The Guardian Weekly

Emperors and Qings

From gowns to handprints, a revelatory new London show traces the innovation and decay of 19th-century China – alongside the shameful role of the British

By Jonathan Jones

British and French troops pillaged and destroyed the Summer Palace of China’s Qing emperors in 1860, carrying off pieces of art and chunks of architecture – and a tiny, hairy dog who belonged to the emperor. Looty, as the dog was renamed with impeccable bad taste, was given to Queen Victoria and was the first “Pekinese” in Britain.

A portrait of Looty is one of the many arresting images and facts in what must be the strangest blockbuster the British Museum has ever staged. It’s a heady experience to enter the heavily ritualised ambience of the emperor’s inner circle. The clothes alone are incredible works of art: gowns and dresses intricately decorated with butterflies, filigree patterns, dragons. China’s empire still defined itself as “all under heaven”. But this exhibition shows in pitiless detail how far the court’s view of itself had strayed from reality.

Britain plays a stunningly cynical part in the story of imperial China’s final decline and dissolution. The East India Company was producing opium in India specifically for export to China. China’s senior administrator Lin Zexu, portrayed here philosophically drinking wine in the countryside, but fingering a sword, wrote to Queen Victoria in 1838 complaining about the British drug trade’s devastating impact. Britain responded by sending the fleet.

The first and second opium wars – it was in the second that the Summer Palace was looted – were the first direct, military face-offs between China’s time-hallowed civilisation and the industrial, upstart west. It was a foregone conclusion. Portraits, armour and weapons of “bannermen”, the elite of the Qing imperial army, resemble glorious props from a martial arts epic set in the 11th century. But this was the 19th century and the British had modern guns.

Gunpowder was of course invented in China centuries before, as was movable type. How had world history turned so comprehensively upside down that China could now be humiliated and ransacked by Queen Victoria’s

drug dealers? One reason is glimpsed in a glass case containing a suit made of rice-fibre and palm with a bamboo hat, the garments of the rural and urban poor. It conjures the ghosts of nameless millions who eked a desperate existence. Meanwhile, technologies of the 19th-century global economy were starting to reach those millions. The new western invention, photography, was used to preserve the faces of ancestors.

But it was an older import, Christianity, that unleashed the most devastating cataclysm of 19th-century China. It inspired Hong Xiuquan, a village school teacher who failed his civil service exams, to declare he was the brother of Jesus Christ and make himself Heavenly King: in 1851 he led his Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to war against the Qing. Twenty million people died in the Taiping rebellion, making it the bloodiest civil war in world history.

This exhibition is atmospherically designed as a shadowy labyrinth, in which you discover one clue after another to an often shocking history. The curators try to end on an optimistic note. We meet the poet and revolutionary activist Qiu Jin, who was executed in 1907 and became a martyr for the new century.

After the Qing dynasty fell in 1912, China lived happily ever after – you might walk out of this exhibition thinking if you have never seen a newspaper or history documentary. In reality there were horrors as great as the Taiping to come: Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, Mao’s Long March, the Cultural Revolution and so on up to today’s powerful capitalist economy ruled by an authoritarian Communist party that’s making feints at democratic Taiwan. Where will it end? This dumbfounding exhibition shows modern history to be as thrilling and mysterious as the ancient past: but a lot more worrying.

China’s Hidden Century is at the British Museum, London, until 8 October

Culture Exhibition

en-gb

2023-06-02T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-02T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://theguardianweekly.pressreader.com/article/282445648438698

Guardian/Observer