Early Modern Notes

Yesterday I took a day off work and went to see the V & A’s current exhibition Encounters: the meeting of Asia and Europe 1500-1800. “It explores”, we are promised, “how East and West perceived and represented each other and how the appeal of the exotic shaped both cultures.”

And that promise is kept well. Half of what’s presented here will be quite familiar to many Europeans with even a passing interest in history: the porcelain, the textiles, carved ivory, lacquerware and all the other beautiful goods that were brought to Europe; the missionaries; the men of the eighteenth century (like William Fullerton) who went to India and embraced the sub-continent’s culture (and women…) in a way that (as we’re reminded) became in the nineteenth century impossible for imperialist governors to imagine.

It’s the other half that makes the exhibition something different, something special: where, for once, we learn what ‘they’ thought of ‘us’. In China and Japan at least, the answer is frequently: not a great deal. Europeans were barbarians; the Japanese called the Portuguese ‘nankan-jin’ (southern barbarians), and depicted them as comic figures with big noses (and even bigger trousers). There is a laugh-out loud seventeenth-century Japanese print mocking the sexual prowess (and smell) of the Dutch male, too. Some of it strangely made me think of modern European attitudes towards America and Americans, our stereotypes of brash, unsophisticated Yanks (even as the USA emerged as the world’s most important political, economic, cultural power).

Europeans are clearly depicted as marginal and inferior in several of the paintings (this, for example. But Chinese disdain was perhaps best expressed in a poem on a wall hanging depicting Lord Macartney’s (not very successful) trade embassy to Beijing in 1793, and commenting on the gifts the envoys had presented to the emperor:

… While they appear ordinary their hearts are good and true
Yet their gifts are not precious but curiosities, whose subtleties have been exaggerated…

One of the gifts was a telescope. Later in the exhibition, there is another telescope, from just a few years earlier, that was also a gift to Chinese rulers, though this time in Canton (Guangdong) province. The second one is accompanied by a label claiming that it “demonstrates how much European technical novelties were prized at the imperial court”. But the object itself cannot tell us how it was received. The words of the poem surely should warn against any simple notion that merely because powerful people accept gifts, they ‘prize’ them (except as symbols of power). The exhibition is at its best, rather, when it gives us the (translated) words (and images) created by these people, so unfamiliar to us in time and place – which it does, powerfully, again and again.

There is the beautiful scroll, from China again and dated 1781-5, showing a man and woman from each of a range of countries or ethnicities. A translation of the commentary for the picture of the British couple was provided: British men “are commonly dressed in wool and flannel and like drinking.” (The man carries a bottle.) “Women, before marriage, bind their waists to make them narrow.” And: “Some people carry a snuff bottle in a little bag made of golden threads.” (!)

Accuracy is hardly always the overriding concern of representations of the ‘Other’ on either side of these encounters. Nonetheless, that snuff bottle detail surely comes from first-hand observation (and, after all, ‘some’ is a pretty elastic quantity…). And eighteenth-century British men commonly did like drinking, though whether they were worse than any other European males is of course another matter. Yet the roll was perhaps most striking for its overall effect, all these couples beautifully pictured (but who were they meant to be? I longed for more information, not just on the British pair), and the interest in ‘other’ peoples suggested by the roll – in contrast, perhaps, to European stereotypes of Chinese ‘insularity’.

Conversely we learn how Chinese maps not only placed China at the centre of the world but contained little information about anywhere beyond China’s borders. We’re starting to see the complexity and diversity of possible attitudes. And there was one picture that was for me startling and intriguing. It’s an eighteenth-century Japanese portrayal of three scholars, Japanese, Chinese and European, at a table. The Japanese scholar is at the centre; he is sitting close to the European on his right; the Chinese scholar is set apart from them. In this view, then, Japanese intellectuals (at least) considered themselves to have more in common with westerners than with their own neighbours.

Mutual fascination and ambivalence was really the key theme of the exhibition. Regional variety, too, was emphasised; for example, the way in which Japan and China regulated and restricted the movements of Europeans, kept them at arms-length, compared to the much freer interactions permitted in India. Like Guardian’s reviewer, though, I wondered just how far any of these interactions went:

as with present-day globalisation, it is hard to marvel at the free flow and consumption of diverse commodities and artefacts without wondering whether they advanced understanding and sympathy across nations and cultures at the same time.

(By coincidence, Another Damned Medievalist asked the same question at Blogenspiel very recently.) Interest, fascination even, does not necessarily entail either sympathy or understanding. As I suggested already, there can be some dissonance between the positive, optimistic story – of ‘fluidity’, of mutual exchange and enrichment – that the V & A wants to tell us through the cultural artefacts, and what those artefacts themselves frequently say or portray.

The exhibition largely steers clear of issues of imperialism, racism, exploitation; the message is that these are features of the nineteenth century. Well, yes, it’s not hard to see that there were enormous differences between the situation in (say) 1650 and that of 1850. But there is little sense of how relations or attitudes developed over the centuries, especially during the eighteenth century (in part, perhaps, because a chronological framework was deliberately eschewed in favour of a thematic one). The final section of the exhibition, ‘Exchanges’, presents ‘Europe in Asia’ and ‘Asia in Europe’; it’s packed with artefacts, mostly eighteenth century. The contrast was perfectly clear: the Europeans imported from Asia all those luxury goods, beautiful and often purely decorative things – unless and until they could manage to copy them more cheaply at home (such as cotton fabrics); from Europe, Asians imported technology. Maps and guns. That disparity – given the eighteenth-century emphasis – seemed to signify, disturbingly, just how things were, indeed, changing and how soon Asian political autonomy would be under threat (even in those countries that were not formally colonised).

Perhaps the exhibition shouldn’t be criticised for not dwelling on the development of European imperialism, when it spends so much time looking through the eyes of those who were later on the receiving end. For, if that splendidly condescending verse of 1793 and other exhibits are anything to go by – though I’m happy to be corrected by the experts if this hardly well-informed judgment is mistaken – Asia did not see European dominance coming either. Perhaps the final message is a melancholy one, despite the up-beat tone of the exhibition. ‘Encounters’ between Europeans and Asians during those three hundred years created many things of astonishing beauty, and for some generated wealth and new opportunities, cultural and economic. But in the end, they did not bring Asia’s political elites understanding of the aggression that the Europeans were increasingly prepared to bring to bear to protect and further their interests in Asia – any more than those encounters taught westerners respect for Asian civilisations and cultures. Each continued to see the other as ‘barbarians’ – and, disastrously, terrifyingly, that barely seems to have changed in the two centuries that have since passed.

Enough for today. I have one or two thoughts raised by particular exhibits, but they can wait for their own posts. If you can get there, this is well worth £8 of your money (I think there are student concessions) and a few hours of your life…

Further notes and resources:
A 2-day conference is to be held on 12-13 November 2004.
Telegraph review (registration required; excerpt at Renaissance weblog)
Exhibition links
East and South-east Asia links here at EMN (sorry, I haven’t got to the Indian sub-continent yet in this series)

Also this exhibition web page: Luxury textiles east and west