Page 120 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

“Rose-water Upon His Delicate Hands” 105
critically unexamined by the museum a century later, and disconnected from the
Chinese inscription on the base of the ewer.

1884 and the Museum Register

The first description of the ewer within the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art
comes from the Museum Register of 1884, a sizeable Victorian volume—divided into
columns with headings for Registration Number; Date; Description, &c.; From whom
procured; and Remarks—spanning the years 1880 to 1884:

Gold Rosewater Jug or Ewer; body pear-shaped, with narrow neck; low concave
base; on body two projecting heart-shaped panels bearing chased scrollwork;
engraved water leaves on long neck; spout rises out of the mouth of a kylin;
S-shaped handle has a dragon’s head and a leaf for terminals; a tie-piece of scroll -
work connects spout with neck; the cover has bands of diaper and scrollwork.
Chinese from the Imperial Palace of Peking, 1860. 32

The date given for the entry is September 25, 1884, and in the “From whom pro -
cured” column “Presented by Lady Hope Grant” is inscribed without further
comment, and without an address or a place, as was customary with contemporary
entries. 33 No comments appear in ink under the “Remarks” column to the right of
the “From Whom Procured”’ column. However, close examination reveals a set of
seemingly casual calculations jotted down in pencil, apparently reckoning the financial
value of the ewer. The physical description of the ewer is careful and precise, and
fully describes all of the defining physical features of the ewer. However, it is the last
line of the entry, which is of most interest in terms of provenance. The origin of the
ewer is simply given as “Imperial Palace of Pekin (sic),” not the Yuanmingyuan, the
Summer Palace, Imperial Summer Palace, or the Old Summer Palace. Twenty four
years after the events of October 1860, the terms imperial palace and Pekin apparently
remained synonymous, requiring no further description of source. The ewer was also
prominently cited by the Director, Thomas C. Archer (d. 1885) in the Report of the
Director of the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art at the beginning of his report
for 1884 where it was formally described as “Massive gold ewer, from the Summer
Palace, Pekin. Presented by Lady Hope Grant” and placed foremost in the list of
donations for that year. 34 Geoffrey Swinney has researched the nature of museum
registration and documentation practices, and has pointed out that, “The register as
a museum object is . . . generally considered a primary, unproblematic, authentic and
35
authoritative source of knowledge.” The entry for the ewer in the Museum Register
of 1884 is however problematic in several ways. At the remove of well over a century,
the textual practices associated with the Museum registers during the early decades
of the Museum’s existence are now dimly understood. Viewed today, the almost
exclusive emphasis on the formal physical qualities of the ewer in the entry is of
considerable and perhaps even startling interest. It makes no note of any of the three
engraved inscriptions on the ewer, English or Chinese, and no transcription is provided
of these very obvious engravings and dedications, which suggests that the entry was
drafted separately from the object, and perhaps reflecting a degree of migration from
an original through one or more subaltern documentary sources. The entry in the
Museum Register of September 25, 1884 also pays only the briefest attention to the