A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [227]
This stand is made of ancient jade / but the jade bowl that once went with it is long gone. As one cannot show a stand without a bowl / we have selected a ceramic from the Ding kiln for it.
By combining the bi with a much later object, the emperor has ensured that, in his eyes at least, the bi now fulfils its aesthetic destiny. This is a very typical Qianlong, eighteenth-century Chinese way of addressing the past. You admire the beauty, research the historical context and present your conclusions to the world as a poem, so creating a new work of art.
The bowl in the Palace Museum, Beijing, that the Qianlong emperor matched with the bi
In this case the bi itself became the new work of art. The emperor’s musings were incised in beautiful calligraphy on the wide ring of the disc, so fusing object and interpretation, as he saw it, in an aesthetically pleasing form. Chinese words, or characters, are spaced so they radiate out from the central hole like the spokes of a wheel, the very words I have been quoting. Most of us would see that as a defacing – a desecration – but that’s not how the Qianlong emperor saw it. He thought the writing augmented the beauty of the bi. But he also had a more worldly, political purpose in making his inscription. The historian of China Jonathan Spence explains:
There was very much a sense that China’s past had a kind of coherency to it, so this new Qing Dynasty wanted to be enrolled, as it were, in the records of the past as having inherited the glories of the past and being able to build on them, to make China even more glorious. Qianlong was, there’s no doubt about it, a great collector; and in the eighteenth century, when Qianlong was collecting, China was expanding. There is a bit of nationalism about his collecting, I think; he wanted to show that Beijing was the centre of this Asian cultural world … And the Chinese, according to Voltaire and other thinkers in the French Enlightenment, did indeed have things to tell Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, important things about life, morality, behaviours, learning, genteel culture, the delicate arts, the domestic arts …
And politics. The Qing Dynasty had one major internal political handicap. They were not Chinese – they came from modern Manchuria, on the north-eastern border. They remained a tiny ethnic minority, outnumbered by the native Han Chinese by about 250 to 1, and were famous for a number of un-Chinese things – among them, an appetite for large quantities of milk and cream. Was Chinese culture safe with them? In this context, the Qianlong emperor’s appropriation of ancient Chinese history is a deft act of political integration, but only one act among many. His greatest cultural achievement was the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, the largest anthology of writing in human history, encompassing the whole canon of Chinese writing from its origins to the eighteenth century. Digitized, today it fills 167 CD-ROMs.
The modern Chinese poet Yang Lian recognizes the propaganda element in the Qianlong emperor’s lyrical inscription on the bi, and takes a rather dim view of his poetry:
When I look at this bi I have some very complex feelings. On one side I am very much appreciative: I love this feeling of a link with the ancient Chinese cultural tradition, because it was a very unique phenomenon which started a long time ago and never broke, continually developed until today through many difficult times … In that case the jade always represented the great past. But on the darker side, the beautiful things were often used by rulers and powers who had bad taste, so they don’t mind destroying