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By Root 2909 0

is a document of the Aztec Empire at the height of its artistic, religious and political power; it is also evidence of the systematic oppression of its subject peoples that ultimately destroyed it. Soon Moctezuma was dead and Tenochtitlán was reduced by the Spaniards to smoking rubble. With no emperor and no capital, the Aztec empire was effectively at an end. These catastrophes were swiftly followed by the impact of devastating European diseases, especially smallpox. It has been suggested that as much as 90 per cent of the local population died within a couple of decades of the arrival of the Spaniards. Mexico would become just one important part of Spain’s vast empire in the Americas that stretched from California to Chile and Argentina – an empire, as we will see, that would have an impact beyond just Spain and the Americas.

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Kakiemon Elephants

Porcelain figurines, from Japan

AD 1650–1700

For a large part of the world, white elephants have always been signs of power and portent. They were prized by monarchs of south-east Asia; the Buddha’s mother dreamt of one before giving birth to him. They were also a mixed blessing – as a gift from a king, they could not honourably be put to work and were horribly expensive to keep. A ‘white elephant’ has become our term for a useless extravagance. We have two almost white elephants in the British Museum. They’re perfectly useless and they’re expensive (they would have cost thousands of pounds in today’s terms) but they’re exceedingly jolly to look at, and they tell an unexpected story of the triangular power struggles between China, Japan and Korea in the seventeenth century – and of the birth of the modern multinational company.

The elephants in the British Museum were shipped to Europe from Japan sometime between 1660 and 1700. They are about the size of Yorkshire terriers, and you know they are elephants essentially because they have trunks and tusks. Otherwise they are pretty startling. The body is of white porcelain, a beautiful milky white, and over that, painted in enamel, is broad decoration – patches of red on the legs, blue patterning over the backs, which is clearly meant to represent a harness, and a primrose-yellow edged in red on the insides of the ears – which are clearly the ears of an Asian elephant. The eyes, equally clearly, are Japanese eyes. There can be little doubt that the artist who made these elephants is imagining a creature that he has never seen, and there is no doubt at all that this artist is Japanese.

Our high-spirited porcelain elephants are a direct consequence of Japan’s complex relations with her neighbours China and Korea, but they also show the impact of the close trading links between Asia and western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ever since this direct contact began, Europe has periodically been seized by a passion for the arts and crafts of Japan. It all started in the seventeenth century with a craze for Kakiemon-style porcelain, a specific technique said to have been devised by an entrepreneur potter named Kakiemon that became a traditional Japanese craft technique, passing through generations of potters. Our elephants are Kakiemon-style elephants, and they and other Kakiemon creatures rampaged decoratively over furniture and mantelpieces in the great houses of seventeenth-century Europe. One of the finest and earliest collections of these Japanese porcelain animals is at Burghley House in Lincolnshire, which also has Kakiemon elephants.

Miranda Rock, a direct descendant of the Lord Exeter who collected the porcelain, describes how he came by the objects:

This porcelain is really the success of our great collector John, the fifth Earl of Exeter, and his wife, Anne Cavendish, who were very enthusiastic Grand Tourists. We know the Japanese porcelain was here in 1688 because it is mentioned in the inventory, but we have to assume that there was a very astute dealer who John had close contact with, because there is an enormous amount of it here at Burghley and it was much in vogue at the time. And