Page 44 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

latter workshops were one of the main ways in which Qianlong's personal taste was

disseminated throughout the workshops and studios of the palace organization.
The sheer scale of palace operations in decorative arts and painting is astonishing. To
some degree, it is explained by the construction of new palace buildings. To the building
activity already mentioned, one has to add: the transformation of the summer retreat at Jehol
into the largest of all the imperial gardens (including a dozen temples in Lamaist style, one of

which is a replica on a smaller scale of the Potala palace in Lhasa); the many new gardens
within the Western Park next to the Forbidden City; and new buildings in the Forbidden City
itself. This was furthermore a period of lavish political gifts. However, commands did not

necessarily respond to a functional need. Conforming instead to a special form of
conspicuous consumption and display of power, the possibilities offered by the workshops
existed in order to be exploited, even if only on a whim. Qianlong's requirements, moreover,
outstripped the resources of even his expanded palace workshops, so that specific projects
had to be delegated in whole or in part to private contractors in the south. One, admittedly

special, example of this was the carving of "jade mountains" from the enormous quarried
boulders that became available following the successful Xinjiang campaigns of the later
1750s. This was undertaken for the court by workshops in Yangzhou.

In these new circumstances, criteria of quality necessarily changed. In decorative arts,
for example, the Qing palace workshops had originally been an enclave of the highest
possible workmanship in the late Ming sense of a master artisan's handiwork. But the onset
of mass production under Qianlong displaced attention from the traces of an individual mind
to the decorative system that the object embodied. Creative innovation gave way to a

systematic exploitation of all the possibilities of combination and substitution (550). The
results may frequently be incongruous, even absurd or grotesque, but they are in their own
terms perfectly logical. On this level, the decorative arts of the palace workshops and the

architectural program of the summer palaces may be seen as microcosmic and macrocosmic
expressions of the same totalizing phenomenon. A further example is the innumerable
portraits of Qianlong, where he was as liable to appear in the guise of Guanyin bodhisattva as
in the role of a European monarch, a mounted Manchu general, a scholar in his garden, or a
Tibetan living Buddha (552). In the imperial cosmology of the Qianlong reign -- the Emperor

as universal ruler -- each manifestation of imperial presence and control was equally valid,
valuable and real.
It was no less essential to present each of these realities as unblemished and absolute.

The pictorial technology of European realism was particularly useful in this regard, providing
as it did an almost documentary proof. It reached its highest level at the Chinese court in the
work of Castiglione, whose architectural skills are in evidence in the European Palaces, as