Page 124 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

“Rose-water Upon His Delicate Hands” 109
which had Yuanmingyuan provenance including in the sections on “Pottery–Antique
Earthenware, etc.” and “Works in Metal” respectively:
821 Bottle-shaped vase, light green ground, from the Palace, Pekin.—General Sir
Hope Grant. 53
1144 Japanese clock.—Sir Hope Grant. 54

As the two entries above demonstrate, the quality of descriptions, of information
about provenance, and even of the lender’s titles, were of variable consistency through -
out the catalogue. Nevertheless, even allowing for the telegraphic nature of many of
the catalogue’s entries, General Sir Hope Grant appears not to have lent the ewer
to the 1861 exhibition.
The attempt in this chapter to examine some of the dominant readings of the
Hope Grant Ewer arose out of a moment of curatorial anxiety that occurred in 2011.
In that year, work had begun on reinstalling the National Museum of Scotland’s East
Asia gallery, which displayed selections from the Museum’s Chinese, Japanese, and
Korean collections. 55 First opened in 1996, the gallery had been deinstalled in 2008
as part of a large scale museum refurbishment project, and now my role, having
joined the Museum in 2009, was to reinstall the gallery in 2011 for a three year
lifespan until 2014, at which time the gallery would again be deinstalled in order to
make way for a future phase of museum development. The label that sat in front of
the Collecting China display case, in which the ewer was exhibited between 1996
and 2008, read Rose-water ewer of gold from the Imperial Summer Palace at Beijing.
19th century. Given by Lady Hope Grant. 56 No comment or reaction by members
of the public to the display of the ewer prior to 2008 is recorded in Museum files,

Figure 7.3 Display of Chinese artifacts including the Hope Grant Ewer in the National
Museum of Scotland’s Lady Ivy Wu Gallery Between 1996 and 2008. By kind
permission of the National Museums Scotland.