In 1860 British and French troops pillaged and destroyed the Summer Palace of China’s Qing emperors, carrying off pieces of art and chunks of architecture – and a tiny, hairy dog who belonged to the emperor. Looty, as the dog was renamed with impeccable bad taste, was given to Queen Victoria and was the first “Pekinese” in Britain.
A portrait of Looty is one of the many arresting images and facts in what must be the strangest blockbuster the British Museum has ever staged. In 2007, this museum put on a show about China’s first emperor. China’s Hidden Century takes the story up to the last emperor – the child ruler Aisin-Gioro Puyi, deposed by a revolution in 1912. Yet in the closed world of the 19th-century imperial court, recreated here, it seemed nothing had changed for centuries. It’s a heady experience to enter the heavily ritualised ambience of the emperor’s inner circle. The clothes alone are incredible works of art: gowns and dresses intricately decorated with butterflies, filigree patterns, dragons. There’s a dress that belonged to the Empress Dowager Cixi, who effectively ruled China from 1861 to 1908 and changed her glittering apparel several times a day: nearby are costumes and wall hangings from the operas performed at court. It’s hard to tell opera from reality, so formalised was everyday life in this rarefied centre of power.
In 1911 the Chinese court sent two colossal vases, decorated with golden dragons in swirling blue, as coronation presents for George V. These 2-metre-tall cloisonné monstrosities are on loan from Buckingham Palace. Their size is an act of assertion: China’s empire still defined itself as “all under heaven”. But this exhibition shows in pitiless detail how far the court’s view of itself had strayed from reality.
Britain plays a stunningly cynical part in the story of imperial China’s final decline and dissolution. A lithograph published in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition that celebrated Victorian capitalist triumph, shows a cavernous depository stacked to the ceiling with goods for export: it’s proudly titled, “A busy stacking room in the opium factory at Patna, India.” The East India Company was producing opium in India specifically for export to China: its Patna brand was considered the best on the market. China’s senior administrator Lin Zexu, portrayed here philosophically drinking wine in the countryside, but fingering a sword, wrote to Queen Victoria in 1838 complaining about the British drug trade’s devastating impact on China’s addicted elite. Britain responded by sending the fleet.
The first and second opium wars – it was in the second that the Summer Palace was looted, and Britain came to own Hong Kong – were the first direct, military face-offs between China’s time-hallowed civilisation and the industrial, upstart west. It was a foregone conclusion. Portraits, armour and weapons of “bannermen”, the elite of the Qing imperial army, resemble glorious props from a martial arts epic set in the 11th century. But this was the 19th century and the British had modern guns.
Gunpowder was of course invented in China centuries before, as was movable type. How had world history turned so comprehensively upside down that China could now be humiliated and ransacked by Queen Victoria’s drug dealers?
One reason is glimpsed in a glass case containing a suit made of rice-fibre and palm with a bamboo hat, the garments of the rural and urban poor. The caption praises its efficacy as rainwear, but it conjures the ghosts of nameless millions who eked a desperate existence far from China’s bejewelled court. Meanwhile, technologies of the 19th-century global economy were starting to reach those millions. The new western invention, photography, was used to preserve the faces of ancestors: in an amazing example from the later 1800s, a photograph has been used to create an embroidered photorealist portrait of a man.
But it was an older import, Christianity, that unleashed the most devastating cataclysm of 19th-century China. Christianity offered a rival worldview to Taoism and Buddhism. It inspired Hong Xiuquan, a village school teacher who failed his civil service exams, to declare that he was the brother of Jesus Christ and make himself Heavenly King: in 1851 he led his Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to war against the Qing. “Christ and I were begotten by the Father,” affirms Hong Xiuquan in his own correction of a British missionary’s letter on view here. A propaganda print shows the imperial army finally defeating the Taiping rebel capital, Nanjing, in 1864: their leader is depicted running away but in reality he was already dead. His remains were dug up and fired out of a cannon. Twenty million people died in the Taiping rebellion, making it the bloodiest civil war in world history.
Still the court staggered on. If the emperor lived in a closed world, ordinary people were looking farther: a Chinese magazine here even illustrates the opening of Liverpool’s railway under the Mersey in 1886.
This exhibition is atmospherically designed as a shadowy labyrinth, in which you discover one clue after another to an often shocking history. The curators try to end on an optimistic note. We meet the poet and revolutionary activist Qiu Jin, who was executed in 1907 and became a martyr for the new century. She’s projected on a cinematic scale as the face of the future.
So, after the Qing dynasty fell in 1912, China lived happily ever after – you might walk out of this exhibition thinking if you have never seen a newspaper or history documentary. In reality there were horrors as great as the Taiping to come: the 20th century would bring Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, Mao’s Long March, the Cultural Revolution, and so on up to today’s powerful capitalist economy ruled by an authoritarian Communist party that’s making feints at democratic Taiwan. Where will it end? This dumbfounding exhibition shows modern history to be as thrilling and mysterious as the ancient past: but a lot more worrying.
China’s Hidden Century is at the British Museum, London, from Thursday until 8 October
