All across early modern Europe, peepboxes delighted the audiences who peered inside to see the dramatic effects that magnifying lenses could have on the pictures hidden inside these simple optical devices. 1 By the end of the eighteenth century, the peepbox had also become a common part of urban life in China (plate 1). 2 In this export painting from around 1790, a peepbox showman calls to passersby and gestures toward his set of staggered boxes fitted with lensed peepholes at various heights to accommodate a variety of viewers. Puppets or figurines atop one of the boxes attract bystanders and entertain impatient future clients, while the flag above them identifies what could be seen inside the box as ‘Western scenery’(Xiyang jingzhi). This rare textual identification of the peepbox in a painting is a variation on ‘Western scenes’(Xiyang jing), the most common of the several names by which the peepbox was known in Chinese. When written with a different final character, the single homophone Xiyang jing also meant ‘Westernlens’, the peepbox’s second most common name in Chinese and one that emphasized its biconvex magnifying lens. Whether ‘Western lens’ or ‘Western scenes’, these Chinese terms for the peepbox were distinguished not by the act of looking, but rather by what one encountered in the device. In Europe, the pictures seen inside the peepbox were generally known as vues d’optique. These horizontal hand-coloured prints are characterized bya strong central perspective with a single vanishing point and a variety of exaggerated depth cues such as foreshortening, size constancy, and chromostereopsis (the visual illusion of depth created by certain bright colour juxtapositions). 3 These optical views, mostly topographic renderings of places abroad and sometimes at home, have been construed as orderly representations suitable for polite society even when they depicted foreign scenes, such as the Forbidden City (plate 2), the Chinese imperial palace in Beijing. 4 Despite the widespread cultural effects of chinoiserie in Europe, less than one percent of extant European optical views depict China: all of these were produced in Paris and Augsburg around 1770–90, and often derive, as in plate 2, from Johann Nieuhof’s (1618–72) illustrated memoirs of the Dutch East India Company embassy to China in 1655–57. 5 The optical views produced in China for its own peepbox culture were generically referred to as ‘Western paintings’(Xiyang hua) despite typically being simple, hand-coloured woodblock prints that mostly depicted Chinese subjects. Chinese engagement with optical devices began at least as early as 300 BCE, but expanded dramatically with the early modern introduction of European devices such as spectacles, telescopes, and the peepbox. By the late seventeenth century, domestically produced optical devices, primarily fitted with locally ground rock