of the eighteenth century. But, Berger argues, these have been seen predominantly as the fruits of strategic political decisions aimed at keeping the territories of Inner Asia, particularly those inhabited by Mongols and Tibetans, "onside" with the Qing dynasty's project of Manchu hegemony. At worst they have been reduced to cynical manipulations of religious belief, aimed at impressing frontier peoples with the dynasty's commitment to the dharma. It is a major achievement of this book that the attentive reader is unlikely ever again to feel comfortable with such an interpretation. By herself taking Buddhism seriously, Berger allows us in turn to see the Qianlong emperor taking it very seriously indeed. The culture of politics and the politics of culture are thus seen as inseparable, and both are shown to be informed by understandings of complex issues such as nonduality, which...