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and seeking to understand new lands. This object is from China at a time when it was having its own Enlightenment, under the rule of the Qing Dynasty that had displaced the Ming in 1644 and which would rule China right up to the early twentieth century. The Qing ruler of the time, the Qianlong emperor, roughly contemporary with George III, devoted considerable attention to exploring the world beyond China. In 1756, for example, he decided to map the territories he had annexed in Asia, so he sent out a multicultural taskforce, two Jesuit priests trained in map-making, a Chinese astronomer and two Tibetan lamas, which produced such useful geographic data that the knowledge spread across the world, along with the emperor’s reputation.

The object here, a jade ring called a bi (pronounced ‘bee’), is another product of the emperor’s intellectual curiosity, this time about the Chinese past. This bi – a fine, plain disc with a hole in the centre, of a type often found in ancient Chinese tombs – was already more than 3,000 years old when the emperor decided to study it. The emperor took the ancient, unadorned bi and had his own words inscribed all over it. In doing so, he transformed the ancient bi into an object of the eighteenth-century Chinese Enlightenment.

For Enlightenment Europe, China was a model state, wisely governed by learned emperors. The author and philosopher Voltaire wrote in 1764, ‘One need not be obsessed with the merits of the Chinese to recognize … that their empire is the best that the world has ever seen.’ Rulers everywhere wanted a piece of China at their court. In Berlin, Frederick the Great designed and built a Chinese pavilion in his palace at Sanssouci. In England, George III erected a ten-storey Chinese pagoda in Kew Gardens.

The Qianlong emperor in his study

In the fifty-nine years of the Qianlong emperor’s reign, from 1736 to 1795, China’s population doubled, its economy boomed and the empire grew to its greatest size for five centuries, more or less to its modern extent – covering more than four and a half million square miles. The Qianlong emperor was a tough leader, happy to proclaim the superiority of his own territorial conquests over those of his predecessors and to assert for his Qing Dynasty the backing of the heavenly powers – in other words, to claim for himself the Mandate of Heaven:

The military strength of the majestic Great Qing is at its height… How can the Han, Tang, Song or Ming dynasties, which exhausted the wealth of China without getting an additional inch of ground for it, compare to us? … No fortification has failed to submit, no people have failed to surrender … In this, truly we look up gratefully to the blessings of the blue sky above to proclaim our great achievement.

This emperor was also a shrewd intellectual, an adroit propagandist and a man of culture – a renowned calligrapher and poet, a passionate collector of paintings, ceramics and antiquities. The prodigious Chinese collections in the Palace Museums today hold many of his precious objects.

It is not hard to understand why this bi thoroughly engaged the emperor’s attention, for it is a strange and intriguing thing, a pale beige thin disc of jade, about the size of a small dinner plate but with a hole in the middle and a raised edge round it. Nowadays we know from similar objects found in tombs that this bi was made probably around 1200 BC. We don’t know what it was for, but we can see clearly enough that it is very beautifully crafted.

When the Qianlong emperor examined this bi, he also thought it was very beautiful and was moved to write a poem recording his thoughts on studying it. In his collected poems his bi poem is entitled: ‘Verses Composed on Matching a Ding-ware Ceramic with an Ancient Jade Bowl Stand’:

It is said there were no bowls in antiquity / but if so, then where did this stand come from? It is said that this stand dates to later times / but the jade is antique. It is also said that a bowl called wan is the same as a basin called yu, but only differing from it in size.

While