Chapter Seven
Patterns of Design in Qing-China and Britain during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century
Dagmar Schäfer
In the year 1842, the Mancunian Thomas Bellot (1806–1857), assigned to a British army post in Qing China between the two Opium Wars (First War 1839-1842, Second War 1856-1860), sampled the street markets and fairs of the Yangtze delta, thereby acquiring a couple of contemporary Chinese books. A doctor and humanist, Bellot showed a learned interest in treatises on herbs and illness, language and classic literature. Curiously though, a small mass-market booklet on embroidery also made its way into the collection that Bellot brought home. Why Bellot was attracted by what he called a ‘Ladies book of patterns for working embroidery, for pillows, shoes etc.’, is a question that deserves a moment’s thought. [Fig.1 Detail from an illustrated embroidery pattern book, Qing dynasty, Thomas Bellot Collection, Manchester Central Library] What interests me in this chapter is the existence of the embroidery pattern book in itself, and what this says about knowledge exchange in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century global trade. Pattern books, delineating the various steps of production and sampling designs, witness an incipient knowledge codification process. Bellot’s Qing pattern book embodies a special moment in which a technical format easily traversed cultural and knowledge spheres. My story in this essay concerns the factors that made this exchange possible. Central then is the pattern book as a symptom of two quite diverse cultural approaches to production management and design.
Design and Empires
There is something fascinating about an ephemeral object substantiating the everyday constituents of British-Chinese knowledge exchange. Generally, stories about global flows of knowledge and trade during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century feature the collecting British, Italian, German or French gentleman or humanist entrepreneur who translated the raw data of other regions into new codified forms such as botanical catalogues or technical guides.[i] The format of the pattern book, which has a long tradition in many cultures, was reinvented on the shop-floor to document new materials and designs. In Britain, a pattern book had multiple purposes that circled around the negotiation of information between merchants, craftsmen and customers and the organisation of labour and materials, even before trade was globalising. Fine ladies and common housewives consulted pattern books to keep up with the fashions of their times. Pattern books were items of a commercialising society ofwhich Bellot was part.[ii]
During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries both Qing China and the British empire prospered, though in divergent ways.[iii] The Qing had enjoyed a century of stability and prosperity, induced by peace with their neighbours, an intensification of trade within their expanding territory and silver-inflows from export trade.[iv] The state-owned manufacturing units in various fields including silk and porcelain and officials monitored and, to some extent, taxed prospering private trades. Britain by that time had moved from mercantilist politics to free trade or at least Smithian laissez-faire economics. Seafarers expanded the empire and traders opened up the markets of the world.[v]
Yet despite many differences, when it comes to pattern book designs, Eighteenth Century Britain and the Qing Empire seem to have shared some striking trends. In Qing period China embroidery pattern books, for instance, were also a pastime for elite female hands and part of a thriving economy of sorts.[vi] In terms of manufacture, consumption and use, both the British and the Manchu Qing encountered similar questions. In both empires, officials ruled over large territories and, with a relatively small number of people, over foreign lands. In Qing China, Chinese officials upheld structures quite independently on the local level, while higher ranked Chinese and Manchu officials held roaming positions throughout the land. British administrators were equally independent on their outposts, while inspectors regularly kept them connected to their homes. In both Britain and China by the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century production and consumption were distanced. Desires and needs were communicated across distances and social classes. No surprise then that pattern books, which are known to have existed in both cultures for a long time, are characterised by similar features: they come with little text, if any, relying on more or less schematic illustrations of fashionable designs in a modular and emblematic manner, taking samples from actual production and use. It was for clarification only that Thomas Bellot spelled out the purpose of this small mass-printed booklet in English on its first page.
Indeed, the printing industries of both countries were similarly engaged in designs and art. Manufacturers in Britain compiled pattern books from samples and with registers in vast numbers throughout the Seventeenth Century. There was a varied literature on high arts as well as sampled craft designs ranging from pastry decoration to garments and furniture. Middle and upper-class ladies indulged in more or less elaborately printed and coloured pattern books as guides to fashion. British architects and furniture makers employed pattern books as well, sometimes to discuss real and imagined Chinese styles. While William Temple’s (1628-99) comparison of Greek and Chinese gardens still only stimulated elite curiosity, William Halfpenny’s New Designs for Chinese Temples (1750) and William Chambers Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines and Utensils (1757) were read and applied across industries and social groups.[vii] Printed books were, however, only one aspect of this era’s approach to designs in material culture. The agent of August III, the Strong, in Dresden for instance also purchased large mixed lots of single-sheet or serial woodblock illustrations from the Dutch East India Company in Amsterdam. These coloured woodblock prints verifiably served as templates in the production of porcelain at the Royal Manufactory of Meissen and for furniture production for the court and elite households.[viii]
In Qing period China printers also throve on reproductions of the high arts. Painting manuals (huapu畫譜) that emerged between 1570 and 1620, swamped the markets of the Qing to such an extent that even foreigners such as Thomas Bellot could access them, as we will see later on. But the printed book was only the upper end of the illustrative arts: woodblock prints and reproduced designs were produced for calendars or greeting cards or for decorative displays of doors or walls. As James Cahill notes, during this period the repertoire of painters broadened far beyond the high arts. Cahill identifies a ‘new mimetic mode’ in vernacular paintings made in boudoirs around the prospering cities of Jiangnan, interpreting it as a sign of secularization in the arts.[ix] This trend may well be connected to the increased commercialization of the arts and crafts in places such as Suzhou and Yangzhou from the late Ming period (1580 to 1645). Craftsmen at that time clearly worked with templates and probably also borrowed from painting manuals and book illustrations when reproducing the designs of the high arts and the imperial taste that we see emerging in weaving, embroidery, interior design or the porcelain trade.
The literature that codified the practical arts in Britain and Qing-China proliferated for very different reasons due to the substantially different approaches to manufacture and design,and hence the effects of this literature differed, too. As strangers to the land that they ruled, the Manchus employed material production to shape the empire ideologically. They embarked on a substantially Chinese tradition: since early times, political and scholarly debates intimately related morals to material culture, hence design and fashion had always been a gentleman’s and state affair. Patterns were circulated within court and state contexts in a systematic way in the awareness that artefacts transported essential values and ideals throughout social groups and regions: an artefact was proof of a scholar-gentleman’s social ability and his capacity to balance desires and needs. The ritual object represented the pinnacle of such ideals. Its design was hence as much a question of aesthetics as its purpose, to imitate the patterns of heaven (tianwen天文), reflected the gentleman’s superior understanding of the surrounding world.[x] This approach substantially shaped the context in which knowledge and know-how about artefacts was handled and codified. Namely, design became a political affair, handled by the Ministry of Rites (libu禮部) whose task it was to keep morals high and the order of the heavens alive.
In an attempt to resolve the tension between imperial taste and state concern—an issue that is evident throughout all Chinese courts—the Qing period emperors, however, took a crucial step and transferred actual design responsibilities from the public ministries to the Imperial Court. Methods of record keeping, the organization of labour, and the general culture of communicating craft knowledge and aesthetic concerns changed. Produced on flimsy paper Bellot’s embroidery book exemplifies a trend towards standardized and modularized schemes of production and their use in textile production that went public. The Yongzheng 雍正emperor (1678-1735, reign 1722-35) at the same time actively discouraged the production of signed works. Literati-officials such as Tang Yin 唐英(1682-1756), for instance, employed their skills in painting and sketching for the administration of the imperial porcelain kilns.[xi] In the combination of these events lies the reason for a growing industry of reproduced designs within the imperial court and across the commercializing fields of the arts and crafts. Such developments did not occur evenly though. The popularization of embroidery and its codification in pattern books also marks a continued shift from weaving to embroidery that was caused by imperial taste as much as by the Qing rulers’ inability to master the weaving trades.
In Britain, pattern books are also part of a story of the codification of technical information, albeit in different terms: a pattern book facilitated individual labour at home, and it also itemized products in a way that enabled segmented production on a larger scale. Such books became part of new forms and ideas of ownership, such as patenting and copyright legalization: in August 1842 the copyright for industrial designs was expanded from three to nine months. The stacks of pattern books submitted to legal courts increased throughout the subsequent decade.[xii] As a bachelor of a north western English middle class clan of doctors, Bellot fostered close ties with Manchester’s growing nouveau riche of the cotton manufacturing industry and even though he spent much of these years abroad, it is clear that he was aware of British politics as well as British attempts at homemade exotica.[xiii]
At the same time, Bellot’s collection also features a fine selection of Chinese published works on painting. It exemplifies an informed approach to Chinese illustrative methods driven by scholarly interests. His purchases provide a window into the impact of the Qing Empire’s imperial intermingling with manufacture and design.
A Mancunian Buys Chinese Books
A naval surgeon, the Mancunian Thomas Bellot entered the Qing world in the 1830s after journeys through Africa and the West Indies. Bellot experienced China at a moment of decay, weakened by opium imports and a trade deficit, but still with an intact dynastic government and an elite only partially aware of the Western Imperialist threat. Bellot only stayed in China for a couple of months. He used his time efficiently though, and collected and purchased artefacts and product samples, books, manuscripts and antiques, which were donated upon his death to the newly founded University and Museum of Manchester.[xiv] Among the artefacts are everyday items, souvenirs as well as some rather mediocre porcelains and bronzes from local markets.
Even though he was a doctor by training, Bellot showed little interest in medical literature.[xv] Apart from material medica and a work on ulcers, Bellot mainly purchased books on generic topics, such as a guide on China’s legal system, on the Qing examination system (written for examination candidates) and Chinese classical literature such as the Yijing. Furthermore Bellot sampled dictionaries such as Zhang Zilie’s 张自烈(1597-1673) Zhengzi tong正字通(Complete mastery of correct characters), and works on Buddhism, showing that he had a genuine interest in Chinese culture, religion, society and history.[xvi] What makes his collection so interesting is the fact that Bellot purchased a refined selection of books with and on illustrations. He brought home the then fresh-out-of-the-press 1804 edition of Ruan Yuan’s 阮元(1764-1849) collector’s guide Jigu zhai zhongding yiqi kuanzhi積古齋鐘鼎彝器款識(Inscriptions on bells, tripods and bronze vessels from the Jigu studio),[xvii] a 1752-edition of Wang Fu’s 王黼(1079-1126) Bogu tu博古圖(Illustrations of learned antiquity)[xviii] and three volumes of a 1779-edition of the Guyu tupu古玉圖譜(Illustrated catalogue of ancient jades) which, as the University librarian notes in the 1850s card catalogue, was in its original printed form of 100 books containing ‘more than 700 figures of the collection of the first emperor of the Southern Sung dynasty’.[xix] There were also listed two Qing-dynastic drawing guides: Hu Zhengyan’s 胡正言(1582-1672) Shizhu zhai shu hu(a) pu十竹齋書畫譜(Ten bamboo studio collection of calligraphy and painting) (1817) (classified by the librarian as a ‘painting and drawing book’) and Wang Gai’s 王槩(1677-1705) Jiezi yuan huazhuan芥子園畫傳(Manual of the mustard seed garden), (published 1782). Last but not least, the typed catalogue of the Bellot collection at the Manchester City Council Library listed an illustrated, though ‘imperfect’ embroidery pattern book entitled Ciyi刺藝(The art of the needle).
Bellot came from a middle class background, his family was not particularly well-off and his salary as a military doctor somewhat less than lavish. All of the books were also fairly inexpensive and of a mediocre or bad paper quality, accessible on South Chinese (and Yangtze?) markets, where Bellot was stationed for most of the time.[xx] Still it seems that Bellot fostered a comprehensive approach to information gathering and his choices show some reasonable combinations. Language acquisition, for instance, as the principal prerequisite to all information gathering stood high on the agenda. Bellot seems to have been interested in practical issues, social reward systems and the Qing elite education system, the rules of Chinese chess (weiqi 圍棋) and material objects which in his case included coins and antiques as well as embroidery. The painting and drawing guides must have looked to Bellot like a logical choice and a useful addition. Closely related to the emergence of pattern books in Britain was the rise of painting guides such as John Gywnn’s (1713-1786) An Essay on Design including proposal for Erecting a Public Academy (first published in 1768, London: J. Brindley, and others,) based on Gerard de Lairesse’s (1641-1711) The principles of Daring or an easy and familiar Method whereby Youth are directed in the Practice of that Useful Art (1733). A grasp of drawing in standardized and recognizable schemes was necessary to the popularizing of pattern books across a globalizing world of trade and design and thus Bellot may have seen the need to purchase such a guide for Chinese painting methods.
The embroidery guide may have attracted Bellot’s attention for many reasons. While Bellot himself remained a bachelor, he was aware that embroidery was a respected pastime for women in Victorian England and he may have purchased it as a present for a female member of his far-ranging family. A Mancunian, Bellot was well acquainted with the textile industries of Britain and thus the practical usefulness of a work on textile designs may have been obvious to him. The illustrations were clear, and must have looked easily accessible. For Bellot this pattern book represented a Chinese version of his own tradition.
Embroidery: Art and Patterns in Book
Embroidery pattern books were not a novelty in Qing dynasty China. The concept of kesi緙絲as a genre had enjoyed a status comparable to painting since at least the Song dynasty – it is then that they were given a section in the imperial art catalogues and collections, and the name of the artist that produced them is recorded. Huizong 徽宗(1082-1135), the last emperor of the Northern Song era (960-1126), for instance, included embroidery in his art collection. In the late Ming, embroidery, in particular pictorial kinds, had achieved artistic status.[xxi] To this end embroiderers developed stitches that enabledthem to reproduce painterly themes and produced manuals that outlined steps and stitches in a didactic manner similar to painting guides.[xxii]
Pattern books on embroidery testify to the fact that throughout the Qing era embroidery became very widespread and accessible, and as a result different classes of embroidery took form—the regional embroidery styles and the genres of boudoir, vernacular, and commercial embroidery. In this sense embroidery pattern books such as the one collected by Bellot embody the popularization of an elite art as well as the commercialization of a craft.