Imperial clocks from the Palace Museum, Beijing

Fig 1. Clock in the form of a pagoda with extending mechanism. Height 126cm, to 158cm fully extended.
Gilded copper with coloured stones. 18^th C. Made in England (maker’s name unknown)

This summer, London’s Science Museum plays host to 23 magnificent clocks from the Palace Museum, Beijing. Among the precious objects collected by emperors of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), clocks were a great favourite, especially those with automated features known as zimingzhong 自明钟 (“self-chiming clocks”). The Palace Museum holds hundreds of them.  

But as you might expect of the Qing (not known for their restrained taste), these are not any old clocks. Time-keeping seems to be a secondary function: their main purpose is to knock your eye out with dazzling adornment and mechanical trickery.

Fig 2. Clock in the form of a crane with pavillion. Gilded copper, enamel and coloured stones.
18^th C. Made in England by James Cox, possibly with additional decoration in China. 

The one used on the exhibition’s publicity material (see above) is a modest example. Standing 38cm high, made of gilded copper and coloured glass, it takes the form of a crane carrying a pink-and-gold pavilion on its back, with a small clock-face attached. The crane turns back to offer an auspicious lingzhi fungus to the residents of the pavilion. It plays a tune every hour, or so we’re told: none of the exhibition’s clocks is active. 

While this is one of the least ostentatious pieces in the show, it embodies all the key attributes of the collection: the influence of foreign clock-makers (its mechanism was made in England), automated functions, the use of natural and religious imagery, and dazzling ornamentation.

A more typically bling example is the pagoda clock (Fig 1) which greets you as you enter the exhibition. Standing 1.26m high, elaborately wrought from gilded copper inset with deep blue stones, its nine tiers extend upwards like a concertina every three hours, and then retract three hours later, while the music box plays a Chinese folksong. It is one of a pair of pagoda clocks previously owned by the Emperor Qianlong. You can see its twin in action in this video from the Palace Museum (go to 02:00).  Have a look too at other examples of automation at 06:30 to 06:50. The museum workshop obviously takes great pride in restoring these devices.

Fig 3. Clock in the form of a lotus jar with opening flowers, swimming ducks, Daoist figurines and
musical device. Gilded copper, glass and enamel. Height 118cm. 18^th C. Made in the Palace workshops, Beijing.

I was very taken by this lotus jar clock (Fig 3), whose blossoms open to reveal three Daoist figurines (see below), while the little ducks swim round the pond to the sound of music.   

Fig 4. Detail from the lotus clock. The blossoms open to reveal (from left) a white ape,
the Queen Mother of the West, and a boy holding a peach. The blossoms close again when the music ends.

I could go on about the other pieces on display but here are some of the blingiest:

Fig 5. From L to R:

1) Elephant with clock on a plinth borne by four lions. Gilded copper with coloured stones. 18^th C. Height approx 100cm. Made in England. 

2) Double-gourd shaped clock mounted on two layers of automated scenes decorated with auspicious symbols. Gilded copper and enamel. 18^th C. Height 112cm. Made in Guangzhou, China.

3) Clock with knight and horse under a jewelled canopy. Gilded copper with coloured stones. 18^th C. Height 143cm. Made in England by Stephen Rimbault. The curtain rises and falls to music while a dragon flies across.

While the clocks are dazzling, the overall purpose of the exhibition is a bit vague. Is the aim just to astonish us with sparkly toys? In a display of “self-chiming clocks”, it’s disappointing to find none of them operational (a small notice explains that they are too old to be played regularly). There are a couple of videos showing clocks in action, and another video in the hall outside showing an automated farmyard scene with pecking chickens and a barking dog. Otherwise you have to read the labels and use your imagination.  

Perhaps there is a scientific purpose? The exhibition offers some models of cogs and wheels to play with but these time-keeping mechanisms were known in Europe two centuries before they arrived in China. The Science Museum has a Clockmakers gallery so perhaps this seemed like a good fit, but there’s no explicit link to it, which is strange. Also strange is the absence of an exhibition catalogue. A well-illustrated catalogue would have sold by the truckload, giving the museum some much-needed cash.

I found all this a tad frustrating because the rise of the Imperial clock collection links a number of important historical threads: notably the infiltration of foreign missionaries into China and the adoption of foreign technology by Chinese artisans. 

The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (see my earlier post) first gave a pair of mechanised chiming clocks to the Wanli emperor of the Ming dynasty in 1601. Prior to this, Chinese timekeeping relied on cumbersome devices like sun-dials or water clocks. One famous water-driven clock, invented in 1092, was about 6m high (see below). Some foreign visitors were bemused that the Chinese, who invented printing and gunpowder, hadn’t figured out automated time-keeping.

Fig 6. Water-driven clock invented by imperial engineer Su Sung in 1092. Source: Cambridge University Press

The advent of European clocks running on weights and springs, much smaller and prettier than any existing devices, must have resembled the arrival of the iPhone. Eventually, any visitor seeking favour with the imperial court would include at least one luxury clock in their array of gifts, preferably sourced from elite makers like James Cox of London (French and Swiss makers were also in vogue). 

As the imperial collection grew, the Jesuits helped to repair and service these delicate toys. This, plus their skills in fine arts and astronomy, helped consolidate their place at court. They also practiced “cultural accommodation”, allowing their Christian converts to observe Confucian practices like ancestor worship. All other Christian missionaries forbade this and were duly thrown out of China by the Kangxi emperor in 1721. I like to think that the emperor didn’t want to lose the only people who could fix his precious clocks. 

Ever responsive to new trends, Chinese artisans began making their own zimingzhong, both within the Palace and around the city of Guangzhou where the Jesuits had their first Chinese mission. Their work shows a distinct blend of Chinese and European design features, as in Fig 7 where the double-gourd (symbol of health and longevity) sits on a platform borne by four rams. The animal-mounted platform (featuring lions, rhinos, bulls, etc) was a favourite detail used by British clock-makers. 

Fig 7. Double-gourd clock with mechanical features including automated scenes of Chinese rural life. Gilded copper with enamelling. Height 94cm. Dated 1790. Made in Guangzhou. Source: Liao (2002)

The Guangzhou clockmakers also catered for wealthy local residents for whom a European-style clock was a prestige item. This appeared in contemporary literature like the 18th century novel Dream of the Red Chamber, where the ownership of clocks and watches highlights the Jia family’s elite status. Eventually, of course, they became an everyday item for all levels of society.

Given this rich background, the Science Museum could have done more to flesh out the history of these devices (here's where a catalogue would have been useful!). But I’m grateful that they were able to bring these amazing pieces to London. As long as you’re happy to be blinded by bling, this exhibition is well worth a visit. 

The Emperor Jahangir's fantasy world

This 17th century painting, attributed to Abu’l Hasan, is one of the finest works in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin and certainly one of the most bizarre. Dating from 1616, it depicts the Mughal emperor Jahangir standing on a globe while furiously shooting arrows into the decapitated head of a black man. The globe rests on the back of a bull which is standing on a giant fish. An owl perches on top of the severed head while another seems to be falling off it. Celestial beings in the upper right corner reach down to offer Jahangir more weaponry.

 The answer to the question “what’s going on here?” is not a short one, but worth unpacking nonetheless. Firstly, the head is meant to be that of Malik Ambar, a former slave of Ethiopian origin who became a successful military leader in the Deccan region, fighting against Mughal expansion in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The Mughals struggled for decades to conquer the five Deccani sultanates; it was a long painful to-and-fro affair until Jahangir’s grandson Aurangzeb finished the job in the mid-17th century. At the time of this painting, Malik Ambar was very much alive and the whole Deccan business was a massive thorn in Jahangir’s side. He seems to have commissioned this allegorical fantasy in part to assuage his own raging frustration.

Source: New York Review of Books

The surrounding images are so complex that academic sources don’t always agree on their meaning, and a full discussion is beyond our scope here. One thing that stands out is Abu’l Hasan’s use of European imagery. The globe is not only a reference to Jahangir’s own imperial name (“he who seizes the world”) but seemingly also a nod to their popularity in European Renaissance art. The Mughal court was well acquainted with contemporary European painting thanks to gifts from Jesuit missionaries from as early as the mid-1500s. Jahangir (when not obsessing about his enemies) had a keen and enquiring mind, and was much taken with this new field of art. In a way, this portrait is a distant cousin of Holbein’s The Ambassadors, another work packed with allegorical references, including a hidden skull and (yes) some globes. The little weapons-merchants in the upper right rather resemble Italian Renaissance putti, while also harking back to the celestial beings seen in classical Indian sculpture.

The art historian GA Bailey has pointed to the tiny Persian text inscriptions beside each key image as another feature seen in European Renaissance art. The one beside Malik Ambar’s head reads: “The head of the night-coloured servant has become the house of the owl”. While owls certainly had a bad rep in Indian superstition, this text also reminded me of the “habitation of dragons and a court for owls” in the Book of Isaiah; indeed, the furious speech of God’s Judgement on the Nations (read it here) could be Jahangir raging about the Deccan. The idea that this image has Christian metaphorical overtones isn’t far fetched: we know about the Jesuit connections, and on the globe Abu’l Hasan has included an image of a lion lying down peacefully with a deer or antelope. In the companion piece to this painting (“Jahangir slaying poverty”), the biblical imagery is even more distinct.

Abu’l Hasan is careful to tie it back to Indian and Islamic imagery, however, as the Mughals were Muslims after all, albeit rather liberal at times. The bull and the fish are common images in Indian art, and the artist knew that his audience could make its own references to Matsya the giant fish (avatar of Vishnu), Nandi the bull (companion of Shiva) and so on. But he may also have been referring to an idea amongst some mediaeval Islamic scholars that the earth rested on a bull and a fish.  For example, there is a striking similarity with this image from a 13th century illustration by Islamic mystical scholar Zakariya Qazwini, whose book Ajaib al-Makhluqat (The Wonders of Creation) was just the sort of thing that curious Jahangir would have loved.

Source: US Library of Congress

The main aim, I suspect, was to show Jahangir at the very centre of a painting filled with Western, Islamic and Indian imagery, both ancient and modern, so as to underline his position as He Who Seizes the World - if he could only get rid of those pesky Deccan rebels! 

Happily, Malik Ambar lived on well into his seventies as a high-ranking courtier in the sultanate of Ahmednagar, even acting as regent at one point. It was not until years after his death that the sultanate finally succumbed to Mughal forces. Sunil Khilnani talks about him in his fascinating Radio 4 series Incarnations: India in 50 lives. If you have BBC iPlayer, you can access it here. 

Useful sources of information for this post included: "Sultans of Deccan India 1500-1700", Metropolitan Museum, NY; "The Indian Portrait, 1560-1860", Rosemary Crill; "Biblical Themes in Mughal Painting", SP Verma; and "The Spirit of Indian Painting", BN Goswamy. 

My memory of the phrase "habitation of dragons and a court for owls" comes from Gerald Durrell's "The Garden of the Gods", Corfu Trilogy, Book 3, Chap 4.

Matteo Ricci in the UCL art collection

At the Public Curating Takeover hosted by University College London last week (a great event, by the way), I was delighted to find this print in the collection. There was no mistaking the image of Matteo Ricci (on the left), perhaps the most famous Jesuit missionary ever to work in China. The figure on the right is named as Paul Siu, about whom more later.

The UCL catalogue does not name the artist, but other sources trace this image to a book (China Illustrata) published around 1668 by a Jesuit scholar named Athanasius Kircher. Whether Kircher actually executed the engraving himself is unclear. Judging from the rather muddled Chinese characters on the altar hangings, I would guess that it wasn’t the work of a Chinese artist.

Ricci first arrived at the fledgling Jesuit mission in southern China in 1582, when Christian missionaries were struggling to gain a foothold. He successfully applied the Jesuit strategy of “cultural accommodation”: adapting to local language and customs to spread the message, while dressing and living as a scholarly Chinese gentleman to win the trust of influential local people. Hence the significance of this image, in which he wears Chinese robes and a Confucian scholar’s hat. By 1601 Ricci had established the first Jesuit mission in Beijing itself and had begun to build direct ties with the Imperial Court, quite a coup by any standards.

For the art world, Ricci was important in at least two ways. First, he laid the way for Giuseppe Castiglione (a Jesuit priest and artist) to become an influential Qing dynasty court painter in the 18^th century. Castiglione became noted for elaborate portraits like the one of the Qianlong emperor, below. His work is sometimes dismissed as trivial but he became a key member of the imperial atelier (pretty amazing for a foreign artist) thanks to foundations laid down by Ricci. These days, no exhibition of Qing art is complete without a few Castigliones – his portraits of imperial pet dogs are especially popular. 

But it is Ricci’s role in the clock-making industry that I find most fascinating. Mechanical time-keeping devices (the kind that run on springs and cogs) didn’t exist in 16^th century China. When Ricci presented a pair of European clocks to the Wanli emperor in 1601, he set off an absolute craze for the devices. It seems the 17^th century Chinese were as keen on modern technology as their modern descendants. And having studied the imported European models, they eventually set up their own clock-making workshops (mainly around Guangdong) which flourished as the growing middle classes all wanted one too. Hardly surprising, as some of the finest Imperial palace clocks looked like this (below), which sold at Christie’s Hong Kong in 2008 for US$4 million.

Best of all, according to the historian Joseph Needham, Matteo Ricci was worshipped well into the 19^th century as a patron deity (pu-sa) of the Shanghai guild of clockmakers, due to his role in bringing modern clock-making to China. Now that’s cultural accommodation!

As for Paul Siu, he was born Xu Guangqi and brought up as a good Confucian. He rose through the ranks of Chinese bureaucracy to become a “first grand secretary” in the Ming dynasty, before converting to Christianity in 1601. According to the historian David Mungello, Xu and two other senior civil servants were Matteo Ricci’s most celebrated converts, later known as the Three Pillars of the early Christian church in China.

So the UCL collection’s print is significant because it illustrates both the strength of Matteo Ricci’s missionary zeal (as reflected in his full Chinese dress), and shows next to him an example of his success in the form of Paul Siu.