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 rado
The 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
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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
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:
‘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
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in Art, New Haven and London 2022, forthcoming.
3 See