Of Clouds and Cocoons: A Conversation with Xiaojing Yan (original) (raw)

How did the Qianlong Emperor in the Qing dynasty come to understand a world becoming increasingly global in his day? And what role did visual imagery play in his understanding of such? This paper starts with a small but complete case study focusing on the description of an exotic bird known as an “emo” by the Qing court and a series of images made of it. In addition to determining that this bird is actually a cassowary that became fashionable among various royal courts and natural historians in Europe during the Age of Exploration, it has also been discovered that the “Imperial Illustration and Record of the Cassowary” of the Qianlong reign actually comes from the collection of anatomical reports by the French royal academician Claude Perrault published in his Memoires pour servir a l'histoire naturelle des animaux from 1671 to 1676. This paper specifically focuses the discussion on the only two surviving images of the cassowary at this time: “Cassowary” in the album Manual of Birds and Yang Dazhang’s hanging scroll Cassowary. Through comparative analysis, this paper is an attempt to portray how the Qianlong Emperor came in contact, selected, and converted knowledge and images from Europe during the Age of Exploration. It also shows how this foreign material helped Qianlong in a very innovative way in terms of pictorial imagery: On the one hand, it successfully demonstrates his construct of world knowledge, and on the other hand rewrites the traditional imperial political narrative. In conclusion, through research in a case study, this paper attempts to demonstrate how the Qianlong court came to a certain understanding of knowledge and imagery from Europe in the Age of Exploration. With every action not only a part of world history, and in accordance with certain political needs, no effort was spared in rewriting and integrating European knowledge and imagery in response to traditional Chinese formulations. And visual imagery was a very important way in which Qianlong grasped an understanding of the world, constructed knowledge, and imaged his empire. Keywords: Qianlong, Qing empire , knowledge, natural history, Sino-Western cultural interactions, cassowary, “emo” bird, Qing court painting