Page 147 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

132 John Finlay
collection of paintings that Bertin has received from China, and which put before
our eyes the manners, the customs, the products and the arts of this great empire
which has been up to now so little known to us. Monsieur Bertin takes pleasure
not only in allowing his study to be seen but even in making available the
different objects to the savants and artists who hope to take away some practical
value from examining them. 50
In a kind of continuation of the Jesuit missionaries’ earlier publication of the Lettres
édifiantes et curieuses between 1702 and 1776, Bertin maintained an extraordinary
correspondence with the French missionaries in Beijing, an exchange he called the
Correspondance littéraire de la Mission française de Pékin. Many of the detailed
articles, translations from Chinese sources, and other documents that Bertin received
were printed in the 16 volumes of the Mémoires concernant les Chinois between
1776 and 1814. 51 The Mémoires also included a certain number of illustrations,
but like the articles, these were only a selection of what Bertin possessed. The
Yuanmingyuan is cited in various volumes, although no pictures of it are reproduced.
However, connections within elite social circles in late eighteenth–century France
allowed for a certain movement of knowledge and ideas, a process that nevertheless
remained haphazard and incomplete. Henri Bertin was in an ideal position at the
center of personal and political networks that were concerned with the acquisition
of accurate knowledge of China. His role in the dissemination of knowledge of the
Yuanmingyuan is just one example of the successes—and extent—of that encounter.

Notes
1 A key source on Bertin is Jacques Silvestre de Sacy, Henri Bertin dans le sillage de la
Chine: 1720–1792 (Paris: Editions Cathasia; Les Belles lettres, 1970).
2 On the role of the French Jesuits in Qing China, see, among other sources, Virgile Pinot,
La Chine et la formation de l’esprit philosophique en France (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1932;
reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1971). And see Camille de Rochemonteix S.J., Joseph Amiot
et les derniers survivants de la Mission française à Pékin (1750–1795) (Paris: Picard
et fils, 1915). Reprint editions are available; see also http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/
bpt6k5609162p; accessed July 14, 2015.
3 Taken by a French officer in the 1860 looting of the Yuanmingyuan, it is now in the
Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Département des Estampes et Photographie, Rés.
B-9. See the BnF website, http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb438054446/PUBLIC,
Yuanming Yuan si shi jing; accessed June 20, 2015, for catalogue information and access
to digital images of the “40 Views.”
4 See the second Qing imperial catalogue of paintings and calligraphy, Shiqu baoji xubian
‚ƒ„ † (1793), juan 78, reprint vol. 7, pp. 3755–3759 (Taipei: National Palace
Museum, 1971). The inscription on painting no. 40, Dongtian shenchu, gives the date,
equivalent to October–early November 1744, and the names of the painters, Tangdai
(唐ˆ, 1673-after 1751) and Shen Yuan (‰Š, act. ca. 1728–1748).
5 Imperial woodblock-printed books were distributed, in some cases, among the various
imperial palaces as well as among imperial princes and high officials as a sign of the
emperor’s favor.
6 See Véronique Royet et al., Georges Louis Le Rouge: Les jardins anglo-chinois (Paris:
Bibliothèque nationale de France; Connaissance et Mémoires, 2004). Che Bing Chiu also
discussed examples of the “40 Views” in his presentation “On Silk and on Paper:
Representations of the ‘Forty Views of the Yuanmingyuan’ ” for the University of
Manchester workshop The Yuanmingyuan in Britain and France: Representations of the
‘Summer Palace’ in the West, 8–9 July 2013.