Politics of patronage
John Spurling
China: The Three Emperors 1662–1795
Royal Academy, London, until 17 April 2006
‘The state is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain,’ wrote the Chinese poet Du Fu in the 8th century AD during a rebellion that temporarily overthrew the Tang Emperor. Four centuries later, ‘Give us back our mountains and rivers!’ was the slogan of Chinese nationalists after the conquest of northern China by the Jürchens from Manchuria; and the same slogan reappeared during the rebellions that swept away the next wave of conquerors — Kublai Khan’s Mongols — in the 14th century. The Chinese are nothing if not consistent. Theirs is the only ancient civilisation that survived into the modern world and part of the reason is no doubt that whoever ruled, whether foreign or native, relied on a highly educated native bureaucracy with a long tradition. The official examinations that selected its civil servants were first held in 165 BC.
In the tenth and penultimate room of this huge and overwhelming exhibition you will find the mountains-and-rivers men, those scholar-artists who, when China was conquered once more (in 1644) by foreigners from the north — the Jürchens again, now called the Manchus — withdrew so far as they could into the landscape. Their ancestors had regularly done the same, whether because they had failed the civilservice exams or had lost their jobs or didn’t care to serve the current rulers. But in this case many of their peaceful paintings of mountains and rivers — loaded with that perennial political message as well as references to a scholar-artist tradition stretching back at least a thousand years — ended up anyway in the foreign Emperors’ collections. Nearly all the 400 items in the exhibition come from the Palace Museum in Beijing and almost all belonged to the three great Manchu Emperors of the early Qing Dynasty: the Kangxi Emperor (reigned 1662–1772), the Yongzheng (reigned 1723–35) and the Qianlong (reigned 1736–95).
All three were devoted admirers of Chinese arts and crafts. That was part of their success as rulers of the largest empire in Chinese history. In addition to being ruthless autocrats with a highly efficient military organisation, they studied and adopted the languages, culture and religions of all their main subject peoples, Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans and above all Chinese. They were even nice to the Jesuit missionaries who had arrived in the dying phase of the previous dynasty, valuing especially their mathematics, astronomy, cartography and curious European mode of painting, with single-point perspective and shadows. Those fathers with artistic talent (notably Giuseppe Castiglione, Jean-Denis Attiret and Ignaz Sichelbarth), instead of running up altarpieces for Christian churches, were kept busy by the emperors as architects, portraitists and, together with Chinese court-painters, in recording the emperors’ leisure activities, celebrations and processions. Several long handscrolls showing in minute detail such scenes as the Kangxi Emperor’s southern inspection tour (ships along the Yangzi River) and the Qianlong Emperor’s 60th birthday celebrations (lines of troops, horseback bodyguards, kneeling courtiers, teeming citizens) are displayed in the Royal Academy’s central gallery; preceded by an antechamber featuring the three emperors’ portraits in their yellow silk dragon robes and red hats, together with cases containing two of the actual robes and one of the hats, all looking as if they were made yesterday. Perhaps they were — the Chinese being such very clever people — though the equally sumptuous catalogue, heavy with colour plates and intricate scholarship, dates them to the Kangxi and Qianlong periods.
Further into the exhibition, after a magnificent horseback portrait by Father Castiglione of the Qianlong Emperor wearing yellow padded armour, and a case nearby containing arrows, quiver, saddle and swords which presumably belonged to him, you come to the evidence of his grandfather’s skill as a scholar-artist. Here are the Kangxi Emperor’s writing tools, brushes, inkstones, ink-sticks, porcelain or bamboo brush-pots and wrist-rests, plus some of the poems and calligraphy he wrote with them. His grandson, the Qianlong Emperor, was a scholar and collector on a still grander scale, a painter and calligrapher, too, composing innumerable poems and inscriptions, stamping his large red seals and writing his commentaries on almost every blank space he could find in a picture. His father, the Yongzheng Emperor, was also a scholar and artistic patron, but of a more idiosyncratic kind. The room devoted to his collection contains 12 tall brilliantly coloured paintings of ‘Beauties at Leisure’, slim young women in exquisite clothes and elegant interiors, which once formed a screen round the couch in his private study. On another wall are 13 album-leaf portraits on silk of the Emperor himself in different costumes, settings and roles, including a Tibetan monk, a Mongolian noble, a Chinese calligrapher and even a European. In that role he wears a wig, riding-coat, gold brocaded waistcoat, breeches and stockings and runs up a rocky defile to attack a crouching tiger with a trident.
The Kangxi Emperor’s collection contains a selection of porcelain water-pots, brush-washers and vases in the rare ‘peach-bloom’ copper-red glaze, which was so difficult to bring off successfully that it had been done only once before, in the 15th century, and was discontinued in his son’s reign. The Yongzheng Emperor’s room, however, boasts several pieces of equally ravishing porcelain: a perfectly proportioned teapot with a celadon (greygreen) glaze, a set of 12 chrysanthemumshaped porcelain plates, each of a different colour, and a great dish, half a metre across, painted with bats and peach branches to signify long life and happiness.
To inch one’s way through this continually astounding display is to become part of another world, almost another planet. Some of the objects may be alien and perhaps grotesque to our taste, but all are made with consummate skill and most are charged with symbolic significance — reli gious, ritual or simply auspicious. Even in this treasure-house of three sophisticated and all-powerful emperors you are constantly aware of a sense of anxiety, of the fragility of human life and fortune. Indeed, after the death of the Qianlong Emperor, in 1799, it was downhill all the way for the Qing Dynasty, as first the Europeans moved in and then the republicans.
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