The Empress Dowager Cixi’s Japanese screen and late Qing imperial cosmopolitanism
In 1903 the Dowager Empress Cixi commissioned the first photographic portraits of herself. In several she is shown in front of a surviving embroidered silk screen, made by the Japanese firm Takashimaya, which was probably a gift from the Meiji emperor. Cixi’s choice of the screen for her photographs reveals much about the culture, diplomacy and politics of the late Qing court.
by mei mei radoThe de facto ruler of the last half-century of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) played a crucial role in reinvigorating late Qing court arts, from painting and decorative arts to architecture and theatre. In the summer of 1903 Cixi experimented with photographic portraiture for the first time; within two years she had posed for more than thirty photographs –mostly individual portraits – which were reproduced in about six hundred prints. Her photographs constituted an unprecedented mode in Qing imperial portraiture and performed a new political function as diplomatic gifts on the international stage. Departing from the deep-seated Chinese visual taboo that restricted the public display and circulation of imperial visages, Cixi’s photographs embraced international diplomatic decorum: they signalled an effort to improve the Empress’ image abroad and to align the weakened Manchu empire with powerful modern nations.1
Recent scholarship on Cixi’s photographic portraits has thoroughly examined their political significance and the female agency demonstrated in this process of self-fashioning.2 However, the choice and implications of the interior furnishings in these images have escaped detailed scrutiny. This article focuses on a centrally placed but long overlooked object that frames the Empress Dowager in many of these portraits – a large folding screen embroidered with peacocks. Identifiable as a signature product of the Japanese company Takashimaya, the screen, which has survived in the Forbidden City (now the Palace Museum, Beijing), provides important material evidence of Sino-Japanese diplomatic exchanges.
Cixi’s use of the screen in her state portraiture opens up a window into two previously uninvestigated areas. First, it offers an insight into how foreign visual and material cultures contributed to late Qing court art and helped to shape the self-images of Qing rulers. Whereas the imperial engagements with European and Japanese arts during the high Qing period (from the Kangxi to the Qianlong reigns, 1666–1795) have enjoyed a surge
1 On Cixi’s photographic portraiture, see Lin Jing: Gugong cang Cixi Zhaopian [Cixi’s Photographs at the Palace Museum, Beijing] Beijing 2001; and C.-h. Wang: ‘“Going Public”: portraits of the
Empress Dowager Cixi, circa 1904’, NAN NÜ: Men, Women, and Gender in Early and Imperial China 14, no.1 (2012), pp.119–76.
2 See Wang, op. cit. (note 1); Y-c. Peng:
in scholarship, little work has focused on the final decades of the dynasty. Following the Opium Wars and the opening of multiple trading ports in China, the ways in which people, goods and knowledge were circulated differed significantly from the early modern period. Meanwhile, the rise of modern nation states, global industrialisation and successive foreign aggressions in China drove the Qing court to redefine its position on the international map. Cixi’s Japanese screen encapsulates these new cultural and political currents.
Secondly, the peacock screen, together with other contemporaneous Japanese works at the Qing court, sheds light on the little-known history of export art in China during the Meiji period (1868–1912). The copious scholarship on this art predominately places it in the context of the European and American craze for Japan from the 1860s to 1900s and Japan’s self-conscious response to this fashion. As this article will demonstrate, high-end Meiji export works at the Qing court were closely associated with Qing imperial diplomatic missions to Japan as well as the dynasty’s cultural and institutional reforms in its final decade. Such objects both represented Qing imperial knowledge of international expositions and trade and epitomised a successful Japanese model for the Qing court’s reforms. This untold story contributes a new angle to the complex picture of the cultural trajectories and shifting meanings of Meiji export art. The presence of Cixi’s Japanese screen in her photographs functioned as a material index to the global network of commerce and diplomacy around 1900, while embodying the regime’s new cosmopolitan stance.
Cixi chose an amateur photographer, Yu Xunling (1874–1943), a Manchu noble who had grown up abroad and was a brother of her ladiesin-waiting Deling and Rongling, to take her portraits, but she exercised full control over their staging.3 The majority of the photographs represent
‘Lingering between tradition and innovation: photographic portraits of Empress Dowager Cixi’, Ars Orientalis 43 (2013), pp.157–70; and idem: Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s
Image Making in Art, New Haven and London 2022, forthcoming.
3 See Princess Deling (Yu Deling): Two Years in the Forbidden City, New York 1911, pp.216–26.
Cixi in seated poses in full-length or three-quarter view, with only a few showing her standing. All feature a similarly arranged interior with opulent trappings, in which a large folding screen at the very centre serves as the background to her throne and a banner displays her honorary title and a eulogy to her. Although the locations for these pictures were not specified, a memoir by Deling reveals that the initial sittings took place in the throne room of the Hall of Happiness and Longevity (Leshou tang) in the Garden of Nurtured Harmony (Yihe yuan), commonly known as the Summer Palace.4 Some were probably taken in the courtyard for better lighting, with the furniture and decor carefully arranged to resemble the indoor setting.5
To a certain extent, Cixi’s austere seated posture and the strictly symmetrical composition of the photographs recall the tradition of formal imperial likeness created for the ritual worship of ancestors. However, the density of the furnishings and complexity of the visual layers in her photographic portraits deviate from the stylised format of official portraiture, which generally left the background blank. In particular, the screen carves out behind the Empress Dowager a large pictorial field displaying symbolic motifs. Wu Hung has illuminated how in the long history of Chinese visual culture a screen was both an architectural device and pictorial field, functioning to demarcate space and to attach symbolic meanings to a figure placed in front of it.6 In the Qing palaces a tall and expansive screen always accompanied the throne as a marker of imperial status. The arrangement of the throne and screen in Cixi’s photographs closely referenced the settings in the formal reception rooms of the various
4 Ibid., p.220.
5 Ibid 6 Wu Hung: The Double Screen: Medium and Representation
palace compounds in which she usually resided, including the central rooms in the Palace of Eternal Spring (Changchun gong) and the Palace of Preserved Elegance (Chuxiu gong), the original interiors of which have been reinstalled in the Forbidden City. The indispensability of the screen in defining Cixi’s sovereignty is further revealed by the fact that she had a three-panel example placed behind her in outdoor group photographs taken on a boat in the Zhonghai lake, west of the Forbidden City.7 A portable device for denoting the Empress Dowager’s presence, the screen transformed the space it occupied into an extraordinary imperial domain.
In informal Qing imperial portraiture, an image of a screen is often manipulated in order to appear visually unified with the – invariably male – sitter in front of it, while alluding to his status and intellectual spirit. A late seventeenth-century portrait of the young Kangxi Emperor writing in front of a dragon screen provides a telling case: where the Emperor and the dragon (an imperial symbol) overlap, the latter dissolves into the clouds so as to make way for the former, as if the creature emerged from the emperor’s body and manifested his divine identity (Fig.4). In her oil portraits Cixi also explored this pictorial idiom of interaction between screen and sitter. In 1903 Cixi commissioned the American artist
8
in Chinese Painting, Chicago 2005.
7 For these photographs, see Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur
9 Ibid., p.238.
Katherine Carl to paint her portrait in oil for exhibition at the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis. She instructed Carl to embed various imperial emblems in the picture, including the trope of the nine phoenixes.8 Based on motifs drawn from an actual Chinese blue cloisonné screen, the whereabouts of which are unknown,9 Carl rearranged the phoenixes and peacocks – symbols of the Empress – on the painted screen so as to hover above Cixi, and the central phoenix carries her official seal, as if these auspicious birds were announcing the title and power of the Empress Dowager (Fig.5). In reality, no extant Qing court screen has a composition purposefully designed to accommodate a sitter’s body. Despite the element of realism specific to the photographic medium, Cixi’s portraits nonetheless create an impression of melding her with the central motif on the screen. In the photographs of her featuring the peacock screen, a peafowl sweeps diagonally across the central panels above Cixi, largely unconcealed by any other feature (Fig.1). However, the flat banner, elevated by two poles, that sings logevity to Cixi, displays her honorary title and bears her official seal, runs across the peacock’s
4. The Kangxi Emperor in informal dress at his writing table. Late seventeenth century. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, image 50.7 by 32 cm. (Palace Museum, Beijing).
5. The Empress Dowager Tze His [Cixi], of China, by Katharine Carl. 1903. Oil on canvas with original camphor wood frame, canvas 297.2 by 173.4 cm. (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, Washington).
body immediately above her, so optically unfolding as a sign carried by the magnificent bird.
In staging her photographs, Cixi fully explored the visual potential of the screen simultaneously as a dignifying device and an interactive image-bearing object that extended a visual field around her. For such a significant element she would doubtless have chosen her favourite pieces, which carried important meanings on account of their provenance and design and communicated the messages that were pertinent to her imperial image and, by extension, to the image of the Qing empire.
The photographs of Cixi depict three different screens: a three-panel folding one, probably made of zitan wood with an inlaid design (Fig.3); one of silk embroidered with chrysanthemum motifs that are only partially visible (Fig.2); and the screen under discussion here, a multi-panel piece embroidered with peacocks and peonies that appears in at least ten photographs. Given the considerable height and width of this screen, only the central panels are shown. The screen itself has not until now been studied in connection with Cixi’s portraiture. It consists of six panels hinged together, each enclosed in a black lacquered wood frame with a curved top and mother-of-pearl butterfly patterns on the lower part (Fig.6). The reverse of the screen is mounted with a Japanese painting on paper depicting pine trees and a silver pheasant, now badly torn. In the screen’s current state, the front includes small birds scattered around two peacocks and a sun disk, which do not appear in the photographs. These are painted details on paper,
which were cut and pasted onto the silk screen at an unknown later date, probably to alter the composition so as to depict ‘[one] hundred birds paying homage to the peacock and the phoenix’, a traditional iconography for glorifying women with high prestige. On the lower left corner on the back of the frame, a gold inscription in Japanese reads ‘made with the supervision of Iida Shinshichi of Takashimaya in Kyoto of the Great Nippon’ (Fig.9). This identifies the screen as a product of the Japanese company Takashimaya, which specialised in high-end decorative textiles for export.
6. Folding screen depicting peacocks among peonies, made by Iida & Co. (Takashimaya). Japan, c.1903. Silk embroidery and later ink and colour on paper, 268 by 456 cm. (Palace Museum, Beijing).
7. Detail of Fig.6, showing the padded embroidery of the peonies’ petals. (Photograph the author).
8. Detail of Fig.6, showing the subtle colour gradations and sheen of the peacock’s feathers. (Photograph the author).
9. Detail of Fig.6, showing the Japanese inscription on the back of the frame. (Photograph the author).
A relative latecomer to the Kyoto textile industry, Takashimaya was founded by Iida Shinshichi I (1803–74) in 1831; by the late 1870s it had evolved into a major commissioner and retailer of decorative silk fabrics. From the 1880s the company was an active participant in domestic industrial exhibitions and an important supplier to the imperial household. At the same time, Takashimaya ambitiously explored international markets, establishing its foreign trade division in 1887 and exhibiting regularly in World’s Fairs from 1888. In 1897 the company won the privilege of being a ‘purveyor to the imperial household’. In addition to opening five shops aimed at foreigners in Kyoto, Osaka, Tokyo, Yokohama and Kobe between 1893 and 1901, it also established branches or offices in Lyon, London, Taiwan, Tianjin and Seoul between 1899 and 1908.10 The signature ‘Iida Shinshichi’ on Cixi’s screen refers to Shinshichi IV (1859–1944), who in the first phase of his directorship of the family-owned company, from 1888 to 1919, oversaw its significant global expansion.
Japan’s export trade soared during the Meiji period. A category of high-quality art textiles known as bijutsu senshoku emerged in the late 1870s and thrived through to the first decade of the twentieth century. Such textiles were not used for furnishings in typical Japanese residences. They primarily consisted of silk embroidered folding screens (rather than the traditional painted paper ones) and yūzen-dyed velvet hangings with pictorial themes such as birds-and-flowers and landscapes. It was a unique genre responding to the contemporary European and American enthusiasm for Japanese ornamental silks, as well as to the Western notion of Japan’s refined aesthetic tradition and the need to classify Japanese entries in
10 On the Takashimaya’s company history, see Tomoki Sueta: Takashimaya hyakunenshi [100-year history of Takashimaya], Tokyo 2009 [1941]; and H.T. McDermott: ‘Meiji Kyoto textile art and Takashimaya’, Monumenta Nipponica 65, no.1 (2010), pp.37–88. 11 On Meiji art textiles, see J.E. Sapin: ‘Merchandising art and identity in Meiji Japan: Kyoto Nihonga artists’ designs for Takashimaya department store, 1868–1912’, Journal of Design History 17, no.4 (2004), pp.317–36; McDermott,
international expositions according to the Western categories of ‘fine’ and ‘decorative’ arts. Foreign customers and the Japanese imperial household were the two major patrons of art textiles. Takashimaya played a leading role in producing, exhibiting and trading such textiles and engaged famous Kyoto Nihonga (Japanese-school painting) artists to design underdrawings for its products.11
A magnificent example of Takashimaya’s art textiles, Cixi’s embroidered screen features a dynamic composition depicting two peacocks among bushes of pink and white peonies against an open background. One peacock coils its neck attentively towards a flower, while the other, proudly perching on a rock, gracefully turns its head and sweeps its train diagonally across three panels. A variety of stitch techniques and a delicate control of silk colour threads achieve a strikingly realistic representation. A padded foundation for creating the effect of low-relief – a salient feature of Meiji-period export textiles – has been employed on the tips of the petals and the plumes of the peacock (Fig.7). For rendering the rocks, leaves, flowers and peacocks, satin stitches and long and short stitches are used throughout, with occasional outline stitches, diagonally staggered lines and round knots for details such as the area around the peacocks’ eyes, the shafts of the feathers and the veins of the leaves. The birds’ necks, wings and tails in particular exhibit virtuoso
op. cit. (note 10); H.T. McDermott et al., eds: exh. cat. Threads of Silk and Gold: Ornamental Textiles from Meiji Japan, Oxford (Ashmolean Museum) 2012; and Hirota Takashi: Meiji Taishōki no senshoku shiryō no kenkyū: Takashimaya shiryōkan shozō gensen, shitae, sakuhin shashin no hikaku, kōsatsu [Study of Materials Related to Textiles in the Meiji and Taisho Periods, Archived by the Takashimaya Historical Museum – Comparison and Consideration of Sources, Designs and Photos of Works], Kyoto 2018.
skills in capturing the downy texture and iridescent sheen of the feathers (Fig.8). Stitches in varying lengths and directions sensitively juxtapose and blend silk colour threads in a rich palette ranging from green, purple, azure, pale blue, black, brown and grey to orange and yellow, building up tonal gradations and chromatic layers. Short white lines are applied to the edges of the plumage around the lower part of the neck in order to mimic the natural brilliance of the down.
In its theme, composition and naturalistic pictorial style, this screen closely follows paintings by the Maruyama-Shijō school of the late Edo period, whose tradition was inherited by the Kyoto Nihonga painters in the late nineteenth century and in turn was adopted by Takashimaya as the defining style for its art textiles. Magnificent peacocks with trailing tails among flowers were a hallmark of Maruyama-Shijō paintings. Cixi’s screen indeed strongly resembles the famous painting Peonies and peacocks (1771; Shōkoku-ji temple, Kyoto) by Maruyama Okyō (1733–95), the founder of his namesake school. The postures and positioning of the peacocks on the screen are almost a mirror image of those in Okyō’s painting, a prototype that was repeatedly copied by his disciples and followers.
Peacocks in the Moruyama-Shijō- Nihonga tradition figure prominently in the design repertoire of Takashimaya’s export textiles. The twenty-odd photograph albums that formed the company’s trade catalogues in the first decade of the twentieth century list about sixty types of peacock embroideries, of which two-thirds are single-panel screens or wall hangings, while the other third are four-panel folding screens.12 One album includes an example representing two peacocks in exactly the same postures as those on Cixi’s screen.13 The only differences are that the former depicts azalea bushes instead of peonies and its four-panel format makes the composition more compact. A label strip accompanying this entry identifies it as ‘based on the painting of Tsuji Kako’, a Kyoto Nihonga artist (1870–1931) who provided a number of underdrawings for Takashimaya’s embroidered works. Evidently a signature product representing the company’s artistic achievements, a version of the screen with the same peacock image appears as a highlight in the brochure of Takashimaya’s ‘principal exhibits’ for the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair, among another fifteen selected works (Fig.10).
A motif transmitted from China, the peacock – an exotic bird in Japan – had been firmly integrated into Japanese art by the nineteenth century, carrying similar symbolism of royalty, immortality, prosperity and otherworldly beauty as in China. In the European and American wave of the ‘Japan craze’, the peacock motif enjoyed immense popularity, capturing the Western imagination as an embodiment of the quintessential Japanese aesthetic.14 The prominent presence of peacock embroideries in Takashimaya’s trade inventories demonstrated a self-conscious effort to cater to the Western taste in Japanese design. This business strategy echoed the Meiji government’s growing cultural nationalism from the 1880s, which reinvented and attempted to define the essence of the Japanese tradition by internalising Western views.15 World’s Fairs in particular provided significant occasions for Japan to propagandise through ‘fine art’ entries an image of itself as an artistic and civilised country, at once modern and rich in cultural heritage.
12 These albums are reproduced in Hirota Takashi, ed.: Takashimaya bōekibu bijutsu senshoku sakuhin no kiroku shashinshū [Photographs of Exported Textiles Produced by Takashimaya], Kyoto 2009.
13 The image is reproduced in ibid., p.229, no.52-019.
14 McDermott et al., op. cit. (note 11), p.123; M.M. Rado: ‘The hybrid Orient: Japonisme and nationalism of the Takashimaya Mandarin robes’, Fashion
Theory 19, no.5 (2015), pp.595–96.
15 Rado, op. cit. (note 14), pp.603–05.
16 McDermott, op. cit. (note 10), p.70.
17 Kunaichō [Dept. of Imperial Household], ed.: Meiji Tennō ki [The Chronicle of the Meiji Emperor], Tokyo 1968–77, IX, p.28.
18 Ibid., IX, p.268. For the screen, see R. Peat, ed.: exh. cat. Japan: Courts and Culture, London (Queen’s Gallery) 2022, pp.236–37, cat. no.136, inv. no. RCIN 79563.
In accordance with this cultural-political agenda, the Department of the Imperial Household (Kunai-shō) of the Meiji government acquired the same type of large, high-end art textiles as those displayed in universal expositions. Some of them may have been used for furnishing the modern reception rooms in the palace, but their major function was as imperial gifts for foreign rulers and dignitaries.16 Meiji Tennō ki, the chronicle of the daily activities of the Meiji court, records a number of such occurrences. In March 1896, for instance, the Japanese embassy sent to Russia for Nicholas II’s coronation gave an embroidered screen to Empress Alexandra;17 in June 1897 Japanese delegates presented Queen Victoria with an embroidered screen portraying Mount Arashi on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee;18 in June 1901 the German field marshal Alfred von Waldersee, who visited Japan after pacifying the Boxer Uprising in China, received an embroidered screen representing the full view of Mount Fuji.19 Likewise, in October 1904 Prince Fushimi Sadanaru, who travelled to the United States as the Japanese imperial envoy, took with him several embroidered screens and a window curtain as gifts from the government for the female members of the families of President Theodore Roosevelt and of the mayor of St Louis, Rolla Wells. Peacocks or peonies appear in three of these art textiles.20 It is clear, therefore, that embroidered screens were favoured by the Meiji government as diplomatic gifts, probably because the pictorial textile medium could
11. Wall hanging depicting a landscape. Japan, c.1895–1905. Yūzen-dyed velvet, image 176 by 116 cm. (Palace Museum, Beijing).
showcase both achievements in painting and refined craftsmanship while representing time-honoured Japanese furniture in a majestic format. This convention continued after the Meiji period: for example, in 1935 the Japanese government presented George V, probably for his Silver Jubilee, with a one-panel embroidered screen made by Takashimaya featuring peacocks and peonies similar to those on Cixi’s screen.21 In the same manner, during a diplomatic visit of the Qing imperial mission led by Prince Zaizhen (1876–1947) to the Japanese court on 21st May 1903, the Meiji emperor’s gifts included an embroidered screen and a pair of silver vases bearing the Japanese imperial emblem.22 Unfortunately, the design and maker of this screen are not recorded in either the Japanese or Chinese sources. However, the purpose and context of this trip offer grounds for conjecturing that Cixi’s peacock screen was likely to have been the one presented by the Meiji emperor on this occasion.
The Qing court had sponsored Zaizhen’s mission with the special goals of attending the Fifth National Industrial Exhibition (Naikoku kangyō hakurankai) in Osaka and investigating Japanese finance, manufacture and education.23 Although in 1898 Cixi notoriously suppressed the Hundred Day Reform led by the Guangxu Emperor (reg. 1875–1908), her attitude changed significantly in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising (1899–1901) and the aggressions of the Eight-Nation Alliance (1900). In January 1901 she initiated what would become a ten-year reform known as New Policies (xinzheng) – a series of measures implemented in the areas of bureaucracy, law, foreign affairs, the economy, industry, public education and the military in order to modernise and strengthen the Qing empire. The fostering of diplomatic exchanges with Western countries and Japan constituted a crucial part of this agenda and the success of the Meiji Restoration in particular provided the Qing court with a model for its own cultural and institutional transformations.24
19 Kunaichō, op. cit. (note 17), X, p.75.
20 Ibid., X, p.888.
21 Royal Collection Trust, inv. no.RCIN 69597, published in Peat, ed., op. cit. (note 18), p.244, cat. no.141.
22 Kunaichō, op. cit. (note 17), X, p.436.
23 The Qing court documents related to this mission are transcribed in ‘WanQing Zhongguo canjia Riben Daban diwujie quanye bolanhui shiliao [Archives Related to Late Qing
Participation in the Fifth National Industrial Exhibition in Osaka]’, Lishi dang’an [Historical Archives] 2005, no.4, pp.17–29; also see Kunaichō, op. cit. (note 17), X, p.435.
24 See D.R. Reynolds: China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan, Cambridge 1993. The book does not discuss expositions and the arts, however.
25 The details of this trip are recorded in Zaizhen (composed by
In April 1902 Cixi sent an embassy headed by Zaizhen to London to congratulate Edward VII on his forthcoming coronation. During the fivemonth trip, Zaizhen and his entourage toured Britain, Belgium, France, the United States and Japan, investigating their constitutions, governmental structures and commerce.25 World’s Fairs especially caught the attention of Zaizhen and his attachés. In his diary and the official memorandum that he submitted to the Guangxu Emperor, Zaizhen stressed that such expositions were crucial to the development of trade and had profound, immediate impacts on commerce. He urged the Qing court to mobilise provincial resources and to prepare itself appropriately for future exhibitions.26
Cixi and Guangxu took this advice seriously, as the 1903 embassy to Japan demonstrates, when Zaizhen – by then promoted to Minister of the newly established Department of Commerce – was ordered to collect information for the Qing court that would be useful for future expositions and reform strategies.27 Although the National Industrial Exhibition held in Osaka in 1903 mainly showcased Japanese products, it was the first time that the fair had invited international participants, albeit to a limited extent. The Qing empire took part on only a very small scale.28 According to the diary of Natong (1856–1925), Deputy Minister of Revenue and a core member of Zaizhen’s mission, the envoys spent thirty-three days in Japan, from 27th April to 29th May. They visited the Osaka exhibition on eight consecutive days before heading to Tokyo in order to pay their respects to the Meiji emperor and empress. Natong remarks on the spacious exhibition ground and dazzling electric illumination as well as the extraordinary range and refinement of the works on display. During the journey, the emissaries also inspected the Osaka Mint Bureau, the Morimura ceramic
Tang Wenzhi): Yingyao riji [Diary of the Journey to England], Shanghai 1903.
26 Ibid., XI, p.5; Junjichu dang zhejian [Qing Palace Memorials and Archives of Grand Council], no.149447, Guangxu 28-9-10 (11th October 1902), database of National Palace Museum, Taipei.
27 Qing shilu [Veritable Records of the Qing Emperors], vol.515, the Guangxu reign, Guangxu 29-5-bingchen (28th May 1903).
28 C.-h. Wang: ‘Chengxian Zhongguo: wan Qing canyu 1904 Meiguo Shengluyi wanguo bolanhui zhi yanjiu [Representing China: Studies on the Late Qing Participation in the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair]’, in Huang Kewu, ed.: Hua zhong you hua: jindai Zhongguo de shijue biaoshu yu wenhua goutu [When Images Speak: Visual Representation and Cultural Mapping in Modern China], Taipei 2003, p.422.
13 and 14. Front and back of a woman’s informal court robe (chenyi). China, c.1905. Silk tapestry (kesi) with embroidery highlights. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
15. Back of woman’s informal court robe (chenyi). China, c.1905. Silk tapestry (kesi), lined with squirrel and silver rat fur. (Palace Museum, Beijing).
factory in Nagoya and the Imperial Education Society in Tokyo, among other manufacturers, banks and schools.29
An essential task in this trip was the purchase of high-quality Japanese objects, both as industrial samples and gifts for the Qing court, from shops and museums as well as the fair. For example, Natong notes that in Nagoya they spent a fortune on cloisonné enamel (shippō) vases,30 and in Kyoto they purchased silk embroideries at the Takashimaya store and the House of Nishimura Sōzaemon, another leading maker of art textiles.31 Other sources attest to the high regard in which Qing royalty held Takashimaya’s art embroideries: for example, an entry of 15th September 1902 in Zaizhen’s diary records that he found the silks in the Kyoto market excellent in quality but not compatible with Chinese taste in terms of colour, but then went to the Takashimaya store and bought several ‘embroidered pictures’.32 Documents in the Takashimaya Archives reveal more information about this event: Zaizhen visited the store in order to acquire gifts for the imperial birthday celebrations that were to take place in the ‘royal private residence’, which probably referred to Cixi’s birthday ceremony in the Summer Palace.33 In December 1905 Zaizhen and his retinue are recorded as again purchasing a number of objects at Takashimaya’s Kyoto store.34
The peacock screen appeared in the first of Cixi’s photographic portraits, dated July–August 1903.35 Given that the 1902 entry in Zaizhen’s diary mentions only ‘embroidered pictures’ (xiuhua), a Chinese phrase that is unlikely to refer to a large folding screen, the screen is most probably the 1903 gift from the Meiji emperor. Its format supports this speculation. Takashimaya made very few six-panel screens for sale; most of its large examples consisted of only four panels. Moreover, Cixi’s screen, at 456 by 268 centimetres, is considerably larger than the one depicting similar peacocks exhibited at the 1904 St Louis exposition, which measured 304.8 by 152.4 centimetres (see Fig.10), the average size of Meiji-period embroidered screens made for the export market.36 The unusually grand format of Cixi’s screen suggests a special, prestigious commission.
On 5th June 1903, shortly after the Zaizhen mission returned to Beijing, Cixi and Guangxu received the prince and Natong at the court and inquired about the Osaka exhibition in great detail.37 Zaizhen described the magnificent displays in the Osaka fair and honestly expressed his opinion of the inferior state of Chinese exhibits compared to the ‘updated, innovative’ objects from other countries. Cixi was displeased.38 This disappointment may have directly triggered her aspiration to improve the level of Qing exhibits and promote the empire in international exhibitions. For the 1904 St Louis fair, she showed unprecedented enthusiasm and involvement, even commissioning her monumental oil portrait for public display and allocating enormous funds for this event, three times more than the total sum that
29 On the daily activities during this trip, see Natong: Natong riji [Diary of Natong], Guangxu 29-4-1 to 5-3 (27th March–29th May 1903), transcribed edition, Beijing 2006, I, pp.460–66.
30 Ibid., Guangxu 29-4-13 (9th May 1903), I, p.463.
31 Ibid., Guangxu 29-4-29 (25th May 1903), I, p.465.
32 Zaizhen, op. cit. (note 25), Guangxu 28-8-14 (15th September 1902), XII, p.23.
33 I am grateful to Kawakami Kazuo, former curator of Takashimaya Historical Museum, Osaka, for providing
this information. Email correspondence with the author, 4th August 2015.
34 Ibid.
35 A photograph with this background bears the signature of the photographer Xunling and his brother Xinling, dated the sixth month of Guangxu 29 (24th July–22nd August 1903), in the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing.
36 The size of this screen is given in the brochure The Principal Exhibits to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, U.S.A., 1904 by S. Iida, “Takashimaya” Kyoto Japan
the Qing court had spent previously on participating in international expositions.39 The first-hand knowledge of the Osaka fair obtained during Zaizhen’s trip likely provided a standard for the Qing court to follow in organising the Chinese pavilion at St Louis: Zaizhen’s memorandum to Cixi and Guangxu clearly stated that the Osaka exhibition could serve as a ‘foundation’ for the Qing court’s preparations for future expositions.40 The exquisite Japanese objects brought back by the mission provided Cixi with concrete examples of ‘updated, innovative’ foreign products, offering her a material basis for reimagining the Qing empire in an international context.
Cixi’s peacock screen opens a window onto the wide range of Meiji Japanese works at the late Qing court. A considerable quantity are in the Palace Museum’s stores and await further research.41 Many of these pieces are likely to have been acquired through similar channels during Qing imperial missions to Japan, either as gifts from Japanese rulers and dignitaries or purchased by Qing court officials. An entry in Natong’s diary for 18th July 1903 lists additional Japanese works that he presented to Cixi and Guangxu upon returning from Zaizhen’s mission: cloisonné enamel wares, porcelain wares, ‘a sculpted silver basin’, ‘an inserted screen with bejewelled inlaid design’, ‘a pair of glass mirrors with ornamented borders’, ‘a pair of glass table lamps’, multiple ‘Japanese gold brocades’ and ‘Japanese polychrome satin-ground silks’ and two ‘finely embroidered velvet landscapes’, which were probably yūzen-dyed velvets misidentified as embroidery.42 Some extant textiles at the Palace Museum match Natong’s descriptions: for example, a bolt of orange silk with cranes and pine boughs
37 Qing shilu, op. cit. (note 27), vol.515, Guangxu 29-5-bingchen (28th May 1903).
38 Dagong bao, Tianjin [L’Impartial, Tien Tsin], no.364 (9th June 1903), p.2.
39 See Wang, op. cit. (note 28); and idem, op. cit. (note 1). I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewer of the present article, who suggests that late Qing imperial enthusiasm for the World’s Fair and a changing attitude towards international affairs may have led to Cixi’s policies for modernising Chinese embroidery and her support of the woman embroiderer Shen Shou.
40 Qing shilu op. cit. (note 27), vol.515, Guangxu 29-5-bingchen (28th May 1903).
41 Some of the Japanese collections at the Palace Museum are published in Palace Museum, ed., Gugong cang Riben wenwu zhanlan tulu [Listing of Japanese Cultural Relics in the Collection of the Palace Museum], Beijing 2002. However, the catalogue contains no studies of the general background or individual objects.
42 Natong, op. cit. (note 29), Guangxu 29-run5-24 (18th July 1903), I, pp.471–72.
woven with metallic threads can be identified with typical ‘Japanese gold brocades’ with traditional motifs;43 and a large yūzen-dyed velvet depicting a river between mountains demonstrates the Meiji taste for naturalistic style and technical innovation in pictorial textiles (Fig.11). In another example, a high-footed silver bowl decorated with four phoenixes and bearing the Japanese imperial chrysanthemum emblem has a Qing court label, ‘given by the Japanese emperor’.44
Cixi’s predilection for Japanese embroidered screens can be observed in another set of her photographic portraits that show part of a chrysanthemum screen (see Fig.2), which can also be closely compared with Meiji period export embroideries. Takashimaya’s trade catalogues include numerous pieces with such designs as wall hangings or screens. Although the screen itself has not been found in the Palace Museum’s stores, to judge from the visible part, which is wide enough to frame the throne, it is probably of the tripartite form with a wider and taller central panel.45 Another splendid eight-panel Japanese screen in the stores, depicting a white phoenix perching on a pine tree, includes similar chrysanthemums with sinuous branches and exuberant flower heads on the left three panels (Fig.12).
The design vocabulary and aesthetic of Meiji Japanese works also left traces in Qing court arts. Although a complete picture of this influence
depends on further research, two women’s informal court robes attest to the intriguing outcome of this Sino-Japanese exchange. Both are executed in fine silk tapestry weave (kesi) with a dominant purple palette. The summer robe, with a lighter lilac ground, depicts a peacock with a phoenix-like upper body among large peonies (Figs.13 and 14), while that designed for winter, lined with squirrel and silver rat fur, presents a phoenix on a bluish-purple ground full of plum blossoms (Fig.15). The superior quality of the textiles and the prestigious symbols of peacock and phoenix, appropriate to an empress, suggest that these robes may well have belonged to Cixi, who exercised strong control over the design and production of imperial textiles and greatly encouraged innovations in the patterns and embellishments of informal court robes. From the 1890s onwards the characteristic new fashions associated with Cixi included vibrant, contrasting palettes, ornate trims and enlarged patterns inspired by court opera costumes.46
These robes reveal yet another dimension to Cixi’s innovations: the auspicious birds hovering diagonally on an imposing scale across the width of the garment – a bold rendition of this motif never seen before 16. Woman’s coat, made by Iida & Co. (Takashimaya). Japan, c.1900–09. Silk embroidery on silk crêpe (Metropolitan Museum of Art).
Empress Dowager Cixi’s Japanese screen
17. Vase (one of a pair). Japan, c.1895–1905. Cloisonné enamel (shippō), height 150 cm. (Palace Museum, Beijing).
18. The Meiji Empress, Haruko, by Suziki Shin’ichi I and Maruki Riyō. 1889. Photograph, gelatin silver print signed by Empress Haruko, 27.5 by 20.5 cm. (Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Washington)
in Chinese designs for this type of clothing – were clearly derived from the prototypes of Meiji export and diplomatic arts. The embroidered screens discussed earlier could have inspired the visual focus of a centrally placed, diagonally angled bird with spectacular tails. Indeed, the birds’ heads in the court robes strongly resemble the Japanese mode of depicting a phoenix’s head in profile with an open beak and elongated eye (see Fig.12).
A pair of Japanese cloisonné enamel vases in the Qing imperial collection also has a similar slanting composition of an eagle among flowers (Fig.17). Moreover, Meiji embroidered kimonos made for the export market often feature the same motif of a large peacock sweeping across the back at a striking angle, as exemplified by a Takashimaya robe (Fig.16).47 However, unlike Japanese designs that leave some of the background open, the Qing imperial taste for dense ornamentation results in a saturated composition. The shape of the informal court robe requires the pattern to be repeated on the front and back.
With its shared Sino-Japanese auspicious symbols of peonies and peacocks, the Takashimaya embroidered screen was harmoniously integrated into Cixi’s staged palace environment for her photographic
43 See Palace Museum, op. cit. (note 41), p.250.
44 Ibid., p.234.
45 For example, see Takashimaya album image no.tsu38-086, repr. in Hirota Takashi, op. cit. (note 12), p.455.
46 Y. Li: ‘Gendered materialization: an investigation of women’s artistic and literary reproductions of Guanyin in late
Imperial China’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Chicago, 2011), pp.163–64; and Y.-c. Peng: ‘Staging sovereignty: Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) and late Qing Court art production’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of California, Los Angeles, 2014), pp.90–96.
47 For a discussion of this type of robe, see Rado, op. cit. (note 14).
portraits in order to glorify her female sovereignty. At the same time, the prestigious status of the screen as – almost certainly – a gift from the Japanese emperor and its significance as a souvenir of the Qing imperial foreign mission resonated with Cixi’s diplomatic aspirations, which were embedded in her photographic project. These qualities epitomised the Qing empire’s new desire to align itself with international powers and its openness to domestic reforms.
The Takashimaya screen is not the only foreign textile in Cixi’s photographic portraits. The floral carpet that appears in all the interiors was a machine-woven pile carpet imported from Europe; and in the photographs of her in a standing pose, an Indian paisley-patterned cashmere shawl – or an European imitation – covers a tall stand, also European in style, on which the Empress Dowager rests her arm (see Fig.3). Cixi’s interior, rich in the textures and patterns of textiles (which include the additional visual layers introduced by her ornate clothes) simulated the setting used for eminent sitters in late nineteenth-century studio portraiture. Some widely circulated state portraits of Queen Victoria and Empress Haruko of Japan (Fig.18), for example, show a space saturated with textiles, in the form of carpets, table coverings and background drapery. Cixi adopted the same visual mode – which she may have seen in the portraits presented to her by foreign leaders – in creating her image of an imperial matriarch in command. Instead of solely using traditional Chinese furnishings, she incorporated Japanese, European and Indian textiles to foreground the Qing empire’s cosmopolitanism. Far from being merely decorative trappings, these textiles signified the Qing court’s international connections and its modern foreign policies.
