Page 95 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

80 Stacey Pierson

Figure 5.3 Glazed tile from the so-called “Porcelain Pagoda” (Da Bao’ensi 大報恩 ), Nanjing.
Ming dynasty, c. 1412–1431. British Museum, 1923,0514.1. © Trustees of the
British Museum.

The architectural fragments acquired at this time were initially transformed into
a different type of object by their classification as collectibles and souvenirs in China,
but they underwent a further transformation when they left China. In Britain,
especially, they came to be classified by both private collectors and museums as
“ceramics,” primarily because of their material nature. In the period after 1860, this
would seem to make sense because there was, as yet, no well-defined category of
objects known collectively as “Chinese art”—this would begin later in the century.
Chinese objects were for the most part still exotic “curios,” if made of jade or ivory
or enamelled metalwork, or they were simply “Oriental” but it can be argued that
the Summer Palace provenance and its marketing helped to refine this category into
“Chinese.” Interestingly, architectural fragments transcended this geographical elision
because they could be separately classed as ceramics, a subject that was, as we have
seen, already a well-established field of collecting in Britain by 1860, to the extent
that it had its own survey literature. Thus, once defined as “ceramics,” these
architectural fragments could be made sense of, they could be fitted into an existing
rubric of things and given a place in the narrative of that field.
Within the ceramics collecting field generally, there was specialization and normally
divisions were made by geographical origin and type of body, such as “Porcelain—
European,” “Pottery—Italy,” or “Porcelain—Oriental,” as presented by Marryat in
1850, contributing to a refinement of location of origin. Commonly, the architec -
tural fragments from China were classified as “pottery” and interestingly, by some
specialists in “Oriental ceramics,” as specifically Chinese. The fact of their origins