The British historian Eric Hobsbawm popularised the idea of the ‘long nineteenth century’ in European history, the notion that starting historical accounts of the nineteenth century precisely at 1800 and ending them on the dot at 1900 is inadequate; you have to start at 1789 with the outbreak of the French Revolution to understand everything which followed, and you have to continue the era on until 1914 and the outbreak of the Great War, which marked the true end of the century and all its assumptions.

The curators of this sumptuous, fascinating and beautifully designed exhibition at the British Museum have done something similar to Chinese history, extending their definition of China’s long nineteenth century – what they’re calling ‘China’s Hidden Century’ – to start in 1796 and to end in 1912.

The dates

Why start at 1796? Because that’s the year a new emperor came to the throne, the Qianlong Emperor. It didn’t mark the start of a new dynasty; the Qianlong Emperor was the fourth in the well-established Qing dynasty which had started in 1644. But the start of his reign arguably marked a high tide mark of China’s power and confidence. In that year the empire contained over 300 million souls, an estimated third of humanity, and the total territory ruled by the emperor exceeded the area of Europe.

This map from his reign is a political map in the sense that it doesn’t strive for geographical accuracy but marks places by importance. So it’s amusing to learn that Europe is shown as a small border area at the top left and that Britain is one of the tiny insignificant islands indicated by white-lined blobs off the blue coast at the very top left.

Complete Map of All Under Heaven Unified by the Great Qing, China, about 1800 © The British Library

Why end the period in 1912? Because that’s the year when, following the revolution of 1911, the last Qing emperor, the Xuantong Emperor, commonly known as Puyi, was forced to abdicate, bringing to an end over 2,000 years of imperial rule.

Why the ‘hidden’ century? Because the long century between these two dates has conventionally been seen by Western historians as an era of steady decline, a sunset period after the artistic glories of the 17th and 18th centuries, leading inexorably down to the empire’s final collapse at the start of the 20th century. The curators’ aim is to question and reverse this preconception, to rehabilitate China’s long nineteenth century.

Nineteenth century wars

When describing the nineteenth century in China, Western historians all too often focus on the series of wars which China fought and consistently lost, notably the two Opium Wars (1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860), the catastrophic Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), the Sino-Franco War (1884 to 1885), the First Sino-Japanese War (1894 to 1895), the Boxer Rebellion (1899 to 1901).

But despite these various disaster, in China, like everywhere else, people continued to live and love, marry, have families, make homes, work or run businesses, hustle for money or places in the bureaucracy, buy clothes and furniture and toys and household implements, shop and cook and eat, wear fine clothes and jewellery, write letters and contracts and wills and poems, decorate and draw and paint beautiful things.

And that is what this exhibition is about. Wars and emperors are covered, but what it’s really about is Chinese social history, about uncovering the lives and lifestyles of the widest possible range of Chinese people – a people steeped in tradition and religion and rituals and business and art – through a dazzling collection of objects.

Jacket with border of steam ships 1860 to 1900 © The Trustees of the British Museum

The exhibition contains 300 objects brought from over 30 lenders, public and private, around the world. It’s taken four years to assemble and involved over 100 scholars from 14 countries. The result is not only the exhibition and the typically sumptuous catalogue which accompanies it, but a related book by a team of scholars which details the lives of 100 Chinese citizens chosen from all across ‘China’s Hidden Century’.

Seven rooms

The exhibition has been organised into seven rooms, each addressing an aspect of Chinese life, being:

1. Introduction
2. Court
3. Military
4. Artists
5. Urban life
6. Global China
7. Reformers and revolutionaries

Representative figures

Each room also features one particular individual who typifies or epitomises the theme under consideration. There are an unknown woman courtier; an empress; a soldier; an artist; a businessman’s wife; a merchant; and revolutionary poet.

In a lovely piece of design these personages are threaded through the show’s iconography by shadows, life-sized outlines of these fugitive figures from history. The Museum commissioned the London College of Fashion to create silhouettes of these figures, which are projected on delicate white fabric or gauze hangings throughout the beautifully laid-out show.

In fact the first thing you see when you enter the Sainsbury Wing where the exhibition is being held is an opaque screen with life-size silhouettes of 7 mysterious figures cast on it. These shadowy figures, from a distant country, from a vanished past, will hover over and guide the visitor through their treasure and marvels.

Shadows of the past – screen designed by the London College of fashion in ‘China’s Hidden Century’ @ the British Museum

1. Introduction – women’s voices

The map (above), a bilingual document in both Manchu (language of the ruling dynasty) and Chinese (language of the majority Han people), and an imperially commissioned dictionary indicate some of the scope and scale of the multilingual, multi-ethnic empire at the exhibition’s start point. But the most significant object here is a portrait of an unknown woman.

Portrait of an unknown Manchu woman by an unknown artist © The Trustees of the British Museum

As Chairman Mao said a century later, ‘Women hold up half the sky’, but women’s lives were very circumscribed in traditional China. As well as bringing the story of a neglected century into the light, the exhibition is very committed to giving women’s stories and women’s experiences their due. This picture of an unknown woman from the Qing court sets the tone or announces this intent.

Accompanying the picture is a 1-minute audio of her imagined thoughts and feelings, read in both English and Chinese. All of the seven figures have an audioscript like this, in which they describe their lives and experiences.

On a more specific level, if you look very closely you can see that she has three earrings in each earlobe, something Manchu women did to as a marker of their ethnicity i.e. belonging to the ruling caste. Ethnicity was important. The introductory section also contains a map of Peking, which was sharply divided by ethnicity. The imperial palace complex and immediate environs were reserved for Manchus. Han residents lived to the south in the walled part of the city. Foreign diplomats and business people were confined to a quarter in the north-east.

2. The court

Six emperors ruled in succession between 1796 and 1912 and a lovely scroll on the wall gives their names and dates and a one-phrase description. They were:

1. Underestimated emperor: The Jiaqing emperor (ruled 1796 to 1820)

2. Emperor forced to open China: The Daoguang emperor (1821 to 1850)

3. Witness of Qing decline: The Xianfeng emperor (1851 to 1861)

[Power behind the throne: Empress Dowager Cixi (1835 to 1908)]

4. Puppet emperor: The Tongzhi emperor (1862 to 1874)

5. Reforming emperor: The Guangxu emperor (1875 to 1908)

6. Last emperor: The Xuantong emperor (Puyi) (1908 to 1912)

The last three of these came to the throne and their reigns were dominated by the great power behind the throne, the Empress Dowager Cixi, the de facto ruler of China from 1861 to 1908: her son became the Tongzhi emperor and her nephew ruled as the Guangxu emperor.

Cixi is centre stage here, the Representative Figure, a life-sized silhouette of her caught on a hanging gauze, while all around her are clothes and objects indicating the luxury of the imperial court. As with all the other representative figures, there’s an audio playing of some of the Empress Dowager’s words, in this case an amusingly immodest claim:

“I have often thought that I am the cleverest woman that ever lived… I have heard much about Queen Victoria…her life was not half as eventful as mine.”

Empress Dowager Cixi’s robe (about 1880 to 1908) © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Objects include a sumptuous imperial blue gown (above). This features a swooping phoenix amid lush chrysanthemums and wide sleeve bands and is a gorgeous combination of Manchu, Chinese and Japanese motifs, in purple, gold and turquoise. The Empress Dowager’s wardrobe contained hundreds of such dazzling items, which she would accessorise with grandiose, jewelled headpieces, some of which are on display.

But there’s also an abundance of other objects, from the sublime to the ridiculous. At the everyday life end of the scale there’s a collection of snuff boxes. Before 1860 snuff-taking was the preserve of high-status bannermen, government officials and wealthy merchants; after 1860 these stylish little boxes became more widespread as fashionable male accessories.

The most impressive display is of a huge monumental hanging. Dramatic textiles such as this are thought to have served as backdrops for operatic performances but originally derived from hangings for religious festivals or banners in ritual processions. In the centre of this one is a theatrical warrior figure with a yak hair beard and padded-out face. The colours and method of depicting the figures is similar to woodblock printed images of popular deities. In front of it is an elaborate theatrical costume.

Monumental hanging made from silk and metallic thread embroidery on plain-weave wool with animal fibres (nineteenth century) Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art

There are thumb-rings used by Manchu archers and cavalrymen, an informal robe made for the Guangxu emperor, ritual vessels used as part of state religion, the portrait of a Daoist priest and a Buddhist figure (Buddhism was an important component of the Qing court’s belief system, with Mongolian and Tibetan lamas (teachers) and monks conducting services at court). There’s a woman’s court vest and robe and a photo of court women wearing such clothes. There’s hairpins and fingernail guards; glassware and lacquerware. In short, a wealth of beautiful evocative objects.

Most incongruous objects is the pair of enormous, highly decorated cloisonné vases which were a diplomatic gift from the last Qing emperor Xuantong (also called Puyi) to King George V and Queen Mary for their coronation in June 1911.

Two Chinese vases, cloisonné enamel on copper with carved wooden stands (1908 to 1911) Lent by His Majesty The King

Photography

Something that’s always puzzled me about Chinese art from this period is the odd dysjunction between traditional forms and styles and hyper-realistic faces. The curators explain it was the advent of photography. Western photography, as it developed and spread throughout the nineteenth century, strongly influenced non-Western artistic traditions and in China led to a fashion for hyper-realistic faces, derived from photos, but embedded in traditional clothes, in traditional scroll format, with traditional writing still written on the painting – something we see striking examples of later in the show.

Film

Moving pictures were first publicly presented in 1895 and quickly spread as the technology developed at lightning pace. In an alcove to one side there’s rare, silent black and white film of a dancer, Yu Rongling, daughter of a Qing diplomat, who studied traditional dance in Japan, then, when her father was posted to Paris, studied Western dance and with the dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. She returned to China in 1903 and was asked to perform for the empress. This rare footage of her performing a sword dance is from 1926, after the exhibition’s time limit, but indicating the kind of performance which would have been staged for the last emperors. She is also, of course, part of the exhibition’s foregrounding of women’s achievements.

3. The military

As mentioned foreign and domestic wars ravaged Qing China throughout the 1800s. Civil conflicts including the White Lotus Insurrection (1796 to about 1806), the Xinjiang wars (1820s and 1860s) and the ruinous Taiping Civil War (1851 to 1864), and then wars with imperialist powers such as the two Opium Wars with Britain (1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860), the Sino-French War (1884 to 1885), the Sino-Japanese War (1894 to 1895) and the Boxer War (1899 to 1901).

This section is dominated by the impressive figure of a bannerman. We see an impressive soldier’s uniform from mid-century and hear an audio of General Mingliang (1735 to 1822), spoken in Manchu and English, recounting his life and experiences. What is a bannerman?

Bannermen were elite hereditary soldiers who commanded divisions called the Eight Banners, identified by eight coloured flags. They were mostly Manchus, Mongols and some Chinese whose ancestors fought against the Ming dynasty in 1644. Most bannermen lived in the region around Beijing. In provincial garrisons they lived apart from the local population, often in walled sections of major cities. Bannermen were paid a state salary and enjoyed preferential treatment under the law and in the national and regional exam system, success in which led to a government post.

Installation view of ‘China’s Hidden Century’ @ the British Museum, showing Qing army uniform, shield, musket and banner

Illustrating the role of the Chinese army during the long nineteenth century are an album recording the postings of an unknown military official; the diary of Wanyan Linqing, a Manchu bannerman and high-ranking official which contains lovely ink line drawings by contemporary artists. There’s examples of military uniforms and flags along with images of weapons such as double swords, trident, swallowtail shaped shield, infantry archery, sword with shield, long spear, long sword with curved blade and muskets.

From a naval perspective there’s a map of China’s coastline indicating islands, reefs and sandbars. Most poignantly or pointedly of all, there’s a physical copy of the actual Treaty of Nanjing which ended the First Opium War, signed on 29 August 1842. It was the first of the ‘unequal treaties’ which were imposed on the weak Qing Dynasty by arrogant Westerners and, as such, the source of burning resentment for over a century. Its provisions forcibly opened up coastal cities like Shanghai to European and American merchants.

The First Opium War

In the early 1800s, ships began smuggling opium (an illegal narcotic) from British India into south China. As opium consumption increased, the Daoguang emperor banned the trade. The British surrendered 20,283 chests of British-owned opium, promising compensation to the merchants concerned. Lin Zexu, the emperor’s special commissioner, confiscated and destroyed it all. The British government sent a fleet of ships to recoup compensation of lost opium profits.

By the treaty the Qing were ordered to pay an indemnity of $21 million over three years and relinquish Hong Kong to the British. There is absolutely nothing to redeem Britain’s bullying, extortionate and immoral behaviour. In ironic counterpoint to Britain’s bullying, there’s a delicate portrait of Queen Victoria made in 1842 by an unknown artist looking as if opium wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

The Second Opium War

Britain began the Second Opium War to force China to legalise the opium trade and to secure profits from it. The 1858 Treaty of Tianjin opened 11 further ports to Western trade. In 1859, the Qing military defeated an Anglo-French fleet sent to Beijing to ratify the treaty. In 1860, more Anglo-French forces marched on Beijing. They looted the Summer Palace, home to the emperor. Prince Gong, the emperor’s brother, signed the Convention of Beijing, bringing the war to an end. Reformers subsequently began to strengthen and modernise Qing rule.

So the British burned the emperor’s summer palace to the ground as punishment for disobeying our imperial commands. Apparently, the brick and stone ruins have been left to become the defining symbol of European violence against 19th-century China. (Other areas of the site have been built on to form parts of the campuses of Peking University and Tsinghua University.) There are some sad relics from the palace on display, namely a couple of broken glazed turquoise architectural tiles.

The Taiping rebellion

One of the weirdest but at the same time most destructive conflicts in human history. Schoolteacher Hong Xiuquan (1814 to 1864), a small town schoolmaster exposed to Christian teachings through a missionary pamphlet, had a nervous breakdown as a result of which he became convinced that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ!

He appointed himself ‘Heavenly King’, first emperor of the new dynasty of Taiping. Mind-bogglingly he attracted hosts of followers, amassed an army and by the late 1850s his ’empire’, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, occupied much of China. With about 200 million people under its control, the Taiping had its own rulers, officials, civil service exams, calendar, currency and laws.

Qing dynasty forces fought back and the conflict turned into a full-blown civil war. Amazingly, it resulted in an estimated 20 million dead, making it the deadliest conflict in human history. Western mercenaries fought on both sides. Foreigners protected their interests by supplying both the Qing and Taiping with weapons.

Relics or indicators of this vast catastrophe include an embroidered jacket from the Taiping court, a portrait of Hong, a notice to be placed on European’s homes sparing them from Taiping violence, Taiping coins and a seal, a hand-written letter from Hong and a copy of the Taiping Bible which was amended to insert Jesus Christ’s brother.

The Taiping made Nanjing their capital in 1853, fortifying the former Ming capital with an outer wall. This was where they made their last stand in summer 1864, surrounded and under siege by the Hunan army led by Zeng Guofan – as depicted in this contemporary woodcut.

The defeat of the Taiping, Nanjing, about 1864 © SOAS University of London

4. Artists

Despite the disruption and huge death toll of China’s nineteenth century wars, life for most people carried on, with many people prepared to pay for luxury objects and works of art. The century saw continued production of China’s classic media and genres, landscape paintings, fans and albums and there are rare and beautiful examples here.

But the century saw the slow steady introduction of western techniques such as lithography, which was combined with traditional woodblock printing design. Cheaper printing technology allowed cheaper magazines and newspapers to be produced such as the weekly pictorial magazine, Dianshizhai huabao, on display here – which included western style images and spread a new Western aesthetic. New artistic and literary groups were set up. Artist Ren Xiong was a member of this new generation and is represented by this fine painting of his patron’s wife.

Autumn shadow in Liangxi (Wuxi) by Ren Xiong (1840 to 1857) © Michael Yun-Wen Shih Collection

There are examples of works by other artists from the period including Xugu, Sun Mingqiu, practitioner of bapo art, as well as some beautiful examples of traditional calligraphy by Yi Bingshou and Huo Ziye.

The commonest and most impactful form of art was mass-produced religious art, especially images of gods and goddesses depicted in woodblock prints and there are striking examples here, notably a painting representing the Daoist goddess Magu, protector of women.

Women’s art tended to be exchanged within closed networks and so tends to be under-represented in modern collections. The exhibition tries to redress this by displaying works by Cao Zhenxiu and Ma Quan.

Album of Insects and Flowers by Ju Lian (1865) Lent by the Metropolitan Museum

5. Everyday urban life

This feels like the biggest and fullest room and, insofar as the exhibition’s aim is to show the continuity of everyday life during the period, is arguably at the core of its mission.

By the 1850s China’s population had reached a staggering 450 million. Average life expectancy was just forty years but despite this cities grew rapidly as people migrated from war-torn areas. A growing body of entrepreneurs developed businesses using new technologies and materials. Handicrafts were industrialised and commercialised. Wealthy people’s homes and fashion reflected these political, cultural, technological and environmental changes. Newspapers and magazines showed their readers middle class lifestyles to aspire to.

Installation view of the urban life room in ‘China’s Hidden Century’ @ the British Museum

This room is packed with stuff, with objects from everyday life, life on the street, ordinary people’s lifestyles. There’s a baker’s shop sign, a cook’s jacket and trousers, a picture of a weaver. There’s a great portrait of an itinerant dentist holding strings of teeth dangling from her advertising placard.

There’s carved portraits of gods, side-fastening jackets in eye-catching colours, brightly coloured leggings, silk and leather shoes, a child’s jacket and hat, examples of men’s fashion. There’s winter wear, a woman’s sleeveless jacket, an amazing hood decorated with dragons, detachable collars of different shapes and sizes, elaborate head dresses for wear on special occasions. Loads and loads of things.

Elaborate headdress with peacock and bee motifs (1800 to 1900) Lent by the Teresa Coleman Collection

There are everyday objects and tools, including sewing tools such as needles and thimbles, sleevebands and accessories. Earmuffs. Hair extensions. A mahjong set and objects from games and sports, cricket cages and a shuttlecock, glove puppets and marionettes. Traditional musical instruments such as a pipa (pear-shaped lute) and a dizi (transverse flute). A charming set of miniature furniture as for a doll’s house.

I didn’t know whether to be charmed or appalled when I learned that bannermen in Beijing often kept pigeons, releasing them into the sky twice a day to watch them fly and listen to the music created through their whistles. There are depictions of theatre and opera indicating popular and middle-class entertainments, a woodblock showing a troupe of jugglers, a watercolour depicting a wealthy merchant from Hangzhou surrounded by his courtesans.

There’s a bizarre-looking water-proof cape made entirely from stalks of straw for a street worker, farmer or fisherman. Conservators have painstakingly restored it to its former strangeness.

The Representative Person here is Madame Li. She was a Buddhist and married to Lu Xifu who ran a successful business in the Foshan area near Guangzhou (Canton). She and her husband are represented by ancestral portraits painted in the new realistic style inspired by photography and commissioned by their nephews. In their business success, in their bourgeois self-image, in their family piety, in their easy incorporation of Western styles into a traditional format, they epitomise the later Chinese nineteenth century. Like all the other representative figures, Madame Li has a one-minute audio describing her life, in English and Chinese.

Portraits of Lu Xifu and his wife, Mrs Lu by an unknown artist (about 1876) framed hanging scroll with ink, colours and gilding on paper. Lent by the Royal Ontario Museum

6. Global Qing

We’ve seen how foreigners triggered war with Qing China and how foreign styles influenced some artists. This section looks at the increasingly international nature of trade and the cosmopolitan nature of the objects being traded.

Until the 1840s, Guangzhou (Canton) was the only place in China where trade with Europe and the USA was legal and where foreigners could live and work. The Treaty of Nanjing of 1842 forced the government to open up more ports to foreign trade, which became known as ‘treaty ports’, most successful of which was to become Hong Kong.

With trade came new materials, styles and technologies. In the second half of the century modern technology revolutionised industry and changed people’s lives. Inventions such as electricity and the new postal system transformed the way people worked and communicated.

So this room contains a painting of the waterfront at Guangzhou; a portrait of Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, a Bombay-born Parsi merchant and philanthropist who made a fortune trading with Qing China in commodities including opium; a portrait by a Qing artist named Lamqua of a British East India Company Midshipman; a book belonging to Silas Aaron Hardoon, once one of the richest men in Asia who made his pile in Shanghai selling opium, renting out properties and investing in the new stock exchange.

Luxury objects include a cream silk parasol with multicoloured knotted tassels; a carved ivory basket with handles carved like dragons; a beautiful painting of crabs done by a local Guangzhou artist; luxury objects such as a fan, a lacquer bracelet and a gaming chest.

There’s a set of ‘reverse glass paintings’ and a treaty port silver punch set made from ‘export silver’ and consisting of a punchbowl, six beakers, a sugar bowl and tongs. tongs. It has applied dragons, the initials of its British owner, John Penniall, and the date 1905.

Treaty port silver punch set, Shanghai (1905) © Trustees of the British Museum 2023

There’s a folding screen which was exhibited at the 1867 International Exposition in Paris; a fashionable round fan with a map of the Eastern and Western hemispheres, a fan portraying the Tianjin incident.

It’s an old curiosity shop, a rummage sale, an Antiques Roadshow of all kinds of accoutrements and impedimenta. There’s a beautiful silk robe embroidered with images of the new steamships plying China’s rivers, a poster for a Shandong line train.

I especially liked the travelling medicine chest of Ida Kahn (1873 to 1931), a pioneering female doctor. Kahn was the adopted daughter of an American missionary in southeast China, studied medicine in the USA and England. Returning to China in 1896, she was hailed as a ‘modern woman’, gaining the support of the local gentry and foreign missionaries alike. But as well as Western medicine, Ida had knowledge of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Hence this travelling chest filled ointments, powdered plants, dried insects and written charms to speed recovery. I particularly liked the dried lizard.

Traditional Chinese Medicine chest (1890 to 1910) Lent by the Natural History Society of Northumbria

The Representative Person here is Lu Guangheng, also known as Mouqua (1792 to 1843) who organised trade with foreign merchants in Guangzhou, serving as head merchant of the ‘Hong’ – a guild with the exclusive right to trade with foreigners – from 1807 to 1811. He suffered severe financial losses in a fire in the city in 1822. In his portrait he is dressed in the robes of a high official which, however, he paid for rather than passing the difficult public exams. Mouqua was unusual for his time in speaking English.

Mouqua, also, has a one-minute audio-recording, telling his story in both Cantonese and English.

7. Reformers and revolutionaries

The last room concerns the political disruption which eventually led to the overthrow of the last emperor in 1912. A good deal of the final collapse was caused by foreign interventions. Qing China was shocked by its defeat to Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 to 1895. In response to this humiliation Chinese patriots pressed for sweeping reform of the administration and the need to modernise all aspects of the country. The old Empress Dowager Cixi reluctantly permitted some reforms when the country was rocked by the Boxer War of 1899 to 1901.

The Boxer War

Anti-Christian militants supported by Qing troops against foreign residents of China and Chinese Christians. In summer 1900 Beijing’s foreign community was trapped in a 55-day siege in the capital’s walled diplomatic district. Qing and Boxer armies were eventually defeated by a joint expeditionary force from Austro-Hungary, the British empire, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the USA. The war is represented by a striking colour woodblock illustration. There’s a copy of the reformed military flag which was adopted by the Qing government.

North China was plundered by foreign troops and the foreign governments in yet another humiliation forced Qing China to pay reparations amounting to about £67 million over 39 years.

Rout of foreign troops by Boxers at Beicang near Tianjin. The Boxers are in the foreground wearing turbans. Commanders of the Qing troops wear yellow silk. Foreigners, at bottom left, hold the Union Jack and other European flags. Woodblock colour print on paper (1900) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Reform

Intellectuals searched for ways to revive China’s administration after the 1895 defeat by Japan. In 1898 a reform movement to radically modernise China was launched, which came to be called the Hundred Days’ Reform movement because it was opposed by conservatives at court and shut down by the all-powerful Empress Dowager Cixi. Two leading reformers, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, were forced into exile where they wrote doleful poetry.

However, pressure for reform continued and in 1905 the imperial exam system which focused on knowledge of Confucian philosophy was abolished. A revised curriculum for schools was introduced, including new subjects such as Western sciences and languages. Across China, new universities were founded.

Revolution

Many educated men and a few women left China for Japan, where some were radicalised. Pockets of resistance were established across China, but ultimately an uprising in Hubei on 10 October 1911 was the catalyst for change. The last emperor, Puyi, abdicated in February 1912, bringing to an end 2,000 years of imperial rule.

Qiu Jin

The exhibition ends, as it started, with a woman’s voice. Qiu Jin (1875 to 1907) was a revolutionary, feminist and poet. Qui travelled to Japan where, like many of her generation, she was radicalised i.e. saw that an Asian country could modernise without losing its traditional values. She returned to China where she was involved in revolutionary movements. She was arrested on trumped-up charges and executed aged just 31.

Qiu Jin in Kimono, from the Carrie Chapman Catt diaries and photographs (1910) © Wisconsin Historical Society

Apparently, she remains a celebrated figure in China to this day. Not only a political figure, she was a noted poet. A line of her poetry is written over her display:

‘As my heart shatters with rage over my homeland’s troubles, how can I linger, a guest abroad, savouring spring winds?’

The exhibition ends with a whole wall devoted to a slowly rotating sequence of photos of Qiu and, in a striking achievement, a recording of a song written by Qiu Jin performed by the London Chinese Philharmonic Choir (!) And with this rousing performance, this remarkable, overwhelming, encyclopedic journey through an alien culture and distant time, comes to a vivid and moving conclusion.

Reflections by Qiu Jin

The sun and moon without light. Sky and earth in darkness.
Who can uplift the sinking world of women?
I pawned my jewels to sail across the open seas,
parting from my children as I left the border at Jade Gate.
Unbinding my feet to pour out a millennium’s poisons,
I arouse the spirit of women, hundreds of flowers, abloom.
Oh, this poor handkerchief made of merfolk-woven silk,
half stained with blood and half soaked in tears.

Summary

Everything about this exhibition is carefully considered. The design, with its hanging gauzes, is lovely. The structure feels logical and inexorable. The representative figures reach out from the past to speak to us. The objects are uniformly fascinating or exquisite.

And through it all Chinese culture and society, its mores and values, shimmer and hover on the brink of our understanding. At moments it veers into our frame of reference and understanding. I understand cups and plates and furniture. Business is business everywhere and war is universal. And yet just as you think you can relate to these distant people, the Chineseness of Chinese art and design and life and war  arise as impenetrably other. Take the paintings: their concern with exquisite landscapes or photographic portraits obviously overlap with our interests, and yet derive from thousands of years of a completely different way of looking at the world and recording it, from a tradition it’s hard for us to relate to. We can really like it, but it’s always as outsiders.

At some moments the exhibition brings us really close to named individuals and their thoughts and concerns and, for a moment, we have the pleasing sensation that we understand these people. But the next moment the exhibition goes on to explain something about Chinese opera or art or poetry or politics or religion or social customs or traditions which seem utterly alien, and we are all at sea again.

I completely understand why the American Civil War was fought, the motives of the opposing sides and why it dragged on for so long. Whereas the Taiping Rebellion, which was ten times larger and one of the most catastrophic events in human history, remains incomprehensible.

I understand that Qiu Jin was a revolutionary, feminist and poet and yet, on closer examination, those very Western concepts don’t quite capture her, don’t quite map onto her actual words and concerns as recorded here. There’s something else. Something escapes. The fugitive Chinese quality of her thought and the lovely allusive quality of her poetry.

This feeling of shimmering closeness and then slipping out of reach, of the subject being wonderful and familiar yet utterly strange, and at the same time, is the delicious feeling this exhibition delivers.

Related links

• China’s Hidden Century continues at the British Museum until 8 October 2023
• Qiu Jin Wikipedia article

China reviews

History

• China: A History by John Keay (2008)
• The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present by Jonathan Fenby (second edition, 2013)
• The Scramble for China by Robert Bickers (2011)
• The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China by David J. Silbey (2012)
• China’s War with Japan 1937 to 1945 by Rana Mitter (2013)
• Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944 to 1945 by Max Hastings (2007)
• The Korean War by Max Hastings (1987)
• The Vietnam War by Mitchell Hall (2000)
• The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter (2013)

Fiction

• The Great Wall of China by Franz Kafka (1917)
• The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham (1925)
• Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard (1984)
• Miracles of Life by J.G. Ballard (2008)

Art

• Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700 to 1900 @ the Victoria and Albert Museum (January 2014)

More British Museum reviews

• More British Museum reviews