Aptly, just across from the Science Museum’s little Clock Gallery is a charming new exhibition – Zimingzhong: Clockwork Treasures from China’s Forbidden City.
What is a Zimingzhong and how do you even say it? Glad you asked. It’s a clock that 1) tells the time; 2) moves; 3) makes a musical noise and 4) has some symbolic significance. Several of the 23 pieces here from Beijing’s Palace Museum tick all of those boxes; all of them tick some. As for pronunciation, the Zhong is pronounced Jong.
These pieces are testimony to a flourishing period of international trade between China and Europe in the 18th century. As far as Britain was concerned, Chinese tea, teacups and porcelain were all the rage – Chinoiserie was very cool – but there was the problem of what to trade in return.
The British answer was clocks; mechanical ones of great elaboration, size and ingenuity. Most of the 23 here were originally made in England but what’s interesting is that Chinese artisans copied them in turn, giving their own decorative and symbolic take on the genre.
This was an age of curious automata, and it’s interesting to see what European clockmakers considered would attract the eye of an emperor – because it was the emperors who had something of a monopoly of these show-off timepieces. (Alas, the merchants never got to meet an emperor; he would send his Hoppo, a customs official, to select the best objects.)
There was a moving pagoda with nine tiers made in London, which would slowly rise to the sound of music. There were beautiful shepherd boys with musical instruments, or leading goats, or bearing fruit. The French sent a richly caparisoned horse led by a man in a turban surmounted with a palm tree, under an ornate tent – with a handy depiction of the coronation of Louis XIV on the back.
One James Upjohn made an impressive gold temple featuring Alexander the Great at the centre, presumably on the basis that the great man must be known to the Chinese too, and umpteen dragons, lions and other beasts.
One of the greatest of these clockmakers was James Cox, whose work included a wonderful, rather lifelike elephant whose tail and trunk moved, with gold lions at the base. It is one of the many pieces which give the impression that in terms of function, the timepiece took very much second place behind the magnificent decoration.
The exhibition closes with another impressive elephant. Yes, I know, China doesn’t have elephants, but the ornamental gist was general orientalism. Another exquisite, small, clock is surmounted with an armillary sphere, showing the movements of the planets around the earth. Poor Mr Cox ended a poor man, after closing his clockwork museum off Trafalgar Square. Look at the digital display on your horrid mobile phone, and weep.
The Chinese who copied the British originals at Guangzhou sometimes combined European mechanisms with their own decoration. There’s one elaborate bowl of flowers on spindly stems, at the top of which were Thumbelina-like figures, and little herons at the base; the mechanism under the sepals made the petals open and close.
The man who first introduced mechanical clocks to China was the brilliant Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, and others followed suit. It wasn’t straightforward; the Chinese marked time in two hour and quarter hour units, and we find here a little conversion table from our time to theirs.
The only drawback to this charming exhibition is that you don’t get to see the zimingzhongs moving and making music. But a pleasing soundscape derived from the sound of the clocks makes up for it.
