Provenance volume 5 was edited by Karwin Cheung, provenance researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Willemijn van Noord, curator China at the Wereldmuseum.
General editing by Fanny Wonu Veys, curator Oceania at the Wereldmuseum.
Lay-out: Sidestone Press, Leiden
Cover design: Buro Millennial, Leiden
ISBN 978-94-6426-314-5
5 Introduction: the wide blue yonder of the Chinese world
Karwin Cheung and Willemijn van Noord
7 Note on museum names and inventory numbers
Karwin Cheung
11 Featherweight trade: how pith paper paintings bridge Peru and Canton in the 19th century
Xinwu Luo
21 From Hong Kong to Leiden: Chinese type matrices in the Wereldmuseum Leiden
Yun Xie
37 Imagining South Africa through Chinese Objects
François Janse van Rensburg
51 The blue terrestrial map of China in the Wereldmuseum Leiden
Richard A. Pegg
65 Art and politics: prints and paintings from Rongbaozhai, 1950s-1960s
Pao-Yi Yang
85 A portrait of the scholar as intelligence operative: Robert van Gulik in Seoul 1949
Karwin
Cheung
95 From Lijiang to Leiden and back: digitization and translation of Dongba manuscripts
Tayoulamu Xu Zhang ( 张旭·塔尤拉姆 )
Introduction: the wide blue yonder of the Chinese world
Karwin Cheung and Willemijn van Noord
An early 19th-century map of China printed in brilliant Prussian blue, discussed in this volume by Richard Pegg, aptly illustrates the conundrum of creating a thematic issue on China and provenance in the Wereldmuseum’s collections. The Complete map of the geography of the everlasting, unified Great Qing shows the world from the Netherlands in the upper left, to islands in the South China seas in the bottom right, without any demarcation of borders and boundaries. It asks us: what do we talk about when we talk about China? Likewise, all the authors in this issue take us beyond political borders and Han-centric narratives of China. Their articles illustrate how the production and trajectories of these Chinese objects were the result of international trade routes, imperialism, diplomacy, and religious missions – in other words, Chinese objects are global objects.
Xinwu Luo discusses a rare set of 19th-century Canton export paintings depicting Peruvian scenes. She argues that these objects can only be understood in the
interlinking web of trade relations between China and Peru on the one hand, and China and Europe on the other hand. These trade links between China and Peru are seldom discussed, but her article shows that global trade goes far beyond the simple dichotomy of East and West.
The article by Yun Xie is a timely reminder that in the colonial age, the Netherlands had the largest population of Chinese people outside of China proper in the Dutch East Indies. With the presence of a large Chinese population under Dutch rule came the need for administrative instruments, leading to the Dutch government’s acquisition of the Chinese movable lead types discussed in her article. In this manner, the Chinese script, which since the Shang had been associated with the Chinese bureaucracy, became an instrument of Dutch rule in its colonies.
François Janse van Rensburg looks at the exhibition histories of Chinese objects. He shows how these objects were re-appropriated to tell the history of South Africa, no matter how tenuous these connections might have been in the first place.
The aforementioned articles all focus on objects from imperial China, but of course collecting of Chinese objects continued after the end of the imperial era in 1911 and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. A view of contemporary collecting is provided by the article of
Pao-Yi Yang, who carried out a research project on the Wereldmuseum’s collection from Rongbaozhai, a wellknown Beijing antique shop and woodblock printer. In her article she describes how Rongbaozhai was instrumentalized for the political and propaganda goals of the People’s Republic of China’s government.
One article is not concerned with a Chinese object but rather a Korean one. Literary Sinitic writing and Chinese classics became the basis of a shared intellectual culture in East Asia, which could even be partaken in by Dutch scholars. Karwin Cheung’s article is a study of how the Dutch sinologist and diplomat Robert van Gulik (1910-1967) used his scholarly status to both collect objects and intelligence in a 1949 trip to Korea.
Lastly, the articles in this volume do not only cover how objects came to museums, but also discusses the initiatives taken for their continued use. Tayoulamu Xu Zhang the director of the Association of Dongba Culture and Arts, has worked together with the Wereldmuseum to digitize Dongba manuscripts collected by the Dutch missionary Elise Scharten in the early 20th century. In her article she recounts how these efforts have made the valuable documents, containing legends and ritual instructions, available once again to Dongba shamans of the Naxi people.
Note on museum names and inventory numbers
Karwin Cheung
The Wereldmuseum is an umbrella institution founded in 2014 under the name of Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (NMVW) and incorporates three formerly separate institutions: Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden, and the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal. The collections of NMVW are part of the Dutch national collections (Rijkscollectie). Since 2017, NMVW has a partnership with the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam, one of Rotterdam’s municipal museums.
The constituent museums of NMVW have changed their names to Wereldmuseum in 2023. This marked the most recent change of name in the histories of these museums. For clarity and consistency, the editors have chosen to use the present names throughout this publication regardless of time period. Please refer to the following table for the various historical names used by the respective museums of NMVW and Wereldmuseum Rotterdam.
Wereldmuseum Leiden
1837-1864 Rijks Japansch Museum von Siebold
1864-1935 Rijks Ethnographisch Museum
1935-2005 Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde
2005-2023 Museum Volkenkunde (since 2014 part of NMVW)
2023-current Wereldmuseum Leiden
Wereldmuseum Amsterdam
1864-1945 Koloniaal Museum
1945-1950 Indisch Museum
1950-2023 Tropenmuseum (since 2014 part of NMVW)
2023-current Wereldmuseum Amsterdam
Wereldmuseum Berg en Dal
1954-2023 Afrikamuseum (since 2014 part of NMVW)
2023 Wereldmuseum Berg en Dal
Wereldmuseum Rotterdam
1883-1986 Museum voor Land- en Volkenkunde
1986-2000 Museum voor Volkenkunde
2000-current Wereldmuseum Rotterdam
Collections of the former Tropenmuseum, Afrika Museum, and Museum Volkenkunde which were acquired before 2015 can be recognized by their inventory number starting respectively with TM-, AM- or RV-. Any objects acquired by these museums after 1st of January 2015 are marked by an inventory number without prefix, starting at 7000.
Objects in the collection of the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam have inventory numbers starting with WM-.
Note on East Asian names
In this volume all East Asian names are written in East Asian order, i.e. surname followed by first name. An exception is made, for bibliographical reasons, for the authors contributing to this volume, whose names are written beginning with their first name.
Featherweight trade: how pith paper paintings bridge Peru and Canton in the 19th century
Xinwu Luo
In the Wereldmuseum Leiden, a set of nine Chinese pith paper paintings with Peruvian subjects (RV-5464-1 to 9) was at the time of its acquisition registered in the museum’s department of Middle and South America. Their material and execution clearly indicate that these works were made in China. Yet, the Peruvian subjects depicted in this set are unusual for Chinese pith paper paintings. Each painting depicts one or two figures, representing a range of social classes and cultural backgrounds, such as a native Peruvian street vendor, a black man on a donkey, and Spanish women with luxuriously embroidered shawls or veils (fig. 1). Two of the latter (RV-5464-1 & 3) have Dutch inscriptions written in pencil at the bottom of the painting: ‘Tapadas met elkander in gesprek A’ (Tapadas in conversation with each other A); ‘des Tapada of ongemaskerde B’ (the Tapada or the unveiled one B, fig. 1). Tapada (plur. tapadas), meaning ‘veiled woman’ in Spanish, is a term for
the female dress practice of veiling in Spain and South America under Spanish colonial rule between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries (Bass & Wunder 2009: 97).
The figures and inscriptions indicate that this set belongs to the costumbrismo genre (Majluf 2007: 45). This is an artistic or encyclopedic representation of regional daily life
Figure 1. Des tapada of ongemaskerde B, gouache on pith paper, framed with laid paper, 18 × 11.5 cm.
Wereldmuseum Leiden, RV-5464-3.
and folkloric customs, which developed in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It later spread to Hispanic America, particularly Peru, and became a popular subject in the first half of the nineteenth century. The topic of the costumbrismo genre paintings made in Canton (modernday Guangzhou) for export has long been overlooked by scholars of
Chinese art and will be explored in this article through their circulation and provenance.
Canton painting studios and their production methods
During the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, the Chinese government had implemented a series of isolationist policies restricting international trade, which culminated in the decision of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735-1796) in 1757 to make Canton the only port open to foreign traders through licensed Chinese hong (factories) in the neighbourhood along the Pearl River (Gardner 1953: 320; Clunas 1984: 13). Until the First Opium War (1839-1842), Canton was the main trading centre and cultural conduit for Western merchants and consumers. The emergence and popularity of Chinese export painting, mainly (gouache) watercolour,1 reverse glass painting, and oil painting, as a specific genre tailored to Western tastes, coincides with the development of hong in Canton.
Pith paper paintings were popular amongst Europeans and Americans who travelled to China in the nineteenth century. The detailed paintings with
1 Whilst watercolour paint and gouache are both made from water soluble pigments and binders, the latter has been made to be opaque.
a velvet-like look were attractive due to their small size and depictions of Chinese figures, everyday life, port views, tortures, and Chinese flora and fauna. They were often bound into albums and brought home as souvenirs.
In the early nineteenth century, there were approximately thirty studios in Canton run by Chinese artists who specialized in watercolour painting for export (Chinese Painting 1835: 291). These painters worked in Western oil painting styles, making use of techniques such as realism and linear perspective, rather than following the manner of Chinese literati painting. Puqua (active 1780-1810), Fatqua (active 1810-1830), Lamqua (Guan Qiaochang, 1801-1860, active 1825-1860), Sunqua (active 1830-1870), and Tingqua (Guan Lianchang, c. 1809-?, active 1840-1870) are some of the well-known Canton export painters of this period.2
The costumbrismo pith paper paintings have been associated with
2 These are Western transcriptions of Chinese names, which the artists used to sign their works, but unfortunately most of their Chinese names are unknown. The traditional explanation for the syllable ‘qua’ is that it means ‘official’ in Cantonese, so ‘qua’ initially was the suffix added to the surnames of officials of the hongs as a sign of respect by foreign merchants. At a later time, it was also attached to the surnames of export painters (Clunas 1984: 82-3; Jiang 2007: 131-32; Dobkin 2013: 206). Another explanation is that it is derived from the Portuguese word ‘quadro’, which means ‘painting’ (Chen 2018: 160).
the studios of Sunqua and Tingqua. Two albums of such paintings with the stamp of Sunqua were auctioned at Sotheby’s London in 2001 (Majluf 2007: 55; Williams 2014: 104). An album of Peruvian subjects with Tingqua’s stamped label is held at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Majluf 2007: 40; Library of Congress). It is likely that the costumbrismo genre on pith paper was solely produced in Canton (Majluf 2007: 39).
A description of export painters’ studios and their production methods is found in the writings of the Frenchman Charles-Hubert Lavollée, who visited Lamqua’s studio in Canton in 1849 (Lavollée 1849, cited by Gardner 1953). Lavollée wrote that the production process at the studio was systematically divided between apprentices. For example, an apprentice would be responsible for one part of the painting, such as the limbs or the clothing. Apprentices would work in this manner for as long as they were not capable of completing a painting on their own (Gardner 1953: 316).
The assembly line production makes sense when considering the limited variety of subjects in Canton export painting. This does raise the question of how painters treated subjects that were beyond these subjects. As will be argued below, uncommon subjects such as the Peruvian images were painted using a print as a model. Perhaps such
limited editions would not be the result of assembly line production, but rather the work of one painter.
After the end of the first Opium war in 1842, the export painting industry in Canton declined as its position as a trading centre shifted to other ports, especially Hong Kong and Macao (Nesbitt et al. 2010: 89-90). In addition, some export painters had relocated to Shanghai and Beijing. With the spread of photography, Chinese export painting gradually disappeared in the early twentieth century.
Materials and media of Chinese export paintings
Export watercolours were painted on several types of paper, the earliest one used is often called ‘Chinese paper’ or ‘Xuan paper’, made from rice straw and bark fibres of plants such as mulberry and bamboo with water. Pith paper, on the other hand, is not made from tree bark, but rather the pith of the Tetrapanax papyrifer, which grows in Taiwan and southern China. A thin slice of the plant’s cylindrical stem is rolled off, after which it is dried and trimmed without any further processing. Confusingly, this type of paper is often described as ‘rice paper’ by Western collectors and institutions due to its soft, transparent, and white
appearance, which was associated with rice grains (Chassaing 2015: 90-91).3
Although the earliest written reference to pith paper dates to the reign of emperor Hui of Jin (r. 290-306) (Tsai 1999), the material was not produced in large quantities until the nineteenth century (Tsai 1999, Chassaing 2015: 92). The velvety surface of pith paper is an ideal base for applying water-based media: the texture of the plant absorbs water from the pigment, and it forms a dry colour layer on top of the pith paper (Williams 2014: 10-12). As a result, the painted subject is more sharply defined and more vivid compared to watercolours on other types of paper (Hasler 2017). This makes pith paper particularly suited to miniature painting, a fashionable genre in Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The attractive characteristics of pith paper and its relatively cheap production cost (Chassaing 2015: 94), likely led to its mass production to meet
the demand for Chinese export art in the nineteenth century.
One of pith paper’s downsides is that it is particularly susceptible to moisture and light, making it difficult to preserve. The paper also tears very easily, as can be seen in several examples in the Wereldmuseum collection (RV-5464-2, RV-5464-5, and RV-5464-8). Pith paper paintings were often preserved by mounting in albums framed by blue or turquoise strips of silk (or less common cotton), but in the case of the Wereldmuseum set, each of the paintings is covered by a semitransparent sheet and framed with laid paper (fig. 1). Based on their texture and manufacture, paper conservator Irina Tjeroenova identified three of the paintings’ semi-transparent sheets as Chinese paper and the other six as European paper. One characteristic is that the plant fibres are visible through the Chinese paper.
3 Sir William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865), then Director of Kew Botanical Gardens in London, procured the first batch of pith paper sheets and the first seedling of pith plants in Europe between 1849 and 1857. Although he identified the plant in 1852 under the name Aralia papyrifera Hook, the term ‘rice paper’ was still used in his diary to describe pith paper. Later, in 1859, the botanist Karl Koch (1809-1879) adopted a different name: Tetrapanax papyriferum, and the shrub is now called Tetrapanax papyrifer (Chassaing 2015: 91-92).
Watermarks on the back of the frames confirm the laid paper is Dutch. Four of these show the Maid of Holland and the Leo Belgicus, sitting in the Garden of Holland with the motto ‘Pro Patria’ (‘Propatria’ in this case, fig. 2)’.4 The Pro Patria watermark, with its symbolism referring to the signing of the Act of Abjuration in 1581, was a popular watermark between the seventeenth century and early
4 They are RV-5464-1, RV-5464-2, RV-5464-4, and RV-5464-7.
Figure 2. ‘Propatria’ watermark seen in a mirrored position on the framing of RV-5464-2.
nineteenth century (Ogierman 2017: 94). The watermark ‘A. Van Ree[?]’ can be seen on the frames of the other five paintings, but no further information about this watermark could be found.5
Circulation of paintings and their models
There are only a few other known Canton pith paper paintings with nonChinese subjects. These are mainly
British landscapes and portraits of European men and occasionally women, all of which seem to have been based on foreign models (Crossman 1991: 156-76, Jiang 2007: 226-34).6 This also seems to be the case for the museum’s paintings of Peruvian subjects, which are similar in composition and style to works by the Peruvian artists Francisco Javier Cortés (1775-1839) and his presumed student Francisco Fierro (ca. 1808-1879, also known as Pancho Fierro) (Majluf 2007: 19, Anderson 2011: 45, 50). The painter Cortés is assumed to be responsible for the earliest surviving costumbrismo works, dating back to 1826 (Majluf 2007: 22-23).
Cortés, Fierro and their contemporaries created these paintings for foreign merchants and travellers, sold individually or bound in albums (Majluf 2007: 22-23), in the manner of Chinese export paintings.
Four of the Wereldmuseum pith paper paintings are copied from ‘models’ by nineteenth-century artists active in Lima. Their treatment of subjects and compositions are strikingly
5 They are RV-5464-3, RV-5464-5, RV-5464-6, RV-5464-8, and RV-5464-9.
6 For example, the Wereldmuseum collection contains three portraits of Europeans (TM3728-485, TM-3728-486, and TM-3728-487) on pith paper, together with 38 other paintings bound in a red leather album. Of these, TM-3728-487 is very similar to a print portraying the famous French actor François-Joseph Talma (1763-1826) in Roman costume. Unfortunately, little is known about the provenance of these portraits (see also van der Poel 2016: 160).
Figure 3. Woman in Peruvian costume with a fish, gouache on pith paper, 18 × 11.5 cm. Wereldmuseum Leiden, RV-5464-8.
similar, such as the women in Peruvian costume holding a fish (fig. 3 & fig. 4). The facial characteristics, however, suggest that it was difficult for the Chinese export painters to skilfully imitate non-Chinese facial features. Similarly, the figures look rather unnatural and even stiff. In terms of the colour palette, most of them have been slightly altered, perhaps because certain pigments were not available in Canton, or because the artists were unable to match the original colours.
In studies of Chinese export paintings, the trade network between China and Peru in the early nineteenth
Figure 4. Fisherwoman from Chorrillos, attributed to Francisco Javier Cortés, watercolour and tempera on paper, 24.5 × 19.3 cm. Lima Art Museum, 2015.21.75.
century has received only scant attention. Commerce between China and Peru arose in the aftermath of several wars of independence of South American countries between the 1810s and 1830s (Majluf 2007: 38-39). European and North American merchants were granted access to Peru’s natural resources, mainly gold and silver bullion, for trade with China, and an average of five ships annually sailed from Lima to Canton (Majluf 2007: 54-55). The circulation of goods between Peru and China continued and even increased during the 1840s (Majluf 2007: 39).
Under these circumstances, it is likely that merchants brought the original costumbrismo artworks from Peru to Canton, where they served as models for Chinese artists. The resulting costumbrismo pith paper paintings would subsequently be taken back to Lima for the general market, or otherwise they were made by commission.
A hand-coloured engraving of a tapada included in the three-volume book Reize naar de oost- en westkust van Zuid-Amerika, en, van daar, naar de Sandwichs- en Philippijnsche eilanden, China enz. gedaan, in de jaren 1826, 1827, 1828 en 1829. Met het koopvaardijschip Wilhelmina en Maria, written by the Dutch merchant captain Jacobus Boelen (1791-1876), and published between 1835 and 1836 in Amsterdam, show that such images also circulated in Europe. The Amsterdam artist Dirk Sluyter (1790-1852) was commissioned to produce six coloured engravings of Peruvian, Indian and Chilean costumes for Boelen’s travelogue. His depiction of the tapada shows a striking resemblance to one of the Wereldmuseum paintings (RV6564-3) and a painting in the Victoria and Albert Museum (inventory number: MSL/1984/27/1-3). These images’ movements suggest that pith paper paintings and their models travelled along sea voyages worldwide in the nineteenth century.
Museum acquisition
The set of nine paintings was donated to the Wereldmuseum Leiden in 1986 by Anna Gerardina Elink Schuurman (18 August 1907-3 June 1996, fig. 5). Elink Schuurman was born in Utrecht, the eldest of five children. She studied astronomy at Utrecht University and worked as a scientific assistant at the Sonneborgh Observatory (Sterrenwacht Sonneborgh) in Utrecht after her graduation. In 1938 she became a teacher at the domestic science school (de huishoudschool) in Puntenburg. During World War II, she taught mathematics in Veendam. Later in 1945 she was appointed as a teacher of mathematics and cosmography at the Wagenings Lyceum until her retirement in 1988. She lived in Wageningen until her death at the age of 88 (Landré 1997: 5-7).
According to her nephew, E.P. Elink Schuurman, and his cousin, Nico de Ko, who was also the executor of her will at her death in 1997, Elink Schuurman had never shown any particular interest in Asia and did not own any other Asian objects. Nevertheless, she had always been a conscientious person and it follows that she would have donated these paintings (of which she herself would have known little) to an institution with the right expertise well before she passed away.
Unfortunately, the paper trail ends with Elink Schuurman, and we can only
make an educated guess as to how she acquired these paintings. All three of her brothers had connections with Indonesia, which could be a possibility for how she obtained this set of paintings. The most likely brother would be P.E. Elink Schuurman, who had an accountancy office in Bandung. Another brother was unfortunately lost in the Battle of the Java Sea (1942) and a third brother went to Indonesia after the war. A.G. Elink Schuurman herself probably never visited Asia.7
Conclusion
Tracing the imagery and materials of these paintings has revealed much about their production, making it possible to display these works in a more contextualized way in the future. These works illustrate the artistic exchange between Lima and Guangzhou and the international circulation of art in the nineteenth century.
A total of about one hundred and forty surviving costumbrismo pith paper paintings by nineteenthcentury Chinese artisans are known to be kept in public collections, mainly in the United States. The series of paintings discussed here, now in the Wereldmuseum collection, are therefore
Figure 5. Elink Schuurman at the alumni day of the department of Physics and Astronomy, Utrecht University, 13 April 1991 (Landré 1997).
valuable and provide knowledge about a new range of imagery in these paintings. In further research, comparing this series to the similar Peruvian art and the collections of pith paper paintings outside the Netherlands, will shed new light on the study of Chinese pith paper paintings.
7 Personal communication between curator Willemijn van Noord and Nico de Ko and E.P. Elink Schuurman, 1 May 2023.
Xinwu Luo MA 羅心吾 has degrees in Chinese Language and Literature, Archaeology as well as Museum Studies. The research conducted for this paper was part of her internship at the Wereldmuseum. She is interested in the connections between wider regions along the ancient Silk Roads, and the history and reception of Chinese collections (and Asian collections in general) in the Netherlands.
I would like to thank Dr. Willemijn van Noord and Karwin Cheung for helpful discussions.
Bibliography
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From Hong Kong to Leiden: Chinese type matrices in the Wereldmuseum Leiden
Yun Xie
In 2016, Ronald Steur, president of the Stichting Lettergieten, was contacted by Liesbeth Kanis, then Managing Director of Brill Asia, who was searching for Brill’s former collection of movable Chinese metal types. Brill’s aim was to secure proof of their historical engagement in Chinese printing, vital to enhance their presence in the Chinese market.
Over the next two years, Steur immersed himself in the search for these unique types (Steur 2016: 66). The breakthrough came in 2019 when Steur stumbled upon a lead in Amsterdam type foundry N. Tetterode’s corporate archives. In 1981 as N. Tetterode was preparing to move from Bilderdijkstraat to Willem de Zwijgerlaan, their director corresponded with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding the collection of Chinese matrices (matrices are integral to the creation of metal printing types). Notably, these matrices were still property of the Dutch government, who
advised that this collection should be entrusted to the Wereldmuseum Leiden. Armed with this information, Ronald Steur contacted Wereldmuseum Leiden and located the matrices of the Chinese types (RV-5123-1) in the museum’s depot (Xie 2021: 26).
These matrices epitomize the brilliance of the metal type printing era, yet they have remained shrouded in dust for 40 years in the digital age. The knowledge history they embody has also gradually faded into obscurity. This article endeavours to unearth this chapter of knowledge history, constructing a hitherto unexplored global knowledge network rooted in the creation of Chinese types.
Terminology and techniques
Johannes Gutenberg’s (1394-1468) process of making metal type revolutionized the ability to reproduce letterforms on a large scale. To understand this technique better, it’s essential to explain three key terms: punch, matrix, and type.
Firstly, a punchcutter engraved a positive letter shape onto the upper part of a durable metal rod, typically made of steel. This metal rod was then inverted and struck onto a softer metal strip, usually copper, creating a negative version of the letterform, known as a matrix. Subsequently, this
matrix was inserted into a mould, and a mixture of molten metals, commonly lead, tin, and antimony, was poured into it. The liquid metal quickly cooled and solidified, resulting in a type.
In Gutenberg’s process, the most time-consuming step is punchcutting. An experienced punchcutter can only complete one punch in approximately a day. Hence, languages based on an alphabet are best suited for this technology. However, the Chinese script, comprising characters rather than an alphabet, does not naturally align with Gutenberg’s typecasting method.
The vast number of Chinese characters presents a formidable challenge. Despite numerous historical attempts in China to introduce movable type printing, involving wooden, clay, and metal movable type, along with the production of some printed materials, a mature and cost-effective industrial process was never successfully established. Consequently, woodblock printing remained the dominant printing technique in these regions. In this approach, a skilled artisan meticulously carves an entire page of characters onto a single wooden block. Subsequently, a sheet of paper is placed over the block, and the back is lightly brushed, resulting in the reproduction of an entire page of printed text.
In the early 19th century, the arrival of the British Protestant missionary Robert Morrison (1782-1834) in China
marked the start of modern printing technology in the country. Beyond religious objectives, Protestant missionaries also engaged in publications in fields such as linguistics and science, prompting the need for suitable printing infrastructure. However, the prevailing conditions in China at the time were less than ideal for printing. Restrictive policies against missionary activities, the incompatibility of woodblock printing for combining Chinese and Latin text, and other factors compelled missionaries to seek alternative printing methods. They turned to Gutenberg’s printing technology, which had been prevalent in Europe for centuries.
Description of the collection
In this metal cabinet (fig. 1), there are approximately 10,000 matrices stored across 45 drawers. Each drawer holds 8 rows of matrices, with roughly 30 to 35 matrices in each row. These matrices are crafted from zinc, featuring copper coatings on the sections used to cast type. This copper coating is a result of the electrotyping method, a technique widely employed in the typography industry during the mid-19th century. Additionally, there are a small number of type samples and scattered matrices of various sizes, and their origins remain uncertain.
Figure 1. Metal chest containing type matrices. Ca. 1970. Wereldmuseum Leiden, RV-5123-1.
Intriguingly, the matrices are not uniform in size. Chinese characters are composed of square-shaped characters, and a single size of matrix would suffice. This discrepancy may be attributed to cost-saving measures employed by the type foundries. Considering the variations in width among Latin types, which range from slender characters like ‘I’ to
wider ones like ‘M’ and even include ligatures, it is plausible that matrices of different widths were required. As a result, foundries possibly repurposed existing Latin type material for Chinese character matrices in an effort to save resources (fig. 2).
On both the front and back surfaces of the matrix, numerical index codes are engraved, serving as a practical aid for the typesetter to quickly locate the desired matrix. Additionally, the codes on the front of the matrix relate to the codes cast on the type (fig. 3). These numbers correspond to the Chinese radical-strokes system, primarily based on the characters’ fundamental
Figure 2. Different sides of matrices. Electroplated copper coated lead alloy. Ca. 1850s. Wereldmuseum Leiden, RV-5123-1. Photo by author.
components known as ‘radicals’ (or in Chinese, bushou 部首 ), forming the basis for efficient indexing.
Historical background
Since their first voyage to Asia in 1596, the Dutch quickly recognized that collaborating with the Chinese was essential for establishing an economic foothold in the region (Blussé 2013: 32). Over time, the authorities in the Dutch East Indies came to understand
the importance of European translators proficient in the Chinese language. In the 1830s, the British Protestant missionary Walter Henry Medhurst (1796-1857) served as a translator for the Dutch colonial authorities. While the colonial government also employed Chinese interpreters, their translations of Dutch legal terminology were notably unreliable, emphasizing the crucial role that Medhurst played. Consequently, when Medhurst left for China in 1842,
Figure 3. Chinese types used by Brill. Private collection of Ronald Steur. Photo by author.
the Dutch colonial authorities realized the immediate need for dependable interpreters.
On 10 April 1849, Professor Pieter Johannes Veth (1814-1895) delivered a lecture at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Amsterdam, the precursor to the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences,
advocating for the establishment of a university chair in Chinese and Japanese studies. His reasons included the vast Chinese population, the promotion of Christianity, the fostering of global trade, and the advancement of scientific knowledge. Veth emphasized that other nations like Britain, France, and Germany had already made significant strides in Chinese studies, while the Dutch lagged behind. He also noted that the Dutch overseas territories were home to nearly half a million Chinese settlers (Veth 1849: 77-78, Kuiper 2017: 9-10).
In Japan, the Dutch settlement in Nagasaki had served as the primary
Figure 4. Portrait of Johann Joseph Hoffmann, professor of Chinese and Japanese at Leiden University. Artist: Eva de Visser, oil on Canvas. 2017. Senaatskamer at Leiden University. The Chinese type appearing in the painting is in Hong Kong Type and is from the 1867 publication of Japansche Spraakleer. Photo reproduced by courtesy of the artist.
point of contact with the West for over two centuries. Even after Japan’s forced opening in 1854, the Dutch language remained significant for commerce. In an effort to solidify the Dutch language’s prominent position, the Dutch government sought to promote the Dutch language among the Japanese, particularly interpreters, as well as promoting Japanese language studies in the Netherlands (Kuiper 2017: 588-589).
In response to the Dutch government’s pressing need for translators in Chinese and Japanese, Johann Joseph Hoffmann (1805-1878) (fig. 4), proficient in both languages (a
rarity within the European academic community), became in 1855 the inaugural professor of Chinese in the Netherlands and the first professor of Japanese in all of Europe (Kuiper 2017: 30-36). In the same year Hoffmann submitted a request for the acquisition of Chinese movable types, which were essential for the publication of Chinese and Japanese materials.
The purchasing process of Hong Kong Types
During a meeting at the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen) on 14 May 1855, Hoffmann proposed three practical suggestions for the advancement of Chinese and Japanese studies: (1) the acquisition of more Chinese works, (2) the publication of sinological works, and (3) the procurement of Chinese types in order to print the aforementioned sinological works. A committee comprising Taco Roorda (1801-1874), Anthonie Rutgers (1805-1884), and Conradus Leemans (1809-1893) assessed the plan and wholeheartedly endorsed Hoffmann’s proposal to acquire Chinese types. In their evaluation of the available type options, the Paris type and the Hong Kong Type emerged as the most favorable choices (Hoffmann et al. 1856: 56).
The Hong Kong Type represents an approach where each individual
type corresponds to a complete Chinese character. Its initial design and production were attributed to Samuel Dyer (1804-1843), a missionary of the London Missionary Society at the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca. The type had originally been created for the printing of Christian evangelical materials (Su 1996: 260). Dyer began by developing a relatively large type (size ‘double Pica,’ approximately 24 point).1 Following a suggestion from Medhurst, a fellow missionary with a background in printing, Dyer started working on a smaller size of type (size ‘three-line diamond,’ approximately 13.5 point).
After Dyer’s passing in 1843, his colleagues, the brothers Alexander Stronach and John Stronach from the Singapore Mission, continued his type-making efforts. By the time the Stronach brothers relocated to Hong Kong in 1846, the number of two-line pica size characters had expanded to approximately 4,000,
1 This article explores two different typographic measurement systems: the English-American point system and the Didot point system. Unless otherwise indicated, the type sizes mentioned in this paper are based on the English-American point system. The Didot point system was established in France at the end of the 18th century, predating the English-American system, which emerged in the 19th century. The Didot point system briefly gained popularity in the Netherlands but gradually gave way to the more international and standardized English-American point system in the late 19th century.
while the three-line diamond size remained at 400 (Su 2000: 198-201). In 1847, the arrival of Richard Cole, an experienced printer employed in Presbyterian printing facilities in Macau and Ningbo, significantly enhanced the efficiency of type-casting work (Heijdra, 2004: 114-115, Su 2014: 263). Cole further developed a ‘bourgeois’ size (approximately 9 point), smaller than its predecessors. By 1857, the combined number of characters for all three sizes, from large to small, totalled 5,584, 5,584, and 592 (Su 2014: 256-259).
The Paris type, on the other hand, is a divisible type, representing an approach where Chinese characters are broken down into components and reassembled. This method was created by Marcellin Legrand under the guidance of sinologist Pierre-Guillaume Pauthier. By 1855, Legrand had collected 9,000 divisible types capable of forming around 32,000 different Chinese characters through various combinations (Hoffmann et al. 1856: 51). While this division and recombination method allowed for the composition of a significant number of Chinese characters with a small set of metal types, it posed challenges to the calligraphic aesthetics of Chinese script. Deconstructing Chinese types into various parts and reassembling them disrupts the structure, integrity, and fluidity of characters, elements crucial to calligraphic aesthetics (Mullaney 2017: 95-96).
Initially, the committee and Hoffmann were highly intrigued by Legrand’s divisible type, mainly due to its significant reduction in the total number of types. Despite the somewhat rigid and unconventional appearance of divisible types, they offered costcontrol advantages. However, obtaining the divisible type from Paris turned out to be financially impractical. Types are consumable products that need replacement due to wear and tear. The Dutch had considered reproducing the purchased types using electroplating, but this would have sparked a copyright dispute with Legrand.
Therefore, Hoffmann proposed an alternative solution: create Chinese types in Japan, based on Legrand’s divisible type principle. He assumed that Japanese engravers, given their familiarity with Chinese characters, would have a good grasp of Chinese character aesthetics.2 In the years 1857-1858, the Dutch tried to find skilled engravers in Japan. However, their efforts failed to yield satisfactory font samples (Hoffmann et al. 1859: 89). It wasn’t until 1869 that the Japanese acquired the necessary skills for metal type production (Kornichi 2000: 165). Additionally, the cost of producing the 11 types was approximately 13 Dutch guilders
2 In Japan, the use of Chinese characters, known as kanji (in addition to two other scripts: hiragana and katakana), has deep historical roots.
(approximately 141.97 euros in 2021), a substantial expense at that time.
Hoffmann redirected his focus towards the Hong Kong Type. One of his former pupils, Carolus Franciscus Martinus de Grijs (1832-1902), then the Dutch vice Consul in Xiamen (Amoy) who at that time was devoted to the study of the Fujian dialect, agreed to send a set of fine Chinese movable types to Europe on Hoffmann’s account (Hoffmann et al. 1859: 89).
According to a letter De Grijs wrote to Hoffmann on 12 March 1858, De Grijs personally visited the Chinese printing house in the Anglo-Chinese College in Hong Kong to examine the types (De Grijs 1858).
Hoffman found the Hong Kong Types to be not only ‘very reasonably priced’ but also ‘one of the most beautiful Chinese fonts, both in terms of accuracy of form and gracefulness of execution’ (Hoffmann 1860: 5). Thus, with the help of Antonie
Wouter Pieter Kup (1829-?), the Dutch vice Consul in Hong Kong, De Grijs acquired 5375 pieces of Chinese types (only one size ‘three-line diamond’) and sent them to Europe in August 1858. The total price of this batch of types was approximately 140.25 Dutch guilders (ca. €1612.68 in 2021). Hoffmann received the types three months later.
Hong Kong Type in the Netherlands
After the Hong Kong Types arrived in the Netherlands, the initial step, as planned, was to create matrices of these types. Since only one set of each type was purchased, once matrices were produced through electrotyping, they could be used to replicate types endlessly. Ironically, one of the reasons Hoffmann did not choose the Paris types was his concern that electroplating types might lead to copyright disputes. However, there were no moral reservations when it came to replicating the Hong Kong Types.
The process of making matrices began in March 1859 at the N. Tetterode type foundry in Amsterdam. By the end of April, N. Tetterode had made 1582 matrices. Of these, 500 were ready for use, and then the first batch of types could be cast. Up to this point, Hoffmann had been personally funding the undertaking. It was not until 23 May 1859, that the Dutch government decided to back the entire project by allocating a sum of 12,046.37 Dutch guilders. This would not only cover the work that had been accomplished thus far but also support the production of matrices and types in the future (Hoffmann 1860: 7-9). All the materials were to remain the property of the state. The further production of the matrices and type stock was thus secured, and Hoffmann was entrusted
with its supervision. By 31 January 1860, the entire collection of 5503 matrices had been completed (Hoffmann 1860: 11). A catalogue of these characters was typeset, printed, and published on 23 April 1860.
Hoffmann also aimed to expand the range of Chinese characters in the Dutch collection of Chinese types. With the help of his two assistants Johan Adriaan Buddingh (1840-1870) and Willem Pieter Groeneveldt (1841-1915), Hoffmann examined the characters that appeared in the catalogue entitled Two lists of selected Chinese characters, containing all the characters which appear in the Bible and twentyseven other books, with introductory remarks by William Gamble (Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press 1861), and found that Tetterode’s type collection lacked 725 types which Gamble had deemed necessary (Hoffmann 1864: vi-vii). The missing characters were later engraved by N. Tetterode’s engraver, the Belgian Louis Carkerine, whose skill was highly appreciated by Hoffmann. The punchcutting was done under Hoffmann’s direct supervision, and he probably wrote the characters himself (Anonymous 1909: 12).
N. Tetterode offered two different corps options for the same type size, namely the 14 Didot corps point and the 16 Didot corps point.3 This means that the character size remains
unchanged, but the body of the metal types increases. Choosing a larger corps results in wider spacing between the characters.
After Hoffmann’s passing, the characters collection continued to grow under the guidance of Gustav Schlegel (1840-1903), the second professor of sinology at Leiden and a student of Hoffmann. By the early 20th century, N. Tetterode had published at least four ‘Oriental types’ specimens that included Chinese movable types (Hoffmann 1860; Hoffmann 1864; Hoffmann 1876; Anonymous 1909). In the N. Tetterode type catalogue from April 1864, a collection of 6,581 different Chinese characters was showcased. In a third edition from July 1876, this number had increased to 7,808. During the 1870s, N. Tetterode sold 7,650 Chinese types to Adolf Holzhausen (1868-1931), a Vienna-based publisher specializing in publications featuring various Asian language types (Lehner 2004: 180-181). By the time of Schlegel’s passing, the collection had grown to approximately 9,100 different types. By 1909, N. Tetterode claimed to have amassed a collection of over 10,000 Chinese types (Xie 2021: 55).
While overseeing the process of casting matrices and types at the N. Tetterode foundry, Hoffmann also dedicated a portion of his time to the printers, initially collaborating with Albertus W. Sijthoff (1829-1913) and
3 See footnote 8.
later with Brill, both publishers located in Leiden. Prior to the introduction of Hong Kong Types to the Netherlands, Sijthoff had already worked together with Hoffmann. However, in March 1875, the collaboration between Hoffmann and Sijthoff came to an end after disagreements between both parties.
Brill has a long history of interest in Chinese publications. Going back to 1864, Brill utilized Hong Kong Type to publish the Chinese Confucian canonical book The Great Learning (Daxue 大學 ) in a bilingual Chinese and Japanese edition, edited by Hoffmann and printed by Sijthoff. In 1867, Brill collaborated with Sijthoff to jointly publish Hoffmann’s Japansche Spraakleer. In 1875, when Hoffmann’s collaboration with Sijthoff ended, the Chinese types were moved from Sijthoff’s print shop to Brill for the publication of Schlegel’s Uranographie chinoise (1875) (Lehner 2004: 201). In the same year, Brill acquired the rights to use Chinese types from the Ministry of Colonial Affairs for 3,514.45 guilders (ca. €42.202 in 2021). The contract, signed on 19 April 1875, states that the matrices remained the state’s property. This was a substantial investment, but it solidified the publishing house’s monopoly position in European Chinese printing (Van der Veen 2008: 64).
Typesetting in Chinese posed unique challenges that required a solid grasp of the script. Schlegel provided
fundamental training on Chinese grammar for Brill’s initial typesetters. In 1927, Brill’s master typesetter J. P. van Duuren, affectionately known as ‘the Mikado’ due to his specialization in Far Eastern typography, shared his experience of being trained by Professor Schlegel fifty years earlier with the journalist Marie J. Brusse (1873-1941) from Rotterdam. This training lasted three months likely including a six-week foundational phase. Once these typesetters achieved proficiency, they passed on their knowledge and experience to new generations of typesetters (Van der Veen 2008: 64).
The initial intention behind introducing Chinese types was to address the communication issues related to Chinese in the Dutch East Indies. In the past, the Chinese translations of Dutch laws, regulations and ordinances were transcribed by hand, later lithographed, and then distributed to Chinese communities. However, both methods were inefficient and costly. Therefore, after 1858, when the Dutch introduced the Hong Kong font and replicated matrices, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, Charles Ferdinand Pahud (1803-1873), wrote to the Minister of Colonies, James Loudon (1824-1900), requesting Chinese fonts and the necessary facilities, along with a budget for appointing one typesetter and two pupils. Hoffmann suggested
sending an entire set of Chinese fonts to Batavia for printing any text required by the colonial authorities, without limiting it to specific purposes. The minister agreed to this proposal. On 20 May 1862, a complete set of 5,740 characters (with 50 copies of each character) was completed and sent to Batavia (Kuiper 2017: 727).
In Batavia, Chinese types were primarily used for two main purposes. The most significant one was for implementing government laws and regulations, which included both temporary policies and long-term laws. The former’s text was printed on large sheets of approximately 34 by 42 centimetres, folded in half, with no extra embellishments. The latter, on the other hand, was printed on smaller pages and bound into booklets measuring about 21 by 14 centimetres, roughly the same size as the Staatsblad (the legal and administrative publication in the Dutch East Indies) itself. From the 1880s onwards, these booklets were designed in a Chinese style, featuring a double frame (shuanglankuang 雙 欄框 ), a central margin (banxin 版心 ) with a ‘fish tail’ (yuwei 魚尾 ) and page numbers, and were bound in a Chinese fashion with double-folded pages, demonstrating a more meticulous approach. This design was evidently aimed at appealing to Chinese readers’ interests (Kuiper 2017: 728).
Another use of Chinese typefaces was for dictionaries and a few other types of books. Due to the substantial time taken by the printing of government regulations on the Chinese facilities, when Jan Francken and Carolus de Grijs’ Amoy-Dutch Dictionary was being printed in the 1870s, this work could only be carried out in the printers’ spare time, resulting in an exceedingly prolonged printing process (1864-1882) (Kuiper 2017: 729).
There were also additional uses of the Hong Kong Type. Based on my recent research findings, it has become evident that this unique typeface was employed in the design of banknotes issued by the Bank of Java since 1864. These banknotes were manufactured at the Joh. Enschedé en Zonen printing and casting facility located in Haarlem, the Netherlands. The Chinese types were supplied by N. Tetterode, with Hoffmann serving as a crucial intermediary. He facilitated cooperation between the two companies and offered valuable insights on typographic aspects.4
The use of this Chinese typeface continued until 1987 when metal types became outdated. That year, Brill’s printing division was separated from the company, after which typesetting in Chinese or Japanese has been outsourced to the Far East (Van der
4 This is the latest research outcome from my Joh. Enschedé fellowship, and I am currently in the process of writing it into a paper.
Veen 2008: 139, Hoffstädt 2013: 251). During this process, the cases containing the renowned Brill Chinese types were emptied, and the lead types were destroyed, although several printing enthusiasts were able to collect a few Chinese lead types as mementos, including the abovementioned Ronald Steur. Fortunately, the matrices of the Hong Kong Types were preserved and subsequently transferred to the Wereldmuseum Leiden, where they have remained to this day.
Hong Kong Type: Rebirth
In the Summer of 2018, Ronald Steur, while still in the process of searching for Hong Kong Type, inadvertently initiated the revival of this typeface through his correspondence with Yung Sau-mui, the Program Director of the Hong Kong Open Printshop.
As printing technology advanced, especially since the 1990s, the distinct and textured letterpress style was gradually replaced by offset printing and desktop publishing. This shift marked the end of an era in manual typesetting, as the last type casting company in Hong Kong, Yau Luen Type Foundry 友聯鑄字廠 , ceased its operations in 2002. Consequently, matrices for this unique typeface became virtually unattainable in Hong Kong (Chu 2020: 18).
However, a significant turning point occurred in 2019 when the matrices of
the Hong Kong Type were identified at the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. Subsequently, the Hong Kong Open Printshop embarked on a collaborative effort with the Stichting Lettergieten to undertake a project aimed at recasting the Hong Kong Types. In December of the same year, they secured the support of the Wereldmuseum for the recasting process (Xie 2021: 115-116).
Despite facing technical challenges and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the casting team demonstrated unwavering determination. By July 2020, they had successfully produced the first set of 73 ‘Hong Kong Type’ characters. These characters were then returned to Hong Kong and displayed in the exhibition Between the Lines: The Legends of Hong Kong Printing at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, which took place from October 2020 to February 2021.
More recently, positive news about the resurgence of the Hong Kong Type has emerged. Starting from October 2023, five newly cast Hong Kong Type lead characters 香港字傳奇 (The Legend of the Hong Kong Type, cast by Seewhy Ng Cho-yiu) has been showcased in the Rijksmuseum’s Asian Pavilion. Although this exhibit was relatively small in scale and temporary, placed alongside other cultural artifacts, it nonetheless contributes significantly to the ongoing story of the Hong Kong Type, marking a momentous step
in its recognition as a dual cultural heritage between the Netherlands and Hong Kong.
Yun Xie 谢筠 obtained her Research Master’s degree in Art History from Utrecht University in 2022. Her Master’s thesis, titled Republic of Characters: A social network centred on the Hong Kong Type, received the Tiele Thesis Award in 2022. She was also the recipient of the Brill Fellowship in 2022, the Joh. Enschedé Fellowship in 2023 and the Allard Pierson friends fellow in 2024, supporting her research on the history of non-Latin typefaces associated with the Dutch colonial era.
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Imagining South Africa through Chinese Objects
François Janse van Rensburg
In 2019, the new permanent exhibition Africa Inspires (2019-2023) opened at the Wereldmuseum Berg en Dal (fig. 1). At the time, I was working as a curator and assisted in creating the showcase on the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa during the first Dutch settlement in 1652. In addition to objects from South Africa, I chose a small painting of Table Bay (TM-1754-3) from the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam’s collection to represent a European perspective on the Cape. It was described as European in the museum’s database, and I repeated this attribution in the exhibition text. Later, I discovered the painting was not European but made in China.
I selected the painting because I wanted a European object from the colonial period depicting South Africa. In the period the Dutch controlled the Cape (1652-1806), museum practices were still in their infancy, and there was little interest in collecting ethnographic objects – at least from South Africa. Because of this, I did not have many objects to choose from. In my eagerness to use a tangible object
from a certain period, I did not stop to consider other stories that might be embodied by the painting. In my later research, I realized that previous generations of Dutch curators have also used Chinese-made objects to tell stories about South Africa, sometimes with little regard to their Chinese origins.
Contemporary practices of provenance research seek to uncover the stories that objects have accumulated, the movements of objects and their changing and sometimes conflicting meanings over time (Mooren et al. 2022: 15-17). This allows us to challenge the rigid categories that museums often impose on their collections and pose new questions
1. The South Africa showcase at the Wereldmuseum Berg en Dal. The small Chinese painting (centre) is the only object in the case not made in Africa. Photo by author, 2019.
that challenge our understanding of old objects. In this essay, I will briefly discuss the unusual trajectories of three objects that depict South Africa but were made in China. The objects are the small Chinese export painting mentioned above, as well as two pieces of Chinese export porcelain: a plate depicting Table Bay from the Rijksmuseum collection (AK-NM-13510) and a soup tureen from the Hendrik Swellengrebel service (TM-4137-1a). Instead of focusing only on their link to
Figure
South Africa, I will consider their origins as Chinese export art, the European stereotypes embedded in them, and how they have been exhibited in the Netherlands.
Colonial Cape Town on a Chinese Export Painting
Located near the southernmost tip of Africa, European ships in the 15th to 19th centuries encountered the enormous flat-topped mountain, which they (re) named Table Mountain.1 It served as an important navigational reference for passing sailors and marked the anchorage of Table Bay. At the base of the mountain, the city of Cape Town was established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652 as a refreshment post for passing ships. In time, Cape Town grew into a city and became the heart of the expanding Dutch Cape Colony until 1806 when the Cape was ceded to the British. The mountain’s unique appearance led to its frequent featuring in European colonial art as a symbol for the distant and exotic lands visited by European ships. In these depictions, the mountain was almost always shown from the viewpoint of a ship entering the port.
This is the case for the painting of Table Bay (fig. 2), which is part of
1 Table Mountain’s indigenous name is Huriǂoaxa (Hoerikwaggo) in the Khoekhoe language.
a set of 12 works (TM-1754) donated by Leonard Willem Bierens de Haan (1898-1994) in 1947.2 The series represents scenes of trading ports, coastlines, and rivers in Africa and Asia, which would have been appealing to European buyers. The depiction in the painting is typical of colonial views of Cape Town. It shows European (in this case British) ships approaching the city, dwarfed by Table Mountain. These paintings were appreciated by the museum, which restored them in 1948 and exhibited them in one of the museum’s auditoriums (Aberson 1948).
In his correspondence with the museum, the donor, L.W. Bierens de Haan (1947), speculates that the paintings, originally a set of 24 of which he owned 12, were ‘…likely [collected] in the year 1827 by my grandfather (on my mother’s side) and my greatuncle Christiaan de Haan (co-founder and first chairman of the Javasche Bank, after the 10th year of his presidency [of the bank]. [T]hey travelled to Japan together and spent some time on Deshima. It is likely that they bought [the paintings] there…presumably made by a European…?’3
Based on genealogical research, I determined that the donors he listed are most likely his great-great
2 Only 11 paintings were registered in the museum’s database. The fate of the 12th is unknown.
3 Translation author.
Figure 2. ‘Cape of Good Hope’ by an unknown Chinese painter, early 19th century, oil painting on panel, 18,5 × 24,5 cm, Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, TM-1754-3.
uncle Christiaan de Haan (1796-1889) who became chairman of the Javasche Bank in 1828 and Daniel Jacob van Ewijck van Oostbroek en de Bilt (1786-1858) who was the grandfather of Bierens de Haan’s aunt.4 As is often the case in provenance research,
4 This is inconsistent with De Haan’s own description. It is possible he may have misremembered the details, or alternatively that there is a problem with the genealogical sources or my interpretation of them. This kind of inconsistency is quite common in provenance research.
uncovering the chain of ownership of the paintings has given me little insight into who made them, nor was I able to find out anything about the collectors’ journey to Japan. I can only speculate that they may have stopped in China on the way to or from Japan, or that the paintings were purchased in Japan or Batavia, where Chinese arts and crafts were available for sale.
The donor Bierens de Haan also put the museum in contact with a distant cousin of his, Sippo Johan van Ewijck van Oostbroek en de Bilt
(1902-1979),5 a descendant of one of the collectors, Daniel Jacob van Ewijck van Oostbroek en de Bilt. Sippo Johan owned the other 12 paintings (series TM-2034) of the original set of 24. These were donated to the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam in 1952.
Like the donor, the museum did not seem to realize the 24 paintings had been made in China, and they were all classified as European instead. This remained the case until the art historian Rosalien van der Poel identified these and other paintings in Dutch museums as examples of Chinese export art (Poel 2016). However, the description as European is not entirely incorrect. It does depict a European view of South Africa. The Chinese makers knew exactly what kind of paintings (and other products) Europeans were interested in buying. First, the view on Table Bay, like the other works in the two series, is an oil painting. At the time, China had no tradition of working with oil. Artists in Canton had learned how to paint with oil in European style specifically for European clients (Poel 2016: 95). Second, the compositions were based on images which were already popular in Europe.
The image of Table Mountain depicted in the painting is not an original work, but is copied from a print in a series published by the English
landscape painters Thomas and William Daniell in 1810. The series was based on sketches they made during their travels to Asia in the period 1785-1794 (Daniell & Daniell 1810). Influenced by changing tastes in the European art market, the Daniells specialized in producing romanticized images of exotic locales such as Egypt, India, and East Asia. Their works enjoyed lasting popularity and were influential in shaping the British (and European) public’s view of Asia (Archer 1980: 7-11, 233).
At some point, these prints must have ended up in a studio in Canton (Guangzhou) and formed the basis for this and other Chinese export paintings, several of which ended up in Dutch collections (Poel 2016: 14, 24, 119).
Out of the 23 surviving paintings in the set of 24, all but 3 are identical copies of prints found in the Daniell’s book A Picturesque Voyage to India by Way of China (Daniell & Daniell 1810).
The Trader’s Gaze and Chinese Export Porcelain
5 Coincidentally, he lived in Cape Town, having moved there in his youth.
Many of the Chinese export paintings identified by Rosalien van der Poel, including all the paintings in the series TM-1754 and TM-2034, depict locations related to overseas trade. These kinds of images are also found on some types of Chinese export porcelain. In the collection of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, there are (by my count) 9 different pieces of Chinese porcelain
depicting Table Bay.6 The images on export products like these, whether a copy of a European image or an original design by a Chinese artist, were created to appeal to a European ‘trader’s gaze’, featuring exotic or romantic images of China and other parts of the world, rather than depicting reality. The most successful of these images were massproduced (Poel 2016: 47, 50). Why were these images so popular? In recent decades, there has been a growing understanding in art history that no art produced in the colonial
Figure 3. Plate with Dutch ships anchored in Table Bay, ca. 1750-1774, porcelain, 22,9 × 2,5 cm, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, AK-NM-13510. Photo by Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
period can be separated from the history of European imperialism (Barringer, 2018). The images of Cape Town are not innocent decorations but represent the worldview of the buyers. As I have discussed earlier, 17th to 19th century depictions of Cape Town often featured scenes of ships in Table Bay, with Table Mountain overshadowing the scene. These scenes are not restricted to paintings and drawings but may be found in other media, such as a porcelain plate in the collection of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (AK-NM-13510) (fig. 3).
Like the painting, this porcelain plate represents a seemingly idyllic
landscape. But for whom are these scenes so idyllic, and why?
Consider the plate’s materiality. It was likely made in Jingdezhen out of porcelain, a luxurious material at the time. The enamel decorations were painted on top of the glaze, probably in Canton. The plate is presumably ornamental, as eating off it would have damaged the overglaze decoration. So, this plate was probably made for display, maybe on a wall or in a display cabinet.7
The depiction of Table Bay on this plate is common. It is one of the most common harbor scenes on Chinese export porcelain (Lunsingh Scheurleer 1989: 222-224, 246). On the plate, we see Dutch flags illustrating (like the British flags on the oil painting), the fact that the city is ruled by European empires. On both the painting and the plate, ships in the harbour speak of the wealth and power of European trade, while the buildings in the background show a bustling and growing port city. The people who would have bought and displayed these objects were the wealthy elites of European colonial empires – the kind of people benefiting from the colonial trade depicted on these objects.
7 This kind of display is visible in the elaborate 17th or 18th century doll house (BK-NM-1010) in the collection of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. The doll house depicts a wealthy Dutch house, which has an entire room nearly filled with porcelain.
Expensive items like these, allowed people to showcase their wealth, as well as present a sanitized view of the origins of that wealth.
Unpacking these images reveals a colonial worldview where Dutch or British dominance of the Cape is taken for granted and considered a normal and desirable state. What is not depicted in these works are the indigenous people of South Africa; the violence committed against them by Europeans; the enslaved people from Africa and Asia carried on European ships or working on European plantations; or the atrocities committed to acquire and control land and valuable trade goods. Implicit in these images is a worldview that sees Europe dominating global trade and establishing outposts and colonies across the world. It is not surprising then that these images would be appealing to European buyers.
Exhibiting South Africa through Chinese Objects
The Netherlands lost control of the Cape Colony in 1806 following its conquest by the British. This transition is visible on the two objects discussed above: the porcelain plate is from the Dutch period, hence the Dutch flags, and the oil painting from the British period, hence the British flags. The loss of the Cape weakened the ties between the Netherlands and South Africa, even
though there were still many people of Dutch descent living there. As a result, the Dutch public largely lost interest in the Cape during the 19th century (Holtrop 2017), contributing to the relative scarcity of colonial objects from South Africa in Dutch museum collections.
Although the Netherlands remained a colonial empire controlling places such as Indonesia and Suriname, following the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), the Belgian Revolution (1830-1831), and German Unification (1866-1871), the country was no longer the pre-eminent world power it had been in the 17th century. From the Dutch perspective, the Netherlands was reduced to being a small country, economically backwards compared to its neighbours, and at risk of being swallowed up by larger European empires such as France and Germany, as it had been under Napoleon.
During the late 19th century, Dutch nationalist narratives began to push back against the feeling of national smallness by emphasizing the concept of a Greater Netherlands. In this narrative, the Dutch-speaking Boers in South Africa – descendants of the Dutch Cape Colony – were seen as stamverwanten or kinsfolk of the Dutch people (Kuitenbrouwer 2017). As a result, there was an explosion of Dutch public interest in the topic of South Africa, especially during the South African War (1899-1902). Dutch
fascination with South Africa was reflected in the numerous South African exhibitions held in the Netherlands in the early to mid-20th century.8
In 1952, celebrations and exhibitions were held across South Africa and the Netherlands to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the establishment of the first Dutch settlement at the Cape (Henkes 2017: 278-291). This must have posed a challenge to curators in the Netherlands; relatively few objects from the Dutch Cape Colony existed in Dutch collections. In searching for objects to exhibit, some pieces in various displays in the Netherlands were chosen despite dubious provenance9 or with only a tenuous connection to the Cape. In the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, the anniversary was commemorated in the exhibition Zuid-Afrika 300 jaar (Henkes 2017: 290). Looking at photos of the exhibition,10 the lack of historic objects connected to the Dutch Cape Colony is apparent (fig. 4). Most of the historical objects on display were maps and archival documents. Among the only tangible objects were several
8
I wrote an article related to this topic: ‘Model ox-wagon: Prisoner of War Art and pro-Boer propaganda’ in Provenance #1 (Janse van Rensburg 2020).
9 This included the portrait and staff of Jan van Riebeeck (1619-1677), the founder of the Dutch Cape Colony, neither of which turned out to have a link to him (Janse van Rensburg 2017).
10 I am unsure if a catalogue was made for this exhibition, therefore I used photos to determine which objects were displayed.
Figure 4. The painting of Table Bay exhibited at Zuid-Afrika 300 jaar. The porcelain teapot (right) is probably also Chinese. Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, TM-10035848.
Chinese export items, including the porcelain plate and oil painting discussed above. The museum would have known the porcelain was from China, though here they emphasized the link to South Africa. The museum was not aware of the painting’s Chinese origins.
In addition to these pieces, one other group of Chinese objects has frequently been used in exhibitions about South Africa: the Swellengrebel service (fig. 5). In 1963-1964, the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam held an exhibition Wonen in de Wijde Wereld on the former Dutch Colonial Empire. Among the items chosen to represent South Africa was a soup tureen (TM-4137-1a) that had once
belonged to Hendrik Swellengrebel who was governor of the Dutch Cape Colony between 1739-1751 (Stichting Cultuurgeschiedenis van de Nederlanders Overzee 1964: cat. no. 228). The soup tureen is a long-term loan to the museum, initiated by one of Swellengrebel’s descendants. Though the museum knew it was an example of Chinese porcelain, it emphasized the tureen’s links to South Africa to the point of putting the object in the Africa department.
Hendrik Swellengrebel (1700-1760) was born in the Cape Colony and was of Russian descent.11 The Swellengrebel
11 He was the only governor of the Dutch Cape Colony who had been born there.
Figure 5. A Soup Terrine from the Swellengrebel service, ca. 1750, porcelain, Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, TM-4137-1a.
service, bought near the end of his term as governor, is an example of Chinese armorial porcelain made to order. Remarkably, it is the only set of Dutch family armorial porcelain for which a bill of sale survives (Badenhorst 2017: cat no. 6,10). Swellengrebel would have ordered this 106-piece porcelain dinner service based on illustrations in a Dutch catalogue. A drawing of his family crest would have been mailed to Dutch traders who acted as intermediaries between European buyers and Chinese porcelain factories, based in places like Jingdezhen. A crest would have been added to the porcelain, and then exported via Canton to Cape Town (Van Campen 2007: 32).12 The bill of sale, dated 9 May 1751, reveals
the exorbitant price of 90 Spanish dollars, a small fortune at the time. Very few people could afford such luxuries, signifying Swellengrebel’s trajectory from his humble origins to his entry into the elite of Dutch society (Badenhorst 2017; Lunsingh Scheurleer 1989: 163). After retiring from his position as governor in 1751, he moved to the Netherlands.
Other than the identity of its owner, there is very little linking the porcelain service to South Africa. The set arrived in Cape Town after Swellengrebel had moved to the Netherlands and was forwarded to him. It was probably never used in South Africa. Despite this tenuous connection to South Africa, part of the service was again exhibited at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam in the Depotopstelling Zuid-Afrika from 2001-2006.13 A related piece was exhibited at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam during the 2017 exhibition Good Hope: South Africa and the Netherlands since 1600 (Badenhorst 2017: cat no. 6,10).14 At this exhibition, the object’s links to
12 The crests might have been added in Jingdezhen when it was made or later in Canton before export (Tang 2018).
13 Wonen in de Wijde Wereld (1963-1964) and Depotopstelling Zuid-Afrika (2001-2006). There may have been other exhibition moments or times it was on loan to other museums.
14 Other surviving pieces of export China from the Swellengrebel family (not all originating from Hendrik Swellengrebel) are found in the collections of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. These are AK-RBK-1971-13, which appears to be part of the same service, and series AK-RAK-2005-1 which is a different service.
China were more fully explored than they had been in previous exhibitions. More recently, other parts of the Swellengrebel service have appeared for sale at an antiquities dealer, here both the links to China and Cape Town were emphasized (Zebregs & Rōell n.d).
Conclusion
All the objects discussed in this article were made in China but used in different times and places to imagine South Africa. It is curious that their link to South Africa so dominated these objects’ narratives to the point where their connection to China was pushed to the margins or even in some cases forgotten.
In the 20th century, the objects were reinterpreted as historical artefacts of the colonial era. These items, with their exotic appeal, were seen as remnants of a bygone era when countries like the Netherlands were major world powers. Exhibiting these items in the Netherlands allowed visitors to indulge in a romanticized version of their history, which placed the Netherlands in the centre of global affairs. In the case of South Africa, the relative scarcity of South African objects in colonial collections meant that Chinese export products often took centre stage in exhibitions, carrying the story of Dutch settlement in South Africa despite the objects’ often tenuous links to that place.
More recently, objects like these are used to reflect on the ongoing harms of European colonialism. In the Wereldmuseum Berg en Dal, the South African display focused on the indigenous Khoekhoe people, who suffered greatly at the hands of European settlers. Once again, the relative lack of South African objects from colonial South Africa means that Chinese objects, such as the painting or parts of the Swellengrebel service have been used to reflect on South Africa’s colonial past. There is nothing wrong with this practice, provided that museums seek to understand and explain the complex histories of these objects, which include their Chinese origins.
With this in mind, I have examined colonial era objects from diverse perspectives: their Chinese origin, their European buyers, the images of South Africa depicted on them, and the way they were exhibited. Taking all these stories together provides a more nuanced view of an object’s ever-changing meanings. They illustrate the movement of objects, people, and images through global trade networks across the oceans and across time. They remind us that there is no such thing as a bidirectional relationship, such as between the Netherlands and South Africa or the Netherlands and China. Instead, these objects are entangled in a global history that links the Netherlands, South Africa, China and
other parts of the world. This certainly complicates provenance research, but it also makes it much more interesting.
François Janse van Rensburg is a museum researcher based in the Netherlands. From 2018-2021, he worked as the junior curator for Southern Africa at the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen. At the time of writing, he worked as a Provenance Researcher based at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as part of the NWO-funded project Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value, and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums. This article was written as part of the project.
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The blue terrestrial map of China in the Wereldmuseum Leiden
Richard A. Pegg
A copy of the map titled Da Qing wannian yitong dili quantu 大清萬年一統地理全圖 (Complete map of the geography of the everlasting, unified Great Qing), part of a popular series of maps produced in the first decades of the 19th century, is in the Wereldmuseum Leiden collections (fig. 1).1 The map was printed in eight sheets from woodblocks using Prussian blue ink (Pegg & Papelitzky 2023: 190-1). Originally this map was half of a pair of large format maps, one terrestrial and one celestial, produced in the city of Suzhou, China.
1 The map was brought to my attention in 2018 by Radu Leca, a then postdoc working on a cataloging project of the Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866) collections. During the summer of 2019, I visited the Wereldmuseum in person to view the map. It was during that in depth viewing that I was inspired, and I asked my colleague Elke Papelitzky, also present at the viewing, if she would like to write a book about the blue maps of China. And so, it was from the rediscovery of this particular map that a book project was born whilst standing in storage at the Wereldmuseum.
Figure 1. Complete map of the geography of the everlasting, unified Great Qing , 1812-1825, China, pigment on paper, 132 × 227 cm. Wereldmuseum Leiden, RV-1-4306.
The celestial chart was entitled Huntian yitong xingxiang quantu 渾天壹 統星象全圖 (Complete Chart of Unified Star Configurations in the Heavenly Sphere). The blue celestial charts provide linkages between heaven, earth and man, furnishing tools for correlating celestial phenomena to earthly phenomena.
The terrestrial map participates in a long lineage of map making in China. The Qing empire had vastly expanded its size in the 17th and 18th centuries and the Qing court commissioned a map by Huang Qianren (1694-1771) in 1767 titled Da Qing wannian yitong tianxia quantu to show that expansion. The inscription on the blue terrestrial map cites Huang Qianren’s map and further claims that Huang himself used a map made in 1673 by his grandfather Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 (1610-1695) to make his own map. And it is within this lineage that the blue maps participate.
The blue pair was modelled on the Dili tu 墬理圖 (Geographical map) and Tianwen tu 天文圖 (Map of heavenly patterns) created by the Song dynasty court scholar Huang Shang 黃裳 (1146-1194) in the 1190s, which were subsequently engraved on stone in 1247 by Wang Zhiyuan 王致远 (1193-1257).2 Huang’s two maps were meant to be combined to present ideal
2 Those two map steles still exist today at the Confucian Temple in Suzhou with countless rubbings having been made from them over the subsequent centuries.
cosmological models for the young, future Ningzong Emperor (r. 1194-1224) on good governance and as a gentle protest/reminder that northern China had been under Jurchen, a northern nomadic people who would later be renamed Manchu, rule for more than seventy years. Combined, as they were intended, the blue terrestrial map and blue celestial chart also present an idealized cosmological vision for the Manchu-ruled Qing empire.
Ten different editions of the blue terrestrial map have been identified thus far, created during the reigns of the Jiaqing (1796-1820) and Daoguang (1820-50) emperors from 1812 to 1825, with seven other known undated prints (Pegg & Papekitzky 2023: 187).3 The production, function and consumption of the blue maps make them unique in the global history of mapmaking.
Production and Mounting
The production of this map was unusual on several counts including printing process, use of blue colourant and paper. Although printed from woodblocks, the prints were made in the manner of rubbings from stone steles. The carving into vertical stone slabs of historically important writings in a variety of scripts and image types
3 This edition is type F as categorized by Pegg & Papelitzky (2023). The other seven are in Library of Congress (G7820 1816 .D3) and in various private collections.
(including maps) is an age-old practice in China. Later, rubbings, relatively easy to transport and collect, would be made from these stone steles. Rubbings were an essential component of longestablished epigraphic study and associated collecting practices, as well as specific calligraphic practices.
The rubbing process made the toponym characters along with the highlighted natural and manmade elements stand in the pure white of the paper against the blue ground on the blue maps. To make a rubbing from an engraved stone stele, slightly moistened paper would be fixed on a prepared, flattened then carved away, stone slab. The moist paper would be manipulated using brushes and pointed sticks, pressing the paper into the recessed areas of the carved stone. An inked (typically in black) dauber (fabric over cotton wadding) would be tamped down onto the paper-covered stone. The ink would adhere to the ‘raised’ paper making the areas of carved away stone appear in white.
This contrasts to the typical manner of woodblock printing where a negative image is carved in relief into the block, the block is then inked and the paper pressed onto the inked block with the ink remaining on the paper, making for a positive image on the paper. Using the rubbing production model is highly unusual in map making practices in China and likely was the result of intentional aesthetic and
historical considerations on the part of the makers.
Although the first edition of this map was produced from stone, all subsequent editions, including this one, were produced with woodblocks (Pegg & Papelitzky 2023: 187). The switch from stone to woodblock, points to the ease of making small changes (in title, studio names, dates and so forth) found between the numerous editions that cannot be accomplished when using stone (Pegg & Papelitzky 2023: 187-188).
The carving of the blocks for this print was quite sharp indicating an early print from the newly carved blocks. In addition, it was carefully prepped and inked making for an extremely fine print. Also keep in mind, as the ink was applied by hand, every print is unique to itself in that regard.
The blue map makers printed using Prussian blue ink, the first large scale use of this colourant in East Asia (Pegg & Papelitzky 2023: 195-196).4 Prussian blue, a ferric (iron) hexacyanoferrate, was first synthesized accidentally in Berlin by Johann Jacob Diesbach (ca. 1670-1748), a Swiss painter and colourmaker, in 1706. It was imported to Japan through the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the 1770s and
4 Although not yet tested, it is assumed the Wereldmuseum’s print uses Prussian blue ink. Other prints of these maps have been scientifically tested to confirm the use of this pigment.
arrived in China through the British East India Company in the 1790s. It seems that production began at scale in Canton, China, by the second decade of the 19th century when the blue maps were made. This availability made production of the blue maps cost effective and possible. The specific reason blue was chosen for these maps is still unknown, but it was likely the availability of the new colourant and an intentional aesthetic choice.
There were generally two hues of Prussian blue used in the printing process of these maps to differentiate between land masses in dark ink and patterned water in a lighter tone of ink. This copy also has a maroon ink highlight, likely an iron or potassiumoxide based colourant, added using a brush in the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts with their distinctive ‘desert dot’ pattern. A number of these blue maps have small, customized colour additions or variations, likely according to the preferences of the owners of the maps (Pegg & Papelitzky 2023: 191-3).5 The paper normally used for these prints was not the typical lianshi 連史 paper used for rubbings nor the high-end xuan 宣 paper used for painting and calligraphy but something in between, a
low grade xuan paper, another unusual choice (Papelitzky forthcoming).6
The relatively inexpensive production costs for ink and paper no doubt contributed to the popularity, wide distribution and availability of the blue maps. A variety of mounting practices were used satisfying a broad range of tastes and budgets. The original eight sheets, intended to be mounted as eight vertical hanging scrolls (the usual practice for mounting and displaying Chinese paintings and calligraphy), were distributed as loose sheets (Pegg & Papelitzky 2023: 193).
The maps were quite popular, given the many extant prints, and soon made their way to Japan where they were mounted in a range of formats, including hanging scrolls, folding screens (byōbu 屏風 ), sliding doors (fusuma 襖 ) and folded sheet maps. The immediate attraction to Japanese audiences was likely because of the aesthetics – as they are beautiful and impressive – and because they were a novelty from China. These different mounting formats also changed how the maps functioned and were viewed. Hanging scrolls were occasional wall presentations to be easily viewed in their entirety. The fusuma and byōbu were architectural (permanent or semipermanent) becoming more decorative in their function.
5 Similar maroon colourant was examined on a print in the Harvard-Yenching Library and a private collection in Japan.
6 The paper of this print has not yet been tested and so it is assumed to be the same type of paper as found in other examples.
Figure 2. Detail of the bottom left edge of the map.
The folded sheet map was to be placed on the floor, which meant it could not be viewed in its entirety from any single point but was convenient to store. This print was mounted in Japan as a bound-with-covers folded sheet map.7 When assembling the eight sheets and aligning them with the map content to make a single large sheet, the Japanese mount maker apparently discovered the sheets did not form a perfect rectangle and so the mount maker corrected this by trimming the
7 Of the extant prints, it appears that many were mounted in Japan. Another print also bound in the same manner as the Wereldmuseum’s print can be found in the Harvard-Yenching Library (T 3080.8 4831), a map acquired from Japan in the 1950s.
map. The mounter cut a long, thin triangular strip from the lower left edge and applied it along the bottom edge to make that corner a true right angle (fig. 2).
The front cover of this map is made of paper board wrapped in a pale blue paper with a printed pattern of scrolling vines and a stylized flower-lozenge pattern known as hanabishi 花菱 in Japanese. It has a bilingual manuscript title slip written in a metallic pigment (likely powdered brass) displaying the map’s title in large Chinese characters flanked on the right by small Japanese phonetic script (katakana) to indicate the pronunciation in Japanese (fig. 3).
Content
All editions of the blue terrestrial maps display the territory of the Qing empire and surrounding regions stretched over eight sheets of paper. The Qing dynasty (1644-1911) was founded in the 17th century by the nomadic Manchu peoples from northeastern Asia.8 The blue terrestrial maps were created in the city of Suzhou. These terrestrial maps present an idealized administrative map that is not to scale (as found in Euro-American maps of the period) but is nonetheless very accurate in the types of prioritized administrative information presented. Numerous types of information are combined in this map, including geophysical and man-made compositional elements that create structure along with encoded toponyms and text blocks that demarcate the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ administrative spheres of the Qing empire. The geo-physical details generally run east-west like the two primary rivers of China, The Yellow River in the north and the Yangzi River in the South or the dot-patterned Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts (fig. 1). Oceans surround more than half the periphery of the presented Euro-Asian continent. There are man-made details like the
Figure 3. Blue paper cover of the map with bilingual label.
Great Wall of China and the Willow Palisade (liutiaobian 柳條邊 ).9
The bulk of the information is textual presenting the Qing empire’s ‘inner’ territory and the ‘outer’ regions the Qing had direct, official relations with. The introduction on the lower right of the map mentions a variety
8 The Qing dynasty was first proclaimed in 1636 in Mukden (Shenyang), but seized control of Beijing in 1644, which is considered the start of the dynasty’s rule.
9 The lesser-known Willow Palisade in Manchuria was created to separate Han Chinese, Mongolians, and Manchus in the region and to restrict illicit trade of ginseng, furs, pearls, and deer antlers. Constructed from probably 1648 onwards, the palisade stretched over roughly nine hundred fifty miles in length, with twenty gates, of which eighteen are depicted on the blue maps. The Willow Palisade was never designed as a military defence line but functioned as fixed ethno-political lines demarcating a border that can be found visually on numerous eighteenth and nineteenth century Chinese and Korean maps of the region.
Figure 4. Detail, Beijing (large rectangle in centre) and differing surrounding encoded administrative toponyms.
of administrative units (listed in descending order of population density and bureaucratic importance like prefectures, sub-prefectures, counties, and so forth) that are each demarcated with a geometric shape (fig. 4). These shapes (and their imbedded toponyms) are intentionally presented generally and relationally with no regard to scale.
The use of geometric shapes in association with toponyms, by surrounding them, and administration is a characteristic of a particular typology of Chinese mapmaking that visually links places with the people of those places.
By encoding administrative units with a geometric shape and thus visually prioritizing administration, the
people living in each administrative unit become important, as does the relation of each toponym with the surrounding ones in an administrative hierarchy of the entire empire in a uniquely Chinesebased familial social structure. By using toponyms that are encoded to reflect the humanity (administrative bodies) of all ‘inner’ places in the empire, this type of map presents, visually and quite accurately, the tax base, as well as communication and postal systems for maintaining and understanding the entire empire in a single glance and thus conceptually manifests a harmonious and just empire.
The ‘outer’ sphere of the blue maps consists of a range of non-Qing entities, including Russia, India, Thailand,
Figure 5. Outer ring of non-Qing entities with official relations and affiliations to the Qing empire including, Europe and Holland.
Vietnam, Japan, and Korea, as text blocks in visually unbounded spaces generally in a ring around, and not too sharply defining, Qing space (fig. 5).
For the outer sphere, the map’s text blocks repeatedly include terms like ‘bringing tribute’ (chaogong 朝 貢 ) to define the relationship between the Qing empire and the non-Qing regions. This does not mean the blue maps present what has been called the ‘tribute system,’ a system of international relations that entailed a constant and regular presentation of emissaries and gifts. The theoretical framework of the ‘tribute system’ has been criticized, among other
things, as being overly unilateral and simplistic, ignoring its complexities.
Understanding the relationships the Qing had with other states as a ‘tribute system,’ a hierarchy (with the Chinese states at the top) beneficial to only the Qing (as the term might imply), minimizes the multilateral matrix that existed between the various states that was ultimately mutually beneficial (Hevia 2010, Sarasin 2014, and Wang 2018). On these maps, and on other documents from the Qing, terms like ‘bringing tribute’ reflect official relations and affiliations between the Qing empire and the ‘tribute bringing’ country, using a vocabulary from the
point of view of the Chinese state. On the blue maps this vocabulary is used to distinguish between the inner (Qing) and outer (non-Qing) spheres.
The outer sphere affiliations were governed by the Ministry of Rites (Libu 禮部 ). The Qing state preferred to segment and localize its external relations through ranked local administrators to monitor foreign entities and provide a direct and trusted conduit for intelligence to Beijing from the frontier. The Ministry of Rites regulated that officials from each country had to use a specific city to enter the Qing empire. Only Joseon Korea was given special privilege and communicated with no intermediary body but directly with the Ministry of Rites in Beijing. Russia was however not governed by the Ministry of Rites but by the Court for Ruling the Outer Provinces (Lifan yuan 理藩院 ).
Between the inner and outer spheres is a third sphere that includes textual elements of both the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ spheres, made up mostly of the regions conquered and integrated into the Qing empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and southwest China, which (except for Taiwan) were administered by the Court for Ruling the Outer Provinces. On the blue maps, these regions include both administrative units encoded by shape as well as short text block annotations, similar to those for the non-Qing
regions, emphasizing their hybrid, fluid and in-between nature.
The most spatially and politically distant relationships are found in the small maritime region shown in the upper left corner of the blue maps (fig. 5). Several toponyms and several islands partly connected to the western European world are named. Two of these specify oceanic space: The Great Western Ocean (Da Xiyang 大西洋 ), and the Small Western Ocean (Xiao Xiyang 小西洋 ). The understanding of the exact location of the ‘Western Ocean’ underwent several changes throughout the centuries, but by the seventeenth, the Small Western Ocean generally referred to the Indian Ocean and the Great Western Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. Other islands simply labeled with their name include England (Yingguili 英圭黎 ) and France (as Helanxi 和蘭西 instead of the usual Fulanxi 佛 蘭西 ). Spain is mentioned as Castille (Gansila 干絲臘 ), which is said to be ‘the ancestral land (zuguo 祖國 ) of Luzon’ in the Philippines (Spanish galleons had been going to Manila on the Island of Luzon since the 1570s). The island with the most extensive description is labeled as Holland (Helanguo 荷蘭 國 , fig. 5). The inscription reads: ‘The country of Holland is in the northern part of the Western Sea. According to the book Zhengzhi dianxun 政治典 訓 , a Dutch envoy said that Yiguo 伊 國 and Russia share a border and their languages are the same’. This is a rather
strange inscription compared to others on the maps, as it is only marginally connected to the Dutch.10
The frontiers depicted in these maps were not meant to be understood as sites of separation but sites of relationality acting as bridges connecting people, things and ideas. The non-Qing affiliate participants are abstracted into text blocks and presented as part of an imperial geography. These non-Qing entities also act like the encoded toponyms of the inner sphere as participants of a Chinese familial social structure acting as agents in the macro-scale frameworks of the realm, presenting a harmonious hierarchy with the Qing at the centre.
Von Siebold connection
This map was brought from Japan to the Netherlands in 1830 by Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866), a German doctor appointed by the Dutch government to serve as physician at the Dutch trading post of Deshima in Nagasaki harbour. Von Siebold arrived in 1823 and was forced to leave Japan at the end of 1829; Japanese authorities discovered he
10 The Zhengzhi dianxun was a political handbook produced during the Kangxi period (1661-1722). Other sources repeat the anecdote mentioned on the blue maps in very similar words. The location of Yiguo is unclear.
had obtained maps (a criminal act) of the ‘northern territories’, then not yet part of Japan. In fact, Von Siebold collected many maps for his studies of Japan and surrounding countries and regions. Most of these are now kept in the Special Collections of the Leiden University Library, although a handful form part of the ethnographic sections of Von Siebold’s collection kept at Wereldmuseum Leiden. This ethnographic collection covers the full breadth of Japanese material culture, and encompasses some 700 paintings, of which around half are mounted as scrolls. Some of the paintings Von Siebold brought back are mounted with identical pale blue decorative paper found on the front and back covers of the blue map. These all have the same scrolling vines and flowerdiamond pattern on the paper. The decorated paper was reminiscent of (and a cheaper alternative to) woven silk with similar decorative patterns that was typically used to mount hanging scroll paintings within Japan.
The use of the same mounting papers implies that the blue map and the paintings were mounted in the same place at the same time using the same materials and the same
mounter.11 Daan Kok, curator for East Asia of the Wereldmuseum, concludes that these paintings were all mounted in Nagasaki, since several paintings by Nagasaki-based painters in the Von Siebold collection feature the same decorative paper mounts. This means, in turn, that Von Siebold brought unmounted paintings by Edo-based artists such as Utagawa Kunitsugu to this same mounter in Nagasaki; he most likely acquired these paintings, either through purchase or gift, during his trip to the shogun’s court in Edo, in 1826.
Dutch officials staying at the island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbour, like the local Japanese officials, typically stayed just over one year and then returned to Batavia. The Dutch ships arrived yearly from Batavia in midAugust and returned from the end of October on the northern monsoon. Every spring, a small delegation of officials had to travel to Edo in a large and costly procession for an audience with the shogun, to bring gifts and international information, and consolidate trade relations. After 1790,
the frequency was lowered to once every four years. Von Siebold – in his official capacity as physician – travelled to Edo just once, in 1826. For him, this was the only time any direct official cultural, diplomatic or economic ‘exchange’ took place between Europeans and the capital in Edo. Given the identical paper mounts, it was most probably after that trip and before or during 1828-when he was placed under house arrest over the illegal maps –that Von Siebold commissioned the mounting of the blue map and a group of paintings in Nagasaki.
In closing
11 Although the use of relatively inexpensive paper mounts was typical for maps, the use of an inexpensive paper to mount expensive high-end paintings by artists like Utagawa Kunitsugu (1800-1861) and (pupils of) Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) would not be consistent with Japanese taste, confirming Von Siebold was the one to commission the mountings. There are also a number of unmounted paintings in Von Siebold’s collection.
The blue maps production model is quite unique. The rubbing method of printing on this scale is quite unusual while the use of Prussian blue pigment represents the first large scale use in all East Asia. In addition, this print of the blue terrestrial map brought to Holland by Von Siebold is historically important for numerous reasons. It confirms the appearance of the blue maps in Japan almost immediately after their production in China. It confirms that the maps left China and were sold as loose unmounted sheets in Japan, as Von Siebold had it mounted himself. It provides fixed dates, in a very narrow window between 1826-1828, when the eight sheets were mounted in Nagasaki, Japan. It is one of two known copies mounted in the bound-with-covers
sheet map format. It participates in a unique set of mounting aesthetics that combine Japanese materials, the use of blue patterned papers as chosen by a European patron, for mounting the map and a group of paintings. In addition, the mounter himself trimmed one corner to square up another corner, so that all the right angles were true. As one of three known copies it was also customized, using maroon pigment in the deserts. However, we do not know when that was done nor whether the other two still are in Japan. Every copy of the blue maps is unique as they are all hand inked. It is truly remarkable that the blue terrestrial map in the Wereldmuseum Leiden reveals so much about the post-production journey, from China to Japan to Leiden.
Richard A. Pegg is currently Director and Curator of Asian Art for the MacLean Collection, an Asian art museum and separate map library located north of Chicago Illinois. His relationship with the blue maps began in 2007 when he acquired a copy of the terrestrial map for the MacLean Collection. He published his first thoughts on the topic in Cartographic Traditions in East Asian Maps (2014) and will publish his updated thoughts on the topic in the forthcoming Correlating Heaven and Earth: The Blue Maps of China.
Bibliography
Hevia, James L. 2010. ‘Tribute, asymmetry, and imperial formations: Rethinking relations of power in East Asia.’ in Past and Present in China’s foreign policy. From ‘tribute system’ to ‘peaceful rise’, John E. Wills (ed.), 61-76. Portland, Maine: Merwin Asia.
Pegg, Richard A. 2014. Cartographic Traditions in East Asian Maps. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press and MacLean Collection.
Pegg, Richard A. & Elke Papelitzky. 2023.
‘The Blue Maps of China: Considerations of Materiality and Function in China and Japan’, in Maps and Colours, Diana Lange & Benjamin Van der Linde, 184-98. Leiden: Brill.
Pegg, Richard A. & Elke Papelitzky forthcoming Correlating Heaven and Earth: The Blue Maps of China
Viraphol, Sarasin. 2014. Tribute and Profit: SinoSiamese Trade 1652-1853. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wang, Yuanchong. 2018. Remaking the Chinese Empire: Manchu-Korean Relations, 1616-1911. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Art and politics: prints and paintings from Rongbaozhai, 1950s-1960s
Pao-Yi Yang
Rongbaozhai 榮寶齋 (the Studio of Glorious Treasures) was established in 1672 in Beijing’s Liulichang 琉璃廠 , a street famous for its stationery and antique shops since the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Initially the shop sold paper and ink, but it expanded its activities in the 19th century to the art trade and woodblock printing (Zheng 2019: 6-13). The Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s almost meant the end for the centuriesold store. After the war, the studio became a joint state-private enterprise in 1950 and a fully state-owned enterprise in 1952. In 1956, the Chinese government designated Rongbaozhai as a Foreign-Related Unit 涉外單位 (a government unit dealing with foreign affairs), where foreign visitors could view the printing workshop and buy artworks (Qian 2023: 325). During the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, the studio’s woodblock prints were made specifically for export and presented by the
Chinese government to foreign guests as a form of soft power.1
Today, the Wereldmuseum Leiden and the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam hold over 400 objects that were either acquired from, gifted by, or produced by Rongbaozhai. The collection contains woodblock prints of classic and modern Chinese paintings; printing blocks and carving tools; genuine Chinese paintings and calligraphies; and communist propaganda prints. The quantity and variety of the works kept in the Wereldmuseum make its Rongbaozhai collection one of the most representative outside of China.
Thanks to funding from the Vereniging Rembrandt and its KroeseDuijsters Fund, I was able to research this collection and the history of Rongbaozhai in the spring of 2023 (Yang 2023). This article focuses on the production of Rongbaozhai prints in the context of the Cold War as reflected in the museum’s collection. There are two main sections in this article. The first shows how Rongbaozhai’s woodblock prints complied with Communist China’s policies of cultural diplomacy during the 1950s and 1960s. The second explores the provenance of a 1938 figure painting by Zhang Daqian 張大千 (1899-1983). The Wereldmuseum Leiden curator Gan Tjiang-tek 顏昌德
1 Before Rongbaozhai became a ForeignRelated Unit in 1956, its woodblock prints were mainly for the domestic market (Sun 2019: 81-88).
(1919-2020) acquired this painting from Rongbaozhai.2 This painting illustrates how the Chinese government regulated art export through Cultural Relics Shops and Rongbaozhai after the 1960s.
History and composition of the Wereldmuseum’s Rongbaozhai collection
The museum’s Rongbaozhai collection stems from two main sources. The first is the Amsterdam communist bookstore and publisher Pegasus. Established in 1934 by the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN), Pegasus opened on the Leidsestraat in Amsterdam in 1946.3 The Wereldmuseum Leiden purchased over 170 Rongbaozhai woodblock prints from Pegasus between 1956 and 1962.4 These prints are primarily in two forms: prints on paper, mounted in albums or in single sheets, featuring landscapes, birds and flowers, and figures; and scroll-mounted facsimiles of famous Chinese paintings, including
2 Gan started working at the Wereldmuseum Leiden in 1949 as a research assistant specializing in China. In 1957, he became the first curator solely dedicated to China (from 1957 to 1984). Prior to that, there was always a curator responsible for both China and Japan.
3 Pegasus had earlier stores at various locations in Amsterdam before moving to the Leidsestraat in 1946 and the Singel in 1991 (where it is found today).
Figure 1. Rongbaozhai woodblock print of Galloping Horse (1947) by Xu Beihong, scroll-mounted print on paper, ca. 1952-1956. 103.1 x 53.3 cm (Image). Wereldmuseum Leiden, RV-3297-1.
a 1952 reproduction of the ink painting Galloping Horse (1947) by Xu Beihong 徐悲鴻 (1895-1953) (RV-3297-1) and three 1958 prints on silk that reproduce sections from Court Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses 簪花仕女圖 (RV3873-4 to 6, hereinafter Court Ladies), a 175 centimetre long handscroll attributed to the Tang court painter
Figure 2. Rongbaozhai woodblock print of one of six ladies from Court Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses, attributed to Zhou Fang, scroll-mounted print on silk, c. 1958. 64.3 x 37 cm (Image). Wereldmuseum Leiden, RV-3873-4.
Zhou Fang 周昉 (active ca. 730-800 AD) (fig. 1 and 2).
The second major source is a 1964 collecting trip to China by Gan Tjiang-Tek, during which he visited Rongbaozhai several times. Gan was accompanied by Erik Zürcher (1928-2008), professor of East Asian history at Leiden University, whose published diaries of this trip provide
Figure 3. Woodblock gifted by Rongbaozhai in 1964.
3.3 × 27.5 × 16 cm.
Wereldmuseum Leiden, RV-4089-1C.
Figure 4. Rongbaozhai woodblock print of Plum Blossom (date unknown) by Qi Baishi, print on paper, ca. 1949-1964.
32 × 43.5 cm.
Wereldmuseum Leiden, RV-4089-1A.
much of what we know about their travels (Zürcher 2017). Gan brought back numerous woodblock prints, including two albums with writing papers published in 1935, decorated with subtle embossed patterns of antiques such as bronzes (RV-4092-60 & 61). This delicate printing technique, known as gonghua 拱花 , was developed primarily in the early 17th century, and Rongbaozhai became famous for refining it (Zheng 2019: 140-150). Gan also purchased a group of more than sixty Chinese paintings and calligraphy couplets from Rongbaozhai (series RV-4092), including works by wellknown artists such as Zhang Daqian. Perhaps in gratitude for Gan’s bulk order, Rongbaozhai gifted the museum a group of objects that could be used
to demonstrate the woodblock printing process. These include a few carving tools, a set of woodblock prints each showing a different stage of printing
Morning Glory, a painting by Qi Baishi
齊白石 (1864-1957), a set of carved woodblocks, and a woodblock print of Qi Baishi’s Plum Blossoms made from the woodblocks (fig. 3 and fig. 4) (series RV-4089). In addition to Rongbaozhai products, Gan also brought back hundreds of everyday objects from different antique shops and markets visited during this trip.
Next to these two main sources, smaller groups of Rongbaozhai works in the Wereldmuseum came from a variety of art and antique dealers in the Netherlands (e.g., C.P.J. van der Peet and Paul Brandt) and London (e.g., Collet’s Chinese Gallery). About two dozen unprovenanced prints were found at the Wereldmuseum Leiden during the Deltaplan project in the 1990s. The Wereldmuseum Rotterdam has two unprovenanced volumes of Selected Dunhuang Murals with a total of 25 prints (series WM-940101).
Reproducing classics: national propaganda and cultural orthodoxy
Before delving into their political implications, woodblock prints’ status as Rongbaozhai’s most prestigious product needs to be briefly foregrounded here.
The studio considers itself a publisher of art rather than counterfeits. In China its woodblock facsimiles of classic and modern Chinese paintings are referred to as ‘woodblock printed paintings’ 木版水印畫 (Ye 1954). Rongbaozhai’s woodblock printing technique finds its technical origins in the polychrome xylography developed in 17th-century Ming China called douban 餖版 , in which each colour is printed on a separate carved block (Tsien 2011: 135). Unlike earlier woodblock printing that was based on a single block, assembling multiple woodblocks made it possible to make polychrome prints with delicate shades. Rongbaozhai set up its first woodblock printing workshop in 1896, and initially, the workshop could only print small works like decorated writing paper. By the mid-20th century, however, the workshop could produce large prints that closely mimicked the nuanced brushwork of ink painting. This development also forged Rongbaozhai’s close and lasting collaborations with dozens of renowned artists, including Zhang Daqian, Qi Baishi, and Xu Beihong, whose paintings were not only sold but also reproduced as woodblock prints by Rongbaozhai. The woodblock facsimiles of these artists’ works are now found in the Wereldmuseum.
Rongbaozhai has served political and diplomatic interests ever since becoming state-owned in 1952. At the time, ink paintings and calligraphy were reproved as having ‘served the needs
of negative feudal literati’ (Yang 2019: 153). In comparison, after the 1930s New Woodcut Movement, Chinese woodcut printing was appreciated by artists and intellectuals as an influential medium to spread revolutionary ideas and patriotic propaganda.5 In this social context, Rongbaozhai began to publish coloured prints extolling communist ideology in 1950.
One example is a set of forty Rongbaozhai woodcut New Year Pictures (nianhua 年畫 ) published in 1951 and acquired from the bookstore C.P.J. van der Peet in 1958 (series RV-3558) (fig. 5). Traditionally, nianhua refers to a form of coloured woodblock print that features deities and auspicious motifs to celebrate the coming of the new year. Its origin can be traced back perhaps as far as the Qin (221-206 BCE) and Han (206 BCE-220 CE) dynasties. The Chinese Communist Party promoted the production of revolutionary New Year pictures inflected with
5 The New Woodcut Movement was initiated by the Chinese writer Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881-1936). In his view, woodcuts were easy to produce in a short period of time and thus a useful tool to quickly and widely communicate about social changes and national urgency to the public. During the Japanese invasion of China in 1931 (The Mukden Incident) and the subsequent Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s and 1940s, woodcut prints were used by Chinese artists as patriotic propaganda against Japan. For more about the New Woodcut Movement and its relation with Chinese communism, see Hung 1997 and Shen 2000.
Communist ideals as early as the 1920s (Flath 2004: 123-159). These forty prints were made in line with the ‘Directive concerning the development of new Nianhua work’ published by the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China (hereinafter the PRC, est. 1949) in November 1949. According to this directive, New Year Pictures should present heroic images of model communist workers (Flath 2004: 127-128). In addition to circulating them in the domestic market, the PRC also exported New Year Pictures to the United States and Europe as propaganda starting in the mid-20th century; hence, the Chinese captions on posters often have translations into other languages.6 The poor sales of these propaganda pictures, however, forced Rongbaozhai to quickly navigate back to the familiar ground of woodblock reproductions of ink paintings (Sun 2019: 70-71).
Parallel to these domestic politics were developments in the international political arena. After the Chinese Civil War in 1949, China split into two governing entities: the PRC and the Republic of China (hereinafter ROC). The ROC was established in 1912 after the Xinhai Revolution and relocated to Taiwan in 1949 after the Kuomintang’s loss in the Civil War with the Communists. Although
6 See (‘Go Among the Workers, Peasonts, and Soldiers and into the Thick of Struggle’).
Figure 5. Rongbaozhai woodblock print of the New Year Picture ‘New Year Greetings to a Labor Hero’ 向功臣拜年 by Guan Chao 關超, with a portrait of Mao Zedong 毛澤東 on the wall and the slogan ‘Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea’ 抗美 援朝 posted on the window, 1951. 34 × 24.5 cm. Wereldmuseum Leiden, RV-3558-11.
the ROC lost its mainland territory, it did not immediately lose its status as representative of ‘China’ in the international arena. The historical conditions of the Cold War and the Korean War prompted the U.S. to recognize the ROC in Taiwan as the sole legitimate Chinese government, as the real inheritor of Chinese
cultural orthodoxy and the guardian of Chinese high culture. Strengthening the ROC’s claim to legitimacy was the fact that major parts of the former imperial collection, which had been elevated by the Kuomintang to the status of ‘Chinese national treasures’, were shipped to Taiwan as part of the Kuomintang’s retreat (Ju 2007: 118).
In reaction to this political manoeuvre, the PRC promoted, on the one hand, artworks that represented the toil of the working class, while also highlighting, on the other hand, their orthodox political and cultural lineage with classic art. From around 1951 to 1952, with the consent of the Chinese government, Rongbaozhai recast its vision as follows: to take woodblock prints as a medium to inherit and promote Chinese art with ‘nationalist characteristics’, and, in doing so, serve domestic patriotic education and international cultural exchange (Sun 2019: 70-71). Two sets of prints are highlighted below as they show how Rongbaozhai realized this vision: namely, the print album
Figure 6. Woodblock print ‘Apsaras’ based on a copy by Shi Weixiang 史葦湘 (1924-2000) of frescoes in Cave 320 of the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang (constructed around 713-766 A.D.). A page from Rongbaozhai’s Selected Dunhuang Murals Volume 1, 1952. 43.4 × 31.6 cm. Wereldmuseum Rotterdam, WM-940101-1-11.
Selected Dunhuang Murals 敦煌壁畫 選 made in 1952 and 1953 (fig. 6); and three prints from Court Ladies, published in 1958.
Selected Dunhuang Murals
Located in the northwest of Gansu, China, Dunhuang was a crucial hub of commercial and cultural exchange on the Silk Road from the Han Dynasty
(202 BCE-220 CE) to the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Hundreds of caves housing Buddhist frescoes, sculptures, and manuscripts were constructed in the area surrounding the city, mostly between the 4th and 14th centuries. The Dunhuang Caves have gained worldwide renown since the discovery (and subsequent removal) of a cache of ancient manuscripts in the so-called Library Cave in 1900 and it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.
The well-known painter Zhang Daqian went to Dunhuang two times between 1941 and 1942 to copy mural paintings. He appealed to the government to establish a research academy dedicated to Dunhuang art in 1941. His Dunhuang copies were shown in the 1943 exhibition Zhang Daqian’s Copies of Dunhuang Murals in Gansu. This exhibition was successful and thus inspired the Dunhuang Research Academy to send a copying team to Dunhuang in 1944 (Dunhuang Research Academy 1994, 2008; Guan 2021). They spent almost a decade copying thousands of grotto murals for future research and public exhibition (Li 1982). Around 800 copies were displayed in the touring exhibition Dunhuang Art Exhibition, held in Nanjing and Shanghai in 1948, with the aim of promoting the study of mural art as well as the protection of Dunhuang relics (Zhao 2022). In April 1951, the Academy opened another exhibition showing over 900 copies of Mogao frescoes at
the Forbidden City’s Meridian Gate. This exhibition was organized following the instructions of Premier Zhou Enlai 周恩來 (1898-1976) during the PRC’s movement to ‘resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea’.7 At the suggestion of Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸 (1898-1958), who was the then director of the PRC’s National Cultural Heritage Administration and hosted the exhibition’s opening ceremony, Rongbaozhai’s woodblock prints of Dunhuang murals – based on the copies by the Dunhuang Research Academy – were presented as gifts for the guests at the ceremony (Liu 2022: 191).8
The 1951 Dunhuang exhibition was instilled with patriotic fervor. According to Zheng Zhenduo, the exhibition was more than a celebration of Dunhuang art. Rather, it aimed to encourage the Chinese public to take pride in their great national culture and rise up against the Western hegemony (partially) reflected in Euro-American invasions and looting of Dunhuang relics (Zheng 1951: 4). Moreover, as
7 See China Central Television’s interview with Chang Shana 常沙娜 (1931-), who is the daughter of Chang Shuhong 常書鴻 (1904-1994, director of the National Research Institute on Dunhuang Art) and participated in the copying of Dunhuang murals with her father in the 1940s (‘interview with Chang Shana’).
8 Zheng Zhenduo had a long relationship with Rongbaozhai. When Rongbaozhai faced financial crisis after the Chinese Civil War, he supported the studio becoming a joint stateprivate enterprise in 1950 (Sun 2013: 275).
Zheng argued, the exhibition also showed that, in contrast to literati painting and calligraphy, Dunhuang frescoes were created by nameless artisans who were not seeking fame and the ‘collectivism’ embodied in their efforts should be much appreciated (Zheng 1951: 6-7). Later, Zheng also wrote a preface accompanying Rongbaozhai’s 1952 Selected Dunhuang Murals (WM-940101-11).9 In the preface, Zheng mentions how Rongbaozhai worked with the Dunhuang Research Academy to select fine copies that the Institute’s painters had completed in the past years, and again emphasizes the contrast between feudal literati art and mural art created by working-class artisans. The political connotations attributed to Dunhuang art by Communist ideology were also foregrounded at the Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference hosted in Beijing in October 1952. Rongbaozhai’s Selected Dunhuang Murals was included in the state’s gifts distributed to participants of the conference as a token of diplomatic goodwill (Sun 2019: 69).
Court Ladies
The Tang painting Court Ladies is a large handscroll composed of (at least)
9 Rongbaozhai first made woodblock prints of Dunhuang murals in 1951 for the Dunhuang exhibition, and then the studio published three volumes of Selected Dunhuang Murals between 1952 and 1953 (Liu 2022: 191-192).
three smaller paintings executed in the gongbi 工筆 style of brushwork, a careful and meticulous painting technique (Liaoning Provincial Museum, 1998: 2-3). It depicts six women gracefully dressed in long gowns. Their high buns are adorned with delicate gold, beaded headdresses, and blossoms like peonies and jasmines. In 1934, Manchukuo (1934-1945, a puppet state of the Empire of Japan) was established with the last Qing emperor Puyi (1906-1967) as its figurehead. Court Ladies was one of the works from the imperial collection that Puyi brought to his residence in Changchun, Jilin province. After the fall of Manchukuo, this collection was redistributed: jewellery was sent to the Shenyang Imperial Palace, and paintings and calligraphy were shipped to the Liaoning Provincial Museum (Liaoning Provincial Museum 1994: 7-8). Rongbaozhai signed an agreement with the Liaoning Provincial Museum in 1954 to make copies of its collections.10
Court Ladies was selected as one of the classic paintings for Rongbaozhai’s copying project because its composition with six ladies standing apart, is convenient for making smaller test prints with individual figures (Sun 2019:
10 In addition to the Liaoning Provincial Museum, Beijing’s Palace Museum also supported Rongbaozhai’s project of copying classic art. In return, Rongbaozhai often gifted the museums woodblock prints of the paintings from their collections (Zheng 2018: 243).
103). The prints of Court Ladies at the Wereldmuseum are not straightforward facsimiles but rather adaptations to a different format. From a handscroll with six ladies, it was adapted to three hanging scrolls, each featuring one lady (fig. 2).
Court Ladies shows the artistic maturity of Rongbaozhai woodblock prints on silk.11 Unlike paper, the texture of silk makes it difficult to print colours on. To effectively pigment the fabric, artisans from Rongbaozhai used boiled silk, which is soft enough to be attached to woodblocks, learned to brush just the appropriate amount of water on to the silk before printing, and, after that, gently pressed cotton balls wrapped in cloth on the silk to help the colour absorb (Sun 2019: 78, 103-107; Zheng 2022: 191-194). This complex and time-consuming process was part of the reason that it took Rongbaozhai three years and over 300 woodblocks to finally complete a successful woodblock facsimile of the entire painting in 1956 (Fang 1957: 19-21).12 A close-up of the
11 Rongbaozhai made its first woodblock print on silk of the silk painting A Pavilion in the Moonlight 月夜樓閣圖 by the Qing painter Wang Yun 王雲 (ca. 1652-1723) in 1954. The Wereldmuseum Leiden has a copy made in 1955 (RV-3873-9).
12 There is some confusion regarding how many woodblocks Rongbaozhai used to copy Court Ladies. According to a news article in People’s Daily on February 5, 1957, Rongbaozhai used over 700 woodblocks to print this work. Considering the size and composition of the work, over 300 blocks is more likely the case.
Court Ladies print was chosen in 1957 as the cover photo of an issue of China Pictorial 人民畫報 , a monthly magazine circulated domestically and exported internationally to promote the PRC’s national objectives and Communist solidarity.
Court ladies’ lofty status as a Chinese ‘national treasure’ was germane to the diplomatic agenda behind Rongbaozhai’s printmaking (Ma 2019: 257). Since the 1950s, Rongbaozhai has been a cultural establishment receiving foreign guests, embellishing the PRC’s international image with an air of art appreciation whilst brushing off claims of cultural vandalism from the ROC. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs often presented Rongbaozhai’s woodblock prints to foreign visitors. A signature Rongbaozhai product that was made specifically for diplomatic use, the woodblock facsimiles of Court Ladies, which artfully combine classic Chinese art and the artisanship of ‘New China,’ were presented by Zhou Enlai and Foreign Secretary Chen Yi 陳毅 (1901-1972) as a national gift to the then Prime Minister of Burma, U Nu (1907-1995), president of Soviet Russia, Klim Voroshilov (1881-1969), and King and Prime Minister of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk (1922-2012) (Zheng 2019: 4).
Provenance of Zhang Daqian’s Lady in White
Most of the original calligraphy and paintings that Gan Tjiang-Tek brought back from his trip to Beijing in 1964 have the shop labels of Wenwu Shangdian 文物商店 (Cultural Relics Shop). In the following, I will take Zhang Daqian’s Lady in White (1938), bought on this trip, as an example to illustrate the collaboration between Rongbaozhai and Beijing’s Cultural Relics Shops in the 1960s.
The scroll painting Lady in White is dated 1938 (RV-4092-18) (fig. 7), three years before Zhang Daqian set off for the Dunhuang grottoes to copy the murals there. Zhang Daqian is one of the most famous 20th-century Chinese ink masters, with the ability to paint in multiple artistic styles. The Dunhuang trip would change the style of Zhang’s female portraits profoundly, from delicate images like the Lady in White to a plump and lustrous look that characterizes paintings of women from the Tang dynasty (618-907) when many Dunhuang murals were painted.13
Two similar figure paintings by Zhang, one from 1935 and one from 1940, appeared in a 2010 Christie’s auction and a 2010 Beijing Hanhai’s
Figure 7. Lady in White by Zhang Daqian, 1938. Hanging scroll painting, ink and colour on paper. 142 × 72.7 cm (Image). Wereldmuseum Leiden, RV-4092-18.
13 For an example, see Zhang’s painting Tang Bodhisattva from the Yulin Caves in Dunhuang, now collected in Taipei’s National Palace Museum (inv. no. 贈畫000045).
auction respectively (‘Zhang Daqian, Lady’ 2010; ‘Zhang Daqian, Nanhai Guanyin’ 2010). According to Zhang’s inscription on the 1935 painting sold at Christie’s, its style follows the Ming artist Cui Zizhong 崔子忠 (ca. 1574-1644), who was famous for painting graceful women. Zhang’s inscription on the 1940 painting sold
at Beijing Hanhai indicates that it was a 60th birthday present for Zhang’s long-time friend, Ye Gongchuo 葉恭 綽 (1881-1968).14 According to Beijing Hanhai, it is possible that the model in a white hooded robe was Ji Chunhong 池春紅 (1912-1939), a Korean kisaeng (courtesan) who met and fell in love with Zhang Daqian in 1927 when the artist was in Korea.15 Zhang’s femalefigure paintings often feature his lovers as models.
Lady in White was a personal gift. The painting has five seals on the front: the upper two from the artist; the one on lower right from the Wereldmuseum Leiden; 16 and the two on the lower left from the painting’s original owner, Wang Zuanxu 王纘緒 (1885-1960), who was a Kuomintang military leader from Sichuan. Wang gradually lost power after the Kuomintang party retreated to Taiwan in 1949 and the PRC was established. He was arrested in 1957 while trying to flee from Shenzhen to Hong Kong during the PRC’s Anti-Rightist Campaign, and eventually died
in prison. 17 Of the two seals from Wang, one reads Wang Zuanxu yin 王 纘緒印 (Seal of Wang Zuanxu) and the other Zhiyuan zhanyou 治園暫 有 (temporarily owned by Zhiyuan) (fig. 8). 18 The latter seal is particularly interesting as it was most likely carved by the well-known painter Qi Baishi for Wang as a gift. 19 The same seal is also found on a calligraphy by Wang Duo 王鐸 (1592-1652) from Wang Zuanxu’s collection, which appeared in a 2018 China Guardian auction (‘Wang Duo, Calligraphy’ 2018). Considering that Zhang Daqian’s inscription on Lady in White states that the painting was a gift to Zhiyi 治易 (the ‘art name’ of Wang Zuanxu), this painting seals the friendship between Zhang, Wang, and Qi. 20
It remains unclear why Zhang Daqian gifted this painting to Wang Zuanxu, as the artist’s inscription leaves no clue. Nevertheless, the interactions between Wang, Zhang, and
17 Initiated by the Chinese Communist Party, the Anti-Rightist Campaign was cataclysmic for many Chinese intellectuals who were imprisoned and killed for being (wrongfully) labeled as rightists; this basically encompassed anyone who was against communism and one-party rule.
18 Zhiyuan is the name of Wang’s residence.
14 Ye Gongchuo was an artist and the first director of the Beijing Art Academy (est. 1957).
15 See footnote 53 and Li 1987: 47.
16 Gan Tjiang-tek ordered this museum seal during his 1964 trip to Beijing. The seal was carved by Wei Changqing 魏長青 (1900-1977) (Zürcher 2017: 100).
19 The same ‘Zhiyuan zhanyou’ seal is documented in Dai 2000: 282.
20 Zhang’s inscription dates the painting to December 1938, and he was in Sichuan between October and December of that year (Li 1987: 109-112). Zhang did not support Chinese communism and settled in Taiwan after 1976.
Figure 8. Detail of Figure 7, with two seals ‘Wang Zuanxu yin’ 王瓚緒印 (top) and ‘Zhiyuan zhanyou’ 治園暫有 (bottom).
Zhang’s brother (also an artist), Zhang Shanzi 張善孖 (1882-1940) during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) yield a possible explanation. Between 1938 and 1939, Wang Zuanxu was appointed by the Kuomintang as the governor of Sichuan Province and he commanded the Nationalist forces against the Japanese in several battles in southwest China. At the time, Zhang Shanzi and some Chinese intellectuals had several meetings with the Communist and Nationalist officials, including Wang Zuanxu, to encourage the two parties’ cooperation against Japan (Li 1987: 111). Zhang Shanzi and Zhang Daqian also organized several
exhibitions of their paintings together to inspire patriotism and raise funds for the War. Zhang Daqian was in Sichuan between late 1938 and 1939, where he met up with Zhang Shanzi (Li 1987: 110-112). It is possible that during his stay in Sichuan he also met the famous anti-Japanese general Wang Zuanxu and gifted him Lady in White.21
The Cultural Relics Shop label on Lady in White is another clue to the painting’s provenance. The 1960 Provisional Regulations on the Protection and Administration of Cultural Heritage holds that objects of ‘artistic, historical, and scientific values’ belong to the state; they cannot be freely traded and must be collected and managed by specialized government agencies (‘Wenwu Baohu’, 1961: 76-79). Thus, after 1960 only state-designated Cultural Relic Shops were allowed to sell original Chinese works of art to foreigners. Generally, only items with the Cultural Relic Shop label could pass the inspection of a municipal/provincial Bureau of Culture and customs. The Cultural Relic Shops helped the government to ensure that art exports met the PRC’s need to earn foreign exchange (Lee 2014: 106). In the meantime, they also distributed artworks to Chinese museums for research purposes. Within this social context, however, Rongbaozhai, as
21 The plum blossom and bamboo in Chinese art and literature often symbolize the traditional Chinese virtues of uprightness, purity, and perseverance against harsh odds.
a Foreign-Related Unit, often made exceptions: since foreign guests might ask for things to purchase during their visits, the government allowed such sales to be made directly by Rongbaozhai.22 This included sales of woodblock prints and original artworks.
Returning to Lady in White, its Cultural Relic Shop label features the character ji 寄 written in black, meaning that the painting was consigned for sale at Rongbaozhai by a Cultural Relic Shop in Beijing.23 In 1960, ten antique shops in Liulichang were listed as Beijing Cultural Relic Shops, and before that they had cooperated with Rongbaozhai in art dealing for decades (Ye 1997: 114). It was not uncommon for Rongbaozhai to acquire paintings from these shops to restock its inventory. Under the PRC government’s monitor, once the works consigned at Rongbaozhai by the Cultural Relics Shops were sold, the two would share the profits, but the orders had to be credited to the Cultural Relics Shops.
How did Lady in White get from Wang’s collection to the Cultural Relic Shop? Wang Zuanxu was forced to donate most of his collection to the Sichuan Museum in Chengdu (including eight pieces of porcelain, 23 paintings and calligraphies, and 100 personal
22 According to an email on 5 May 2023 from Qian Yitao.
23 I would like to thank Qian Yitao for his discussion with me regarding the Cultural Relic Shop label on Lady in White.
seals) and the Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing (incl. 395 paintings and calligraphies and 360 manuscripts) between 1950 and 1952 (‘Kangzhan chuqi’ 1924-1950: 654-655). Given this, it remains mysterious how Lady in White found its way into Liulichang instead of the above Chinese museums.24 A possible interpretation is that the painting was sold by, or confiscated from, Wang’s relatives or friends to one of the Beijing’s Cultural Relic Shops, after which it was consigned to Rongbaozhai and eventually acquired by Gan Tjiang-Tek.25 This scenario is not inconceivable, considering that many people were forced to sell or transfer their collections during the tumultuous decades of the 1950s and 1960s.26
24 I have consulted the Wang Zuanxu Papers collected in the Hoover Institution Library & Archives (collection number: 2021C23). They reveal that Wang Zuanxu unwillingly donated his collections to the Sichuan Museum and the Three Gorges Museum. The fact that Wang was the director of the Sichuan Museum could be a reason why part of his collection was donated to there. However, there is no image or information in these papers to tell us more about Lady in White in the context of Wang’s collection.
25 At a dinner with friends in 1949, Wang emphasized his willingness to ‘sacrifice everything’ for the Chinese Civil War by gifting the paintings in his collection to the guests (‘Kangzhan chuqi’, 1924-1950: 591).
26 During his 1964 China trip, Gan TjiangTek bought a lot of objects from Chinese aristocrats who had to sell their belongings for food during the famine caused by the PRC’s Great Leap Forward economic policy (1958-1962) (Meeuwse 2020: 112-113).
Conclusion
This article attempts to tease out the previously underexplored provenance history of the museum’s Rongbaozhai collection. Still, some relevant questions remain unsettled and require further research. For example, the acquisition sources of some Rongbaozhai objects are still unclear (e.g., how the museum acquired Selected Dunhuang Murals). The wider circulation of Rongbaozhai prints in the Netherlands and Europe in the 20th century would also be interesting to explore.
The Wereldmuseum’s Rongbaozhai collection is important from both an artistic and political perspective. Building upon multicolour woodblock printing that blossomed in the 17th century, Rongbaozhai further refined the technique to print its woodblock facsimiles on different materials (paper and silk) and in exquisite ink tones. Delving into the production history of these prints has not only uncovered the history of Rongbaozhai’s craftsmanship but also a political history of the PRC in the wider framework of the Cold War. Within this framework, the social context of their production, circulation, and reception makes Rongbaozhai woodblock prints multivalent objects imbued with artistic, political, and diplomatic values.
The Rongbaozhai prints preserve and reflect the sophisticated techniques of Chinese woodblock printing.
Rongbaozhai’s woodblock printing was named part of China’s National Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2006. However, the studio hardly produces any woodblock prints today due to high labor costs and digital copies becoming an alternative (Qian 2023: 332). Nevertheless, it is imaginable that the incredible skill that Rongbaozhai has developed in bridging the gap between prints and painting will again become appreciated, as the spirit of craftsmanship is now being recalled in China and around the world.
Pao-Yi Yang 陽寶頤 (Ph.D. Leiden 2021) has been teaching at Leiden University as adjunct lecturer since 2021. She was a provenance researcher at the Research Center for Material Culture in 2023 (funded by the Vereniging Rembrandt) and postdoctoral fellow at Leiden’s International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in 2022. Yang’s research interests include provenance research, museum presentations of Chinese art in a global context, and museum histories as reflected in changing display aesthetics and strategies. Her publications appear in journals such as Museum & Society, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and Journal of Visual Communication. ORCID: https://orcid. org/0000-0001-6734-2687
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the generous support from the Vereniging Rembrandt and its Kroese-Duijsters
Fonds for my provenance research on the Wereldmuseum’s Rongbaozhai collection. My gratitude also goes to Qian Yitao, Paul van Dongen, Karwin Cheung, and Willemijn van Noord for their committed interaction and supportive suggestions to improve this article.
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A portrait of the scholar as intelligence operative: Robert van Gulik in Seoul 1949
Karwin Cheung
On 11 October 1949, the Dutch scholar-diplomat Robert Hans van Gulik (1910-1967) travelled from Tokyo to the Korean capital of Seoul, arriving in a city where the threat of political violence and war – which indeed broke out the next year – was in the air. By all appearances, this was a private trip by the Dutchman with the aim of studying the culture and history of Korea. A diplomat by profession but a scholar by training, Van Gulik had by this time already made a name for himself through his publications on East Asian history, musicology, and connoisseurship. During 11 days in Seoul, he visited cultural sites and met with some of the most well-known Korean scholars and artists of the day.
However, Van Gulik’s motivations for this trip were not just scholarly. Materials at the Dutch National Archives show that Van Gulik was in fact sent by the Dutch government on a covert mission to gather intelligence about the political situation
Figure 1. O Sechang. The Zhonghe qin chamber. Ink and pigment on paper. 118 × 33 cm. Wereldmuseum Leiden, RV-5265-10.
and the possibilities for opening a Dutch embassy. Considering the tense political situation and post-colonial sensitivities, a covert mission was decided upon. Was the guise of a study trip then merely a convenient cover for Van Gulik to carry out his mission? The answer is complicated by Van Gulik’s well-known propensity to turn the official into the private and vice versa (Barkman & de Vries-van der Hoeven, 2018: 53). In Korea as well, much of his covert mission was taken up by the supposed cover of cultural activities.
One of the objects collected by Van Gulik in Korea is a work of calligraphy by the Korean scholar O Sechang 吳世昌 (1864-1953), today in the Wereldmuseum Leiden (fig. 1). A study of this scroll and its provenance show how Van Gulik used his status as a sinologist and scholar to facilitate not just his diplomatic work, but also his collecting. More generally, this article illustrates how private interests and
official responsibilities intermingle in diplomat-collectors, who are one of the most common sources of objects in the museum.
Robert van Gulik: the diplomat-collector and his collection
Robert van Gulik was born in 1910 in the Dutch city of Zutphen. He spent most of his childhood years in the Dutch colony of Indonesia, where his father worked as an officer in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL). In 1923 he returned to the Netherlands to continue his education and he went on to study law and sinology at the university of Leiden, eventually obtaining his PhD in 1935 at the university of Utrecht with a dissertation on the tantric deity Hayagriva. After his studies he applied for a position at the Dutch ministry of Foreign Affairs, rather
than continuing in academia (Barkman & de Vries-van der Hoeven 2018: 25).
A career at Foreign Affairs had traditionally been one of the options open to Dutch sinologists, due to Dutch imperial interests in Asia and the large Chinese population in the Dutch East Indies (Kuiper 2017). This did not mean that Van Gulik gave up on his scholarly work. In fact, life as a diplomat provided unique opportunities for his studies. Postings in Japan and China in the 1930s and 1940s allowed him to meet well-known intellectuals of these countries, as well as access to source materials unavailable elsewhere. In addition, living and working in Asia allowed him to build his collection of East Asian art and antique books.
Van Gulik is without a doubt one of the most significant 20th-century Dutch collectors of East Asian material culture. Although the collection was dispersed after his death in 1976, significant parts are kept at public institutions. His collection of books, over 2800 titles in ca. 10.000 volumes, was sold to the Leiden Sinological Institute in 1977 (Kuiper 2016). A significant part of his art collection is today held at the Wereldmuseum Leiden, which had acquired works from Van Gulik’s collection in 1955 and 1983 (Noord 2020). The materials held at the Wereldmuseum Leiden include antique paintings from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing periods (1644-1911), as well as works of calligraphy written by 20th -
century Chinese intellectual or political figures in Van Gulik’s network.
Seoul 1949: the collector of objects
On 21 October 1949, Seoul residents found the following headline in that day’s edition of the newspaper Chosun Ilbo: ‘A precious guest from the Netherlands has come to Korea’ (‘hwaran ui jingaek naehan’ 1949).1
The arrival of the Dutch scholar had led to quite some media attention, with several national newspapers reporting on the visit. There was a radio interview as well, which the polyglot Van Gulik carried out in Korean – a feat singled out in the newspaper’s report. The Japanese surrender in 1945 had brought an end to 35 years of colonial rule in Korea and its suppression of Korean customs and language. Thus, the news of a foreign scholar visiting Korea to study its history and culture –even carrying out interviews in Korean –would have been well received.
The photograph in the Chosun Ilbo’s report shows Robert van Gulik and the Korean scholar Jeong Inbo 鄭 寅普 (1893-1950) jointly writing a work of calligraphy. In Korea, Van Gulik met friends and acquaintances from his earlier travels in the country and his time in Chongqing (Gulik 1949: 2). He had already visited Korea several
1 Author’s translation.
times during his first stint at the Dutch legation in Tokyo from 1935 to 1942. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Van Gulik would be posted in the city of Chongqing, the wartime capital of China, from 1943 till 1946. His Chongqing sojourn gave Van Gulik the opportunity to meet numerous Chinese cultural and political figures, as many of China’s political and cultural elite had flocked to Chongqing in these years (Shi 2012). Van Gulik’s network of Chinese intellectuals is well known, less known however are his contacts with Korean scholars and politicians in Chongqing. The war had also brought the headquarters of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, a government in exile, to the city of Chongqing, where it would be based from 1940 till 1945.2
The Chosun Ilbo reports that Van Gulik met several well-known intellectual figures during his stay in Korea. Next to the aforementioned Jeong Inbo, Van Gulik also met Kim Jaewon 金載元 (1909-1990), the first director of the National Museum of Korea (established in 1945), who gave
2 There are few published records of Van Gulik’s interactions with the Korean community in Chongqing. The 1 June 1943 edition of the Dongnib Sinmun, a newspaper published by the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, which during its Chongqing period was published in Chinese language, contains a report of a speech Van Gulik gave to the Korean Youth Associaton in Chongqing (‘Hanguo jingshen buke zhengfu’ 1943).
him a tour of the National Museum, which at that time was housed in the former royal palace of Gyeongbokgung. Most importantly for this article was Van Gulik’s meeting with the scholar and calligrapher O Sechang, who wrote the scroll under discussion in this article.
O Sechang’s calligraphic scroll is written in literary Sinitic, the classical language of intellectual exchange in East Asia. The focus point are the four large Chinese characters written in archaic seal script, which read (from right to left): Zhonghe Qinshi 中和琴 室 (‘the Zhonghe qin chamber).3 This scroll was evidently meant as the name board for Van Gulik’s qin chamber, the room where he kept and played his qin zither.4 To the left of these four large characters, we find a dedication, written in smaller regular script (fig. 2). It reads:
3 The romanizations provided here are Mandarin Chinese pinyin, reflecting how the scroll’s owner would have commonly read them. The calligrapher O Sechang would have of course pronounced these four characters in their Korean reading: Junghwa Geumsil. 4 The name of Van Gulik’s qin chamber is a mystery worthy of a detective novel author (another occupation of Van Gulik). Koos Kuiper has suggested that there is an element of wordplay in the name. Zhonghe could be translated as (1) middle harmony, (2) Sino-Dutch, and (3) Sino-Japanese (Kuiper 2010: 25). Van Gulik, on his part, only wrote that the room was named after one of his qin named the Zhonghe (Van Gulik 1969: 255). The fact is however that Van Gulik had already used this name for his qin chamber before he bought the Zhonghe qin in 1938.
芝臺先生正謬
檀記四二八二年冬
韓京老布衣
吳世昌
For the corrective perusal of Mr. Zhitai5
Written in the winter of the 4282nd year of Dangun (1949)
The old plain-robed scholar from Seoul, O Sechang
O Sechang is known as one of the finest Korean calligraphers of the 20th century. He was born in 1879 to a wealthy family, which had made its money as official interpreters. O had been a part of the Korean independence movement during Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945). The March 1st movement in 1919, a largescale protest for independence, led to his imprisonment for three years. After his release, he turned away from direct political activities and instead focused his energies on calligraphy and research on Korean art (Hong 2013).
As a calligrapher, O Sechang took a special interest in old scripts, as seen here in the four large characters written in large seal script, an archaic form of Chinese writing dating to before the standardization of Chinese script in the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE).
Van Gulik was evidently quite fond of the calligraphy he received from O Sechang. He had the work mounted and hung it prominently on the walls
Figure 2. Detail of calligraphy by O Sechang. Wereldmuseum, RV-5265-10.
of his study (fig. 3). In return, Van Gulik presented O Sechang with a book titled Zhitai Yincun 芝臺印存 (Seal album of Zhitai), which contained impressions from his collection of seals.6 The album would have been undoubtedly gratefully received by the epigraphy expert O Sechang.
In 1936 Van Gulik had started studying the qin, a stringed instrument which had long been associated with the Confucian scholar.7 The qin not
6 O Sechang’s book collection is today stored at the National Library of Korea. Van Gulik’s Zhitai Yincun is catalogued under inv. Nr.
위창古 433-38
5 Zhitai is Robert van Gulik’s pseudonym or hao.
7 For a study of Van Gulik’s first instrument see Cheung (2024). Both Van Gulik as well as O Sechang had a stake in the (disappearing) intellectual tradition of East Asia, based on Literary Sinitic and Chinese classical texts.
only became a favorite pastime and scholarly obsession for Van Gulik, but it also was an important conduit through which he expanded his social network. In the Chinese war-time capital of Chongqing, where Van Gulik was stationed from 1943-1946, he joined the Tianfeng qinhui 天風琴 會 (the qin society of the heavenly wind). This society counted among its members many well-known political and intellectual figures, such as the general Feng Yuxiang or the poet-intellectual
Figure 3. Robert van Gulik’s study in the Dutch embassy, Tokyo 1967. Reproduced by courtesy of the Van Gulik estate.
Guo Moruo. In the late 1930s Van Gulik devoted much time and attention to studying the instrument’s history and cultural significance, writing several articles before publishing his seminal 1940 book The Lore of the Chinese Lute.
It is clear from the Zhonghe Qinshi scroll and other works collected by Van Gulik during his trip in Seoul that it was his status as scholar – of classical East Asian culture and the qin – that facilitated social contacts.
In 2023 the Van Gulik estate donated the archive of Robert van Gulik to the Leiden University Library. Included in this gift are two works of calligraphy, also concerning the qin, by the aforementioned Jeong Inbo.8
It was almost certainly the association with the qin that made the museum decide to acquire the O Sechang scroll, rather than O Sechang’s fame as a calligrapher. The museum acquired the scroll in a 1983 auction of works from Van Gulik’s collection at Christie’s Amsterdam, in which it bought several qin-related works.9
Seoul 1949: the collector of intelligence
One gets a very different perspective on Van Gulik’s journey through archival materials now kept at the Dutch National Archives. A confidential report written by Van Gulik and titled Rapport over een dienstreis naar Korea (report on an official trip to Korea) shows that the study trip was in fact meant to gather intelligence (Gulik 1949).
Van Gulik was the obvious choice when on 16 June 1949 the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs sent instructions to the Dutch embassy in Japan to report on the situation on the
8 At the time of writing (summer 2023), these works had not yet been catalogued by the Leiden University Library.
9 These works are RV-5263-1; RV-5265-1; RV-5265-5a/b.
Korean peninsula. The year prior Van Gulik had been appointed as political advisor of the embassy, his second posting in Japan. In the diplomatic service Van Gulik was well-known for his knowledge of Asian languages, historical knowledge, and wide-ranging network. Taking the airplane from Tokyo, Van Gulik landed in Korea on 11 October 1949.
The political situation on the ground had been highly volatile. After the country’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, Korea had been divided in two zones of occupation by the United States and the Soviet Union. The division of the peninsula resulted in the creation of two rival states, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north and the Republic of Korea in the south. These two states not only had differences to settle with each other, but there were also factional battles to be fought out within the young countries. It was just a few months before Van Gulik’s arrival that Kim Gu 金九 (1876-1949), the former president of the Korean government in exile who Van Gulik might have known from his time in Chongqing, had been assassinated by a military officer.
It was partly this tense post-colonial situation that had led to the decision to make Van Gulik’s mission covert.
The ambassador H. Mouw had thought that sending a Dutch diplomat from the mission in Japan, might inadvertently suggest that the Dutch still thought
Korea to be part of Japan. In addition, presenting the journey as a private one would afford Van Gulik more freedom of movement, as he would not be encumbered by minders of the South Korean government. Nevertheless, he was given the authority to make public the official purpose of his journey to the South Korean officials at a suitable time.
The ploy of presenting his journey as a study trip succeeded excellently.
Van Gulik was able to meet Korean opposition politicians, American military staff, United Nations staff, as well as diplomats from France, United Kingdom, and China. After an informal meeting with the Korean minister of foreign affairs, Van Gulik was even encouraged to pay a visit to Syngman Rhee 李承晩 (1875-1965), the president of the Republic of Korea. Van Gulik met Rhee on October 19th and during their meeting he finally acknowledged the true intent of his journey to Korea. Rhee had apparently been pleased to hear that the Dutch diplomats had considered the sensitivity of sending an envoy from the Dutch embassy in Japan, the former colonial ruler of Korea. Even going so far to say he wished that more countries would be so understanding of the Korean mindset, a statement Van Gulik interpreted as a rebuke of the American diplomats and military officials posted in Seoul (Gulik 1949: 2).
In his report Van Gulik shows himself to be an astute observer of the Korean situation, which in the winter
of 1949 was far from straightforward. Not only were there the many tensions between political factions in the Republic of Korea, which at times boiled over into violence, there was also the uneasy standoff between the Republic’s president Syngman Rhee and the Americans, who provided much of the political and military backing needed by the president. The Dutch diplomat described Rhee’s resentment of the limitations the Americans had put upon him, while the Americans had grown increasingly frustrated with his militaristic and dictatorial tendencies. Meanwhile, this was all happening against the background of looming war between the two opposing states on the Korean peninsula.
As for the second issue of opening a Dutch embassy in Seoul, the situation was straightforward but not promising. The government of the Republic of Korea could not stomach opening a reciprocal embassy in the Netherlands due to a lack of funds, while in Seoul there were few suitable buildings available for a Dutch embassy. In any case, the issue of politics would soon make the question of the embassy a moot case. On 25 June 1950 the Korean war broke out and it would not be until decades later that a Dutch embassy was opened in Seoul.
Conclusion
Van Gulik did not write any scholarly works on the qin after 1941, the year in which he published Hsi K’ang and His Poetical Essay on the Lute. However, the instrument remained an important conduit for social exchanges with Chinese scholars (Li 2011). Moreover, these exchanges were not just limited to the geography of China, as shown here by the calligraphy of O Sechang.
Robert van Gulik is commonly described as a sinologist, however that label overlooks his activities and interests in Japan and Korea.10 The Van Gulik collection in the Wereldmuseum Leiden consists almost completely of Chinese objects. Even though his collection held many objects from other countries such as Korea.11 In his interests Van Gulik crossed borders of nations and academic disciplines. He also crossed the border between diplomat and collector. Thus, in the end we might wonder whether the meeting between Van Gulik and O Sechang was merely a scholarly one. Though retired, O Sechang had been a prominent intellectual and political
10 The term ’orientalist’, though now thoroughly out of fashion, might be more appropriate. 11 A few Korean objects from Van Gulik’s collection have been preserved in other museums. Take for example a scroll of the Surangama Sutra and a painting by Kim Hongdo, both in the collection of the British Museum (inv. nr. 1997,0720,0.1 and 1984,0405,0.1).
figure. In fact, many of the Korean intellectuals Van Gulik met in Seoul were also political figures. In his official report Van Gulik does not name any of the Korean sources from whom he gathered intelligence, but it is not unlikely that he would have discussed the political situation with O Sechang. Thereby further blurring the lines between gathering intelligence and gathering objects.
Karwin Cheung works at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the NWOfunded project Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value, and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums. He previously worked as assistant curator for the East Asian collections at the National Museum of Scotland and the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Marc Gilbert and Piet Rombouts for their help accessing newly acquired and uncatalogued materials at the special collections of Leiden University Library.
Bibliography
Barkman, C.D. & De Vries-van der Hoeven, H. 2018. Dutch Mandarin: The Life and Work of Robert Hans van Gulik, trans. Rosemary Robson. Bangkok: Orchid Press. Cheung, Karwin. 2024. De naamloze qin van Robert van Gulik. Aziatische Kunst 54(1): 33-38.
Gulik, Robert Hans van. 1949. Rapport van de politiek adviseur van de Nederlandse Missie in Japan over zijn dienstreis naar Korea. Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Commandant der Zeemacht in Nederlands-Indië, 2.13.72, inv. nr. 1441.
Gulik, Robert Hans van. 1969 [first ed. 1940). The Lore of the Chinese Lute. Tokyo: Sophia University.
‘Hanguo jingshen buke zhengfu’ 韓國精神 不可征服 [The spirit of Korea cannot be conquered] Dongnib Sinmun (Chongqing edition). 1 June 1943.
Hong, Sunpyo. 2013. O Sech’ang’s Compilation of Kŭnyŏk sŏhwa sa (History of Korean painting and calligraphy) and the Publication of Kŭnyŏk sŏhwa ching (Biographical records of Korean painters and calligraphers). Archives of Asian Art 63(2): 155-163.
‘hwaran ui jingaek naehan’ 和蘭의珍客來韓 [A treasured guest from the Netherlands has come to Korea] Chosun Ilbo. 21 October 1949.
Kuiper, Koos. 2010. Gao Luopei 高羅佩 De sinoloog Robert Hans van Gulik in wetenschap en kunst: Tentoonstelling
Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, 16 december 2010 – 13 maart 2011. Leiden: Leiden University Libraries. http://hdl. handle.net/1887.1/item:1843484
Kuiper, Koos. 2016. The Robert van Gulik Collection: Introduction and Catalogue. Leiden University Library. http://hdl. handle.net/1887.1/item:1918727 (accessed 1 May 2023)
Kuiper, Koos. 2017. The Early Dutch Sinologists (1854-1900). Leiden: Brill.
Li, Meiyan. 2011. Helan hanxuejia Gao Luopei shoucang de qinhua ji tizi. Shoucang. 1: 56-60.
Noord, Willemijn van. 2020. De Van Gulik collectie in het Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen: Chinese schilderkunst, kalligrafie en scholars objects. Aziatische Kunst 50(2): 13-21.
From Lijiang to Leiden and back: digitization and translation of Dongba manuscripts
Tayoulamu Xu Zhang ( 张旭·塔尤拉姆 )
In 1936, thirteen volumes of Naxi Dongba manuscripts entered the Wereldmuseum Leiden (fig. 1). These manuscripts had been collected by the Dutch missionary Elise Scharten (1876-1965) when she was on mission in Lijiang, Yunnan province in the south-west of China in the 1920s. Of the thirteen manuscripts, eleven are written in pictographs by Dongba shamans of the Naxi minority in China who live in the foothills of the Himalayas.1 The Dongba script is the only pictographic script still in active use and it has become a symbol of Naxi Dongba. These pictographs are not used to merely convey language, rather they are reserved to record rituals and key elements of Naxi legend.
1 The term ‘Dongba’ can refer to both the religion as well as the shamans of the Naxi people.
Figure 1. A page from the Dongba manuscripts, titled The origin of the longevity sacred tree – praying for long life, ink on paper, about 9 × 28 cm, Wereldmuseum, RV-4175-15.
In 2013, I discovered at the John Rylands Library in Manchester a letter written by Elise Scharten from Lijiang on 21 November 1922, to the British botanist and explorer George Forrest (1873-1932). Forrest had been collecting animal and plant specimens in the Naxi area and he began to collect manuscripts after seeing Dongba scriptures.2 He did not study these books further, but he apparently asked Scharten to do this on his behalf, for in her letter she accepts his request and encloses her translations for Forrest: ‘the two Mo-so books with translation. I hope you will be able to make out what
the pictures in the book mean through the translation’ (Scharten 1922).3 Scharten lent the museum eight Tibetan thangka’s and six Tibetan manuscripts (RV-4175-1 to 14) in 1936, noting that they would be bequeathed to the museum when she died (Scharten 1936). At some point between 1936 and 1959, thirteen Naxi manuscripts, of which eleven written in Dongba pictographs (RV4175-15 to 27) and two in Goba running script (RV-4175-20 & 21) were added
2 Between 1916 and 1932, Forrest sold his collection of over 100 Dongba manuscripts to the John Rylands Library in England, which today belongs to the University of Manchester.
3 In pre-1949 naxiology, the Naxi were called Moxie, transcribed as MoSo in English and MoSSo in French. (So) is the ancient name for man (Dalie & Zhiwu 1994).
to this loan (n.n. 1959).4 Following her death in 1965, the entire series was bequeathed to the museum (Pott 1969: 15). Scharten’s work as a female collector and translator give her a unique position in the history of Naxi studies, even though her name is almost never mentioned in early publications in the field.
The Beijing Association of Dongba Culture and Arts (ADCA) was founded in 1997 and has as its mission to rescue, preserve, and research Dongba culture.5 In 2020 the ADCA cooperated with the Wereldmuseum in an international digitization project of ancient Dongba manuscripts. That year, copies of the Dongba manuscripts in the Wereldmuseum’s collection were brought to the village of Baidi in Yunnan, where they were deciphered by a Dongba shaman.
The origins of Dongba and early Western studies
The exact origin of the Dongba pictographs is still a matter of debate (Jackson 1964). In the past century, researchers have sought the answer in the migration route of the Naxi people, the geographic environment, the documents’ materials, and in the characters themselves. However, no scholar has of yet found conclusive evidence on the nature of Dongba pictographs (Lan 2018).
4 Goba is a syllabic script in which each symbol represents a syllable. However, the Goba script is extremely variable, sometimes several words have the same pronunciation, and sometimes a single word has different meanings.
5 Since 2013, ADCA has started to implement the National Social Science Foundation Key Project (No.12&ZD234), ‘Research into the Construction of an International Digital Sharing Platform for the Inheritance of ‘Memory of the World’ Dongba Manuscripts Heritage’ supported by UNESCO. (ADCA website: http://www.dongba-culture.com).
The ancestors of the Naxi people were descendants of the Qiang people in Northwest China. According to legend, intratribal warfare and the search for new grazing lands impelled a branch of this large and powerful tribe of nomadic yak herders in the grasslands of northern China to set off on a lengthy migration southward. Eventually, they arrived at Jinsha River on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River and settled at the foot of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountains and the Haba Snow Mountains in today’s Yunnan Province.
The shamanistic Dongba religion is based on worship of a pantheon of deities and the animistic belief that all living beings have a spirit. While passed down orally, shamans carved marks on tree trunks and stones as symbols to aid memory when reciting scriptures. Consequently, the Dongba scriptures
are called ‘wood and stone imprints’ (ssî dgyú lû dgyú) in Naxi language. Dongba shamans use over a thousand different pictographs symbolizing natural images which they write onto traditional Dongba paper using a bamboo pen and ink. Since then, Dongba scriptures have become the carrier of Dongba pictographs, passing down from generation to generation.6
The first European descriptions of Dongba script date to the second half of the 19th century. In 1867 Auguste Desgodins (1826-1913), a French priest in the Tibetan mission of the Société des Missions Étrangères, brought back to Paris eleven pages of Dongba manuscripts concerning the origin of the devil. In 1885, Albert Terrien de Lacouperie (1844-1894) published the article Beginnings of Writing in and around Tibet, the first Western publication on Naxi pictographs based on the manuscripts collected by Desgodins (Lacouperie 1885).
In 1898, Prince Henri d’Orleans (1867-1901) published From Tonkin to India (d’Orleans 1898). Prince d’Orléans brought back to France the five volumes of Dongba manuscripts he collected in the Naxi villages in the Lancang River valley. In 1913 the explorer and Tibetologist Jacques Bacot (1877-1967) published Les Mo-So, the earliest
research monograph in the history of Naxi studies (Bacot 1913).
The best-known researcher of Naxi Dongba manuscripts was the AustrianAmerican Joseph F. Rock (1884-1962). Since 1922, he had collected botanical specimens in Lijiang, but gradually shifted his focus to the study of Naxi Dongba religion and script. Rock lived in the Naxi area for 27 years and by the 1940s he had brought nearly 8,000 volumes to Europe and North America (Lin-Tsan 1984). His most notable monographs include The Ancient Nakhi Kingdom of Southwest China (1948) and A Na-khi-English Encyclopedic Dictionary (Part I 1963, Part II -1972).
The current state and preservation of Dongba culture
6 In 2003, UNESCO added Ancient Dongba Naxi Manuscripts to its Memory of the World Register.
In 1999, I led an ADCA research team to do fieldwork in the Naxi Sanba region of Shangri-la, the birthplace of the Dongba religion in the Tibetan area of Yunnan province. We lived with a local Dongba shaman called Xi Aniu 习阿牛 (1913-2009). The Naxi people accorded him great respect and gave him the title of Dongba King. He was especially proficient in divination and dance in Dongba ceremonies. The team filmed his daily life, his divination for the villagers, and his presiding over the Dongba rituals of writing Dongba scripts. In these activities, he served as
the bridge between gods, the human world and nature.
Due to the idea of nature worship, the Naxi Dongba believe that heaven and earth, the sun and moon, mountains and rivers, clouds and wind and all other natural phenomena have souls, and the worshipping rituals should be performed for them. These rituals include, for example, offering sacrifices to the heavens and ancestors, funerals, celebrations, healing, propitiation of nature spirits, and suppressing demons. The ceremonies are presided over by Dongba shamans, who read and memorize the appropriate scriptures during each ceremony. No matter the scale of the ceremony, it is carried out under the guidance of Dongba scriptures.
At this time, we found very few surviving Dongba manuscripts and divination cards in Dongba Xi Aniu’s family. Countless scriptures handed down from his ancestors were all burnt during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The contents of these scriptures were kept only in the mind of this nearly 90-year-old Dongba master. Without books he was unable to pass his knowledge and skills down to his sons and disciples.7
In view of this, the ADCA aims to digitize ancient Dongba books that were collected in various countries, so that institutions with Naxi Dongba manuscripts collections, together with the Naxi Dongba shamans and the next generation of readers and researchers, can share this heritage. In this manner the contents of the books can survive through the deciphering by the few remaining old Dongba, allowing for their continued use.8
From Leiden to the Naxi Homeland
The Academic Cooperation Agreement between the Wereldmuseum and ADCA was signed on New Year’s Day 2020, by which time the museum had digitized all its ancient Dongba manuscripts. The ADCA research team then brought reproductions of the 11 manuscripts to the remote village of Baidi, ShangriLa, Yunnan.
The 80-year-old Dongba master Xi Shanghong 习尚洪 is the only shaman left in the area who can decipher the ancient Dongba pictographs (fig. 2). Dongba Xi Shanghong was born into a Dongba family in a Naxi mountain
7 All Dongba shamans are male. Their position is hereditary, passed down from father to son to grandson, or to a nephew if there is no son; occasionally a master will accept an apprentice from outside the Dongba line.
8 German naxiologist, Dr. Michael Oppitz (ADCA International Academic Advisor) suggested to form ‘a united pool of Naxi manuscripts’ at the 1999 Lijiang International Academic Conference of Dongba Culture. In the same year, ADCA began searching for old Dongba shamans who could decipher the Dongba manuscripts in Tibetan areas of Yunnan.
village in Yunnan Province in southwest China. His father was Dongba Xi Youcai, known for his expertise in painting.
Dongba Xi Shanghong was also the first disciple of the late famous Dongba Xi Aniu. He is one of the few remaining ‘great Dongba’ of the Naxi people.
When the religious rites were made illegal in the 1960s, Xi Shanghong became a village teacher. He recalls that, starting in the 1950s, people no longer performed the traditional Naxi rituals. It was not until 60 years
Figure 2. Dongba shaman Xi Shanghong deciphering a reproduction of a Dongba manuscript kept in Wereldmuseum Leiden. Photo by Gao Weijing, ADCA, 2020.
later in 2019 that the most important ancient tradition of the Sacrifice to Heaven was re-instated in Baidi.
Since 2009, Xi Shanghong has been working with the ADCA to decipher Dongba manuscripts held in Western collections.9 Although he had never seen the Scharten manuscripts, he could remember many Dongba myths told to him by his teacher Xi Aniu when
9 For an explanation of how Naxi manuscripts are read, see ‘Digital Exhibitions – Naxi Manuscripts’
he was young. Thus, he was able to decipher the mythological content of these scriptures (fig. 3).
There are two volumes of Dongba creation myths (RV-4175-24 & 26). The manuscript Worshiping Heaven (RV-4175-27) contains the traditional ceremony with the longest history of Naxi society. The Sacrifice to the Wind Spirits (RV-4175-25) is a ritual book, with various images meant to be painted on wooden slabs. Dongba shamans then carry out the ritual to save the souls of dead lovers who committed suicide, letting them reach the mountain kingdom reserved for faithful lovers. The scripture Sacrifice
Figure 3. ADCA research team deciphering and translating the Dongba manuscript of the Creation Myth (RV-4175-26). Photo by Gao Jinsong, 2020.
to Dongba Sha La (RV-4175-23) is used for the funeral of Dongba masters and to escort the soul to heaven. The ancient cremation tradition of this ritual is still preserved in remote Naxi mountain villages (Zhang Xu 1998: 127). Two other manuscripts worth mentioning are the Prayer for Long Life (RV-4175-15 & 16). Traditionally, this ceremony is held for highly respected elderly Dongba masters or village elders, so that the infinite magic of the Great Dongba and the noble
character of elders are passed on to future generations. One of the two manuscripts (RV-4175-15) describes the myth of the longevity tree, vividly describing how ghosts destroy the holy tree, upon which the gods protect and restore the sacred tree. The eleven Dongba manuscripts collected by Scharten represent some of the most important Dongba stories and rituals.
A comparison of translations
The Naxi creation myth is known as Coqbbertv in the Naxi language and has been translated into various titles such as Origin of the World, The Migration of Mankind or The Story of the Flood. It is one of the three most important Dongba epic works, telling the story of the origin of all things, the birth of heaven, earth, and mankind, and of the Naxi ancestors’ migration that took place over thousands of years and thousands of kilometres.10
Scharten’s translation titled From Where Mankind Comes? is kept in the Wereldmuseum archive (Scharten n.d.) (fig. 4). In her rendering, the opening lines of the creation myth are as follows:
From the very beginning the heavenly spirit made all kinds of things. On earth the spirit spoke. The trees could walk.
The stones could open their mouth. The earthglobe could move. All these things were, but heaven and earth were not yet created.
(Translation by Elise Scharten)
Several prominent Western and Chinese researchers of Naxiology have translated and studied and published about this classic, such as Joseph Rock (Rock 1935), Lin-Tsan Lee (1957), Charles McKhann (McKhann 1992), Li-Min He (He 1985), and Michael Oppitz (Oppitz 1998).
During my research, I discovered thirteen Dongba manuscripts of the creation myth in European collections, some of which were already translated in their entirety into Chinese, French and Swedish by researchers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.11 However, due to the scattered nature of collections and lack of communication between researchers, these translations have not yet been published.
Scharten was the first to ever completely translate this creation myth into English when she was in Lijiang between 1924 and 1934. She would
10 The other two are the heroic epic The War between the Black Tribe and the White Tribe, and the love epic with the theme The Love Suicide Story.
11 I.e. Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), the British Library (BL), the Swedish National Museums of World Culture, École française d’Extrème Orient (EFEO), the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and the Wereldmuseum.
Figure 4. First page (out of ten) of Scharten’s typewritten translation in the Wereldmuseum archive (Scharten n.d.: 1).
have done so with the help of a Dongba shaman. Even though she spoke the Naxi language, she would not have been able to decipher all the Dongba writing, nor would she have been familiar with the rituals (Poupard 2018: 96). The fact that Scharten carefully collected two volumes of creation myths highlights that she first learned the names and general content of these scriptures from the Dongba shaman, and then selected the manuscripts that she considered more collectible. Her collection and detailed translation
should be attributed to her many years of missionary work in Lijiang and close contact with the Dongba shamans. A comparison between Xi Shanghong’s interpretation and Scharten’s translation shows that the two versions are generally quite close in meaning. There is one major difference in the first page of manuscript RV4175-26 deciphered by Dongba Xi Shanghong and subsequently translated into English by me, goes as follows:
Before heaven and earth were born, first appeared their shadows. Before the sun and the moon were born, first appeared their three kinds of shadows. Before the stars were born, first appeared their three kinds of star-like shadows. Before mountains and valleys were born, first appeared their three kinds of shadows. Before trees and stones were born, first appeared their three kinds of shadows. Before water and streams were born, first appeared their three kinds of shadows.
Here is Scharten’s translation of the same passage:
All these things were, but heaven and earth were not yet created. In heaven only the shadow of sun and moon were there, the echoes in three different kinds.
No stars, only their shadow and echo in three different ways. No mountains only their shadow and echoes in three different ways. No trees and stones, only their shadows and echoes in three different ways. No river nor water, only their shadows and echoes.
Although the manuscript does not include the Dongba pictogram for ‘echo’, Scharten writes ‘echoes’, making the translation more graphic and vivid. Usually, Dongba shamans only use the term ‘shadows’ in their decipherment
of the creation myth’s opening lines, depicting the illusory nature of the universe before the birth of all things. The Dongba scripts are used as mnemonic symbols by the Dongba shamans during their chanting.
Scharten apparently found a highly qualified Dongba shaman, who could add details to the story beyond the written text and express the echoes of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions at the beginning of the Creation. She likely faithfully recorded the decipherment of the Dongba shaman. The shaman used this text as a prompt and fleshed out the content of the verses with ‘echoes’. Scharten writes ‘echos’ five times, bringing a strong auditory impact and spatial expansion to the translation.
As a devout Christian missionary, Scharten’s intention was to bring her religion to China, but she also ended up bringing important Chinese Naxi Dongba religious mythology back to the Netherlands. She translated the Christian Gospel of Mark into Naxi and the Dongba creation myth into English (Poupard 2021). Although Scharten did not further research Dongba scriptures, her exploration and translation of manuscripts in the process of collecting undoubtedly made her a highly qualified collector and translator in this field. Her contribution of translating the famous Dongba creation myth should go down in history.
Epilogue: the wish of Dongba master Xi Shang Hong
When I interviewed Dongba Xi Shanghong, he said with great emotion: ‘Fortunately, Dongba’s old books had
been collected abroad. If the books had stayed here, they would probably all be burned…’ Xi Dongba has deciphered the collections of ancient Dongba scriptures brought back to him from eight countries around the world.
He continued: ‘Actually, it doesn’t matter where the scriptures are currently stored, as long as our Dongba can still see the contents of these scriptures, we can restore the Dongba rituals that have been lost here for decades.12 Even if they are somewhat incomplete, it doesn’t matter…’(Zhang 2015). ADCA has been working hard to help the 80-year-old Dongba master turn his wish into reality, and most recently, in the autumn of 2023, assisted him in restoring the Dongba ritual of sacrificing to the ancestors, lost for 70 years in his small mountain village of Rishuwan in Shangri-La, making Xi Dongba’s wish come true.13
12 The interview is from the ADCA documentary The Return of Dongba Scriptures, produced and directed by the author of this article, which won the ‘Best Humanities Documentary Award’ at the 2015 Festival du cinéma chinois de Paris and can be viewed on the website https://digitalcollections.universiteitleiden. nl/view/collection/naxi. It was part of the China National Social Science Foundation Key Project (No. 12&ZD234).
13 Through the academic research project ‘Revitalisation of Naxi Dongba Script’ between the ADCA and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the traditional Dongba ritual of Ancestor Sacrifice was revived. The digitized Dongba manuscripts of ‘Sacrifice to the Ancestors’ used in this ritual were brought to Xi Sanghong Dongba by the ADCA for deciphering in 2019. The original manuscripts are housed at the Leiden University Libraries.
Zhang Xu Tayoulamu 张旭·塔尤拉姆 , a Naxiologist and founder-president of Beijing Association of Dongba Culture and Arts (ADCA), has been conducting Naxi region fieldwork since 1990. She engages in research, translation, and cataloguing of Dongba manuscripts collections worldwide. She presided deciphering and recording Dongba manuscripts for the China National Social Science Foundation key project and directed internationally award-winning anthropological documentaries. She lectures on the history and status of Dongba culture at the United Nations and universities in various countries.
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