Page 121 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

106 Kevin McLoughlin
provenance of the ewer, in either its pre-1860 imperial or post-1860 imperialist
iterations. What the registry entry does privilege to the exclusion of almost all else
is the physical nature of the ewer with a detailed description of the ewer’s ornamental
features and forms. At 10 lines, the length of the ewer’s entry description is longer
than the majority of contemporary artifact entries in the registry, the majority of
which range from one to, at most, several lines, with few exceeding three to four
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lines. This attempt to capture the ewer’s description so fully and accurately suggests
an attempt to fix the unfamiliar, to descriptively capture the qualities of its crafts -
manship, or perhaps because the ewer possessed greater cultural novelty or financial
value, or both, than was usually the case; it therefore needed to be described in fullest
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detail. Similarly, the entry for the Hope Grant Ewer focuses on form, and to a lesser
degree function, describing the ewer’s purpose as a rose-water jug. Whether entries
were in all instances the result of direct first hand description, or transcribed from
secondary curatorial or other sources extrinsic to the author of the entry, or to the
Museum and the no doubt partially tacit epistemic practices and values of registration
then current, means that an exact understanding of what epistemic practices were
applied, and to what extent, remains frustratingly out of reach. Swinney again
observes that:

There were (at least) two registers, the “permanent register” (i.e. the copy which
was kept centrally and was supposed to reside in the fire-proof safe) and the
“scroll register” (a copy which for departmental convenience was maintained by
and probably within the department). At different times in the Museum’s history
one or other was considered the “master”. Entries in the “master” were probably
made as items were entered into the collections (or possibly annually from an
accessions book). The entries were then transcribed (sometimes with additions
or omissions) into the other “version” (these practices of bulk transcription
account for the uniformity of handwriting). This transcription might have taken
place some considerable time after the “registration” or “accession” event. 38

Of relevance too, is the period of the museum’s institutional history in which the
entry was transcribed, since the museum was then operating under a number of
discernible formative and external influences. The National Museum of Scotland that
exists today is the cumulative result of the merging over time of several component
museum institutions and collections, some with their origins dating back to the late
eighteenth century. Founded in 1854, an 1855 Act of Parliament established funding
for an Industrial Museum of Scotland, to be built in Edinburgh. When the ewer
entered the Museum in 1884, the Museum had been renamed the Edinburgh Museum
of Science and Art. 39 George Wilson (1818–1859), Professor of Technology at the
University of Edinburgh, was appointed as the first director, a post he held between
1855 and 1859. He set out his vision for the role of the Industrial Museum of Scotland
in 1855:

An Industrial Museum is intended to be the repository for all objects of useful
art, including the raw materials with which each article deals, the finished
products into which it converts them, drawings and diagrams explanatory of
the process through which it puts these materials, models or examples of the
machinery with which it prepares and fashions them, and the tools which specially