SUMMARY
The Porcelain Pavilion.
Dutch Literary Chinoiserie and the Western Image of China (1250-2007)
Chinoiserie is a term normally used to characterize a European style in art that
flourished in the late 17th and 18th century and ever since has remained a sometimes
weaker and sometimes stronger presence in the decoration of western homes and
gardens. It is a complex phenomenon that has taken many different shapes and produced
a wide variety of objects and styling – from splendid works of art and excellent
examples of craftsmanship to mass-produced pieces of rubbish. The only recurring
features that qualify them as chinoiserie seem to be the distorted imitation of Chinese
images, forms, styles and production procedures and the fact that they are produced for
the western market, originally by western artists, but since long also by Chinese
manufacturers with a keen eye for western taste.
The term is also applied in other fields than art to characterize distorted views of
China produced in other periods, be it in literature, political or philosophical discourse
or, recently, in the western perception of China as a new economic power. These
distortions can often be interpreted as projections of western concerns, hopes and fears
and as such tell us more about western social and cultural issues than about China.
Through the centuries – from the first Franciscan missions to the Mongols (c. 1250) to
the post-Tiananmen economical boom – one thing stands out in all these views: China
has fascinated, seduced and puzzled the West as no other culture or country has done
ever before. First as a huge, wealthy and mighty silk-producing kingdom named Cathay
that was idealized as a possible ally against the Arabs. Seen from the 16th century as a
distant, exotic paradise of wisdom, social justice, beauty and wealth, it served until the
beginning of the 19th century as a kind of utopian counter-image of Europe. Although
in the 17th century the hausse of sinofile publications already provoked strong
sinophobic reactions, during centuries westerners looked upon China with amazement
and a certain feeling of inferiority. This view changed to its contrary during the 19th
century, when the Heavenly Empire was considered backwards and barbarous, and by
far inferior to Europe, both in civilization and in scientific development. In fact, it was
seen as an ‘immobile empire,’ where nothing had changed for ages.
Due to the fact that China never posed a real threat to Europe, different from
Arabs or Turks, the westerner could dream on about China without ever being woken up
by reality. In the 19th century sweet dreams turned into nightmares and from then on
negative and positive images have alternated in the western mind until today, with the
dreams of Mao’s workers’ paradise and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the
nightmares of Deng Xiaoping’s Tiananmen massacre and a hostile takeover of western
economy as most recent examples.
At the beginning of the 21st century an entirely new situation in westernChinese relations arose. From then on, for the first time in history, China has become a
real life presence in western homes and minds, with the country nearly daily on the
news, Chinese made goods (textiles, toys, consumer electronics) overturning western
markets, and Chinese modern art, film, literature and lifestyle (tai chi, feng shui, martial
arts) conquering the old world. As a member of the UN and the World Trade
Association China chose to be part of the global community and accepted to play by
international rules. Hosting the Olympic Games (Peking 2008) and the World
Exhibition (Shanghai 2010) it opens up to the outside world as it has never done before.
But also now not without causing nightmares to the West.
In spite of the radical change in the early 21st century – the Chinese Century, as
some say – China still continues to occupy a unique position in the western imagery and
subconscious, although the country has become more than ever a country among other
countries. Unlike any other country or culture it has fascinated the West as a counterworld and a culture of ‘otherness’ where all western ideas and values were put upside
down. With its ancient culture, vastness, enormous population and tremendous working
and business potential it has inspired and still inspires a constant mixture of hopes and
fears, and it seems to continue to embody a western subconscious concept of vastness,
greatness and large numbers. Whereas western Orientalism can be seen as a quest for
the identity and roots of western civilization, which was largely defined by Greek and
Roman culture, Christianity and the Bible, thus producing selfrecognition, China
represented the radically different, the not-our-own, the unknown, and as such inspired
a lasting fascination which created strong images that, more or less consciously, remain
present in the western mind.
Although it seems quite obvious that western images of China were and still are being
produced within a western multilingual discourse, until now little attention has been
given to the spread of that discourse and to the development of multilingual image
building within national boundaries. Western images of China have been analysed
mainly by English speaking scholars. Either they focused their investigations on images
and texts produced within Anglo-Saxon culture – as is the case with Raymond
Dawson’s The Chinese Chameleon. An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese
Civilization (1967) – or they worked from a broader view – most notably in Hugh
Honour’s Chinoiserie. The Vision of Cathay (1961) and Donald Lach’s Asia in the
Making of Europe (3 Vols., 1965-1993) – or they restricted themselves to a personal
choice of ‘representative’ authors and or topics – as did Nigel Cameron (Barbarians
and Mandarins. Thirteen Centuries of Western Travelers in China, 1970), Colin
Mackerras (Western Images of China, 1989), and Jonathan Spence (The Chan’s great
Continent. China in Western Minds, 1998).
With the exception of Lach all defend the limitations of their field of research by
stating that the subject is enormous or limitless. This may be true for researchers
wanting to cover the entire field of western images and text production about China, as
Lach daringly endeavoured to do for historic, geographic, cultural and anthropological
knowledge from the early middle ages until the end of the 17th century. Delimiting their
radius, others may choose a more or less restricted time period, a central theme, a
language or a country. Dealing with a long lasting relationship with a huge cultural
entity such as China this can be unrewarding exactly because of the imposed
restrictions, which can produce a telescope or tunnel view, enlarging phenomena to
more than life size and omitting the broader picture, thus creating the danger of
overlooking diachronic developments and differences, parallels and symmetries with
earlier and later periods.
The emphasis on one major language, mostly English, can also have its
problems. Although most writers on the subject also consider works written in Latin,
French and German, other important languages in the history of the western Chinadiscourse – such as Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Dutch – are poorly represented or
merely accessed through translations. In order to somewhat repair this ‘neglect,’ in this
study Portuguese, Spanish and Italian texts are also taken into consideration in as far as
they seem representative of early western images of China – mainly in the 16th and 17th
century.
The notion of multilingual discourse and image building seems to be fairly
workable within the context of a relatively small country like the Netherlands, which as
an important player in the field of western-Chinese relations ever since the beginning of
the 17th century and as a country with a long standing multilingual culture and a
considerable reputation for publishing works in foreign languages both in the original
and in translation, can to some extent be considered exemplary for the development of
western perceptions of China.
This tentative assumption is put to the test in this study that works along two
main lines. The first line explores the history of western relations with China between c.
1250 and 2007, from the first Franciscan missions to the Mongol khans until the rise of
China as an economic superpower in the last decade. The second line explores the
Dutch (and Flemish) part in the building of western images of China and from the 17th
century onwards focuses literary texts written in Dutch which transmit distorted views
on China, the Chinese and their culture.
The studied material is extremely varied, as is to be expected when dealing with
texts which function against an historical background of complex and complicated
relations, and perceptions of a foreign land and culture developing from next to nothing
under difficult circumstances. And difficult they were, for from the first contacts with
the Mongol court until the 19th century Opium Wars all western endeavours to establish
stable contacts with Mongol and Chinese rulers shipwrecked due to a fatal lack of
understanding of the tribute system, which only allowed western powers to be
considered vassal states of China, an honour most western ambassadors vehemently
repudiated, while others not even got as far as paying their respects at the imperial
palace. Apart from the tribute system, the xenophobic policies of the Middle Kingdom
also kept western visitors at a distance. This way, unknowingly, the Jin, Yuan, Ming
and Qing emperors nurtured the western fascination, which could develop freely into
images of unequalled wealth – first transmitted by Marco Polo –, social justice –
propagated by Portuguese travellers and prisoners in China –, and moral virtue and
wisdom – with Jesuit missionaries established in Peking presenting Confucius as a
Chinese saint and moral philosopher of great interest to western Christianity.
From the beginning, images of China in the Netherlands have appeared against
an international background. Therefore the international western context seems
indispensable to position and understand Dutch literary chinoiserie. Due to the fact that
these images function within and are developed from the historical discourse of
western-Chinese relations, both lines are presented simultaneously in chronological
order. Thus, starting out on the historical line with the first westerner to meet Chinese
(1254) and describe them in Latin, the Flemish Franciscan friar Willem van Rubroek,
the line of Dutch and western literary chinoiserie begins with the tragedy Zungchin, or
the Decline of Chinese Dominion (1667), inspired on the fall of the Ming Dynasty in
1644, and written by Dutch major poet Joost van den Vondel. From there Dutch
chinoiserie develops in various ways, mirroring different time and circumstance related
attitudes towards China, in texts ranging from an early adaptation of thoughts of
Confucius, poems on military campaigns against the Pescadores islands, travelogues,
and descriptions of embassies to the emperor, to comedies about tea-drinking ladies and
fake-letters from the Chinese emperor.
Dutch literary chinoiserie reached a climax between the two World Wars, when
many Dutch and Flemish poets discovered Chinese poetry through adaptations into
French (Judith Gautier’s Livre de Jade), German (Hans Bethge and Klabund), and
English (Arthur Waley). They were attracted to the views on life it conveyed and in
translations and adaptations also experimented with new forms (poems in prose and
expressionist verse) leading away from the moulds, rhyme and rhythm of classical
poetics. After the Second World War, poets and prose writers showed a growing interest
in Chinese philosophy and poets continued their experiments with form and poetic
language, denoting influences from Ezra Pounds Imagist theories based on Chinese
poetry. Over the past decades Chinese literature has become largely available in Dutch
owing to a rapidly increasing number of translations of prose and poetry by sinologists.
New chinoiseries are nonetheless still being written, partly reviving earlier trends and
partly exploring new directions, thus showing that images of China – nowadays no
longer stable entities but atomized into innumerable floating views of past and present,
fantasy and reality, fact and fiction – continue to fascinate and inspire.