The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display 9780857452399

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Sacred Beings in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) Dynasties
2 Trophies of War, 1844–1852
3 Articles of Industry: The Great Exhibition of 1851
4 Curiosities, Antiquities, Art Treasure, Commodities: 1854–1867
5 Specimens of Ethnology and Race: Liverpool Museum, 1867–1929
6 Objects of Art, Archaeology and Oriental Antiquity: Liverpool Museum, 1929–1996
7 Objects of Curation and Conservation: Liverpool Museum, 1996–2005
Future Lives: Liverpool or China
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Lives of Chinese Objects

Museums and Collections Editors: Mary Bouquet, University College Utrecht, and Howard Morphy, The Australian National University, Canberra As houses of memory and sources of information about the world, museums function as a dynamic interface between past, present and future. Museum collections are increasingly being recognized as material archives of human creativity and as invaluable resources for interdisciplinary research. Museums provide powerful forums for the expression of ideas and are central to the production of public culture: they may inspire the imagination, generate heated emotions and express conflicting values in their material form and histories. This series explores the potential of museum collections to transform our knowledge of the world, and for exhibitions to influence the way in which we view and inhabit that world. It offers essential reading for those involved in all aspects of the museum sphere: curators, researchers, collectors, students and the visiting public. Volume 1 The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific Edited by Nick Stanley Volume 2 The Long Way Home: The Meaning and Values of Repatriation Edited by Paul Turnbull and Michael Pickering Volume 3 The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display Louise Tythacott

The Lives of Chinese Objects Buddhism, Imperialism and Display

Louise Tythacott

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2011 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2011 Louise Tythacott All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of congress cataloging-in-publication data A C.I.P. record of this book is available from the Library of Congress

British Library cataloguing in publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-0-85745-238-2 (Hardback) E-ISBN: 978-0-85745-239-9

For my father, Ken, with love, and in memory of my dear mother, Joyce.

Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction Research and Serendipity Objects, Meanings, Biographies Objects and the Museum 1

1 1 6 10

Sacred Beings in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) Dynasties Construction: Births, Iconographies and Consecrations Location: The Island and the Temple Reception: Pilgrims, Lay Worshippers and Monks

17 18 35 43

2

Trophies of War, 1844–1852 China and the World Outside Edie’s War: Disease, Death and the Deity of Compassion Edie’s Objects: The Significance of Things From Public to Private, Sacred to Profane

51 51 55 64 76

3

Articles of Industry: The Great Exhibition of 1851 Articles of Imperial Ideology China’s Refusal China at the Great Exhibition Late Arrivals: Exhibiting Edie’s Collection Pilgrimage and Ritual at the Temple of Industry China at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham

83 84 87 89 94 100 102

viii

4

5

6

7

Contents

Curiosities, Antiquities, Art Treasure, Commodities: 1854–1867 In the Cabinet of Gems: Objects of Bram Hertz, 1854–1856 Art Treasure: May to October 1857 Commodities: Sotheby’s, 31 May 1854 and 24 February 1859 Objects of Joseph Mayer: Antiquities and Curiosities, 1856–1867 Specimens of Ethnology and Race: Liverpool Museum, 1867–1929 From Private to Public Objects in the Museum At the Back of the Walker Art Gallery and in Gatty’s Catalogue: 1882 Objects of the ‘Mongolian’ Race: 1894–1929

106 107 112 118 123 135 135 139 145 149

Objects of Art, Archaeology and Oriental Antiquity: Liverpool Museum, 1929–1996 Chinese Objects as ‘Art’ Objects in War and Store: ‘An Exhibition of Official Neglect’ Objects of Archaeology: 1940–1966 Objects of Antiquity: 1966–1996 Guanyin Rediscovered: Objects of Chinese Metalwork and Connoisseurships, 1970s–1990s

182

Objects of Curation and Conservation: Liverpool Museum, 1996–2005 New Identities Objects of Conservation Objects of ‘Contact’ and ‘Encounter’

192 193 198 206

161 162 170 176 178

Future Lives: Liverpool or China On Objects Future Lives: Liverpool or China Objects in Liverpool Objects in China Postscript: Confessions of a Former Curator

223 223 231 232 236 240

Bibliography

243

Index

267

List of Illustrations 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 2.1

2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2

3.3 3.4

Cast bronze statue of Guanyin, Putuo Island, China. Cast bronze statue of Wenshu seated on a lion, Putuo Island, China. Cast bronze statue of Puxian seated on an elephant, Putuo Island, China. Cast bronze statue of Weituo, Putuo Island, China. Cast bronze statue of Guangong, Putuo Island, China. Worshippers at the Puji monastery, Putuo Island, China, 2007. Monk in front of multiple-armed Guanyin shrine, Fayu temple, Putuo Island, China, 2007. ‘Rally of the Tartars at Chin-keang-foo’, from The Chinese War: An Account of the Operation of the British Forces, by John Ouchterlony, 1844. London: Saunders and Otley. ‘Sacred temple of Poo-too’, from The Chinese War: An Account of the Operation of the British Forces, by John Ouchterlony, 1844. London: Saunders and Otley. Title page to the Log Book of the Grenadier Company, written and designed by Captain Edie. ‘Opening of the Great Exhibition by Queen Victoria on 1 May 1851’, by Henry Courtney Selous (1803–90). Front cover of An account of the Chinese commission which was sent to report on the Great Exhibition; wherein the opinion of China is shown as not corresponding at all with our own, Sutherland Edwards, 1851. ‘The China Court at the Great Exhibition’, by John Absolon (1815–95). ‘View of the Tunis and China Courts at the Great Exhibition’ depicting the ‘Putuo Five’ from Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

23 27 28 30 32 41 45

56 60 66 90

90 92 94

x

3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6

List of Illustrations

‘Guangong, Weituo and Incense Burner’. Reproduced in the Reports by the Jurors, for the Great Exhibition. Front page of the Illustrated London News, 2 May 1857. ‘Joseph Mayer, c. 1840’, by William Daniels. ‘The “Mummy Room” in Joseph Mayer’s Egyptian Museum, Liverpool’, by Henry Summers, 1852. Exterior of Liverpool Museum. Egyptian Entrance Gallery, Liverpool Museum, early twentieth century. Interior of Liverpool Museum after the bombing, 1941. Storage of collections at Carnatic Hall, c. 1950s. Guanyin’s crown, 1980s. Guanyin’s arms, 1980s. Guanyin in the photographic studio, 1997. Guanyin in the Conservation Centre, 1997. Guanyin without arms, 1980s. Guanyin’s throne in the Conservation Centre, c. 1998. View of the shrine in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery, 2005. Mahayana Buddhism case in the World Cultures gallery, 2008.

99 117 125 129 137 153 171 173 182 185 197 199 201 202 212 214

Acknowledgements One of the things that has made the research for this book such a pleasure is the generosity and encouragement of so many people, both friends and strangers. My family has provided constant and much needed intellectual and emotional support throughout – in particular, my husband, Richard Kirkby, my daughter, Sophie and my father, Ken Tythacott, who have endured endless talk of Guanyin and Edie over the past few years. A complex project such as this – where information has lain dormant in archives, libraries and museums around the world – has only been possible with the help of many different individuals and institutions. Indeed I have been overwhelmed by the kindness of people who have enthusiastically attempted to uncover information about the statues. I am extremely grateful to Ken Tythacott for undertaking detailed archival research on William Edie at the Public Record Office, Kew, and in the British Library. Amongst other favours, Zachary Kingdon, at the National Museums Liverpool, kindly forwarded pages from an 1882 catalogue with vital information on the images. I would like to thank John Kieschnick at Bristol University, who freely gave up his valuable time while on research leave in Taiwan in order to identify the early lives of the bronzes in the temples in China. Through him I recruited Yi-Lin Wu at the Institute of History and Philology, Academica Sinica, Taipei, to examine Chinese monastic gazetteers. John Kieschnick also put me in touch with Robert Bickers at the University of Bristol, who generously provided an essential reference clue to the original locations of the bronzes. I am extremely grateful to Marjorie Caygill at the British Museum for so kindly supplying information on Bram Hertz. For information on Buddhist imagery, Chün-Fang Yü (Rutgers University), Angela Howard (Rutgers University), Hsueh-Man Shen (National Museums of Scotland), Ming Wilson (Victoria and Albert Museum) and Eldon Worrall (National Museums Liverpool) gave their opinions, for which I am extremely grateful. I could not have made the trip to China in 2007 without the support of Wang Hongyang (Nanjing University). In Ningbo, Dinghai and on Putuo Island, many volunteered as guides, interpreters and informants, enormously facilitating my research – especially Wang Rong (and Susan) and Feng Jixuan, also Dai Zongpin, Xia Zhi Zheng, Jin Ming Fashi, Revd Hui Xian, Xin Li, Hu Lianrong, Chen Zhouyue and Wu Rong Jin. The history of the Liverpool Museum has been a major focus and I have had help and encouragement from staff (past and present) at the National Museums

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Acknowledgements

Liverpool, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude: Sue Barker, Clare Bates, Piotr Bienkowski, Lionel Burman, Dorothy Downes, Jane Duffy, David Flower, Anne Gleave, Zachary Kingdon, Annmarie La Pensée, Emma Martin, Steve Newman, Fiona Philpot, Rob Philpot, Keith Priestman, Dudley Reynolds, Claire Sedgwick, Lynne Heidi Stumpe and, most especially, Eldon Worrall. I am grateful to many other curators and archivists who gave often detailed responses to my queries: June Jenkinson at Bebington Library; Bevan Blanchard, Marcella Leembruggen, Hedley Sutton and Jane Walsh at the British Library; Stephanie Clark at the British Museum; Simone Harris and Arthur Holden at Bromley Library; Sue Kauffman at the Central Library Record Office, Liverpool; Rory Lalwan at the City of Westminster Archives Centre; Melvyn Harrison at the Crystal Palace Foundation; Nicola Pink at Hampshire Archives and Local Studies; Bridget Howlett at London Metropolitan Archive; Alison Copeland at the Manchester Art Gallery; Jane Parr at Manchester Central Library; Alistair Massey at the National Army Museum; Jeremy Coote at the Pitt Rivers Museum; Valerie Phillips at the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851; Julie Carrington at the Royal Geographical Society; Adrian James at the Society of Antiquaries; Erik Blakeley, Jim Massey and Ted Green at the Staffordshire Regiment Museum; Michael Rhodes at Torbay Council; Micaela Chandler and Maureen Watry at the Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool; Adrian Allan at the University of Liverpool Archives; Julie Ramwell at the John Rylands, Special Collections, University of Manchester; Helen Rufus-Ward at the University of Sussex; Colin Simpson at the Williamson Art Gallery; Nina Appleby, Bernadette Archer, Annemarie Bilclough, Stephen Calloway, Richard Loveday, Christopher Marsden and Abraham Thomas at the Victoria & Albert Museum. I have benefited greatly from feedback on various chapters and I thank my Museology colleagues at the University of Manchester – Sam Alberti and Kostas Arvanitis – as well as Elizabeth Hallam at the University of Aberdeen and Zachary Kingdon at the National Museums Liverpool for reading parts of the text. The comments of Suzanne MacLeod at the University of Leicester and those of an anonymous reader were also extremely useful. I have benefited from discussions on the subject with Judith Green, Sian Jones, Sharon Macdonald, Helen Rees Leahy and Francesca Tarrocco. My enduring thanks go, above all, to my beloved husband, Richard, who so diligently read and re-read every sentence, making astute and much needed editorial amendments. The book would not have been possible without the semester on research leave granted by the University of Manchester in 2007 and the matching semester awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in 2007–8. I am grateful to Craig Clunas for supporting my original AHRC application. James Thompson at the University of Manchester kindly granted additional financial resources for research on the gazetteers. I also owe an enormous debt to Mark Stanton, Editorial Manager at Berghahn Books, and to Mary Bouquet and Howard Morphy for supporting this publication.

Introduction

Research and Serendipity This book started life one evening in 2005. I was browsing the Internet exploring representations of the China court at the Great Exhibition of 1851 when suddenly my gaze was transfixed by the most extraordinary image. The screen showed a chromolithograph depicting an unmistakable group of objects with which I had once been intimately involved. That they had been exhibited 150 years earlier – and so very prominently – was a complete surprise. In the early 1990s, I had undertaken anthropological research in Hong Kong, focusing upon Chinese temples and their deities. I had also been adopted into the family of a Chinese temple keeper and had spent many hours amidst Buddhist and Daoist statuary.1 A fascination with Chinese religious imagery was still with me when I joined Liverpool Museum in 1996 as their curator of ethnology, and I was immediately drawn to the museum’s fine collection of Buddhist objects. Perhaps curators are not supposed to admit to having favourites, but during my seven years at Liverpool Museum I was enthralled by three large bronze deity figures. The most striking was a complex, intricately cast, almost life-size representation of Guanyin, the Buddhist Goddess of Compassion. Guanyin has long enjoyed the status of the most popular deity in the Chinese pantheon. Once assembled, in a seated position with legs crossed, this statue had two arms held in front in supplication, and twenty-two outstretched on either side. It had an ornate crown, eyes almost closed, a face serene and meditative, and was by far the most beautiful and exquisite bronze deity figure I had ever seen. My two other favourites were a pair. Though not on the scale of Guanyin, they were also large Buddhist images. One – known as Wenshu – astride a lion, the other – Puxian – on an elephant. Both were seated sideways on their mounts, with bodies that were not symmetrical like Guanyin’s, but turned slightly as if to face something in between. Soon after I arrived at Liverpool Museum, I encountered various bits of these statues in a thoroughly dismembered state – Guanyin’s arms, symbols, crown, throne and other body parts were encrusted with dirt and corrosion and scattered around the vast museum stores. All three statues had evidently been neglected over the years: their original accession numbers were lost and nothing was known about how, when or why they had arrived at Liverpool Museum. While it was evi-

2

Introduction

dent that the two smaller images were connected as a pair, there was no documentation to associate them with the larger figure of Guanyin – indeed they were different stylistically. Despite the paucity of information, it was clear to me that these were of such importance that they were candidates for the new World Cultures galleries (funded by the Heritage Lottery) of which, at the time, I was the lead curator. So compelling were these bronzes that, once assembled and shown to outsiders, they were to draw extraordinary attention. A number of leading specialists were invited to Liverpool to assess them in the late 1990s, and to provide advice on culture of origin and approximate dating. Yet, despite this, Guanyin remained an enigma, one eminent authority proclaiming her Japanese. Some dated her to the fourteenth century or Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), while others insisted that she was a nineteenth-century creation. The paired bronzes proved less controversial: there was unanimity around the idea that they were Chinese, dated loosely to the last part of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), that is the early seventeenth century, and they were considered to be of imperial quality. After extensive exposure to the skills of metal conservators in Liverpool’s renowned Conservation Centre, the three bronzes became the centrepiece of a new display within the World Cultures gallery, which opened to the public in May 2005. I located them in a large case devoted to Mahayana Buddhism (the Buddhism of China and Japan), with the twenty-two-armed Guanyin at the centre, flanked by the other two deity figures – Wenshu was on her right, Puxian on her left. I had also decided that the interior of the large case should be painted a vibrant red to evoke the atmosphere of Buddhist temples. However, they only had very basic labels: although we had managed to identify and approximately date them, their previous biographies, their origins and their travels to Liverpool remained unknown – that is until that evening in 2005. The chromolithograph which I had encountered online was a view looking towards the transept of the massive Crystal Palace of 1851, not far from the centre of the building, where the Crystal Fountain was located.2 To the right, the artist depicted a group of men in the location of the famed Koh-i-noor diamond, the star of the show. To the left was a display of dark-coloured Buddhist deity figures, three of which were arranged together on the top plinth. I knew in an instant that these were the sculptures that had so fascinated me at Liverpool Museum. With the First Opium War still a fresh memory, the Great Exhibition organizers had a struggle on their hands as far as artefacts from China were concerned. Nonetheless, there was a China court of sorts, images of which are well known to Crystal Palace scholars. The view that I had stumbled across, however, was not of the China court, but rather the main avenue, at the end of the Tunis display. As if to erase its associations with China, I was later to discover that the Victoria and Albert Museum kept its copy of the revelatory image in its Department of Prints and Drawings under ‘Tunis No.3’.3 Beyond my astonishment at coming across the chromolithograph in this way, I was even more intrigued by the fact that the positioning of the three bronzes,

Introduction

3

and the colour of the large red backdrop at the Crystal Palace, all bore an uncanny resemblance to the Mahayana display in the World Culture gallery that I had devised over 150 years later. In both cases, Guanyin was placed centrally, flanked by the paired bodhisattvas astride animals – Wenshu on her right, Puxian on her left – all against a vermillion backdrop. The grammar of their display had not fundamentally changed. Then, as I examined the artist’s rendering of the Great Exhibition more closely, I noted two smaller statues depicted below the three large ones and suddenly realized that these too were objects I had been familiar with in Liverpool. They had been left in the stores, badly neglected, wrapped in thick polythene bags, covered in dust and corrosion, with bits broken off. Their original accession numbers from the nineteenth century were missing. For some reason, when I worked at the museum, it had not crossed my mind that these two figures – known in Chinese as Weituo and Guangong – were associated with the three larger ones, and I had omitted them from the Buddhism display. As soon as could I went to London to examine the Great Exhibition catalogues, and after a number of false starts finally came across the page devoted to these five imposing Buddhist figures. Laying arguments over their origins to rest, the text revealed that they had come from ‘Pato’ in China. ‘Pato’ was a nineteenth-century rendering of the two Chinese characters ‘Pu’ and ‘tuo’ (Putuo), the famed pilgrimage island some miles off the coast of Zhejiang province, not too far from the mouth of the Yangzi river and Shanghai. Traditionally one of the most important Buddhist sites in China, Putuo’s renown rests on its many temples devoted solely to the worship of the Goddess of Compassion – Guanyin. The Liverpool Guanyin, therefore, would clearly have resided in a key position in a temple on this fabled Buddhist island. Some years later, I read an account of a visit in 1844 by the Scottish botanist, Robert Fortune, in which special note was made of a group of ‘exquisite’ bronze statues installed in Putuo’s most illustrious monastery – the Puji.4 This, then, may have been the original location of these extraordinary images. According to the Great Exhibition catalogue, the deity figures had been ‘obtained’ by a Major Edie from the ‘priests of the island’. William Edie was an officer in the 98th Regiment and was dispatched to China as part of the British expeditionary force which fought in the First Opium War (1839–42). He remained in China until 1845. Research at the Staffordshire Regiment Museum in Lichfield, which represents the now-disbanded 98th Regiment, failed to reveal the exact circumstances under which Edie obtained these objects. There was no diary or other primary Edie material, except, most surprisingly, for a print of an artistically accomplished title page designed and written by the man himself. This described his Regiment’s movements in China. Through various documentation on the campaign, I was able to reconstruct Edie’s experiences, and the opportunities that fell across his path and which led to his acquisition of these statues. In early 2007, in a quest for greater knowledge about the five bronzes, I embarked on my own ‘pilgrimage’ to Putuo.5 I visited and documented a number

4

Introduction

of temples and monasteries and was able to interview senior monks. My hope was to identify the actual temple, amongst the many on Putuo Island, from which the deities had been wrested – a hope which then remained unrealized. I learned that over the course of time, many of these Putuo buildings suffered neglect, and during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), most of the religious edifices had been wilfully destroyed by Red Guards. Still, the long journey to Putuo gave me an essential insight into the world of devotion once inhabited by the five. With the Cultural Revolution long since repudiated, each year the island now receives millions of pilgrims, travelling to pay homage to images of Guanyin. Amongst those with whom I shared my mission in China – monks, academics and museum professionals – there was palpable excitement at the discovery of these treasures which had been removed from their country under the clouds of national humiliation some 160 years before. Indeed, I was later to discover that the figure of Guanyin in Liverpool is believed to be the oldest extant religious bronze statue from Putuo. I was eager to retrace, as far as I could, Edie’s footsteps with the 98th. From Putuo, I took a boat to an island further north in the Zhoushan archipelago. I visited the town of Dinghai where the British had been garrisoned. Later, I was to follow the invaders’ route up the Yangzi river to the decisive battleground of Zhenjiang, and further to Nanjing where the campaign culminated and the first of the momentous ‘unequal treaties’ was imposed upon the Qing court in 1842. Along the route, I discovered some of the temple complexes which were recorded as billets of the 98th Regiment. It became evident that before obtaining the deities Edie must have encountered much Buddhist imagery. The initial significance of these objects was as religious figures, and Guanyin especially had been revered by Buddhists for over four hundred years. In the temples in China these images would have formed part of an ‘iconographical programme’ (Seckel 1989): their precise imagery, the symbols they held, and the thrones or animal mounts upon which they sat, all had symbolic meaning to Buddhist worshippers. Their position in relation to each other and to other deities, their location on the altars in the halls of worship, the siting of temples in terms of fengshui principles as well as the wider position of Putuo in the Buddhist landscape of belief, all served to define their sacredness. Most significantly, as far as the believers were concerned, the bronzes had been consecrated through ceremonies so that they were ‘active’ and capable of being worshipped. In the 1840s they were brutally dislocated from this sacred realm, taken from their pilgrimage island and shipped to the other side of the world. As the research progressed I discovered more things about the extraordinary lives of these objects. Not only had they featured in the Great Exhibition of 1851, but they had been moved after this to the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. In 1854 they were offered, but not sold, at Sotheby’s. Guanyin was then taken to the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition of 1857, the largest public display ever held in Britain. All five objects were auctioned at Sotheby’s two years later, and for an exceptionally high price. By the 1850s, they had entered Joseph Mayer’s

Introduction

5

renowned collection in Liverpool, which in 1867 was given to this wealthy town – and this remained the single most important donation of antiquities in the history of Liverpool Museum. Even before I started working at the institution in 1996, I had heard of this collection. As a curator at the museum, I soon realized that anything tracing back to the Mayer gift was distinguished with the prefix ‘M’ to its accession number. Such was the reputation of the great Mayer donation that a distinct aura of rarity always seemed to cling to any of his objects. Yet with none of their original accession numbers remaining, by the 1990s, the Putuo bronzes were not identified as ‘Mayer’. Once absorbed into Liverpool Museum in 1867, the lives of the bronzes experienced a succession of imposed identities that reflected the changing ideologies and circumstances of the institution. They appeared in an evolutionary display in 1882, where over a thousand words were penned in honour of them in the accompanying catalogue.6 After being exhibited as specimens of the ‘Mongolian’ race in the early twentieth century, several decades later the museum reconceptualized them as objects of Oriental art. They narrowly missed being bombed in the Second World War, when the library next to the museum was hit: they had been hastily removed in 1939, along with the rest of the collections, and ended up in makeshift boxes and dispersed in the stores in terrible conditions. They were first of all placed in a Regency villa in rural Wales, then stored in suburban Liverpool, before being transported in the 1960s to a nineteenth-century brick warehouse by the docks. In 2000, along with the rest of the Archaeology and Ethnology collections, they were taken to an anonymous-looking modern steel and concrete building on an industrial site in Bootle, a mile or two to the north. This book follows the succession of exhibitionary realms through which these images – ‘the Putuo Five’, as I call them – travelled: the temple in China, where for centuries they were worshipped by devout pilgrims; the temple to industry that was the Great Exhibition; and the evolutionary museum display of the late nineteenth century, where they signified stages of racial development. By the 1930s, they were considered as objects of Oriental art, and in their latest exhibitionary incarnation in 2005 they were displayed in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery. Yet while this book explores the meanings accrued in these display realms, it also considers the less glamorous moments in the lives of the figures, when they shifted out of the public gaze and into the quiet of the museum stores. After China, the public lives of the images seem to have been most visible in the mid nineteenth century, when they first arrived on English shores. In the antiquarian landscape of Britain they were exceptional rarities. The 1850s and 1860s, in particular, was a period when they were most mobile and when their meanings and their future trajectories seemed uncertain. During this time, they moved onto the open market, from collector to collector, from one place to the next. At each moment when they were displayed, sold and bought by private collectors and dealers, they underwent an ontological crisis. At the same time their descriptions were carefully documented. Here it is through the museums’ ‘textual coun-

6

Introduction

terpart’ (Black 2000:1), the catalogue, that I have been able to encounter them in most detail. The movements of the Putuo Five were recorded in catalogue entries for the Great Exhibition (1851), Sotheby’s (1854 and 1859), the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (1857) and at Liverpool Museum (1882). In many of these sources there is an awareness of the importance of the Five. Yet despite the intense production of text during the mid–late nineteenth century, once inside a public museum, evidence of their existence dwindled away – and, of course, it is paradoxical that this culturally sanctioned sphere of security was one where records have been harder to find. This, then, is also a story of physical decline, dismemberment, fragmentation and loss. The book charts how the original collection was transformed, not just in relation to exhibitionary spheres of meaning, but in terms of physical deterioration. I document the scars gathered by the bronzes on their long journeys from China, not to mention those inflicted by their travels in England and Wales. As we shall see, parts were removed or damaged, especially in Liverpool Museum’s stores. I trace the significance of these changes to their material condition – not only the implications in religious terms of the removal of the sacred manuscripts from their interiors, but the many symbols that were lost from Guanyin, the bits that were broken off, the jewels that disappeared, and the surfaces that became badly corroded. The lives of the Putuo Five raise a rich set of issues. Their biographies highlight the multiple meanings with which objects may be endowed, a topical subject, as will be seen in the next section. The transformation of the bronzes from sacred beings to curios and specimens relates to debates concerning the display of nonWestern objects, specifically the placement of religious objects within the secular space of the museum. Their careers also illustrate the complex and uneasy ways in which Chinese objects have been classified in the West, a subject little covered in the museological literature. Their positioning in a racial display in the early twentieth century highlights links between the Western museum and racist colonial ideology. The many different interpretations to which they were subjected also map out the shifting relationships between China and Britain over the past 150 years. These objects were wrenched from their original environment as a result of rampant British imperialism. Their appropriation by a soldier in the aftermath of a brutal war raises questions about material culture and identity, and where objects belong – subjects which are addressed in the concluding chapter.

Objects, Meanings, Biographies The interpretation of material culture – a focus of great scholarly interest since the late 1980s – is today marked by its inter-disciplinarity, drawing on subjects as diverse as art history, archaeology, anthropology, history, economics and museology. In anthropological theory, especially, there has been a move away from ear-

Introduction

7

lier paradigms, such as structural functionalism, in which material culture per se was allocated a low value. Over the past twenty years, authors such as Ames (1992), Appadurai (1986), Gell (1998), Kopytoff (1986), Miller (1994, 2008), Thomas (1991) and Weiner (1992) have been instrumental in refocusing attention on the significance and potency of ethnographic things. According to this paradigm, objects do not have real, innate or fixed identities. Rather, meaning is a cultural construction forged in relation to interpretative frameworks. The meanings of objects are always in flux and are contextual; if context changes, so too, inevitably, will meaning. Meanings may lie dormant or be activated as objects move through different interpretative spheres. Not only do objects travel through different ‘regimes of value’ during their lives, they may also be endowed with multiple meanings at any particular moment (Kopytoff 1986). As different individuals come into contact with things, different meanings are imposed.7 This perceived potential of artefacts to hold and generate multiple meanings has led to a range of new research (Ames 1992; Gell 1998; Henare 2005; McCarthy 2007; Myers 2001, Steiner 1994; Thomas 1991). Objects have been interpreted variously as the ‘bearers of meanings’ (Pomian 1990), ‘polysemic’ (Hooper-Greenhill 2000), and ‘vehicles of knowledge’ (Henare 2005: 66). One of the most influential approaches – and one that provides an essential framework for this book – is the idea of objects having biographies. This was a metaphor first expounded by Igor Kopytoff and Arjun Appadurai in 1986. Kopytoff ’s seminal essay, ‘The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process’ (1986) suggested that objects may be compared with people in terms of their having social lives. Just like people, he argued, objects may have multiple ‘persona’ depending on the context in which they are placed. And just as we may analyse the biography of a person, so too it is possible to examine the lives of objects and ask of them similar questions: What, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized? Where does the thing come from and who made it? What has been its career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognised ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life’, and what are the cultural markers for them? How does the thing’s use change with its age, and what happens to it when it reaches the end of its usefulness? (1986: 66–67)8

Kopytoff wrote of things being marked by the spheres through which they pass (1986: 64). Artefacts are seen here to have layered biographies and, as they continue to exist, so their biographies grow. This approach holds that it is not possible to fully understand an object by simply focusing on one particular moment or aspect of its life cycle. Rather it is accumulated experience that gives things their identities (Gosden and Marshall 1999: 170). Influenced by such ideas in recent decades, material culture theory has considered objects to be less static and more mobile than before. This approach

8

Introduction

emphasizes circulation and re-contextualization.9 Objects are described as being ‘in motion’ and are said to build or absorb meaning as they travel. Things may have complex itineraries that can be tracked. Ames talks of artefacts having ‘careers’, which construct a ‘social patina’, and this ‘accrues over time as an object moves from maker to user to collector to preserver to exhibitor’ (1992: 100, 141). In discussing the lives of objects in this way, however, one must be mindful of not making them too active, for material culture is, after all, inanimate until activated by people (Gosden and Knowles 2001: 22–23, Alberti 2005: 561). Steiner, in particular, warns that things are no more animated than before (2001: 210–211). Too many people, he argues, have attributed too much power to objects and have diminished the importance of human agency. For him, it is the relationship between objects and people that is crucial (2001: 210–211). Yet one theory has gone further than any other by actually positing that objects may be conceptualized as persons, an idea that is briefly addressed below. In his seminal book, Art and Agency, Alfred Gell (1998) examines objects as ‘social beings’. His anthropological approach to the interpretation of artefacts perceives things to be the equivalent of persons or social agents (1998: 7, 9). Gell insists that works of art have to be treated as person-like, as ‘targets for social agency’ (1998: 96). Yet in discussing objects in this way, he is not implying that they actually have intentions or motivations. Evidently material culture does not have the same agency as people. ‘Idols’ do not actually ‘do’ anything, he writes, they are immobile (1998: 128). Rather, the agency of an object is manifested in the effect it has on people’s lives, in how it influences behaviour in ways that would not be possible if it did not exist. Agency is ‘any modality through which something affects something else’ (1998: 42). Objects, for him, embody human intentions in social relationships; it is the mediatory role of objects in social process which is important. In particular Gell considers consecrated religious images to be significant, for these represent deities or ‘people’ in especially powerful ways (Thomas 1998: x). The Putuo Five thus take on new significance in relation to Gell’s thesis. As we shall see, they were made to ‘come alive’ through rituals and were considered in the world of the Buddhist temple to be animate beings. In the first devotional realm of significance, Guanyin, Wenshu, Puxian, Weituo and Guangong had extraordinary agency, affecting the lives of believers in profound and multifarious ways. *

*

*

In recent years, Kopytoff and Appadurai’s ideas have informed a number of scholars who have traced the biography of objects (Alberti 2005; Ames 1992: Hamilakis 1999; Foster and Jones 2008; Gosden and Knowles 2001; Gosden and Marshall 1999; Hoskins 1998; Macleod 2010; Peers 1999). However, despite the aptness of this perspective, few extended object biographies have been attempted, and none track progress through exhibitionary and museological domains. Yalouri’s analysis of the Acropolis (2001), for example, takes a single monument

Introduction

9

as her focus, but her emphasis is archaeological and anthropological. Similarly, Bender’s work on Stonehenge (1998) is not conventionally biographical in its documenting of the origins and history of the monument. Rather her concern is to elicit the multiple meanings surrounding these megaliths through contemporary discourse. There has also been a genre of journalistic books devoted to the lives of objects. For example, Paul Chamber’s Jumbo: This Being the True Story of the Greatest Elephant in the World (2007) documents the life and tragic death of the celebrated nineteenth-century African elephant, the star of Regent’s Park Zoological Gardens and later P.T. Barnum’s circus.10 Some follow the stories of famous art works. Joanna Pitman’s The Raphael Trail (2006) is an example, based upon the journeys of the painting St George and the Dragon (1506) between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, through the hands of royal collections and avaricious art collectors.11 In her descriptions of this painting as a commodity, exchanged between the elites of Europe and North America, Pitman uncovers tales of patronage and power. Yet she is correct to acknowledge that this is not the book of an art historian or academic (2006: 51). Geraldine Brook’s People of the Book (2008) charts the movements of a fifteenth-century Jewish manuscript, the Sarajevo Haggadah. Here a fictional narrative is constructed based on the actual travels of the book from Seville (1480), to Tarragona (1492), on to Venice (1609), and then to Sarajevo (1940). Her writing imagines the lives of people who may have come into contact with this beautifully illustrated religious manuscript, as far back as the fifteenth century. Like the present study, both texts track the lives of five-hundredyear-old artistic treasures. Yet, tempting as it is to weave imaginary narratives around the Buddhist images from China, I confine myself here to the evidence uncovered, extrapolating only in so far as imagining the realms which the Putuo Five inhabited. Most studies devoted to the complex itineraries of objects have not been concerned with wider theoretical issues in museology or material culture studies. In this respect, Foster and Jones’s work (2008) comes closest to my own. Like Yalouri, their writing draws on anthropological theory by identifying the discourses accumulated around an archaeological monument, the Hilton of Cadboll Pictish cross-slab. They track its ‘birth’ in the eighth century, its fragmentation, defacement and re-use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the rediscoveries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the new associations coalescing around the sculpture in the twenty-first century. Though parallels with the concerns of this book may be drawn, the cross-slab clearly passed through different social existences. Furthermore, through participant observation and interviews, Foster and Jones examine visitor perceptions in the National Museum of Scotland, as well as the diverse meanings woven around the stone by local people in Cadboll. Their work is strong in oral history and in identifying the multiple discourses surrounding the object. While my own study is, to an extent, concerned with individual perceptions of the images, the focus is the movement of the Putuo Five through shifting cat-

10

Introduction

egories of meaning, especially in the museum. There is an increasing body of research focusing on the values ascribed to material culture in the museum (Alberti 2005; Coombes 1994; Henare 2005; Hill 2005; Levell 2000; McCarthy 2007; Moser 2006; Penny 2002). Yet this book is distinctive in its investigation of the lives of a particular set of things.

Objects and the Museum The traditional glass cases of the museum present little impediment to the eye but they are not ideologically transparent. (Classen and Howes 2006: 218)

Alongside the growth of museum studies since the 1980s, the delineation of the significance of museum objects has become an area of considerable focus (Ames 1992; Coombes 1994; Gosden and Knowles 2001; Henare 2005; Hooper-Greenhill 2000; Pearce 1992, 1994; Penny 2002; Shelton 2001; Thomas 1991). This is a subject that centrally informs this book, for after their arrival in England the Putuo Five were destined for lengthy careers in public displays and museums. Five of the seven chapters examine the positioning of the objects in exhibitions: three focus on meanings accrued specifically in Liverpool Museum (now ‘World Museum Liverpool’). In these chapters I interrogate this institution’s shifting exhibitionary strategies in relation to non-Western objects. A number of authors have contested the neutrality of the museum in relation to our understanding of objects (Ames 1992; Bennett 1995; Duncan 1995; Hooper-Greenhill 2001). It is evident that these institutions do not portray universal truths, but instead perpetuate representations of the societies from which they emerge (Ames 1992: 47). Ames describes museums as ‘machines for recontextualisation’ and as ‘expressions of ideology’ (Ames 1992: 127, 141). Others too contend that these places are not neutral frames through which objects are viewed but are ideologically active environments (Duncan and Wallach 2004; Karp and Lavine 1991). Museums thus do not passively present objects for public consumption, but actively construct the spaces in which things can be viewed. They are sites of cultural production, places where knowledge is articulated and visually mapped – and this is, of course, most evident when things are on display. Moser, amongst others, has written about how meaning is constructed through the juxtaposition of objects in space. Museum displays ‘impart messages’, ‘endorse … theoretical perspectives … Certain arrangements of styles of presenting objects have constructed a particular view of a subject’ (Moser 2006: 2, 3). While it is therefore axiomatic that ways of exhibiting Chinese and Buddhist material culture in museums have been culturally constructed, it is important to note that the conditions of viewing objects too have, over the course of time, been socially mediated. As we shall see, during their lives, the Putuo Five were shifted into very different ‘regimes of visuality’ and distinct sensory landscapes.12 The

Introduction

11

scopic and sonic regime of the Buddhist temple was worlds apart from that of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Their significance also changed as they entered the marked ocular-centrism of the Western museum. Alpers (1991), amongst others, has argued that the modern museum is predominantly a scopic site with a restricted sensory regime (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: xi, 130; Bennett 2006: 263). Classen and Howes too note how often it is only the most visually striking things that are placed on public display (2006: 200). The strong aesthetic forms of the bronze Buddhist statues, as we shall see, rendered them prime candidates for public exhibition. While one focus of this book is the exhibitionary contexts – the most public and easy-to-decipher spheres of museological meaning – there are other arenas in which the museum shaped the identities of the Putuo Five. I consider periods when they were not on display: hastily crated and evacuated in the Second World War, dumped in the various stores, subjected in their confinement to the multiple gazes of specialists, or moved in the late twentieth century to Liverpool’s newly established and technologically innovative Conservation Centre, where their physical forms became modified in new ways. Of course, it will not be possible to document all the interpretations placed upon the images throughout their long and eventful lives and, where detailed information has not been available, I have attempted to delineate instead the broad epistemological frameworks into which they would have been placed. The ways in which they were exhibited throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were products of the ideologies of the times, and so I explore some of the dominant museological approaches that informed the display of non-Western objects during this period – curiosity, evolutionism, aesthetics and object biography. Not only were different meanings for the Putuo Five constructed as a result of shifting museological paradigms, but they were also made to signify in relation to the production of different kinds of knowledge about China. The deity figures, in other words, operated as metonyms for wider British images of the ‘Orient’. A strong thread running throughout the chapters is how their interpretations became entangled in the changing relationships between China and the West.

Classifications A related and recurrent theme of this book is the museological classifications of Chinese and Buddhist objects in the West. Clearly museums have always been concerned to codify knowledge, to organize material culture and place it in taxonomies. The moment an object arrives at this institution, it is assigned a category. Departments and curatorial experts use accession numbers, registers, lists, catalogues and labels to help them sort, locate and separate objects into groups, imposing order and meaning (Sherman and Rogoff 1994: x–xi). It is often the case that such categorizations are seen as neutral activities, predicated upon sci-

12

Introduction

ence. But it is precisely the perceived objectivity of classificatory regimes that makes them so powerful. Once objects are labelled and classified, particularly in an institution that carries such authority as a museum, material is forced and fixed into types, which are often difficult to shake. While this may create connections between particular things, it also separates and divides. For Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, museum objects in this sense become ‘artifacts of our disciplines’: ethnographic objects thus become ‘objects of ethnography’ (1992: 2, 17). While it is certainly the case that ‘ethnology’ has been the dominant category into which the Putuo Five were contained and defined in the museum, it is also important to consider how, when and why they were placed in other classifications. For example, before they entered Liverpool Museum they qualified for a place in the main avenue of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and Guanyin was considered eligible to enter the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857, unlike many other non-Western objects. The Five were incorporated into mid-nineteenth-century antiquarian collections, where they existed alongside gems, cameos and ancient Greek sculptures. Objects from Africa, the Americas and the Pacific were rarely positioned in such a manner. Yet throughout their lives in Britain, the Putuo Five were to be regarded with some ambivalence. They often did not fit neatly into the descriptive classifications of the private collection, the art market and the museum. Their classificatory fluidity was greater than that of objects from other parts of the world, which were usually placed in ethnographic collections. In the early twentieth century, they were represented as being from neither ‘primitive’ nor ‘civilized’ cultures but instead were installed in a gallery devoted to a category in-between, the ‘Mongolian’ or ‘Yellow’ race. The ambiguity is further illustrated by the range of exhibitions in which they participated. They resided in collections alongside military trophies, industrial manufactures, curiosities and antiquities. They also became part of a shifting linguistic landscape of categorization in Liverpool Museum – variously administered as part of Ethnological, Archaeological, Antiquities, Oriental Antiquities and Asian collections.13 In mapping the shifts in the language used to describe these bronzes, I am mindful of the ideological implications of such words. And while I track the movement of the Putuo Five from one category to the next, I also aim to expose the arbitrariness of these Western classifications.14 Some of the name changes were the product of the power and posturing of curators. After the Second World War, the keeper of archaeology, Elaine Tankard, managed to wrestle many of the Asian objects away from the curatorial domain of ‘ethnology’. When I arrived at Liverpool Museum in 1996, to take up the position of curator of ethnology, I was asked to incorporate what were previously designated ‘Oriental Antiquities’ into my orbit of responsibility. I had been surprised to find the bulk of the collections from Asia residing in Antiquities, with only a fraction of the objects from this continent classified as ‘Ethnology’ – material culture predominantly from South East Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and parts of India (the Andaman and Nicobar islands, the Naga) and Japan (the Ainu). Certain aspects of the material culture of Asia had thus been

Introduction

13

placed in the ethnographic collections – those from supposedly ‘primitive’ cultures – while other things were designated Oriental Antiquity. While in 1997 they merged, this separation of the Orient from Africa, the Americas and the Pacific had been long-standing and reflected a distinction that still operates within the classificatory hierarchy of many other museums. This book emerges out of a fascination with such institutional separations and the fact that the boundaries between what have been termed ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ objects seem so much more fluid when it comes to collections from Asia.

Objects, People, Curators This book is also a story of the relationships between people and things.15 Indeed, the individuals who came into contact with the sculptures have been diverse, from Buddhist monks, Chinese and Japanese pilgrims, imperial soldiers, dealers, antiquarian collectors, missionaries, curators, conservators, and many others who cast their eyes on them, all of whom would have endowed them with different meanings. While many of the individual perceptions are irretrievably lost, those that are likely to have been documented and upheld emanate from the most powerful (Hooper-Greenhill 2000:50). In a UK museum, up until the 1990s, this would have been the curator. Over the past 140 years, different curators at Liverpool Museum asserted, contested and changed the meanings of the Putuo Five. In fact, the perceived significance of the objects waxed and waned according to the personal interests of these guardians. The bronzes were sometimes marginalized from regimes of interpretation; at other times, they were given a prominent place. It is evident, of course, that all curators transmit specific interpretations in their dealings with objects, which inevitably carry ideological messages. Curators are products of their time, and in their professional practice reflect contemporary knowledge. At Liverpool Museum, some were more assertive than others in questioning previous paradigms in order to legitimate their own ideas. One of the earliest curators, Charles Gatty, demonstrated a deep knowledge of ethnology but also an ambivalent reaction to Asian material culture. In the 1880s, he wrote of the problem he faced in classifying the Oriental material. Henry Ogg Forbes, who became director in 1894, constructed displays devoted to the ‘Mongolian’ race, midway between the ‘Caucasian’ and ‘Melanian’ peoples. By the 1930s, a new curator of ethnology, Trevor Thomas, was promoting interests in modernism and aesthetics, and demonstrating a desire to distance himself from the ‘visual clutter’ of his predecessors. In reconfiguring the display arrangements, he was to alter once more the dominant meanings attributed to the statues. His colleague, Elaine Tankard, took over the care of the objects after he resigned. She was an archaeologist, fascinated by Buddhism, who drew the Chinese collections into her orbit of concern. From the 1970s to the 1990s, other curators and researchers focused

14

Introduction

on the formal, physical aspects of the images. In particular, by the 1980s they had become valued in a new way as a result of the preoccupations of an Oriental metalwork specialist. Finally, in the late 1990s, I attempted to develop new ideas in the redisplay of the collections – laden, of course, with my own ideological perspectives – centring on both the biographical approach and ideas of ‘contact’ and ‘encounter’ between cultures.

Chapters The book is divided into episodes in the lives of the Putuo Five, and the titles of chapters are intended to denote their shifting identities. Ames notes how in museums often the purpose for studying objects is to ‘identify or reconstruct’ their original context (1992: 45). Chapter 1 is intended to do just that – to explore the meanings of these Buddhist objects in the temples of Putuo. It covers the first four hundred years in the lifespan of Guanyin, and the first two hundred years for the two sets of paired bronzes. The chapter examines how their original meanings would have been formed in relation to construction, consecration and positioning on altars in monastic complexes. It also ponders the significance of these figures to the millions of pilgrims, lay people and monks who, for centuries, worshipped them on China’s most important sacred island. Chapter 2 tells of the movements of the British soldier, William Edie, who ‘obtained’ the bronzes after participating in the First Opium War (1839–42). As well as introducing the broader context of the relationship between China and Britain, the chapter considers the motivations behind this soldier’s desire for such things. It explores how the movement from sacred to secular worlds altered the meanings and values given to the Buddhist bronzes. Chapter 3 interprets the organization and spatial vocabulary of the Putuo Five’s guest appearance at the Great Exhibition of 1851, reflecting upon the ideology underlying this event, the images of China that were produced, and how it was that these bronzes came to be positioned in a central place in this vast exhibitionary complex. Further transformations of meaning are documented in Chapter 4 as the original collection formed by Edie, and displayed in 1851, became split. In the 1850s, the sculptures moved in and out of antiquarian collections and were bought and sold through private deals and at Europe’s most renowned auction house. During this period, their identities changed more frequently than at any other time. Between 1854 and 1867, they functioned variously as ‘antiquities’, ‘curiosities’, ‘art treasures’ and ‘commodities’ in London, Liverpool and Manchester. Chapter 5 explores the lives of the objects once they crossed the threshold of the prestigious Liverpool Museum in 1867. It analyses their display in an 1882 evolutionary gallery and moves on to examine how they were re-conceptualized as specimens of the ‘Mongolian’ race in the late nineteenth century when Liver-

Introduction

15

pool Museum was reorganized on the basis of three racial types – ‘Caucasian’, ‘Mongolian’ and ‘Melanian’. Chapter 6 discusses the links between the Oriental displays at Liverpool Museum and modernist aesthetics. In the 1930s, the processes of highlighting objects for their formal power, rather than absorbing them into racial classifications, was the concern of the curator of ethnology, Trevor Thomas. The second part of the chapter documents the escape of the Putuo Five from the bombing of the Liverpool Museum during the Second World War, and their nomadic existence during the ensuing decades as they moved in and out of museum stores and museological classifications. It ends with the rediscovery of the objects in the 1970s, and the new interpretations placed upon them by a Chinese metalwork specialist. Chapter 7 is devoted to the most recent phase in the cultural biography of the Putuo Five. Here I reflect on my own work as the curator of the objects at Liverpool Museum between 1996 and 2003 and document the practices and processes that led up to their display in 2005. Guanyin had a crisis of identity when she was labelled Japanese, while two of the images were utilized as key marketing symbols for the Museum’s fund raising campaign in China. Three of the statues encountered the world of conservation for the first time, and their meanings and formal imagery were reconfigured in preparation for exhibition in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery. This chapter, more than any other, exposes both the workings of Liverpool Museum and my own personal relationships with these enigmatic Chinese sculptures. The concluding chapter reviews the complex histories of the objects, analysing the impact of the shifts from one visual and interpretative context to the next. It traces how the deity figures became marked by their long and sometimes difficult journeys around the world, and explores their conceptual and physical states of transformation. It also considers debates around restitution, and the possible future lives of such internationally important Buddhist treasures – in Britain or in China. Let us now then begin the story of our dramatis personae, the Putuo Five, in the foundries and temples of Ming dynasty China.

Notes 1. The romanization to be used is Hanyu pinyin, the standard in the People’s Republic of China. 2. Illustrated in ‘Dickinson’s Comprehensive Picture of the Great Exhibition of 1851’ from the originals painted for HRH Prince Albert by Messrs Nash, Haghe and Roberts RA. http://www.bodley.ox.ac/uk/johnson/exhibition/196.htm, accessed on 29 September 2005. 3. PL. XXXI, u.10.b. 4. Fortune (1847: 182). 5. I am extremely grateful to Wang Hongyang at the University of Nanjing for making this trip possible.

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Introduction

6. Zachary Kingdon at Liverpool Museum very kindly brought this catalogue entry to my attention. 7. See Hooper-Greenhill (2000: 114). 8. Appadurai too argues that objects engage in fluid and varied ‘social lives’ (1986: 3). 9. Myers writes: ‘Objects are circulated, defined, and transformed in meaning and value through a network of persons and a range of institutions’ (2001: 168). 10. For other books devoted to animals see Michael Allin’s (1998) Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris, or David Barnaby’s (1988) The Elephant who Walked to Manchester. 11. See also R. Scotti (2009) The Lost Mona Lisa, focusing on its theft from the Louvre; or J. Brewer (2009) The American Leonardo, which examines a particular period in the biography of a Leonardo da Vinci painting. 12. See Berger (1972) and Gell (1998: 2) for changes over time to our ‘ways of seeing’. 13. The range of meanings through which the figures travelled is signified by the shifting terms I have applied to them, not just in the titles of chapters but in the text itself. I mostly refer to them as the Putuo Five, but also as sacred beings, deities, deity figures, images, objects, things, articles, curiosities, antiquities, commodities, artefacts, sculptures, statues, art treasures, art works, bronzes, pieces. I also (though perhaps not frequently enough) describe them by their names in Mandarin (rather than in Sanskrit) – Guanyin, Wenshu, Puxian, Weituo and Guangong. 14. It should also be pointed out that not only do these objects sit uneasily within the classificatory regimes of museums but they also cut across other Western epistemological frameworks. Such objects could equally well be studied by art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and Oriental or religious specialists. 15. Gosden and Marshall argue, for example, that at the heart of biography are questions about the relationships between people and things (1999: 172).

CHAPTER 1 Sacred Beings in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) Dynasties This chapter deciphers the possible meanings bestowed upon the five images in their first sphere of significance in China. Our trail begins on Putuo Island and the neighbouring port city of Ningbo as we trace the birth and attempt to reconstruct the early period in the lives of these enigmatic Buddhist statues. It should stressed from the outset that there has been uncertainty over the exact dating of the figure of Guanyin, although recent iconography experts have tended to agree it is early fifteenth century. Regarding the construction of the other four figures, all the specialists I consulted confirmed that they were made some two hundred years later, at the end of the Ming dynasty, or the early seventeenth century. These deity figures would have occupied specific positions in the temples of Putuo because they had previously been consecrated. Soon after they were cast, all five would have undergone a ceremony to ‘open their eyes’ and sacred scriptures were inserted within their hollow interiors. During their time in the temples they were intact: the symbols they held, the jewels embedded in them and the sacred manuscripts inside them had not then been disassociated; all of these were an integral part of the whole. The Five were a focus of religious rites, placed in halls of worship and positioned on altars in relation to the Buddhist structure of belief. The temple they resided in was also located in accordance with Chinese fengshui principles. The fact that they were in a shrine on Putuo, an island devoted to Guanyin and one of the most important pilgrimage sites in China, served to increase their potency and deepen their spiritual identities during this initial period in their cultural biographies. To Alfred Gell, such images ‘have to be treated in the context of an anthropological theory as person-like … as sources of, and targets for, social agency’ (1998: 96). Image-worship has a central place in Gell’s thesis, for ‘nowhere’, he argues, ‘are images more obviously treated as human persons than in the context of worship and ceremonies’ (1998: 96). As he notes:

18

The Lives of Chinese Objects

Artworks … come in families, lineages, tribes, whole populations, just like people. They have relations with one another as well as with the people who create and circulate them as individual objects. They marry, so to speak, and beget offspring which bear the stamp of their antecedents. Art-works are manifestations of ‘culture’ as a collective phenomenon, they are, like people, encultured beings. (1998: 153)

Utilizing such an approach, in this chapter I shall argue that the five bronzes were ‘encultured beings’, rather than inanimate pieces of metal, in their first sphere of meaning. Drawing on Gell’s work, I explore how the Putuo Five were inextricably embedded in relations of kinship with other Buddhist deities. The chapter begins by introducing the cast of five characters in detail – their form and materiality, and the circumstances around their construction, their iconographies and their consecration. The discussion turns to themes of space, place and location, exploring how the statues gained efficacy through their positioning on altars, in temples and on the sacred island of Putuo. The final section considers the reception of these deity figures in China – by pilgrims, lay worshippers and Buddhist monks.

Construction: Births, Iconographies and Consecrations Commissioning and Ownership The largest and most important figure in the group, Guanyin, was most likely commissioned near the beginning of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). As for the four others, they came into existence towards the end of this era of Chinese history, in the early seventeenth century. Though we do not know who commissioned them, such large bronze images were only found in the leading spiritual and political centres of Buddhism in China, such as Ningbo. This thriving city was the centre of an extensive commercial network throughout the Ming and later Qing dynasties. Yü notes that this important international trading port was famous for artisans who made Buddhist altar fittings (2001: 370). Its surrounding area – Yin county – was a place honoured even by the emperor for its ‘old families and gentry lineages, and its famous mountains and great monasteries’ (Brook 1993: 249). The late Ming, in particular, when the two pairs of supporting deities were created, was a period of revival for institutional religion (Brook 1993: 3). Indeed Yin county rose to the height of its prosperity in the mid sixteenth century, ranking only behind Beijing, Nanjing and Hangzhou as a place endowed with Buddhist sites (Brook 1993: 252). Whatever the genesis of the group, it is clear that they would have demanded resources available only to the wealthy and powerful at this time (Kieschnick 2003: 11). While we can only speculate as to the processes by which the bronzes were commissioned, perhaps more can be ascertained about motives. Brook reminds us that monastic patronage became significant in late-Ming China and made an

Sacred Beings in the Ming and Qing Dynasties

19

important contribution to the institutional vitality of Buddhism (1993: 159, 320). It is almost certain that the statues would have been paid for by donors in order to gain religious merit.1 Commissioning a deity figure and donating it to a temple would have been a way to gain prestige, asserting or improving social status (Kieschnick 2003: 215–16). These gifts converted wealth into symbolic capital, status into power (Brook 1993: 227). Monastic patronage was a matter which concerned the local gentry, and those in Yin county were exceptionally rich during the Ming. Furthermore, Ningbo’s monastic patrons would have confined their activities to their own prefecture, which extended to Putuo (Brook 1993: 21, 151). An image of Guanyin would have been an obvious choice for this sacred island. The four other deities – Puxian, Wenshu, Weituo and Guangong – were also a natural grouping for Putuo, as we shall see. While individual patrons may have been associated with their construction, once inside the temple they formed part of the corporate wealth of the monastic community. However, as Gernet notes, deity figures in traditional China were not simply communal, they were inalienable (1995: 69). Kopytoff reminds us that societies need to set aspects of their environment apart and render it sacred (1986: 69, 73). The de-commoditized world – such as the Buddhist temple – is a place of restricted circulation. Here deity figures were not intended for sale or exchange, in contrast to their future lives in the West, which were to be marked, particularly in the turbulent years of the 1850s, by movement in and out of spheres of monetary value.

Casting Chinese artisans have been skilled at working with bronze for millennia. As far back as the Shang dynasty (1,700–1,028 BCE) exquisite sacred vessels and other objects were cast in proliferation. For the past 1,500 years in China, sacred Buddhist statues have been created from a wide variety of materials: stone, clay, wood and cast iron were the most commonplace, while smaller images might be made of precious metals – bronze, gilt bronze or gold (Seckel 1989: 93). Because gold and bronze were in themselves precious, works in these metals might be destroyed to realize their value (Seckel 1989: 4). As a range of material – old statues, coins, bits of metal – was frequently recycled to create new works, it may well be the case that the sculptures that concern us were cast from older objects, possibly even from deity figures of earlier times (Kerr 1990: 62). Here, it is possible to see how they bear the residue of past lives – the lives of former deities. We cannot be sure where the Putuo Five were cast, as raw materials were easily transported to places of manufacture. Most of the specialists consulted in China believe that the bronzes could not have been made on Putuo, but rather in the neighbouring port city of Ningbo. From here, they could easily have been carried to Putuo Island, about seventy miles and a short sea journey away.

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The Lives of Chinese Objects

The Putuo Five were made by the lost wax process, a means of casting that dates back thousands of years, and is still the best technique for capturing detail in bronze. The exact procedure varies from foundry to foundry but the main principles remain the same. This is fundamentally a method of hollow-metal casting in which a wax image is modelled in detail, and then covered in clay on both sides. After the figure is baked, the wax melts, leaving the impression of the details of the design on the clay. Molten metal is then poured into the resulting cavity to take up the space of the wax model. The mould is left to cool and set, and is then broken open to reveal the bronze image inside. Large and complex sculptures were formed from several castings: the arms, symbols, crown, sword, mounts, stands and tails of the five deities under consideration were all constructed separately. Different parts were then brazed together. The five statues were carefully finished by hand: surfaces were worked so that casting blemishes were removed and precious stones – rubies and turquoise perhaps – were added. In making these figures, artisans in the Ming dynasty would have worked within a defined religious and aesthetic language. The creation of Buddhist images during this period, as today, followed general rules of iconometry: deity figures had to be represented with the correct proportions, symbols and colours. Iconometric diagrams were used to indicate the distance between physical features – for example, the length of the nose and the width between the ears. Fundamentally artisans were concerned with reproducing the correct form rather than expressing individual creativity, for only through conforming to an iconographical ideal would the sacred efficacy of each deity be manifest. If made incorrectly an image could lack power. There is also, of course, an aesthetic element to all this. Gell argues that the more realistic an image, the more spiritually it may be perceived (1998: 132). Freedberg too believes that there must be a relationship between the shape of an object and the attribute of the god; between how things look and why they work (1989: 78). For Seckel: There are good reasons which prompted the creators of Buddhist works of art to make them so beautifully and carefully. Moreover, this fact was quite in line with the wishes of their sponsors. An artistically inferior and technically deficient image or cult implement would not only lack the seriousness of genuine devotion and true sacred power, it would also fail to be a suitable vehicle for religious meaning and expression and might even constitute an offence against the holy being to which it was offered in veneration. Because it lacked sufficient artistic power of expression it would be incapable of revealing its intended meaning. (1989: 201)

Artisans were guided by manuals containing descriptions of sacred persons and detailed prescriptions for their depiction in images (Seckel 1989: 24). Such texts were based partly on canonical sutras. Yü notes that scriptures such as the ‘Qing Guanyin qing’, translated between 317 and 420 CE (2001: 49) and the ‘Karandavyuha’, composed during the fourth century (2001: 7), gave minute details on

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the correct procedures for making a three-dimensional image of a deity (2001: 50). The sutra of the ‘Divine Dharani’ or the ‘Eleven-headed Avalokitesvara’, translated in the latter half of the sixth century, instructed artisans on how to create a wooden image of Guanyin (Yü 2001: 55). Sutras such as these may well have influenced the makers of the Putuo Five. Furthermore, when creating such forms, artists were expected to assume attitudes of veneration (Seckel 1989: 193). Some of the regulations when making a painted image, for example, demanded abstaining from eating improper food and keeping the eight fasting commandments (not taking life, drinking wine, using personal adornments, dancing or enjoying music) (Yü 2001: 58). Prohibitions might also include bathing and performing particular mudras, or hand gestures. Despite the complexity of their labours, more often than not, the names of the artisans who created such statues are unknown (Seckel 1989: 113; Yü 2001: 83).

Buddhist Images and Iconographies While Buddhism2 was disseminated throughout China via written texts or sutras, perhaps the most effective way in which the teachings were known was through visual imagery. The religion engendered a sophisticated iconographical system in which objects assumed a prominent place. The earliest anthropomorphic images were found in India and by the first centuries CE, the Buddha in art had assumed a human form. Buddhism spread across Asia during this period: from its origin in India it moved in several waves. It was transported to China (first–third centuries CE), Korea (fourth century) and Japan (fifth century). In the seventh century it moved through Nepal into Tibet, eventually establishing itself in Mongolia (thirteenth century). As it encountered other artistic and religious traditions so its imagery became ever more complex. Each culture developed its own repertoire of iconographic forms, fusing Buddhist motifs with pre-existing religious imagery. Buddhist material culture took on distinctive flavours in the different countries encountered, although the key deities – the historical Buddha and Avalokiteshvara (Guanyin) – remained important in all. Today the Buddhist pantheon is vast, ranging from benign Buddhas and bodhisattvas, with their serene beauty and placid imagery, to the fearsome guardians and deities that patrol the underworld. Yet of the many gods and goddesses in China, Guanyin, Wenshu, Puxian, Weituo and Guangong are some of the most renowned. Each region has its own grouping of local heroes and deified ancestors, but the bodhisattvas that concern us are worshipped throughout this land. It is important to note that the Putuo Five are ‘bodhisattvas’, not Buddhas. These are deities who have achieved perfect enlightenment and are entitled to enter nirvana (as are Buddhas), but have renounced this in order first to bring salvation to humankind. Bodhisattvas are characterized as intermediate and mediating figures, belonging both to the realm of nirvana and the world of sam-

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sara (suffering, sensations, desire). As such, they are less remote than the Buddhas (Seckel 1989: 13, 98). In Chinese, they are referred to by the abbreviated name pusa. The most familiar are Guanyin,3 Wenshu4 and Puxian,5 known together as the ‘San Da Shi’, the Three Great Beings. Venerated throughout Buddhist Asia, as a grouping they became increasingly popular from the Song dynasty (960–1280 CE). From the Ming (1368–1644), statues of the San Da Shi were placed together in temples (Yü 2001: 353, 441). Each of these – along with a fourth, Dizang6 – has a sacred mountain associated with it in China. Individual Buddhas and bodhisattvas can be identified by their symbols and gestures. All Buddha and bodhisattva images have a cranial bump, the usnisha, the sign of highest enlightenment, and a mark between the eyebrows, the urna. Long pierced earlobes symbolize the historical Buddha’s noble birth, as an Indian royal prince who wore heavy earrings. Facial expressions of Buddhas and bodhisattvas are generally similar – serene, with half-closed eyes and a hint of a smile. More often than not their poses are frontal, with a vertical central axis and perfect (or near perfect) symmetry. Both Buddhas and bodhisattvas are depicted with hand gestures – mudras – that represent particular attitudes or actions (teaching, meditation, etc.) Many hold their own appropriate ritual or symbolic object, and assume body postures or poses, known as asanas. Some sit on a throne or on their own mount (vahana), which may be an animal, bird or mythical creature. Iconographically it is easy to distinguish Buddhas from bodhisattvas, for while the former are depicted in simple form, without adornment, bodhisattvas have rich attire – clothing, crowns and jewels – indicating their continued attachment to the material/human world. Below I describe the mythical biographies and the physical characteristics of the five protagonists of this story in some detail. This is necessary in order to better understand the relationships between form and function, imagery and meaning in their first sphere of significance: Seckel, for example, argues that every element of a Buddhist image has ‘iconographical value’ and ‘profound, metaphysical-magical significance’ (1989: 35, 24). The original features of the Putuo Five are also noted in order that we may appreciate what they lose – and gain – as we track their lives, in the ensuing chapters, through very different worlds of representation and value.

GUANYIN: THE GODDESS OF COMPASSION

Central amongst the five-strong ensemble is the statue of Guanyin,7 marked by its sheer scale. It is almost life-size,8 and the most complex in terms of casting, with twenty-four arms, symbols, a crown and an elaborate throne. The statue comprises an array of over forty separate parts. It is older than the other four bronzes and, most significant of all, it is a Guanyin, and it is from Putuo. Guanyin – ‘the greatest and most famous of all Bodhisattvas’– is often referred to as the Bodhisattva of Compassion (Seckel 1964: 224). ‘She’ is the most popu-

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1.1 Cast bronze statue of Guanyin, Putuo Island, China. Probably early fifteenth century, Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). H: (without throne) 113cm, l: 105cm, w: 40cm. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool (DP Temp 3811).

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lar deity to the Chinese people, worshipped all over mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and amongst the Chinese diaspora worldwide. I use the term ‘she’ in this guarded way because the deity began its existence as a ‘he’ – its female manifestation being specific to China. Avalokiteshvara originated in India as the God of Compassion who travelled with the Buddhist religion across the ancient trade routes of Asia to China in the first centuries CE. By the sixth century the God of Compassion was worshipped in all Buddhist temples (Getty 1914: 68). Avalokiteshvara in Sanskrit was translated into Chinese as Guanyin (Perceiver of Sounds) or Guanshiyin (Perceiver of the World’s Sounds) (Yü 2001:1). Over a period of time the male deity was transformed into a female, so that by the twelfth century it had taken on a well-established feminine form, reaching completion as a female image by the Yuan (1206–1368) (Getty 1914: 70; Yü 2001: 6). Many have speculated on the reasons for the change: some believe it to have been China’s lack of a dominant female deity (Yü 2001: 412–13); others argue that the virtue of compassion in China was best embodied by a feminine figure (Getty 1914: 68). Myths emerged around the persona of Guanyin, providing her with a distinctive Chinese biography. One story, which was well established by the thirteenth century, considers her to have been a historical person, Miao Shan, the third and youngest daughter of King Miao Zhuang (Yü 2001: 291–93). At an early age she became a pious Buddhist intent on gaining perfection, practising abstinence from meat, and chanting sutras. When she asked her father’s permission to be ordained into the nunhood, he flew into a rage, ordering her to kill herself with a sword. The sword broke into a thousand pieces and when Miao Shan fled to a nunnery, her father had it burnt to the ground. Miraculously she survived, amongst the glowing embers, escaping on the back of a tiger deep into a forest where she adopted a meditative life. Many years later, when her father suffered from a lifethreatening illness, Miao Shan performed the ultimate act of filial piety by cutting off her arms and gouging out her eyes to save his life. Astounded by such self-sacrifice, King Zhuang converted to Buddhism and encouraged the dissemination of the religion throughout the land. According to another version, Miao Shan strangled herself as the nunnery burned; she descended into the underworld and through her purity transformed it into paradise. The Buddha of the West then transported her to Putuo where she spent nine years perfecting herself. Guanyin, it is believed, can hear the cries of the needy wherever they may be. Yü writes of her as ‘a compassionate universal saviour who responds to anyone’s cry for help regardless of class, gender, or even moral qualifications’ (2001: 5). The Goddess of Compassion listens to the prayers and cries of those in difficulty and saves people from poverty, disease and sorrow. Not only is she a compassionate saviour, but a mother figure and a bestower of children. As such she is primarily worshipped by women. Brook notes that Guanyin was the most widely worshipped deity in the Ming dynasty – while women revered her as their chief protector, merchants too favoured her over other Buddhist deities (1993: 189, 219). Today she remains the patron saint of merchants, travellers and pilgrims.

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Her inclusive nature means that she is also prayed to by those marginalized within society. In the contemporary world, believers hold that she can ward off cancer and car accidents, and help students pass their exams (Yü 2001: 414, 167). Images of Guanyin have thirty-three distinct manifestations. The figure in Liverpool depicts the ‘thousand-armed’ Guanyin, the most powerful form worshipped on Putuo, and the one most closely associated with Miao Shan (Yü 2001: 294, 350). The figurative term ‘thousand-armed’ signifies her all embracing compassion. Most ‘thousand-armed’ Guanyins in fact have between thirty and fifty arms. The Liverpool Guanyin has twenty-four, eleven of which are outstretched on either side. In 1882, the first curator of the sculpture at Liverpool Museum, Charles Gatty, noted that each hand held a religious symbol. Guanyin went on display in the World Cultures gallery in 2005 holding only seven: on her left, a lotus flower (fourth hand down), a zhong9 (seventh hand), a chopper10 (eighth hand), a precious jewel or ruyizhu11 (ninth hand), and a rectangular-shaped book, presumably sutras (tenth hand). On her right she holds a bottle, presumably of nectar (third hand) and a square-shaped stamp or seal (seventh hand). Her central arms are held in prayer, anjali mudra, the gesture of adoration, signifying respect, submission and veneration, found only on images of bodhisattvas. This is frequently seen on the multiple-armed Guanyin, who pays homage either to the Buddha or the dharma. The hands are held vertically at the level of the chest; palms are together, similar to the Christian mode of prayer. The statue is seated in vajrasana, the meditation position – cross-legged, with the soles of the feet visible. The hair is tied in a topknot, indicating a continued attachment and presence in the world (McArthur 2002: 97). There is a crown on the head, symbolizing high status, which contains, at the front, an image of the Buddha Amitabha, of whom Guanyin is an attendant. The crown is decorated with scrolls, flames and a lotus. It is likely that semi-precious stones were mounted in the round knobs of metal between the scrolls of the crown, as well as in the round holes on the body. The face is rendered according to standard images of Buddhist deities: front facing, symmetrical, with the urna, a concave circular dot on the centre of the forehead, just above the eyebrows, representing the sign of high caste. A jewel was doubtless embedded into this originally. The eyes are almost closed in meditation, and there is that serene beauty, the look suggestive of a smile, so characteristic of Buddhist images. The statue has necklaces, bracelets and beautifully decorated robes to signify status and presence in the human world. The long earlobes indicate royalty. The figure is seated on a bronze lotus throne, reserved for the highest beings in the Buddhist pantheon, the lotus indicating divine birth and purity. The entire figure, including the lotus throne, sits on an ornate stand. There has been uncertainty over the dating of this statue. In the 1990s, a Chinese metalwork specialist at Liverpool Museum, Eldon Worrall (see chapter 6), believed it to be fourteenth century, from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368). However, the elongated body and the shape of the face indicate to others that it is later,

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probably from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Hsueh-Man Shen, formerly senior curator of Chinese Art at the National Museums Scotland, has suggested that iconographically it can be dated to the Yuan-Ming dynasty, possibly fourteenth to fifteenth century: ‘While the round face and long oval eyes seem typical of Ming sculptures, the prominent crown and the “third eye on her forehead” are reminders of the Yuan style’.12 Angela Howard, of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, believes that it may be early Ming, or fifteenth century, based on the elongated torso and thin tubular arms. Yuan prototypes, she argues, are more squat and thick set.13 I tend to agree with the latter, and for the purposes of this book suggest that this Guanyin is probably early Ming. In the Buddhist hierarchy, it is Wenshu and Puxian which come next in importance – and amongst the Putuo Five, to reinforce this status, their statues are smaller than the sculpture of Guanyin, though larger than the other two guardian figures.

WENSHU: THE BODHISATTVA OF WISDOM

Wenshu, known in Sanskrit as Manjusri (‘Wonderful Virtue’), personifies supreme wisdom.14 Appearing in Buddhist art by around 400 CE, his cult spread widely in China from the eighth century, when, as we have seen, he became one of the four main bodhisattvas.15 Wenshu is associated with Wutaishan, the Buddhist mountain of the north, in Shanxi province, a place dotted with temples devoted to him. This deity is believed to conquer death and is invoked when mortality is threatened. Images of him are worshipped by monks and scholars, for he is considered capable of answering complex religious questions (Stevens 1997: 97). In China, Wenshu is seldom worshipped alone, but usually in the triad with Amituofo16 and Puxian. In the temples on Putuo, as we shall see, he may flank Guanyin. Wenshu is often depicted with a youthful appearance. The statue in Liverpool has eyes that are almost shut and a faint smile, so characteristic of Buddha images. His hair is in buns and he wears princely ornaments. Though Wenshu usually holds aloft a sword, symbolizing wisdom, and a scroll of knowledge, this statue is depicted with its left hand in vitarka mudra, the gesture of discussion and debate, in which the thumb and middle fingers touch, signifying the transmission of the Buddhist teachings and an explanation of the Dharma.17 The bronze’s left hand is pierced between the first and second fingers and there is a hole in the drapery below, suggesting that he originally held something with a long stem, probably a lotus or his emblem, a ruyi sceptre. However, there is nothing in his hand in the image at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and so this may have been lost before the statue left China. This image shows Wenshu seated in the relaxation posture (lalitasana), with one leg bent, the other pendant. He sits on a roaring lion, symbolizing strength, energy and the voice of the Law. The statue, like its counterpart and iconographic pair, Puxian, is believed to date to the early seventeenth century, or late Ming dynasty.18

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1.2 Cast bronze statue of Wenshu seated on a lion, Putuo Island, China. Early seventeenth century, Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). H: (of deity) 75cm, h: (of lion) 35cm, l: (of lion) 90cm. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool (1980.134.5).

PUXIAN: BODHISATTVA OF LAW AND COMPASSION

Puxian’s rendering in Sanskrit, Samantabhadra, means ‘He whose bounty is omnipresent’: he is also known as ‘The Lord of Truth’.19 This is a deity that represents the practice and mediation of all Buddhas and the ideals of law and compassion. Puxian, as we have seen, is one of four key bodhisattvas in China, revered as the patron bodhisattva of the monasteries on Emei mountain. Unlike his more popular counterpart Wenshu, he is rarely depicted alone and is usually found in a trinity on the right side of Shakyamuni (the historical Buddha). On Putuo, as with Wenshu, he flanks Guanyin. The Puxian in our ensemble is of similar height to the statue of Wenshu, having identical iconographical details. This suggests that the two were made as a

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1.3 Cast bronze statue of Puxian seated on an elephant, Putuo Island, China. Early seventeenth century, Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). H: (of deity) 75cm, h: (of elephant) 35cm, l: (of elephant) 86.9cm. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool (1980.134.3).

pair, by the same artisans.20 Their stylistic characteristics differ markedly from those of the statue of Guanyin. Like Wenshu, Puxian has hair in buns, eyes that are almost shut and the characteristic smile of the bodhisattva. His right hand has the same gesture as the left hand of Wenshu, the vitarka mudra. He too originally held something, possibly a ruyi sceptre.21 Like Wenshu, the statue of Puxian is seated in the relaxation posture (lalitasana) with one leg folded and the other pendant, common in images of bodhisattvas on the back of support animals (McArthur 2002: 38). Puxian is almost always depicted on an elephant, an animal embodying the powers of the Buddha – strength, wisdom and dignity (Seckel 1989: 29). According to the scriptures, the Buddha’s mother, Queen Maya, dreamt that a white elephant with six tusks entered her side, which was interpreted as a sign of divine

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conception. The white elephant became synonymous with the Buddha himself. The Liverpool sculpture, however, has two rather than six tusks, indicating that the artisans who constructed this bronze may not have been Buddhists.22 In contrast to the statue of Guanyin, the two bodhisattvas seated on animals were not created with frontal symmetry but instead their bodies have been turned slightly, modelled to sit in relation to something in between. Seckel notes the following regarding such Buddhist images: The paired figures on both sides of the Buddha figure cancel out their individual symmetries by serving as each other’s mirror image … Great care is also taken to ensure that the group has clearly defined limits and that the formal direction of all movements (poses of bodies and extremities, the lay of the garment folds etc) converges towards the center. The outer arms of the Bodhisattvas are, therefore, left pointing downward, while their inner arms are raised toward the Buddha. (1989: 98–99)

This is certainly the case with Wenshu and Puxian – their outer arms point down, their inner arms towards something else. When exhibited in 1851, and again in 2005, they assumed the same position in relation to the figure of Guanyin, who was always in the centre. It is quite probable, therefore, that the paired bronzes were created specially to flank the pre-existing statue of the Goddess of Compassion.

WEITUO: PROTECTOR OF MONASTERIES

The fourth deity in the ensemble is considered lower in the pantheon than the three just described – and indeed this religious ranking is reflected in the smaller scale of Weituo compared with Guanyin, Wenshu and Puxian.23 Nevertheless, Weituo24 is an important Chinese deity, for he is the guardian of Buddhist temples and protector of the faith. Indeed he is known as ‘Protector of Monasteries’ and ‘Protector of Dharma books’. According to teachings, Weituo was a son of a heavenly king who was so virtuous that when the historical Buddha was about to enter nirvana, he instructed him to guard the dharma. It became his role to protect the members of the monastic community. Whenever conflict arises within the religion, Weituo may bring about a peaceful settlement. He is responsible for discipline in monasteries and he destroys the demons that creep into temples (Stevens 1997: 91). Weituo also punishes monks who break their vows of abstinence by making them ill. In most temples today, Weituo stands with his back to the entrance, facing the main hall, where the most important images are to be found. He stands so that he can see the main Buddha’s or bodhisattva’s face, and his statue is usually found back to back with Mi-lo Fo, or Maitreya, the future Buddha, who greets visitors with his smile. In some temples, Weituo may be positioned to the left of the main deity, with his counterpart, Guangong on the right. An image of this protector deity can also be found at the entrance to libraries and other special monastic buildings (Prip-Möller 1937: 33).

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1.4 Cast bronze statue of Weituo, Putuo Island, China. Early seventeenth century, Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). H: 79cm, l: 36cm, w: 27.5cm. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool (1981.876.112).

Weituo is easily identifiable – he is always depicted as a young soldier, clad in full armour, with the headgear of a general. While he has three main forms, the Weituo in Liverpool is portrayed standing. The deity usually has one or both hands leaning on the pearl at the top of his club, known as the diamond sword or thunderbolt, used to destroy demons and the enemies of Buddhism (Stevens

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1997: 91).25 The Liverpool statue, however, has lost his sword, though it was present when a photograph was taken in 1851. The spike on the top of the helmet has also been broken off: so has the sash that usually flows around his head. The sculpture has the eyes closed and the serene features of a bodhisattva. He wears a crown and has a gem in his forehead. This bronze casting is contemporary with the two previous bodhisattvas, dating from the early seventeenth century, during the final decades of the Ming.26

GUANGONG: GOD OF WAR

The final deity in the ensemble is Guangong, also known as Guandi, even Guanyu,27 and represents the God of War.28 Guangong embodies loyalty, justice, courage and responsibility. His image is often seen on the altars of ‘disciplined bodies of men’ – soldiers, policemen or firemen (Stevens 1997: 150). Guangong is revered by Daoists, Confucians and Buddhists: as a bringer of prosperity, he can also be found in many folk temples and businesses in places such as Hong Kong. Today he is second only to Guanyin in popular appeal. Unlike many deities of the Buddhist pantheon, Guangong was a Chinese historical figure rather than a mythological figure from India – a military general (c. 160–219 CE) under the warlord Liu Bei during the late Eastern Han dynasty and Three Kingdoms period. In Chinese Buddhism, Guangong is honoured as a bodhisattva and, like Weituo, he is a protector of the Dharma. His Sanskrit name, Sangharama bodhisattva, signifies community (sangha) and garden (arama), or ‘monastery’. He is the guardian of both the temple and the temple garden. On Putuo Island, his statues are habitually located on the far left of the main shrines, opposite his counterpart, Weituo. He may also be found outside temple gates. The statue is bearded – a characteristic of the God of War – and is the only figure in the group with wide-open eyes. He wears a crown with a small image of Guanyin in the centre. His left hand is in abhaya mudra, with hand raised to shoulder height, the arm crooked, the palm of the hand facing outward, and the fingers upright and joined. In Sanskrit this mudra stands for fearlessness, symbolizing protection, peace and the dispelling of fear. His right hand is in vitarka mudra, similar to Wenshu and Puxian. Like the image of Weituo, Guangong is clad in protective armour and has a flowing sash around his head. Iconographically, Weituo and Guangong are a pair, most probably made by the same workshop in Ningbo in the early seventeenth century, or late Ming.29

CONSECRATION

Although I have described in some detail the physical characteristics of each deity figure, we must bear in mind that they should be considered beyond their indi-

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1.5 Cast bronze statue of Guangong, Putuo Island, China. Early seventeenth century, Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). H: 88cm, l: 44cm, w: 23cm. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool (1981.876.111).

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vidual material forms. Kieschnick reminds us that devotees do not worship such bronzes because they simply resemble or look like the deities, but rather because they believe the deities are present within them. The Putuo Five had efficacy in the Buddhist temple, in other words, because they contained the powers of the deities depicted (Kieschnick 2003: 70, 57). In order for an image to function as an object of worship, more is needed than visual faithfulness to an iconographical ideal. Freedberg, amongst others, has noted how something else needs to happen before objects can become spiritually effective (1989: 81). In China since at least the ninth century, statues have been considered to come ‘alive’ through a combination of two actions: the insertion of sacred texts and a ritual ‘opening of the eyes’ (Kieschnick 2003: 62). The relevant ceremonies did take place for our statues: nineteenth-century catalogues refer to manuscripts inside the Putuo Five. As these were long ago removed, we can only speculate on their nature. When I discussed this with the Reverend Hui Xian of the Puji monastery on Putuo, he suggested they might have been sutras; jewels or money could also have been present.30 Seckel refers to such handwritten or printed sutra texts as ‘vehicles of sacred power’, which constitute an image’s ‘spiritual core’.31 The sacred energy already present in a smaller object, such as a sacred text or a relic, is placed directly inside a statue (Kieschnick 2003: 63). Indeed manuscripts continue to be inserted into newly created images on Putuo today. In his analysis of the consecration of Buddhist images in Sri Lanka, Gell argues that although the relics inside sculptures make deity figures seem like the Buddha, this does not in itself amount to an animation. Rather, the action legitimizes the statue, so that from the ‘monkish’ perspective no taint of idolatry arises (1998: 149). In other words, for Gell, statues contain written manuscripts in order to signify that they are part of a scholastic tradition. The situation, however, is different for the laity who, he notes, being more ‘superstitious’, believe that the Buddha is really god. This is why a lay craftsman, rather than a monk, animates an image (Gell 1998: 149). There is a division of ritual labour: while monks place relics into the statue, a layman dots the eyes (Gombrich 1967: 24; Gell 1998: 148). This is also traditionally the case in China. Kieschnick notes that when a deity figure is almost complete, a craftsman carries out the final step to convert it into a ‘receptacle for the gods’ (2003: 60). After the scriptures and other objects were placed in the interior cavities of the Putuo Five, the base plates were soldered on and a second ceremony, the ‘opening of the eyes’, would have taken place – this, as Kisechnick notes, was a widespread practice in China since the sixth century (2003: 60). When I showed photographs of the Putuo Five to Jin Ming Fashi, Master at the Buddhist Institute of Putuo in 2007, he said that the faces of these statues would have been initially cleaned, then a mirror placed in front of their faces and finally a brush (with no water) would have been used to dot – or ‘open’ – the eyes, thus activating their spiritual powers. Mirrors are still used today so that the craftsman does not have to look directly into the eyes of the statue at the crucial moment when the deity is entering.32

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With such a ceremony, the Putuo Five, as religiously efficacious beings, were born. They were capable of both being worshipped and of bestowing help. They were no longer material objects, but the thing which they signified: they became what they represented. Freedberg talks of this as the ‘conflation of sign and signified’ (1989: 31). In their first sphere of significance, the Putuo Five did not merely represent deities: they were deities. They were not lifeless representations but living, sacred beings (Kieschnick 2003: 57). According to certain Buddhist beliefs, the metal base plate should never be taken off.33 Bentor notes that for Tibetan Buddhists in particular: ‘The blessings of the statue disappear if the inner contents are removed, so from a traditional point of view the deity has been destroyed’.34 In this tradition, prising open a consecrated figure and taking out the inner contents is sacrilege. We shall see how the removal of the base plates and the withdrawal of the manuscripts from the Putuo Five occurred in the 1840s, soon after they came into the possession of a British soldier. The scriptures themselves were subsequently lost. As no ceremony has ever been undertaken to close them, the eyes of the Putuo Five are still, to this day, open. It should also be noted that vital components of the images, in their first realm of meaning, were elements that were unseen, namely the manuscripts and jewels within them, and the spirit of the deity inhabiting them. This is something to bear in mind when, in later chapters, we examine the lives of the figures in the public exhibition, the museum, the stores and the Liverpool Conservation Centre, where they tended to exist in their visible or material qualities alone. *

*

*

Just as we must be careful not to view the Putuo Five as inanimate bronzes, so we must also take care not to conceptualize them as individual things: for such figures in the Buddhist belief system are rarely found alone and are always interpreted relationally. In the temples on Putuo, the bronzes were not discrete individual works but composites: they were part of a set, deeply connected to other deity figures, inextricably embedded into a complex network of relationships. Gell notes how such artworks do not appear as singular entities, but rather as ensembles: an anthropological analysis, he believes, should focus on the ‘relational context’ instead of ‘artistic or aesthetic form’ (1998: 153). The relationships surrounding objects in particular settings are particularly important; only once objects are ‘enmeshed in a texture of social relationships’ can they acquire efficacy (1998: 8, 17). Seckel reiterates similar concepts in relation to Buddhist images by identifying how each main deity figure has one or two bodhisattvas attached to them, which are known as their ‘relatives’ (1989: 32). We have already noted the deep metaphysical relationship between Guanyin, Wenshu and Puxian in the Chinese Buddhist tradition – as the San Da Shi, or the ‘Three Great Beings’. In the next section I consider how all five had a special relationship with each other in the temple complexes on Putuo.

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Location: The Island and the Temple Putuo: The Sacred Island There are four mountains sacred to Chinese Buddhism, each of which is associated with a key bodhisattva. Putuo Island, known to the Chinese as Putuoshan (or Putuo mountain) in Zhejiang province, is the mountain of the east.35 It is the most important devotional centre for Guanyin and the key pilgrimage site for this goddess in the Chinese Buddhist world. Putuoshan is a long and narrow island of a mere thirty square kilometres,36 located seventy miles east of the major seaport of Ningbo, south of Shanghai, and forming part of the Zhoushan archipelago. The name derives from the Potakala, the mythological home of Avalokitesvara (or Guanyin), mentioned in the Huayan Sutra and other scriptures (Yü 2001: 295). The island has been a centre for the veneration of this deity since at least the Tang dynasty (618–907). The popular account is that in 916 the Japanese monk, Huie, was stranded there while bringing a statue of Avalokitesvara from Mount Wutai to Japan. His prayer to the deity for help was answered and in gratitude he built a shrine on the mountain – the ‘Bukenqu’ (Reluctant to Go, or ‘Unwilling to leave’), supposedly the first temple on the island. Putuo developed as a key place for the worship of Guanyin between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and was well established by the fourteenth. Within a hundred years it had more than three hundred temples (Palmer 1995: 35). However, the island was frequently attacked by Japanese pirates and in 1387 almost all the monks were driven to the mainland (Crow 1986: 179; Yü 2001: 378). For the next century or so Putuo was nominally deserted. It is recorded that when the Putuo Monastery was evacuated in 1387, an image of a thousand-armed Guanyin statue was taken to Ningbo.37 Nothing was left on Putuo itself during this period, except a monk and his pupil in the Tiewa Dian (‘Iron Tile Temple’). The following year, in 1388, the Putuo Monastery was revived in Ningbo city itself. While this soon fell into decline, the gazetteers inform us that a shrine hall, the Yuantang Bao Dian was built in 1424 in which a thousand-armed Guanyin was enthroned. While this coincides with the date when the Liverpool Guanyin was believed to have been created, we cannot be sure if this is a reference to her: no descriptions of the exact size, iconography or materials were included in this text. Yet judging from the almost complete evacuation of Putuo during this period, it does seem likely that our Guanyin could have been installed originally in Ningbo. As we have seen, the bronze was probably cast in this city, and a local Ningbo person may have commissioned the statue. If Guanyin were indeed enthroned here, then a major event in the image’s early life would have been the journey from the maritime city to the sacred island in the East China Sea. Raids by Japanese pirates during the reign of Jiajing (1522–1566) led to widespread destruction on Putuo, and over three hundred temples fell into ruin.

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During this period of turmoil in the early sixteenth century only one temple survived (Yü 2001: 378; Palmer 1995: 35). It seems likely that either our bronze statue of Guanyin had not yet left Ningbo, or that it was temporarily evacuated to avoid the pirates. It is also remotely possible that the single temple that survived is the one that housed the Liverpool Guanyin. The gazetteer of 1607 compiled by Zhou Yingbin records that in 1598 there was a fire on Putuo, and that the only statues to survive were of Guanyin and Guangong. The text, however, suggests that the Guangong figure was not of bronze (it had a beard which left no burn marks). In any case, the date for Guangong – late sixteenth century – seems too early for our statue, even though the gazetteer indicates that it formed part of a set, along with a Guanyin. As for the latter, it is very possible that this is the Guanyin that concerns us.38 Through the latter half of the Ming dynasty there was renewed interest in Buddhism, and Putuo in particular became an extremely popular site of pilgrimage between the mid sixteenth and mid seventeenth centuries (Brook 1993: 46, 55). It was during the latter part of this period that the remaining four deities were created. The work of rebuilding the temples began in the late sixteenth century due largely to the patronage of the Emperor Wanli (r.1573–1620) and his mother, Empress Dowager Li (Crow 1986: 179). Temples and monasteries were greatly enlarged (Palmer 1995: 35). Yet the revival was brief, for more atrocities took place in 1665 when Dutch pirates driven from Taiwan plundered and burned many temples (Crow 1986: 179). By 1687, the Kangxi emperor had given a thousand tael donation to support the rebuilding of the monasteries, an indication of the significance already attached to the island (Brook 1993: 164). Monks returned from the mainland the following year (Crow 1986: 179). As all five statues were made before the acts of Dutch piracy, it is clearly remarkable that they were unscathed, even as hurried evacuees. Just as the legend of Guanyin records how she miraculously survived the fire of the nunnery, so too, astonishingly, the Putuo Five remained intact during this second phase of aggression from outsiders. This is more than can be said for what happened to them almost three centuries later. In 1941, as we shall see, Liverpool Museum suffered fire bombing during the Second World War, and although the Putuo Five were evacuated once again, this time there were much harsher consequences for their physical condition. From the late seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries Putuo experienced something of a renaissance, particularly under the patronage of the Emperors Yongzheng (r.1722–1735) and his son Qianlong (r.1735–1796). Repairs were made to many buildings and by 1793, when the Huiji monastery (the third largest on the island) was built, the island had reached the peak of its glory, at one time accommodating more than three thousand monks (Haring-Kuan and Kuan 1987: 254). Coincidentally, 1793 was the very year that the British endeavoured, and failed, to ‘open up’ the Chinese empire through George III’s delegation to the imperial court under Lord Macartney. It was around fifty years later, just after the First Opium War (1839–42), when the Putuo Five were dislodged from the sanctuary of their temple by a British soldier. This war, in which the British prevailed,

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ushered in a period of great humiliation for the Chinese. One consequence was that Western missionaries moved to the Chinese Treaty ports in the 1840s and 1850s. Some visited Putuo. G.N. Wright, for example, wrote in 1843, the year after the Treaty of Nanjing formally ended the war: Poo-Too, or Worshippers’ Island … is the chief seat of Chinese Buddhism, and has long been celebrated for the riches, and magnitude, and glories of its temples … here now upwards of 3,000 monks, or bonzes, of the Hoshang or unmarried sect, reside, and lead a Pythagorean life … Upwards of four hundred minor chapels have been erected on this little isle, but there is one building which is considered the very cathedral of Buddhism. (1843 vol iv: 28–29)

The ‘cathedral of Buddhism’ was the Puji monastery, also referred to by foreigners as ‘The Grand Temple’. The year after Wright’s account was published, in 1844, the Scottish botanist and traveller, Robert Fortune, encountered a set of bronze statues in one of the smaller shrine halls in the Puji monastery which clearly left a profound impression: ‘There is one small temple, however, of a very unassuming appearance, where we met with some exquisite bronze statues, which would be considered of great value in England. These, of course, were much smaller than the others, but, viewed as works of art, they were by far the finest which I saw during my travels in China’ (1847: 182).39 It is highly likely that these bronze statues, the finest Fortune set eyes upon in China, were indeed the Putuo Five. Many of the deity figures were huge – six metres high at least – and the size reference is therefore apposite. The vicissitudes through which the island passed after the removal of the statues in the 1840s suggest that, had they remained on Putuo, the five bronzes would most probably not have survived. Below, therefore, I briefly recount something of the turmoil experienced from the end of the First Opium War until the present time on Guanyin’s most sacred isle. During his visit in 1844, Fortune had noted that there were sixty or seventy smaller temples, each of which included three or four priests (1847: 182). He estimated there to be around two thousand monks overall (1847: 185). By the 1850s the French missionary Evariste-Régis Huc believed there to be a hundred temples.40 He noted that ‘Pou-tou’ had one of the most renowned monastic libraries in the ‘Celestial Empire’: ‘More than 100 monasteries, more or less important, and two of which were founded by Emperors, are scattered over the sides of the mountains and valleys of this picturesque and enchanting island, which nature and arts have combined to adorn with their utmost magnificence’ (1859: 399). Yet Huc wrote of the state of disrepair of buildings, a decline exacerbated by the ravages of the Opium Wars and the chaos and poverty of the ensuing years as China was occupied by foreign powers and collapsed into civil war. Fortune had noted that elsewhere in China temples had been ‘battered’ by the British troops and remained in a ruinous condition (1847: 351).41

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In the twentieth century, the fortunes of Putuo’s temples fluctuated greatly. By the 1930s, Crow estimated that the island still had around a hundred temples and monasteries, and just over a thousand monks: ‘Of these structures the most important are the southern and northern monasteries, located on the island as their names imply … The story of each is a story not only of Pootoo but of Buddhism itself and of the history of China because every change in the ancient Empire was reflected here and recorded in the local annals’ (1986: 179–80). According to Morrel, up until 1949, when the Communists took over, some four thousand monks and nuns remained on the island (1983: 319). Yet some images were destroyed immediately after the communists assumed power (Kieschnick 2003: 70). Much more widespread destruction, however, took place during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when Putuo was sacked. Temples, statues and gazetteers were tragically destroyed.42 The most important monastic library in the whole of China – referred to by Huc in the 1850s – was ransacked. During an interview in 2007, one Buddhist monk on Putuo told of how thousands of religious artefacts accumulated during the long history of the island, most of which had been carefully documented, were lost to Red Guard fanaticism. Monks and nuns too were driven off the island (Palmer 1995: 35). Pilgrims were only allowed to return in 1979, when the island opened once again to the public (Yü 2001: 152, 403).43 The three large monasteries, Puji, Fayu and Huji, were restored, along with eight smaller temples; by 1987 the island had over one million visitors a year (Yü 2001: 403). Twenty years later, this figure had more than trebled.44 By 2007, thirty-three temples were open to the public and there were 150 monks in the Puji monastery alone. Putuo, with official sanction, has once more become a thriving pilgrimage site. The great majority of deities in the temples of Putuo today were made in the 1980s or later, funded through donations from the Buddhist diaspora. The statues in the large monasteries are gigantic and all are made of wood.45 In fact the Putuo Five may be the only set of large bronze sculptures left from the island. Chün-fang Yü, author of one of the most important studies of Guanyin, believes that the statue of the Goddess of Compassion in Liverpool is the oldest surviving bronze figure from Putuo, thus endowing it with exceptional historical significance.46

The Temple as ‘Body’ Sculptured images constitute the real nucleus of every Buddhist temple … They are arranged inside the sanctuary in a strictly hierarchical spatial order related to the central Buddha … The typical result is a well-structured and firmly centred configuration consisting of a larger or smaller number of images, depending on the size and rank of the temple or the individual building within the entire temple precinct or in the particular iconographic program. (Seckel 1989: 81)

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For anthropologists, such as Gell, sacred architecture can be likened to bodies, for buildings are ‘containers’ which, just like the human form, have entrances and exits (1998: 253). From this perspective, the Buddhist temple becomes part of the ‘body’ of the deities – their outer shell. Indeed it is true that, at a fundamental level, the Chinese temple is not designed for humans but for the images inside. The architectural form of the Buddhist monastery originates and radiates out from the statues enshrined at the centre. The symbolic colours and lavish decoration are all used to underscore the fact that this is the house of the deities (Seckel 1989: 85). In his discussion of Hindu temples in India, Gell talks of images having a series of ‘skins’, like Peer Gynt’s onion, with the same implication, that ‘the ultimate centre can never be reached’ (1998: 147). The outermost skin of the deities in India consists of the temple: ‘Proceeding towards the centre we approach the idols through the “social skin”, the throng of pilgrims and attendant temple servants … The idols themselves are enshrined at the centre, framed on their altars, adorned with masses of flowers and jewellery … We cannot approach or touch the idols, so we can proceed further on our journey towards the centre in imagination’ (1998: 147–48). This description is strikingly similar to the construction of space in Chinese temples. The different architectural components of monasteries and temples on Putuo, and elsewhere, may be considered to operate as ‘skins’, taking the visitor, step by step, further into the centre, where the main deities reside. All Chinese temples are traditionally built in a way which symbolically elevates them within the landscape. Often they are approached by steps, a characteristic of sacred architecture around the world – the movement upwards, the need for ascent, reinforcing the notion that the visitor is about to enter a sacred realm, a sanctified place where reverence is anticipated and everyday behaviour suspended. Indeed, the flights of steps, columns and elaborate architectural decoration of the Chinese temple will, in a later chapter, be compared with the space of the museum in order to examine how, at different moments in their lives, the Putuo Five inhabited similarly elevated architectural domains. Large Buddhist temple complexes in China usually consist of a series of halls of worship surrounded by a high wall – the external skin – with clearly defined gateways (Seckel 1989: 40). Movement through the entrance is carefully demarcated, for this is the passage from the profane world to the sacred sanctuary within (Seckel 1989: 47). The entrance door, the shan men or ‘mountain gate’ always faces south. In the Puji temple on Putuo, visitors enter via two small entrances to the left and right of the main entrance.47 Worshippers (and evil spirits) are prohibited from moving in a straight line towards the images at the centre, for this is inauspicious. The construction of space thus inhibits immediate visual access to the deities within. Such monasteries and temple complexes operate as precincts, consisting of a range of buildings of different sizes. They are usually organized symmetrically with main prayer halls (dian) in the centre aligned on a north–south axis surrounded by

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minor chapels and monastic dwellings to the side. Some of the latter are residential and administrative buildings; others may be used for special purposes, such as the Meditation Hall or the Library. The entire complex should ideally be positioned on a hill – a good fengshui location – so that visitors ascend from one building to the next in a northerly direction. Halls of worship too are placed up high, with steps in front so that the worshippers must climb to pay respects. Inside the prayer halls, the main deities are positioned in the centre, on platforms, facing the entrance (the south) with their backs to the north. The gigantic size of the images in contemporary temples amplifies their sense of significance. After passing through the entrance door, the first hall is always the Tianwang dian or Heavenly King’s Hall, in which a large image of Weituo is located. We have seen how this guardian is positioned back-to-back with Mi-lo Fo,48 the future Buddha: the latter faces away from the temple complex, while Weituo faces inwards, his gaze turned towards the main prayer halls. The altar upon which Weituo and Maitreya sit is in the centre of these rooms and is usually flanked at the sides by the guardians of the four directions, the Si tianwang tian. After the Heavenly King’s Hall, worshippers step into the first of many roofless courtyards. This may also be a site of reverence – a ‘social skin’ – where incense is lit and the devout bow down towards the deities enshrined in the buildings in front. From here the movement is upwards, from one hall to the next, ‘in graduated stages from the outside, the ‘world’, deeper and deeper into the innermost part of the sanctuary. It reaches its final destination in the inner sanctum where it comes to rest’ (Seckel 1989: 37). The building in the very centre of the complex is the ‘Dai xiong bao dian’, the Treasure Hall of the Great Hero, where the main image is enthroned. The overall arrangement of the deity figures in such temple complexes has been described by Seckel as a three-dimensional mandala (1989: 82). These are ancient principles of spatial organization, deeply rooted within the semiotics of Chinese architecture. The configuration of space in imperial buildings too mirrors the architectural script of the Buddhist temple. In the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, for example, the main halls of worship are placed along a central axis, raised on plinths, surrounded by steps, with thrones at the very centre, reinforcing the power of the Emperor. Edkins pointed out over a hundred years ago that there was a particular arrangement of images in the temples on Putuo, with the substitution of Guanyin for the historical Buddha in the central halls of worship (1879: 259). An 1893 inscription from the ‘Dai xiong bao dian’ in the nearby Qita temple in Ningbo, for example, describes a thousand-armed Guanyin in the centre of the site.49 Yet on Putuo today images of the thousand-armed Guanyin tend to be located in shrines towards the side of these complexes. In the Puji monastery, for example, a magnificent larger-than-life-size, wood and gilded figure of the thousand-armed Guanyin is to the right of the hall for the historical Buddha, positioned behind the central hall for Guanyin of the South Sea. In the Fayu temple, the thousandarmed Guanyin is located between the large shrine halls for Guanyin of the South

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1.6 Worshippers at the Puji monastery, Putuo Island, China. Photograph taken by author, March 2007.

Sea and the three Buddhas. The main statue here is larger than the Liverpool bronze; in front of her is a smaller deity, and back-to-back is a second gilded wooden statue of the thousand-armed Guanyin, smaller than that in Liverpool. When I visited in 2007 this was the only statue with a notice asking worshippers not to touch. It was a focus of veneration, clearly a highly potent image, with many prostrating themselves, praying fervently. Wenshu and Puxian also occupy particular positions in the spatial layout of Putuo temples. Their status in the Buddhist pantheon means that they sit closer to the centre of power in the architectural script than Weituo and Guangong. Indeed, Wenshu’s and Puxian’s relationship with Guanyin – as the San Da Shi – is inscribed within the configuration in the Puji monastery. Here, shrine rooms for Wenshu and Puxian flank the main hall for Guanyin: Wenshu is to the left, Puxian to the right, the three chapels forming an east–west band across the centre of the complex. In the Fayu monastery, statues of Wenshu and Puxian are placed on their altars inside the main hall devoted to the Buddha; once again, Wenshu takes up position on the Buddha’s left, Puxian is on his right. In the ‘Dai xiongbao’ hall of the Qita temple in Ningbo, an 1893 inscription refers to a thousand-armed Guanyin, with Wenshu (once again) on the left, Puxian on the right.50 As well as being based in the Heavenly King’s Hall, statues of Weituo may be found further within temple complexes. In the Puji monastery, his statue, with a

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sword, is located in front of the main altar to Guanyin. He is on the goddess’s left, facing Guangong, on the goddess’s right. In the Fayu temple, these two guardians have their own buildings: Weituo’s hall is to the left of the main Buddha, Guangong’s is to the right. These configurations form what Seckel refers to as a ‘crescendo of religious significance’: the relationships amongst figures being articulated through their spatial arrangements (1989: 83). A Buddhist statue is thus tied to a system of spaces – altars, shrines, halls and monastic complexes – which map its status and significance in the belief system: Theologically, it is part of the Buddhist pantheon, and plays a role both within Buddhist doctrine and in the total iconographic program of the sanctuary. Formally, it is part of a particular configuration within the context of the temple’s architectural designs. We would capture only a part of a figure’s total impact if we did not also take into account all that which points beyond the limitations of the figure’s physical appearance and integrates the figure into its surroundings. Only in this manner is the image really rendered complete. (Seckel 1989: 84)

The sense of completion for such images, then, is constructed through positioning: the configuration of space around deities endows them with efficacy. This is similar, it could be argued, to the ascription of meaning in other structured spaces, notably the museum. Just as objects in museums are given a heightened sense of value through the mechanism of exhibitions, so these figures had their identities confirmed in the specific display arrangements inside the Buddhist temple. Finally, it should be noted that the size of an image is linked to religious rank. Guanyin, as we have seen, is the largest in the ensemble, followed by Wenshu and Puxian, who in turn are larger than Weituo and Guangong. The hierarchy of size, the fact that Wenshu and Puxian are ‘mirror images’ and that Weituo and Guangong are paired, all suggest that they were originally worshipped together in a single hall. The dimensions of Buddhist statues are closely tied to the dimensions of the halls they inhabit and, exhibited as a group, the Putuo Five would have occupied a building smaller than the present-day central halls in the main monasteries on Putuo, with their deities rising to over five metres.51 Of course, we will never know exactly where or how the Putuo Five were displayed, or even if all the five were positioned together. The architectural script of Chinese Buddhist temples on Putuo in the fifteenth or even seventeenth centuries is not known. But considering Robert Fortune’s observation of a set of ‘exquisite’ bronzes in a small chapel in the Puji monastery, the above arguments regarding the size of buildings do give credence to the possibility that the ‘works of art’ he encountered in 1844 were indeed the protagonists of this book.

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Reception: Pilgrims, Lay Worshippers and Monks The Putuo Five, and Guanyin in particular, were a focus of attention and a source of wonder to the innumerable pilgrims who, over the course of centuries, travelled to Putuo Island. Thus, in the final part of this chapter, I consider the values and meanings that might have been attached to these bronze deities by Buddhist devotees in China. For most believers, deity figures are the principal point of contact with Buddhism (Kieschnick 2003: 55). Buddhist statues are first and foremost educational and didactic, making visible elements of religious teaching. Images may represent the qualities of the particular deity and, as such, transmit abstract religious teaching into the sphere of visual representation: they render the ‘religion tangible’ (Kieschnick 2003: 24). Many commemorate historical events and personalities. Some may also act as a focus for monks and practitioners in meditation, contemplation of a statue allowing the devout to better visualize the deity represented (Kieschnick 2003: 55). Believers may copy the postures and mudras in order to identify with deity. The scopic regime here is clearly different from that of the later abodes of the Putuo Five, for example, in the museum. In the temple complex, these Buddhist deity figures were not ‘things’ to be merely observed, but rather vehicles for transformation. The ultimate goal of Buddhists is to attain spiritual enlightenment, to free the soul from the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, to transcend mundane existence and achieve nirvana. A key purpose of the Putuo Five, in their first sphere of meaning, was to facilitate this.

Pilgrims Putuo has been one of the key pilgrimage sites in China for centuries, welcoming pilgrims – both lay people and travelling monks – from all over the Buddhist world. From the Ming dynasty on, the island began to draw worshippers in huge numbers (Brook 1993: 250), and this continued right up to the mid twentieth century (Welch 1973: 213). Before the construction of hotels, travellers slept in the monasteries, near the deities themselves. Today, while pilgrims travel to Putuo throughout the year as individual worshippers, tens of thousands arrive in groups on specific festivals and anniversaries. For the worship of Guanyin, there are three key dates: her ‘birthday’ on the 19th day of the second lunar month (the day Princess Miao Shan was born), her Enlightenment on the 19th day of the sixth month, and the date she achieved nirvana on the 19th day of the ninth month (Welch 1973:108). At these times – and in particular on her date of birth – pilgrims flock from all over China. In the Spring of 2007, I visited Putuo during the ‘birthday’ of Guanyin when the temples were packed with worshippers and the population had swollen to over a hundred thousand. Many in the pilgrimage groups which I observed had

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travelled from far away provinces of the interior of China. Pilgrims also journeyed from all over the Buddhist world – from Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere in the great global Chinese diaspora (Yü 2001: 403). Putuo has long been a place of pilgrimage for Japanese Buddhists too. There is a prescribed route, a circuit that most follow, which requires the offering of incense, the making of small donations, and the collecting of seals at the three main monasteries. In pre-communist China the pilgrimage route was similarly well established: Welch observes, as I did on my own visit, the practice of seals of the monasteries being printed on pilgrims’ yellow bags, on ordination certificates and small albums (1973: 310). The route up to the Huiji, Putuo’s third largest monastery, is marked by 1,060 stone steps. A great throng of pilgrims slowly ascends, some stopping every few steps to bow or prostrate themselves, all the way to the summit of a considerable hill.52 It is predominantly women who follow the route, whispering as they go, hands clasped in obeisance.53

Lay Worship Unlike the awesome silence of cavernous European cathedrals or the quiet simplicity of Protestant churches, Chinese temples have a sensuousness more akin to the Eastern Orthodox tradition (Jochim 1986: 2). Most noticeable is the pungent smell of incense, sticks of varying sizes being left to smoulder in the bronze censers, and the smoke gently wafting in front of the deities, filling the air with fragrance. The interiors of the halls housing the great statues are usually windowless, dark or dimly lit and so the atmosphere is thick with smoke punctured by shafts of light from the large open doorways. The design of space, according to Seckel, is intended to admit light only ‘accidently’ through openings of low doors and windows: ‘daylight is as much as possible kept out of the interior, so that a deep, quasi-formless twilight is created’ (1989: 61). Sometimes the gigantic sculptures in the centre are illuminated – usually from below – and they seem to glow in the ethereal light. They are placed on platforms, today often encased in glass. Temple interiors are ornately decorated – reds, golds, blacks and blues predominate. Traditionally red is used on columns to suggest happiness and yang principles. Whole ceilings are painted gold or red to represent power and glory (Lip 1986: 12). Richly embroidered yellow silk hangings flank the altar tables and long banners stream from ceilings. If a Buddhist ritual is taking place, there is the noise of a drum – the ‘wooden fish’ – tapped rhythmically, cymbals clashing, and groups of seated monks chanting sutras. In busy temples there is always the background whisper of people mouthing their prayers and the scuffle of feet as worshippers move from deity to deity. People worship in Chinese temples for a number of reasons. Often it is to seek advice on a range of life issues: the birth of a child, good health, success in business or promotion at work, better education for children, a safe journey or a good har-

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vest. The requirements depend on the specific deity and historical period. We saw earlier how Guanyin is worshipped predominantly by women, especially those in later life (Yü 2001: 414). Wenshu is the preferred choice of monks and scholars. The method of worshipping has been constant over the centuries:54 an individual rather than communal act that can take place at any time when the building is open. The most common mode of worship is the burning of incense sticks. Usually three are lit and held up in front of the face. The worshipper may bow to the main, then subsidiary deities. People do not necessarily go inside the halls: they might stand outside, in the courtyard, or at the top of the steps, outside the wide open doors. As people often stand far back from cult images, proximity, it seems, is not crucial, but direction is.55 Some stand in the centre of courtyards shaking their incense towards the halls in all four directions. Incense sticks are then placed in the large, ornate bronze incense burners outside. Paper offerings may also be burnt. During my visit to Putuo’s Fayu temple in 2007, large crowds of women were making obeisance in front of a hall with a small image of the thousand-armed Guanyin – the highly charged statue bearing a sign not to touch. Women knelt or prostrated themselves on cushions before it, clasping their hands in prayer, shaking them gently, their lips moving silently as they murmured a wish. Some held incense – three sticks – in front of their faces. Monks may also be present to assist the devout. During my visit, in one of the

1.7 Monk in front of multiple-armed Guanyin shrine, Fayu temple, Putuo Island, China. Photograph taken by author, March 2007.

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halls devoted to yet another thousand-armed Guanyin in the Fayu temple, a monk was seated holding prayer beads. From time to time he waved a jade necklace belonging to a worshipper in front of the statue. Unlike communal forms of worship in the Christian tradition, movement and behaviour in Chinese temples is not strictly prescribed. Yet despite this, while people are free to wander, there is usually a route that is followed. As we have seen, all must enter via a monumental gateway and walk up the sacred path to the centre (Seckel, 1964: 143). Worshippers tend to follow each other, moving from one hall to the next, ascending the steps in the centre and returning along the sides. Pilgrims also walk from one monastery to the next, following a circuit around the different sites.

Monks If ordinary lay people entered into a special relationship with a Buddhist icon when they knelt down and made supplications before it, the relationship between monks and icons was at times even more intense. (Kieschnick 2003: 65)

While lay worshippers and pilgrims had transient encounters with the Putuo Five, those who gave their lives to the path of Buddhism existed in a space alongside them. It would have been the monks, in particular, who developed the deepest and most sustained relationships with these images. The Putuo Five were at the very centre of their world, both spatially and spiritually. On Putuo, Guanyin is the focus of devotion, but the four other deities also have a place in monastic life. Wenshu is an important figure who has the capacity to solve difficult religious questions and he is often prayed to by monks. Weituo is esteemed as a protector of the monastery and the dharma. A hymn to him forms part of the daily liturgy (Welch 1973: 56). A prayer is also traditionally read to guardian divinities, such as Guangong (Welch 1973: 71). Communal obeisance takes place in the Buddhist temple at certain times, when monks are commissioned to perform rites. A variety of rituals may be undertaken for lay worshippers, many being associated with the dead, and collectively known as ‘white services’ (Welch 1973: 195).56 Here the temple becomes the site of group worship, filled with the chanting of scriptures, punctuated by rhythmic strikes on the wooden fish, gongs, cymbals or bells. Traditionally there are two varieties of rites for the dead: ceremonies that take place on an anniversary of death, and routine offerings made before the tablet of the dead person on the 1st and 15th of every lunar month. Of the former, the tantric ritual ‘release of burning mouths’ is visually the most arresting. Here, the presiding monk wears an elaborate five-pointed hat and uses a group of magical instruments to enable ghosts to be reborn. The ceremony is usually held in the evening, in front of an altar, lasting around five hours (Welch 1973: 185–87).

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Simply reciting the Buddha’s name is also believed to give rise to merit, and so monks might be commissioned to do this for a week after someone has died (Welch 1973: 188). Monks may perform other rites immediately after the death of a person in order to help with their rebirth (which takes place forty-nine days later). More rites can be carried out to secure a second rebirth and alleviate suffering. However the tour de force is what Welch refers to as the ‘plenary mass’ (1973: 190) and Yü calls the ‘Water-Land Assembly’ (2001). This is a long and expensive ceremony, lasting seven days and nights, which includes different services at seven different altars. These take place simultaneously. Monks recite the Buddha’s name, chant sutras, offer penances and perform the ‘release of the burning mouths’. The purpose of the mass is to save the souls of all the dead. However, the merit arising from it is credited to the deceased relatives of the family who paid for it (Welch 1973: 190). Today, part of the plenary mass is performed in front of the thousand-armed Guanyin. One such ritual was taking place in the Puji temple when I visited in March 2007. It involved at least sixty monks, divided into seven groups, located in seven halls.57 Six monks were seated in front of the altar to the larger-than-lifesize thousand-armed Guanyin, and three on either side of a table perpendicular to the image, facing each other. One monk, on the left, nearest the entrance was striking a wooden fish. Behind this building, in the large hall devoted to the Buddha, more than twenty monks, dressed in red and brown, facing the main shrine, chanted sutras. One struck a bell, another, the drums. The family that commissioned the service stood behind. Rituals continued in other halls, until, at the end, the monks left and the family followed behind holding sticks of incense. *

*

*

We have seen how the Putuo bronzes operated as part of a set, inextricably related to other images, tied to particular spaces, within the body of the temple. Their location on altars, the position of their shrine halls, and the siting of the monastery itself, all formed a dynamic whole, endowing them with spiritual identity (Gell 1998). The intensity of meaning was magnified on the pilgrimage island of Putuo, the most important site in China for the worship of Guanyin. But the sacred world they inhabited was suddenly and irrevocably shattered in the 1840s with the British attack on China. As we follow the movement of the deities and the unfolding of their lives over the next 150 years, we trace their loss of sacred potency and their transition into display spheres which conflicted with their original purpose and meaning. Specifically, it is to the lives of the Putuo Five in the hands of a British soldier to which the next chapter now turns.

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Notes 1. The Buddhist text, the Lotus Sutra, one of the most popular and influential Mahayana texts (probably compiled in the first century CE), specifies that support for monasteries will create karmic merit (see Brook 1993: 198). Kieschnick suggests that, judging by inscriptions, lay people were the most common donors of Buddhist objects, rather than monks (2003: 162). 2. The five deities were venerated as part of the Buddhist system of belief, which was founded in India by Siddhartha Gautama around the fifth century BCE. At the age of twenty-nine, after renouncing his princely existence, Siddhartha (or Shakyamuni) spent years in a quest for spiritual meaning before becoming the Buddha, the ‘enlightened one’. Numerous distinct groups emerged after the passing of the historical Buddha, with diverse teachings that varied widely in practice, philosophical emphasis and culture. The religion spread throughout the Indian subcontinent and into neighbouring countries, moving further into Asia and arriving in China in the first centuries CE. Here it encountered preexisting systems of belief: Daoism, with its emphasis on ritual, magic and immortality; and Confucianism, more a set of moral precepts than a religion. Historians argue that the success of Buddhism was its adaption to, rather than displacement of, indigenous beliefs. 3. Sanskrit: Avalokitesvara. 4. Sanskrit: Manjusri. 5. Sanskrit: Samantabhadra. 6. Sanskrit: Ksitigarbha. 7. Accession number: DPTemp 3811. 8. Height (without throne) 113cm; length 105cm; width 40cm. Many early cult figures were life-size or slightly smaller (Seckel 1989: 89). 9. A bell-like ritual instrument symbolizing sound and the creative word (Frederic 1995: 65). 10. Symbolizing the cutting through of ignorance (McArthur 2002: 57). 11. This is the gem which ‘grants wishes or satisfies all desires’, in the form of a ball pointed at the top. It represents all the treasures, and especially understanding of the Buddhist Law, bringing freedom from desire (Frederic 1995: 71). 12. Email, 22 June 2007. 13. Email, 18 October 2007. 14. Accession number: 1980.134.5. 15. His duty being to turn the Wheel of Law for the salvation of the Chinese people (Stevens 1997: 97). 16. Sanskrit: Amitabha. 17. In this mudra, the tips of the thumb and index finger would normally touch, forming a circle, and all other fingers are extended upwards. However, there are variants, and in this particular statue, Wenshu’s middle finger and thumb touch – still, nevertheless, a gesture of compassion. 18. The figure is in three sections -– the bodhisattva, lion and tail. The dimensions are: height of deity 75 cm; height of lion 35 cm; length of lion 90 cm. The tail was renumbered in 1955. The lion is lined inside with papier mâché. 19. Accession number: 1980.134.3. 20. Puxian: height 75 cm; width 37 cm; depth 36 cm. Elephant: length 86.9 cm; width 35 cm; depth 35 cm. 21. There is a piece of metal jutting out from inside his palm and a hole in the drapery below.

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

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Interview with Jin Ming Fashi, 31 March 2007. Accession number: 1981. 876.112. Sanskrit: Skanda. The pearl symbolizes the Buddha’s word, the point represents the Buddha’s teaching and insight (Prip-Möller 1937: 30). Dimensions: height 79 cm; length 36 cm; width 27.5 cm. The deity’s personal name. Accession number: 1981.876.111. Height: 88 cm, length: 44 cm, width: 23 cm. Interview, 31 March 2007. Seckel writes that: ‘A cult figure attains its sacred efficacy and its full transformation from a mere artefact into a physically present numen only as a result of such hidden items’ (1989: 83). Interview, 31 March 2007. Kieschnick too notes that the person performing such a ceremony in China must not look into the eyes of the image, and dots them with the use of a mirror (2003: 60). In other religions, consecration involves animation by providing images with eyes. Of all body orifices, according to Gell, the eyes are the ones which signify ‘interiority’ most immediately (1998: 135). Freedberg also remarks that the eyes are the part of the body most indicative of life (1989: 86, 202). Bentor (1994) cited in Hall (2004: 70). Cited in Hall (2004: 72). The reference here is to the view of Tarthang Tulku, Head Lama of the Tibetan Nyingma Meditation Centre in Berkeley, California. The mountain of the north, Wutai Shan, in Shanxi province, is the site of worship for Wenshu. The mountain of the west, Emei Shan, in Sichuan province is devoted to Puxian. In Anhui province, the mountain of the south, Jiuhua Shan, is for Dizang. 8.6 miles from north to south and 3.5 miles from east to west (Yü 2001: 369). Buddhist Association on Ning-Po, A History of Buddhism in Ning-Po, (2007: 25). Zhou Ying Bin (1607: 140). I am grateful to Professor Robert Bickers at the University of Bristol for bringing this reference to my attention. Huc’s The Chinese Empire was published in 1859, although the first preface was written in 1854. Fortune wrote that the ‘celebrated temples on Pootoo-san … show all the signs of having seen better days’ (1847: 9). He noted that in Ningbo, after the Confucian temple has been destroyed by the troops, there was no attempt to repair it: ‘the Chinese seemed to consider that the touch of the barbarian had polluted the sacred edifice’ (1847: 91). Personal communication, Xia Zhizheng, Cultural Relics Officer, Putuo, 2 April 2007. A Buddhist Association was set up that year (Morrel 1983: 319). By the early 1980s there were only around a hundred monks. Personal communication, Xia Zhizheng, 2 April 2007; referring to the year 2006. Interview, Jin Ming Fashi, 31 March 2007. Email correspondence, 18 October 2007. The main door in the Puji temple is usually closed, and is only opened for China’s Premier. Entrances were set at angles too at the Fayu, the Huji and the ‘Unwilling to Leave’ temples on Putuo. Sanskrit: Maitreya. Kieschnick, email, 6 January 2009. Kieschnick, email, 6 January 2009.

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51. Wright commented in 1843 on the colossal images of Buddha surrounded by upwards of fifty of his disciples, fashioned from clay or plaster in the Puji temple (1843, vol. iv: 29). Huc too confirms that smaller deities surrounded the main images in the Puji temple in the 1850s (1859: 400). Robert Fortune noted in 1844 that images in the Tiantong temple in Ningbo might be thirty to forty feet in height (1847: 171). 52. 291 metres. Brook also discusses the visit of Zheng Chengong to Putuo in 1638 in which he describes bowing every three steps and making obeisances every five (1993: 46). 53. See Yü (2001: 353–406) for details of pilgrimages to Putuo from the tenth to twentieth centuries. 54. Kieschnick notes: ‘From ancient times, the main activity of visitors to a Buddhist monastery has been to lay offerings of flowers, fruit, and incense before images and relics’ (2003: 24). Brook writes of Buddhist worship in the late Ming: ‘The simplest gesture … was to enter a monastery, place burning incense before a statue, clap hands to attract the deity’s attention, and bow in humble supplication. This was known as “presenting incense” (jin xiang). One might supplicate for general welfare or seek divine intervention for good fortune in some specific matter, such as the birth of a son or a safe journey, even success in the examinations’ (1993: 97). 55. For Seckel, it is inadmissible to view the deities from some angular perspective – frontality, as we have seen, is important (1989: 98). 56. White is the colour of mourning. 57. The monks chanted different sutras for approximately forty-five minutes, the time measured by the burning of incense sticks. There were six sessions throughout the day, three in the morning and three in the afternoon, and this continued for a total of seven days. Personal communication, Revd Hui Xian, 31 March 2007.

CHAPTER 2 Trophies of War, 1844–1852 This chapter moves away from the specifics of the deities and the world of Buddhist worship to the wider geopolitical forces that resulted in the removal of the Putuo Five from China. We know that in the 1840s these sacred images were brutally dislocated from their first realm of significance and that, at a stroke, their intended trajectories were altered. Once removed from their temple, they ceased being revered as numinous entities, but became instead part of the private collection of a British army officer, William Edie. They were here recast for the first time into a Western sphere of meaning. The chapter focuses on the activities of the British army during the First Opium War (1839–42) in order to examine how it was that someone of Edie’s standing came to acquire such treasures. It tells of the places occupied by this invading army during its first campaign in China, in the towns and temples of the Zhoushan archipelago and along the banks of the Yangzi River. Recounting William Edie’s experiences here will be an important way for us to understand both the wider context of the appropriation of the five bronzes, as well as to decipher this soldier’s possible motivations for obtaining a set of Buddhist statues. I describe the events in some detail in order to underline the significance of the removal of these deities during a war that the Chinese even today consider unwarranted and unjust. The impact of this appropriation on the Putuo Five themselves will be examined at the end of the chapter. First of all, we begin with an outline of the broader relationship between Britain and China in the run-up to the war.

China and the World Outside No episode in modern history has provided more occasion for the charge of ‘imperialist aggression’ than the First Anglo-Chinese War of 1839–42. (Fairbank and Reischauer 1986: 277)

When the Putuo Five were created and worshipped on Putuo, in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), China was the most technologically sophisticated country in the world. It had riches, refinement, and cultural and social organization that surpassed anything to be found at this time in Europe. The Ming period was one of

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China’s most prosperous, with internal stability and tremendous advances in both the sciences and arts. In the early fifteenth century, when the statue of Guanyin came into existence, China was at the summit of the civilized world: ‘their science and technology and their knowledge of the world was so far in advance of our own in that era that it was to be three, four and in some cases five centuries before European know-how matched that of medieval China’ (Menzies 2002: 11). This was also a society with a cultural thirst for knowledge and discovery. Under the leadership of Admiral Zheng He, the Yongle Emperor (r.1402–1424) sponsored some of the most spectacular and brilliant maritime voyages in world history. Yet upon the return of the fleet’s astonishing tours to Africa and other far-flung shores, Yongle’s successor put an end to these extraordinary travels.1 In an act of seemingly self-satisfied arrogance, in 1435 the Celestial Empire closed its doors to the outside world and commenced its long, self-imposed isolation. The Ming dynasty came to eschew foreign exploration, unlike the emerging European states at this time. The country instead became dominated by a disdain for foreign contact and an obsession with internal stability. Perhaps here is the reason why ‘China’ fascinated Europe for so long. This vast, rich, powerful, yet inaccessible empire allowed its exotic products – silks, porcelains and teas – to flow out, but closed its door to Europeans themselves. The encounter between Europe and China by the eighteenth century was thus to a large extent mediated by commodities, as well as by rare and tantalizing glimpses of the Middle Kingdom afforded in the tales of Jesuit missionaries. The country was thought to be full of exquisite things and was considered, by some, to be the most civilized and advanced place on earth. Chinese customs were praised by philosophers such as Voltaire, Diderot and Leibniz. Indeed by the eighteenth century the salons of Europe were in the grip of ‘Sinophilia’, constructing images steeped in Orientalist fantasy.2 Yet despite George III’s attempt to open the country to trade through his doomed Macartney mission of the 1790s, China was as little known to the outside world as it had been for centuries. The romantic images, as well as the power relations between China and Britain, however, were soon to change. From the end of the eighteenth century European nations had expanded dramatically under the impulse of the Industrial Revolution. Britain, in particular, had become increasingly aware and confident of its technological and industrial prowess, and ever more convinced of the need to expand its role in world markets. By the late eighteenth century it was poised to become the most powerful nation on earth. In many ways the reverse was true for China. We saw the embrace of, then disdain for, knowledge of the outside world in the early Ming period. During the ensuing dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911), there was still great wealth and stability. By 1736, when the great Qianlong emperor ascended the throne and after Guanyin had been the object of worship for over three hundred years, China was still the richest and most populous country on the planet (Hanes and Sanello 2002: 16). The six decades of the Qianlong emperor’s reign (r.1736–95) wit-

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nessed the further flourishing of Chinese civilization and a prosperity engendering unbridled population growth. By the end of the eighteenth century, the empire had doubled in size.3 Yet unlike in Britain, there was little concomitant technological change. Over the following decades, with a population periodically malnourished and ready to revolt, China’s internal productivity and economic growth began dramatically to decline. The contrast with Britain’s ascendancy as an industrial and imperial force could not have been greater. A vast discrepancy in power relations between the two had now opened up. Culturally the two were also worlds apart. Peyrefitte contends that China never really changed: ‘The unending cycle of order and disorder formed an immobile history quite different from England’s headlong rush to constant progress and the conquest of an ever expanding world’ (1993: 35). Indeed, this was a culture that had grown as averse to change as Britain was enamoured by it. To the few foreigners who encountered the world of the imperial court, it seemed mired in ritual, excessively devoted to etiquette (Peyrefitte 1993: 37). Furthermore, Chinese society at all levels had a deeply rooted contempt for the merchant class and trade. By the early nineteenth century, after the reports of both the disastrous Macartney (1792–94) and Amherst (1816) trade embassies, the romantic images of China were beginning to change.4 The country was now increasingly compared unfavourably with the West,5 the shifting images coinciding with the dependence of the Chinese on opium, a drug being shipped illicitly by the British from India. The Opium Wars were the most dramatic conflicts between China and the West during the nineteenth century. The underlying cause was the growing pressure of British trade and the dissatisfaction of merchants with the restrictions under which commerce had to be carried out. The confinement of traders to Canton was intolerable to Western merchants, whose ideology of free trade had taken them so successfully to other parts of the world. Discontent stemmed as far back as the early eighteenth century with the tea trade, which in Britain was dominated by the East India Company. As tea became more popular, the cost of purchasing and importing it increased. The Chinese only accepted silver and it became clear as the century unfolded that the drain on the British economy could not be sustained. After failed attempts to export silk and cotton cloth to China, opium grown in British India started to be traded (illegally) for silver, which was then used to buy tea. Though the Chinese consistently tried to ban the trade, corrupt officials turned a blind eye and sales flourished. From the first shipment in the 1780s to the first third of the nineteenth century, the opium habit grew dramatically to some forty thousand chests per year at a cost of some twenty million silver dollars (Fortesque 1927: 302). The drug was devastating the Chinese. By the late 1830s, the Chinese court took decisive action by appointing Commissioner Lin to put a stop to the entire business. Lin blockaded the British and American bases in Canton, and confiscated, then destroyed twenty thousand chests of opium (Massey 1992: 27). In the days of gunboat diplomacy this was reason enough for the British to go to war.

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Between 1839 and 1842, the First Opium War was fought in three phases (Massey 1992: 27). First, a blockade of the Canton River in the south and the capture of Zhoushan in July 1840, the archipelago half way up the China coast of which Putuo was a part. Second, the movement north to Amoy and Zhoushan culminating in the attack in 1841 on the port of Ningbo, the main city opposite the Zhoushan islands, and the place where the deities had most likely been cast. Third, the large-scale Chinese counter-attack by China on 28 March 1842 resulting in the British proceeding up the Yangzi River and defeating the Chinese in the battle of ‘Ching Kiang Foo’ (Zhenjiang). William Edie, the man who ‘obtained’ the Putuo Five, was present at this decisive battle and awarded a medal. Although the main centre for trade with the West up until that point had been Canton, in south China, it was this area along the east coast, in close proximity to the home of the Putuo Five, that the key battles took place in the British attempt to colonize China. That the British won the battles – and the Opium War overall – was largely due to superior military technology and training. The Chinese were utterly unable to match the British armed forces and the campaign was devastating (Fairbank and Reischauer 1986: 281). The British conquered with ease one town after another. The result, in 1842, was the first of a series of what the Chinese regard as ‘unequal treaties’, the Treaty of Nanking, in which China was forced to cede Hong Kong as a colony and open Canton, Shanghai and three other ports to trade, as well as pay an indemnity of over twenty-one million Mexican dollars (Fairbank and Reischauer 1986: 283). Victory thus led to the forcible opening up of the country to foreign traders. The world’s oldest, largest and most populous empire was made to acquiesce to the demands of a people on the other side of the world who occupied an island no bigger than the average Chinese province. The First Opium War was only the start of European imperial hegemony towards China. For the following century, British and other European powers gradually and systematically encroached on Chinese soil. Although China was never officially colonized – apart, that is, from Hong Kong – a relationship of power and economic imperialism was nevertheless sustained. In 1842, William Edie’s arrival as part of the British imperial forces thus signified the end to the long isolation of the Celestial Empire. It was in the years immediately after the First Opium War, when the British were based at Zhoushan, that the Putuo Five were removed from their temple. Later they were described as having been ‘obtained from the priests of Pato’. The exact date and the circumstances around their acquisition remain a matter of speculation, but it has been possible to piece together the movements of William Edie during and immediately after the war. As we shall see, there were two periods when Edie was stationed in the vicinity of Putuo and when he was likely to have had the time to ‘obtain’ these things, thereby setting their lives on radically new interpretative trajectories.

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Edie’s War: Disease, Death and the Deity of Compassion Captain William Edie (1809–1852) sailed with the 98th Regiment from Plymouth on the Belleisle on 13 December 1841, called up to participate in the third phase of the Opium War. He arrived in Hong Kong on 2 June 18426 and stayed there five nights before departing up the coast to ‘Chusan’ (Zhoushan), which had been a de facto outpost of the British for some decades. This archipelago consisted of 128 islands, about a hundred miles south-east of Shanghai, near the mouth of the great artery of China, the Yangzi River. At the time of the First Opium War, Zhoushan had become a key site of British occupation. The main town, Dinghai, had been bombarded, and then taken in 1840,7 and it was here that William Edie was based when he got hold of the Buddhist treasures a few years later. This was the first time the British had led a military expedition to China. The invading forces had little idea of what to expect and no immunity from tropical disease. When Edie arrived in Zhoushan on 16 July 1842, the army was in a deplorable state: ‘The troops, subjected to great heat and fatigue, imperfectly sheltered, and fed upon salted and often putrified provisions, were dying like flies from fever and dysentery’ (Fortesque 1927: 304).8 Cholera was rampant in Asia in the years before Dr Snow was pondering its cure in London. Men were dying too of malaria, dysentery, tetanus and sunstroke. Edie and the 98th Regiment sailed on 17 June up the coast towards the mouth of the Yangzi. They were at Amherst Rocks 18–21 June and two days later at Wusong, a coastal centre near the mouth of the Yangzi. The British planned to capture the ancient capital, Nanjing, 160 miles or so upstream. Around nine thousand men gathered at Wusong where the forces were divided into three brigades.9 The Royal Navy Survey vessels then led the way up this uncharted (at least by Europeans) river towards the city of ‘Ching Kiang Fu’ (Zhenjiang), strategically situated on the south bank, at the convergence of the Yangzi with the Grand Canal, this being the main north–south trade artery of China connecting Hangzhou to Beijing. Blockage of the canal was intended to send a clear message to the capital.10 On 19 July, the armada arrived at its destination, the Chinese having fired only a few shots during the entire journey upriver (Fortesque 1927: 320).

The Battle of Zhenjiang, July 1842 It was intensely hot in the summer months and the troops landed in the relatively cool early hours of 21 July (Fortesque 1927: 203). Yet even by eight in the morning, when the first regiments moved off, many were in distress due to the excessive heat. Dr Edward Cree noted, ‘it was a frightfully hot and sultry day, therm 97 and no wind’ (Levien 1982: 98). It took all morning to organize men, and indeed some companies had only started by midday. As they marched from the banks of the river, up the hill to the walled city, exhaustion set in (Massey 1992: 28). One after another they fell under the piercing rays of the sun (Fortesque 1927: 321).

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At the age of thirty-three, Captain Edie was in charge of the grenadiers that day and, as such, was one of the senior officers in the regiment. Grenadiers were those who, in earlier days, had been tall and strong enough to hurl heavy iron spheres – the grenades – into enemy quarters. These men, who stood at the forefront of fighting, had great discipline and were regarded as an elite. Though Edie’s company would have played an important role in the battle, it was the grenadiers of the 55th Regiment who stormed the city walls on this particular day (Levien 1982: 98). The Light Company of the 98th led the attack on the entrenched camps outside, while Edie’s men marched up the hill and fought a battle that lasted but minutes (Massey 1992: 28). By the end of the day, the city of Zhenjiang was in British hands (Fortesque 1927: 320).

2.1 ‘Rally of the Tartars at Chin-keang-foo’, from The Chinese War: An Account of the Operation of the British Forces, by John Ouchterlony, 1844. London: Saunders and Otley.

Despite this victory, twenty-three men from the 98th alone expired from sunstroke – according to Massey, only one died having been wounded in action (1992: 28).11 Edie later wrote in his title page of the ‘immense impulse in the heart and fatigue experienced on the 21st being the cause of many subsequent deaths’. The British casualties in this battle were 144, the heaviest loss of life in the entire First Opium War (Massey 1992: 28). Those unscathed by fighting were already weak through disease, mainly malaria and cholera. As Cree had written two years earlier

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on Zhoushan: ‘Death is making great havoc in the force, which is very sickly. I don’t wonder at it considering the water we are drinking, stagnant from the paddyfields, all well mixed with liquid manure. It stinks and is white and flatulent, but there is no other to be got in the neighbourhood’ (Levien 1982: 66). With little fresh water, a reliance on alcohol, constant perspiration and a salt diet, men were in a state of chronic dehydration.12 The British uniform was not designed for hot climates, to say the least. The bright red jacket – an emblem of British power – served the function of making soldiers recognizable on a smokefilled battlefield, but being made of wool, was hardly suited to subtropical summer heat.13 It was also tight-fitting and worn with a woollen vest and trousers: ‘the men in one regiment were kept standing in the sun buttoned up to their throat with stiff leather stocks and heavy shakos,14 three days’ provisions and sixty rounds of ammunition, till a dozen of them dropped in the ranks from sunstroke’ (Cree in Levien 1982: 105). The Naval Surgeon had never seen so many deaths from the sun in a single day (Levien 1982: 106). After the battle, Gough withdrew the troops to the nearby heights, but not before some had fallen victim to cholera (Fortesque 1927: 323). He left the forces to blockade the Grand Canal15 and the remainder of the 98th, including Edie, re-embarked on 29 July, setting sail on 3 August for Nanjing, some forty miles upstream. By this time fifty-three men from the 98th Regiment had died from cholera and almost two hundred more were sick (Massey 1992: 28). As a prelude to his acquisition of the bronze Buddhist statues, Captain Edie thus had experienced a war-torn, disease-ridden and terrifying world in an uncharted and hostile land.

War, Temples and Deities Edie arrived in Nanjing on 5 August and the troops proceeded to haul cannon up Zijinshan, ‘Purple’ Mountain, which rises to the south-west of the city, ready to bombard the ancient capital. Here it is recorded that the 98th was based in a temple by a creek (Cook 1929: 30). The British clearly followed Chinese precedent in using these buildings as war billets. The handwritten Digest of the 98th noted that the Regiment sequestered temples along the west part of Zhenjiang after the battle in July.16 The previous month, in Shanghai, Sir Hugh Gough and three regiments had taken up quarters in the gardens of the ‘Ching Huang’ temple.17 In the port city of Ningbo, the Royal Irish and a company of the Westmorelands had been stationed in one (Hayes 2007: 7).18 Fifty years earlier, members of the Macartney Embassy had been quartered – officially this time – in a temple en route to the capital, Beijing (Peyrefitte 1993: 109). After the Opium War, English consuls even took up residence in these buildings.19 These were, after all, logical spaces for an army to occupy, with their cool, sheltered chambers, dry floors and protective walls. We saw in the previous chapter how temples are usually prominent buildings, ideally placed higher than other

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structures – with their backs to hills and entrances facing water. They often command strategic views of the surrounding environment. Many are ‘fortified’, with high walls and defined entrance gates. Most, as we have seen, are constructed around courtyards, providing defence, privacy and ventilation to interior spaces. Halls of worship and ancient trees provide much needed shade. Apart from their strategic and practical value, occupation of such places by the British was also a demonstration of power. Not only was residence in a temple symbolic of subjugation, it was an act of disrespect. At various points in the Opium War, the Chinese authorities begged the British not to attack these sacred sites (Levien 1982: 86). Today, in the Staffordshire Regiment Museum (which incorporates the history of the 98th), a ‘dragon banner’ taken in the First Opium War from outside a temple is prominently on display.20 The negotiations for the Treaty of Nanjing, imposed at the conclusion of the First Opium War, and the greatest single moment of humiliation for the Chinese, took place in a temple – the Jinghai Si, located just outside the city walls.21 First constructed in the Ming dynasty, it was rebuilt in 1988 and now consists of a grouping of large buildings enclosed by an extensive wall. I visited the temple complex in April 2007 and, upon payment of a small entrance fee, was able to wander around the extensive site. The hall where negotiations took place had been reconstructed, down to the tables, chairs and pens. In a nearby building, an exhibition documented the historical injustices of the Opium Wars. The language of the main text panel was incensed: ‘Great Britain outrageously launched a war against China on the pretext of banning opium’. Another referred to it as ‘the beginning of a century’s humiliation’. The temple in which William Edie was based was near one of Nanjing’s ancient gates, the ‘Kuan yin mung’ (Guanyin Men) and he stayed there from 11 August until 5 September 1842.22 Although no outer gates remain today, the Guanyin – or Goddess of Compassion – gate was one of eighteen originally in the outer wall of this ancient capital city.23 In April 2007, I managed to locate its original position, at the scenic area of ‘Swallow Cliff ’, Yanziji, where a public toilet marked the spot. Behind was a complex of temples, known locally as the Taotai caves, some of which are said to date back seven hundred years, although all have been rebuilt in recent times. They nevertheless provide a glimpse of the landscape and world of belief experienced by Edie during his three-and-a-half-week stay in Nanjing. These temples are built into the face of a cliff of some 150 ft in height, with the Yangzi River in front. One is perched up high. Another, dedicated to Guanyin, is slightly raised, with one of its shrines in a cave, and another by the water. The whole complex is located in a strategic position. The cliff above commands excellent easterly and northerly views along the river.24 Of the temples associated with the Goddess of Compassion, Guanyin, the largest is structured in a similar way to those on Putuo, and includes shrines to each of the deities represented in the Putuo Five. As the name suggests, this remains a key place in Nanjing for the worship of Guanyin – and it is surely significant that Captain Edie was billeted in not just any temple, but in one devoted to the goddess. This

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may have been the first time that Edie stayed in a building devoted to Guanyin and it could well have stimulated an appetite for more.

Disease, Death and Dinghai The creek by the temple was infested with malaria and according to Cook there were many more deaths in the city, and ‘it was a very sick regiment which was reembarked on the Belleisle again in September 3rd’ (1929: 38). In fact, the 98th may have been the sickest of all. Dr Cree noted on the day of departure that 110 out of 250 men were unwell on Edie’s ship (Levien 1982: 117). The following week, his diary entry stated: ‘The 98th Regiment, who came out in the Belleisle 720 strong, have lost 160 more by death and have 430 in hospital. She is the first ship to be sent down the river’.25 Considering such numbers Edie would have been lucky to have been untouched.26 On the way downstream, the troops returned to Zhenjiang, the site of victory in battle. They sailed further along the Yangzi to Wusong and out into the East China Sea to Zhoushan, where they remained for just over three weeks.27 It may have been at this point that Edie obtained the bronzes, his interest aroused by experiences in the temples of Nanjing. However, it seems more likely that he got hold of the objects when on a subsequent posting to Zhoushan in 1845. Edie left on 22 October 1842, arriving in Hong Kong a week later28 and with only little hyperbole described the campaign thus: [This was] a voyage unparalleled in the history of the whole world – whether we view it on account of the immense distance gone over – amounting to 19000 miles. The gigantic river up which we explored, 239 miles, the multitude on board, and the remarkable fact of their [sic] being only two deaths from accident in more than twelve months among them.29

Edie’s text highlights a stark truth: apart from the devastation visited on China, the extraordinary voyage had been full of sacrifice. While there had been eight deaths in the regiment up to the attack on Zhenjiang, in the six-month period after the battle (July–December 1842) 305 men in the 98th alone had died. His company landed 136 men at the battle of Zhenjiang on 21 July 1842; but after that date, 62 – almost half – died.30 The garrison remained on board ship in Hong Kong from October 1842 until February 1843,31 but the misery continued, as a quarter of the overall garrison died (Massey 1992: 29).32 But these were not entirely bleak years for Edie as, on 13 June 1845, he was promoted to Major, at the age of thirty-six.33 That year the regiment moved to back to Zhoushan, where Colin Campbell had been commanding the garrison and the British by now had firm headquarters (Cook 1929: 38). It is during this second stay that Edie had the opportunity to visit Putuo, as well as the neighbouring port city of Ningbo, where he acquired a large silk banner.

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From 1840 onwards, the British had occupied different areas of Dinghai, the administrative town for the Zhoushan archipelago, situated on an island to the north of Putuo. This became the headquarters for the British troops.34 The army had taken over the harbour, the Chief Magistrate’s house, each of the four city gates, and the Ziying temple, with its protective wall, covered entrances and halls devoted to deities, such as Guanyin.35 Although it is not clear where Edie was based, one of the regiments (the 26th) was quartered in the ‘great josshouse’, presumably the Ziying temple, which soldiers would have shared with statues of Weituo and Guanyin (Levien 1982: 60).36 While defending the garrison and building new forts (Levien 1982: 79), soldiers also had time on their hands and were in the habit of visiting neighbouring islands.37 Although the British army never officially occupied Putuo, soldiers doubtless travelled there: it would only have been a matter of hours away by sloop. The botanist and explorer, Robert Fortune, for example, wrote of leaving Dinghai for Putuo one evening in July 1844, and returning the next morning (1847: 182). Fortune, who was then based

2.2 ‘Sacred temple of Poo-too’, from The Chinese War: An Account of the Operation of the British Forces, by John Ouchterlony, 1844. London: Saunders and Otley.

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in Dinghai, also noted that this sacred isle had been ‘visited at different times by a number of our officers during the war, all of whom spoke highly of its natural beauties’(1847: 180–81).38 An image of Putuo was even included in Ouchterlony’s long and detailed account of the ‘Chinese War’ published as early as 1844.39 Fortune’s visit to Putuo, in July 1844, was in the company of a Dr Maxwell of the 2nd Madras Native Infantry.40 Fortune noted the approach to a temple, which, judging from the description, must be the present day Puji monastery. We saw in the previous chapter that this is the largest and most important temple complex on the island. Once inside the compound, Fortune wrote of a set of ‘exquisite bronze statues’, which would be considered ‘of great value in England … viewed as works of art, they were by far the finest which I saw during my travels in China’ (1847: 182). If this is indeed a reference to the Putuo Five, one wonders if word of their ‘exquisite’ artistry and ‘great value’ somehow got back to Edie. Fortune was clearly known to members of the British army and wrote about the troops garrisoned in both Hong Kong and Zhoushan during his travels between 1843–46.41 Edie was then based in Hong Kong but would move back to Zhoushan in 1845. In this small world of the British in China, information about ‘exquisite’ statues could certainly have spread rapidly amongst the officers. The army had in effect taken over the whole area and granted its soldiers free rein over neighbouring islands. In this time of war, officers had carte blanche to take what they liked. Nonetheless, Dr Erik Blakeley, curator at the Staffordshire Regiment Museum, expressed the belief that Major Edie must have had permission from senior officers to remove something as significant as the Putuo Five.42

Loot and Putuo According to Hanes and Sanello, the word ‘loot’ came into first usage in the English language to describe the behaviour of the British Army invaders in Dinghai (2005: 93). Hevia also notes that the term entered common usage in India and China between the First and Second Opium Wars (2004: 75). It derives from the Hindi ‘lut’ and the Sanskrit ‘lunt’, both of which mean to rob (Hoad 2003: 271) – and it was usually the officers who were the first to loot, part of the privilege of higher status.43 When the British first invaded and occupied Dinghai in July 1840, a contemporary reporter for the India Gazette described the scene: A more complete pillage could not be conceived than took place. Every house was open, every drawer and box ransacked, the streets strewn with fragments of furniture, pictures, tables, chairs, grain of all sorts – the whole set off by the dead or the living bodies of those who had been unable to leave the city from the wounds received from our merciless guns … The plunder ceased only when there was nothing to take or destroy. (Tho’mas 1997)

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Dr Edward Cree wrote of the British appropriation of ‘trophies’ in the aftermath of the attack on this town: ‘a quantity of plunder was found in the suburb’ (1982: 57). Chinese bows, arrows, spears and swords, as well as flags and banners, were used to decorate the ships: ‘The British helped themselves to everything, Viscount Jocelyn later referring to this as “lawful loot”’ (Hanes and Sanello 2005: 93). After the British capture of Xiamen (Amoy), Wyndham Baker wrote: ‘I am sorry to say the following day the troops were plundering in every direction and nothing could restrain them’ (Hayes 2007: 6). Henry Pottinger wished to plunder Ningbo as ‘reprisal for the maltreatment there of British prisoners’, though others were anxious to save the city from the looting that had taken place in Amoy (Hayes 2007: 7). Colin Campbell, in command of Edie’s Regiment, wrote that he had not taken anything after the battle of Zhenjiang, but that many others had ‘helped themselves so bountifully’. He would have no problems, he added, were he able to loot an imperial palace (Hayes 2007: 8). Twenty years later this came to pass.44 According to the Buddhist Master on Putuo, Jin Ming Fashi, there were six hundred temples dotted across the Zhoushan archipelago at the time of the Opium Wars, from which much was looted.45 Formanek describes certain forms of collecting as akin to hunting: ‘one locates the prey, plans for the attack, acquires the prey in the presence of real or imagined competition for it, and feels elated. The prey becomes a trophy – a symbol of one’s aggression and prowess’ (1994: 328–29). At a fundamental level, it may have been the thrill of the chase that led Edie to obtain these trophies (Akin 1996: 108). Edie probably arrived on Putuo with a group of men – perhaps at the port of Duangu, the only place where larger boats could have moored at this time – and walked over the hill, as Fortune had done, to the environs of the Puji monastery. Did he and his comrades dash in with guns ready to fire and simply take the statues? The Putuo Five are distinctive, large and difficult to transport. It must have taken several strong men to carry each of them: the statue of Guanyin alone weighs around 250 kg.46 The combined weight of the ensemble is over 800 kg – getting on for a tonne – and it would have been time-consuming to detach arms, symbols, throne, animal mounts and tails. As an elite officer, Edie would have had the wherewithal to acquire such heavy things, and may even have been allocated his own wagons for transportation of acquisitions when the Regiment moved on.47 Is it possible that Edie had been inspired by Fortune’s description and journeyed to Putuo especially to get hold of these deities, bringing boxes and crates with him to transport them? Yet the question remains why he wished to acquire such cumbersome, multi-faceted objects in the first place. This is something we turn to in the next section. It is likely that the monks had not entirely abandoned the monasteries when the British invaded. Cree, for example, described an old Buddhist priest in a temple on Zhoushan in 1840 who refused to leave during and after the attack (Levien 1982: 58). Edie himself wrote that he obtained the deities ‘from the priests’, suggesting that there had been some form of encounter. Whatever was intended by ‘obtained’, it is clear that the deities were acquired during a period of military occupation and

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in circumstances of unequal power. The Buddhist monks, officials, museum curators and scholars whom I interviewed on Putuo and the Zhoushan archipelago in 2007 all believed that the sculptures were, in effect, stolen. Yet what would the temples on this fabled Buddhist island have been like when Edie went there? Images may be constructed from the accounts of missionaries who resided in the newly opened port cities. In 1843, for example, the Revd G.N. Wright described the Puji temple at a time when the bronzes may well have been in situ: [there is one building which is considered the very cathedral of Buddhism. In a fertile and narrow valley, overhung by granitic summits that reach, in some places, to a height of one thousand feet, and traversed by a rivulet of clear, sweet water, stands The Grand Temple. Between two tall flagstaffs, planted securely in the natural rock, a flight of steps ascends to the simple gateway leading to the court; monastic dwellings, of two stories in height, substantially built, and surmounted by hideous dragons, are grouped closely together; and behind them rises the many-storied pagoda, that marks the site of temple worship. (1843, vol. 4: 29)

Sadly, in the years after the Opium Wars, the complex fell into abandonment. Huc commented on the state of the buildings in the 1850s, after the five deity figures had already been shown in London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, and Guanyin in Manchester’s Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: ‘at present [the temple] it is a complete state of dilapidation … The vast monasteries of Pou-tou … are now entirely abandoned to legions of rats and great spiders’ (1859: 401). Other temples across the region encountered the same fate. In Ningbo, where Edie obtained the large silk textile, Dr Cree noted in December 1844: ‘The beautiful Temple of Confucius, which was but slightly injured by our troops, is quite neglected, it is said from poverty, the result of the late war, which China will feel for a long time to come’ (Levien 1982: 134).48 China did feel the effects for a long time after. On 25 July 1846 the British departed Zhoushan, it having been retained as a guarantee for the fulfilment of the stipulations of the Treaty of Nanjing. Edie and the 98th set sail for Calcutta on the regiment’s first Indian tour (Cook 1929: 38).49 For many years after, a large and ornate stone memorial to the British stood on Zhoushan island.50 Not surprisingly, it was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. Another trace of the transient occupation was a military cemetery where, by 1900, the gravestones were all broken (Martin 1900: 47). The bodies of Edie’s comrades may lie there even to this day.51 *

*

*

A strong strand of opinion in Britain was openly critical of a war waged largely on behalf of opium traders (Hayes 2007: 4). The first treaties proved satisfactory neither to China nor to the Western invaders and another period of friction followed

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which also ended in war. The Second Opium War lasted from 1856 to 1860 and resulted in the burning and looting of the Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) by British and French troops. Foreign powers imposed yet another series of humiliating treaties (1858–60) in which they partitioned the country amongst themselves. Opium addiction increased and by the 1850s the trade was double that of the 1830s (Fairbank and Reischauer 1986: 285). A system of ‘informal empire’ had emerged; the existence of the treaty ports has been characterized by the Chinese as a form of semi-colonialism (Wood 1998: 2). In the exhibition in the Jinghai temple in Nanjing which I visited in 2007, a text panel lamented that China was reduced to a ‘semi-feudal’ society: ‘We shall not forget the national humiliation in the past century’. Another very public text in the Shanghai History Museum in 2007 outlined the injustices of the foreign settlements, describing the city as being ‘infested with foreigners’. The memory of the Opium Wars and the history of subjugation at the hands of the foreigners is still a painful memory. Authors such as Hanes and Sanello (2002: vi–xii) and Hevia (2003) argue that for Chinese people these conflicts remain an embarrassing symbol of Western domination, the repercussions of which have lingered to the present day.

Edie’s Objects: The Significance of Things ‘… a voyage unparalleled in the history of the whole world …’52 These words, penned by William Edie, today occupy a most prominent position in the case devoted to the 98th in China at the Staffordshire Regiment Museum. But what do we really know of this man? In this section I explore this soldier’s background and career in the army, and ponder his motivations for collecting the rare and exquisite Putuo Five. William Edie was born on 12 July 1809 at Thorn Hill, Leckpatrick, County Tyrone, in the north of Ireland, and joined the 1st West Indian Regiment in January 1826 at the age of sixteen as an Ensign.53 Soon after, he transferred to the 98th.54 There was a hierarchy of desirability regarding the army at this time, and a wealthy family would try to purchase a commission in the most prestigious regiment possible. Those posted overseas to distant places of disease and death, such as the Caribbean, Africa or China, were unpopular, reflecting the price of a commission. According to Dr Erik Blakeley, curator of the Staffordshire Regiment Museum, despite its attraction over the 1st West Indian Regiment, the 98th was nevertheless fairly low in terms of preference.55 When Edie joined in June 1826, the Regiment was in Cape Colony, South Africa. He arrived there when still a teenager56 and stayed for over ten years – this evidently being his first experience of a foreign land. After eight years, in August 1834, he accompanied an expedition exploring Central Africa under the superintendence of the naturalist Dr A. Smith, the founder of the South African

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Museum.57 The group consisted of around fifty people and twenty wagons, its aim being to gather information about the geography, natural history and peoples of the remote interior regions. The expedition travelled across varied terrain, to missionary stations, encountering tribal groups and interviewing chiefs in order to document language and history. However, on 8 November, and after only three months, as the party searched for the source of the Caledon, an ‘accident occurred’ to Captain Edie. The official report noted that it, ‘eventually deprived the expedition of his services’.58 The full extent of the ‘accident’, however, is left unexplained, but it seems that Edie was not able to continue. His relatively brief presence on this expedition nevertheless indicates a sense of curiosity and demonstrates that before going to China Edie had already explored unknown and potentially hostile lands. Furthermore, it seems that the soldier had already started to collect, for today there is a South African musical bow in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, originally from Edie, and most probably picked up on the expedition.59 At £250, in 1826, Edie’s commission had cost a substantial sum.60 He was promoted to Lieutenant in 1831;61 two years later his uncle purchased him a captaincy in the elite company, the Grenadiers, for the increased sum of £1,100. At the age of twenty-four, while still in Africa, Edie was in command of over a hundred men.62 On his return to the UK in 1837, his regiment moved around the country – Weeden (1837–38), Manchester (1838), Bolton (1838–39), the Isle of Man (1838–41), Newcastle (1838–41) and Dublin (1841) – for much of the time quelling Chartist agitation.63 As we have seen, the 98th was summoned to China in late 1841, two years after the Opium War began. Edie hailed from a reasonably wealthy, landed gentry family in Ireland.64 The gulf between officer and the rank-and-file in the British army at this time was vast and only the well-off could afford to buy a commission and sustain a career as an officer. The purchase system required that each step in the hierarchy was paid for, enabling the better off to buy their way over the heads of others (Slater 2007: 2). Purchase in fact produced a ‘wall of separation’ between officers and privates, resulting in an army run by aristocratic senior officers (Slater 2007: 10). The system also rendered military revolt less likely, for the rich had nothing to gain and everything to lose from a mutiny: ‘a cheaply financed officer corps that in no way threatened the established order, mainly because of the social background of the officers themselves … It was far more preferable, both economically and politically, to draw the officers from that part of society most concerned with preservation of its order and stability, the wealthy and landed classes’ (Slater 2007: 3). The pay of the British army officer was paltry, comprising nothing more than an honorarium: ‘Because most commissions were purchasable and salaries were so outrageously low, it was fairly obvious that only men of independent means could actually afford a career in the army’ (Slater 2007: 3). Officers could be responsible for the maintenance of their company’s uniforms, the officers’ mess and the cost of heavy and exacting social commitments, all of which could drive them deeply into debt.65

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‘Although all officers were not drawn from the wealthier classes, the financial demands of the service … rendered it extremely unlikely the rapid advancement of officers who lacked substantial independent means. Purchase thus symbolised the heavily aristocratic and monetarily-dominant nature of the officer corps which, over the years, had come to assume aspects of a rich man’s club’ (Slater 2007: 4).

2.3 Title page to the Log Book of the Grenadier Company, written and designed by Captain Edie, Staffordshire Regiment Museum (accession number 7764). Reproduced with kind permission of the Staffordshire Regiment Museum.

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Clearly Edie was educated, literate and artistic. An extraordinary testimony to his creative inventiveness survives to this day – a title page to the log book of the Grenadier Company, the book itself (now lost) would have comprised a collective diary.66 Two copies of this title page exist in the archives of the Staffordshire Regiment Museum in Lichfield.67 From the words printed in the centre, it is evident that not only did Edie design the decorative surround but he constructed the printing press himself. The intricate patterning seems influenced by Oriental motifs.68 The delicate floral-line ornamentation on the border is reminiscent of Indian, Near Eastern or Coptic influences, and the inspiration may have been a textile pattern.69 The imagery is believed to be too fine to have been cut in wood, and a metal block was probably used.70 Stephen Calloway, curator of prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has suggested that the design is exceptionally sophisticated, particularly given the extraordinary circumstances.71 Edie’s words, in the centre of the document, recount the journey in China: The last pages were finished in the China sea, 30th of May, during a heavy squall … Temperature 87 Fahrenheit. The remainder of these paragraphs giving an account of the conclusion of the voyage, were published by me on board the Belleisle, on our return from the North. One of them presents a melancholy contrast with our high hopes when here before. The result of the China expedition has changed this book to a mere record of the dead.72

Although he does not give the year, it is unlikely that Edie wrote this on the final southbound voyage from Zhoushan in 1846, before he sailed to India, for it is signed ‘Captain of the Grenadiers’ and he had been promoted to Major in 1845. The text was probably written in May 1843, after his return from the battle of Zhenjiang and the voyage to Nanjing. If this is the case, then it is likely to have been accomplished while stationed in the newly acquired territory of Hong Kong. The title page tells the story of the 98th in China and the hardships his company endured at the battle of ‘Ching Kiang Fu’. The second paragraph is a record of the journey undertaken, which to Edie’s mind, as we have seen, was ‘unparalleled in the history of the whole world’. The third section records the deaths. His company had comprised 136 soldiers on 21 July 1842. By the time he constructed this document, some ten months later, 62 – almost half the grenadiers – had died. The title page lingers over the horrors of death and disease, and it is hard not to read it as a lament for dead soldiers: ‘In all the cases of post mortem it was found that the intestines were very much ulcerated, giving the idea of there [sic] having gradually extended, the disease being for many months in existence, and that in the very crowded state of the ship the surcharged atmosphere had communicated infection to the most healthy’.73 The Captain reveals an awareness and concern for the hardships suffered by his soldiers. Perhaps he too was ill and believed it to be only a matter of time before he would fall victim to this fatal illness. A ‘stomach disease’ did eventually kill him.

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There is another text, presumably penned by Edie, which gives an insight into this enigmatic soldier and his perception of Putuo. In the entry for the Great Exhibition catalogue of 1851, he discussed his objects: Bronze images from the sacred island of Pato, near the mouth of the Yang-tse-keang, on which river the ancient capital of China, Nankin, is situated. The largest figure is supposed to represent the Buddhist deity ‘Quon Yam’ (or Queen of Heaven). The particulars relative to this group are doubtless found in the interior of these figures, of very great antiquity, which have not been yet deciphered, and which remain in the possession of the exhibitor, who obtained the group from the native priests of the island, and brought them to this country. (Cole 1851: 1425)

The entry goes on to describe Putuo: The sacred island of Pato has been frequented from time immemorial by mandarins of great wealth and retired ministers of State, who, disappointed in their worldly expectations, or becoming old, have built temples, decorating them with the most splendid works of art, preparing their tombs in the same, where they were afterwards buried, and various priests, having attached themselves to these places of worship, has tended to their preservation (ibid.)

Edie’s familiarity with the Chinese pantheon was certainly underdeveloped, for he confuses Guanyin, the Goddess of Compassion, with Tian Hou, the Queen of Heaven – the latter being a popular deity in Hong Kong. Furthermore, Edie neither includes the names of the temples in Putuo where he found the deities nor the names of the other four bodhisattvas. This, then, is not the record of a scholar-collector concerned to convey contextual information, though as Penny argues details of the origin, significance and meaning of non-Western objects was not an important element in collecting until much later in the nineteenth century (2002: 84). If Edie, the soldier in the war in the 1840s, was not concerned with a detailed record of the deities and their origins, what, we must ask, led him to want to have such things in the first place? What motivated him to collect? The documentation available to us74 records that he ‘obtained’ the deities from the priests – rather opaque words that seem to transcend the intricacies of collecting. ‘Taken’, ‘looted’, even ‘bought’ or ‘given’, are less equivocal about the circumstances of transfer. Edie could not, of course, read Chinese, and if he could speak it would have been the coastal pidgin. But it is unlikely that he even asked for information on the deities, their place in the temple or in religious ritual. Can it be assumed that he was simply looting? Yet even looting takes discrimination. Why, for one, did he acquire such heavy things, when lighter ones would have been much easier to shift? What attracted him to such extraordinary statues in the first place? Did he set off from the garrison in Dinghai with the intention of getting hold of something significant from the fabled island of Putuo, his memory full of images seen in Chinese temples? Could it have been Robert Fortune who told him about the ‘exquisite’ bronzes after his trip in July 1844? Although I have been unable to con-

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nect Edie with Fortune, it is clear that the latter was familiar with the troops between 1843 and 1846 during a period when Edie was based in Hong Kong and then Dinghai. It is possible that Edie was attracted to these objects aesthetically, as pieces of sculpture. Fortune, after all, thought them to be by far the finest works of art he had seen in China – and this intrepid botanist, who spoke Chinese and travelled for years around the country, had indeed seen a great many to compare them with. As a member of the minor landed gentry, Edie was educated and he may have considered himself a gentleman collector. If he acquired the Putuo Five in 1845 during his second stay in Dinghai, they might have formed a celebration of promotion. Did he want a reward for his endeavours? Did he decide to appropriate the objects as symbols of success or did they function more as trophies of victory over the Chinese? Perhaps there were more mercantile motives. We have seen the financial burdens entailed by life in the British army. The cost of the commissions, the ascendancy to Captain, then Major, must have put Edie deeply into debt. Fortune had been keen to note that the bronze statues would be ‘considered of great value’ back in England, and Edie might well have considered them to be a fund from which he could later benefit. They did in fact end up in the hands of antiquities dealers in the 1850s, as we see in chapter 4. But perhaps there were deeper psychological motivations. Edie may have projected his personal needs onto these sacred things. In the aftermath of a horrible war, in a dangerous and inhospitable land, possession of such objects may have affirmed that he was still alive, despite the horrors, disease and death all around him. Was it the physicality and immutability of the bronzes that attracted him when all else was threatened? Unfortunately, collections made in war, unlike those of the careful scholar who documents details, or the anthropologist familiar with cultural context, are riddled with such unanswered questions. Yet various theorizations of collecting are worth exploring here in order to attempt to shed light on William Edie’s possible motivations.

Anxiety and Loss For Baudrillard (1994) collecting may be examined as a way of absorbing anxieties about the continuum of time and the certainty of death. The collecting impulse, he argues, is first aroused as a child, as a way to exercise control over the world and it is men, particularly in their forties, ‘who seem most prone to this passion’ (1994: 9). Baudrillard argues that the collector is unable to cope with the world at large for long and wants to escape from day-to-day existence into a system of objects over which she/he has complete control (1994: 15–16). People collect, in other words, to impose order on an unpredictable world. Considering the chaos of the war, this seems a compelling hypothesis. Objects here could have offered Edie a retreat from danger, an escape into a private realm.

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Baudrillard also argues that collecting is a substitution or compensation, filling a void left by things missing in our lives. A collection, in this view, may be defined by the things it takes the place of. For Muensterberger too (1994) people collect what is subconsciously lacking, filling an emptiness with an accumulation of things through which to express themselves. Could the Chinese figurative sculptures somehow have taken the place of things Edie had lost – his fellow soldiers, perhaps – partially filling the void left by their deaths? Did they somehow operate as signifiers of loss, symbols of mourning? Muensterberger, above all, associates collecting with anxiety. For him certain emotional states lead traumatized people to surround themselves with potent material things, allowing for ‘magical escape into a remote and private world’ (1994: 15). The collector ‘requires symbolic substitutes to cope with a world he or she regards as basically unfriendly, even hazardous’ (1994: 21). Muensterberger argues that conditions of anxiety or imperilment cause people to reach out for objects to protect them (1994: 26), and that artefacts ‘come to the rescue’ when one is in a state of ‘impending danger’ (1994: 253). It is certainly the case that before obtaining the bronzes Edie was surrounded by hostility, and it might be assumed that in the aftermath of the war he suffered what is now known as ‘posttraumatic stress’. Baudrillard writes that collecting is intensely personal, a mirror of the self: ‘it is invariably oneself that one collects’ (1994:12) … ‘although the collection may speak to other people, it is always first and foremost a discourse directed toward oneself ’ (1994: 22). Bal too argues that fundamentally collections look inward: ‘Deceptively, collections, especially when publicly accessible, appear to “reach out”, but through this complex and half hidden aspect they in fact “reach in” helping the collector’ (1994: 105). The collected object thus reflects and reveals underlying desire. From this might we suppose that Edie had a pre-existing interest in sculptural forms or religious objects? Affinities may in fact be found between the soldier and these statues. Both Weituo and Guangong, for example, are depicted as military officers clad in armour, and Guangong, as the God of War, is worshipped by soldiers. On a rather more metaphysical level, could these deities possibly have offered Edie solace against the ever present threat of disease? It is unlikely that he knew that Guanyin protects from illness, comforts the sick and cares for the souls of the dead in the underworld, or that Wenshu is invoked when mortality is threatened and is even believed to conquer death (Stevens 1997: 97).

Status and Taste The formation of this group of large, visually striking bronzes and the rare silk hanging was clearly a way for this officer to distinguish himself from others. Although looting and the taking of objects from colonized peoples was well prac-

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tised, particularly in times of war, it would nevertheless have been unusual for a British officer to own a set of such extraordinarily rare, almost life-size, heavy bronze deity figures. There was the sheer impracticality of transportation, of moving them from place to place as the regiment relocated. Fellow officers and his Grenadier company would have been aware of Edie’s collection and ownership must have marked him out as somehow different. Edie may have used these Buddhist statues to demonstrate a sense of taste, something he had already publicly articulated in the artistic designs for his company’s title page.75 By the late eighteenth century a disposition towards collecting was considered essential to learned European gentlemen. The English aristocracy’s passion for ancient Romano-Greek sculpture is well known (Opper 2003: 60). Global imperial expansion in the early nineteenth century rendered the gathering of all sorts of antiquities ever more popular, particularly with the increase in romantic tourism (Henare 2005: 287). Well known were those such as Belzoni, with his adventures and intrepid collecting trips in Egypt.76 The excavations in 1845 of Amaravati sculptures in India too were high profile. By Edie’s time, collecting was clearly the pursuit of the educated man, a practice used to demonstrate and confirm cultural distinction and class background. Ownership of the Putuo Five would thus have been a way for him to assert his position as a gentleman. They were a visible expression of wealth and status. Collecting here is also clearly a symbol of identity. Moser is not alone in arguing that collections are ‘authored statements’: … ‘as documents of self identity, collections offered tangible evidence of the extent of one’s influence, place and connections in society’ (2006: 13). Green too writes that, ‘Collecting has been viewed as an exercise in the construction and narration of the self, the intimacy between collector and collected is an intensely personal expression of taste and desire, yet it is a construction of the self for an audience, made possible by an audience’ (2002: 212). Although he may not have had the space to exhibit Guanyin fully with all twenty-two arms outstretched in his officer’s accommodation in Dinghai, Edie was certainly keen to display all five publicly ‘for an audience’ when he returned to England. Yet there may also have been a financial aspect to all this. Edie may have ‘obtained’ the large bronzes inlaid with jewels simply in order to make money. Like Elgin before him, he may have considered himself a saviour of antiquities who also had his eye on the monetary worth of the objects.

Souvenirs Relatively few foreigners had been to China by the early 1840s, and fewer still made it to the sacred island of Putuo. Although known by repute, this place had rarely been experienced firsthand. Edie was amongst the first group of British soldiers to go there, and the Major no doubt wished to obtain evidence of this

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extraordinary and enchanting place. It was common for travellers in the nineteenth century to bring back souvenirs as illustrations of their voyages of discovery in order to stimulate wonder and admiration once home (Ames 1992: 50). Objects, functioning as souvenirs, as Thomas notes, represented the ‘accomplishment of the voyage’ (1991: 143): ‘what was important about collecting, was not so much what could be said about or done with the specimens collected but the way that collected material attested to the fact of having visited remote places and observed novel phenomena. In itself, the practice substantiated relations of knowledge and power that were distinctive to the period of exploratory voyages’ (Thomas 1991: 141). Exotic things, in other words, testified to the ‘discovery’ of other cultures, as well as publicly demonstrating a collector’s achievements. They were the proof of far away places and peoples encountered (Newell 2003: 254): ‘the thing did not so much become a commodity as a marker of personal history, an expression of a person’s accomplishments’ (Thomas 1991: 151). The Putuo Five, functioning as souvenirs, thus become metonymic, standing in for events. For both Stewart (1984) and Pearce (1992), the value of souvenirs lies in their ability to recall. It is not the objects themselves that are significant here so much as the attached experience. Souvenirs both embody authentic encounter and distinguish experience – experience that only the souvenir can recreate, even if partially (Stewart 1984: 135). Furthermore, souvenirs are not generally gathered from events that happen on an everyday basis. They serve instead to remember something specific or unusual, often found, as Stewart notes ‘in connection with rites of passage … as the material sign of an abstract referent: transformation of status’ (1984: 139). Perhaps this was the case with Edie – he was, after all, promoted to Major in 1845 just before coming into possession of the bronzes, and he may have used them to mark his particular ontological change. Pearce notes that souvenirs are moving and significant to individuals, as well as being ‘intensely romantic … they ask us to believe that life is not fractured, confused and rootless’ (1992: 72). In this sense, these objects may have provided Edie with a sense of stability through the subsequent route that life took him, firstly to India over the ensuing years, and then back to the UK: ‘[Souvenirs] possess the survival power of materiality not shared by words, actions, sights or the other elements of experience, they alone have the power to carry the past into the present. Souvenirs are samples of events which can be remembered, but not relived’ (Pearce 1992: 72). Pearce also argues that souvenirs help to reduce a large and complex experience, like the Somme or the Western Desert, to a smaller and simpler scale, moving history into the personal sphere (1992: 72). Through the bronze statues, then, Edie may have ‘remembered’ but not ‘relived’ the events of the First Opium War. Fundamentally souvenirs authenticate a past that is personal (Pearce 1992: 72). They are intimately autobiographical, signifying the life of the possessor. Stewart argues that we cannot be proud of someone else’s souvenir, unless it is transformed into a collection (1984: 137). Not only did Edie form a collection, he exhibited it

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for millions to see in the most important public spectacle of the age. The Putuo Five indeed served to memorialize Edie’s name, for they remain some of the only things left to testify to his life. One can see why the soldier wanted such extraordinary statues to memorialize such extraordinary experiences.

Trophies Closely linked to the functioning of the object as souvenir is the idea of it as trophy, a mode of collecting that is fundamentally characterized by power: ‘trophies … are objects onto which have been projected the social relations of mastery and domination’ (Hill 2005: 7–8). As a member of the upper classes and an elite British officer representing the most powerful colonial force in the world, Edie undoubtedly carried with him a confidence in his own cultural and racial superiority. The religious figures, reconceptualized as trophies, would thus have represented Edie’s pride in winning the war. The objects here operate as metaphors for feelings of superiority. Through obtaining the sculptures, Edie was at the same time displaying symbolic mastery over the Chinese people. Classen and Howes write of collected objects as ‘material signs of victory over their former owners and places of origin’ (2006: 208). Hevia refers to Chinese objects looted from the Summer Palace outside Beijing during the Second Opium War as ‘emblems of humiliation’ (1994: 33). Along with power is prestige and the sense of prestige inherent in this mode of collecting is evident in public display (Hill 2005: 7). Indeed one of the characteristics of trophy collections is that they are displayed triumphantly. At the Great Exhibition the objects came to symbolize ‘Edie’s China’ – a China subjugated in war, and a little known China of exotic Buddhist religion. In 1851, exhibited with the name of the Major clearly next to them, they became evidence of the British conquest of the Chinese: ‘The trophy simultaneously expressed victory, ownership, control and dominion. As such it has three qualities – it presents in material form, however incompletely, sets of practices; it triggers fantasies and memories; and it elicits admiration’ (Jordanova 1989: 32). Exhibiting the group at the Great Exhibition for all to see was certainly an attempt to ‘elicit admiration’. Whatever the circumstances of acquisition, the deities were obtained by Edie as a result of an aggressive imperialist war and, in the hands of their new caretaker, may be described as imperial booty. Yet, of course, we must be careful to situate such collecting within the context of its time. Edie’s actions were not so unusual: many colonizing empires and military forces amassed objects from the peoples they dominated. The period in which Edie lived saw an enormous accumulation of objects from conquered nations, many of which ended up in the museums of Europe and North America. Edie’s actions must be considered within the framework of cultural possibilities of the 1840s. He was a man of his time, in a period when collecting was part of the overall colo-

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nial project, one of the means by which imperialist powers dominated other cultures and attempted to control or destroy tradition and belief. The British encounter with China, like the British Empire itself, was predicated upon inequality and violence. And the relationship between these two countries, already tainted by acts of plunder, was set to continue unabated over the following decades.

Edie’s Collection: Difference and Dispersal While our main concern is with charting the lives of the Putuo Five, it should be noted that Edie collected other things. As we have seen, he acquired an African musical bow during his first posting in Cape Colony, possibly picked up during the expedition in 1834, which is now in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. It is not clear whether Pitt Rivers acquired the bow directly from him or whether he obtained it after Edie died, but Pitt Rivers certainly had it by 1874.77 On his travels William Edie was clearly inclined to collect artefacts. He may have had more objects that were not chosen for the Great Exhibition, or, like the musical bow, were disposed of in some way. The fact that the bow ended up in a private collection, and finally a museum – the Pitt Rivers – indicates, at the very least, an interest in obtaining different types of exotic things. At the Great Exhibition, Edie displayed a bronze incense burner with the Putuo Five and it might be assumed that this was originally placed on an altar in the same temple as the statues.78 However the object was not accessioned into the collections of Liverpool Museum and the only records of it are the watercolour of the display at the Great Exhibition as well as the auratically hazy photograph produced for the Jurors’ report of 1851. The present whereabouts of this object is unknown. Edie also exhibited a long red textile with gold embroidery as a backdrop to the Great Exhibition display.79 This was sold at Sotheby’s in 1854, as part of the Bram Hertz collection, and bought by a German archaeologist, Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard Gerhard, for £11 11s 0d.80 In 1851, Edie had written that it was ‘obtained’ from ‘one of the large temples’ near Ningbo. Though he does not specify which one, this is likely to have been either the Asoka or the Tiantong monastery. Ningbo, as we have seen, is not far from Zhoushan, and is the place where the bronzes were probably cast in the Ming dynasty. After the British bombardment of Dinghai in 1840, the Chinese army fled to this city, and it was attacked, then occupied, by the British in 1841 (Levien 1982: 58). Although the 98th Regiment was not officially stationed there, Edie could easily have taken a boat from Dinghai to Ningbo. Dr Cree, for example, wrote of a trip from Zhoushan to Ningbo in 1843 (Levien 1982: 118) and Fortune travelled extensively in the area between 1843 and 1846.81 Indeed, it is perhaps significant that Fortune stayed in the Tiantong monastery outside Ningbo in May 1844, only months before he travelled to Putuo. In his book, Three Years’ Wanderings in

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China, the sojourn in this temple complex was discussed in detail on the pages immediately before the description of the Putuo trip. Fortune noted how the fame of the Tiantong temple had ‘spread far and wide, and votaries came from the most distant parts of the empire – one of the Chinese kings being amongst the number – to worship and leave their offerings at its altar’ (1847: 170). Is it possible that the large temple hanging in Edie’s possession was one such imperial offering? Could Fortune also have told Edie about this temple and its treasures?

Life and Death If collections are extensions of the self, keeping one’s collection may be a way to gain a sort of immortality. (Belk 1994: 323)

On 3 September 1850, William Edie went on half-pay, effectively ending his military career. Half-pay was the means by which an officer would be put into semi-retirement and it usually affected those physically unfit for active service. The address Edie retired to in London was 14 Buckingham Street, just off The Strand, a fine Georgian terrace that still exists today. He died a mere nineteen months after returning to England, on 18 June 1852, at the address of his brother-in-law, Major Leaky, namely St James Terrace, Winchester. His death certificate records that he died from a ‘stomach illness’ at the age of forty-two.82 Unusually for a nineteenth-century gentleman, Edie had no wife or children to pass his collection to and seems to have died intestate.83 On the one hand William Edie must have had a privileged existence as an elite officer in the British Army with all his needs catered for. As an officer, he would have had a comfortable social life and (briefly) enjoyed status as a retired Major back in England. Yet, on the other hand, he would have suffered in the Far East, both physically and psychologically. This was a period when the British were pioneers, encountering new lands for the first time, equipped with enormous levels of arrogance but no protection at all from tropical disease. Life in the army, in such faraway places, was characterized by violence, disease and mortality. Edie would have witnessed the harrowing deaths of many soldiers and no doubt lost many friends. He was deeply connected, more perhaps than most, to the project of British imperialism and, it could be argued, he lived and ultimately died for the Empire. Today, as we have seen, his words live on in the displays of the Staffordshire Regiment Museum.84 While his voice takes up a prominent, though anonymous, position here, he seems to have been almost forgotten elsewhere. And, as this book is focused not on the life of this man but on the biography of the objects, it is to their story of appropriation and transformation that the final section now turns.

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From Public to Private, Sacred to Profane The life-stories of artefacts take place within a series of local circumstances, and interpretative and artefactual frameworks, which may remain stable for a long period of time, or change very rapidly. (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 153)

The seizure of the deities by Edie was a moment of total dislocation from all that they had known before. As the Putuo Five were detached from the temple, their meanings in Nicholas Thomas’s words were ‘violently distorted’ (1991: 208). Gosden and Marshall write of the ‘sharp break’ that may occur in an object’s biography and the ‘radical resetting of meaning’, particularly in circumstances of colonial encounter (1999: 176). At the moment these bronzes lost their status as sacred beings, they became instead one set of war trophies among many, part of the mass of things taken during the colonial era and absorbed into the collections of the West. In this new stage in their careers they came to embody the power of the British army to collect the material culture of those it triumphed over. For Baudrillard, an object can have two functions: it can be utilized or it can be possessed (1994: 8). Possessing an object, he argues, denudes it of its function and makes it relate to a subject (1994: 7). Once an object stops being defined by its function, its meaning is entirely up to the subject (1994: 8). In the temple, as we saw in chapter 1, the deities served a function within the Buddhist system of belief. Once removed from this world, they ceased being Guanyin, Wenshu, Puxian, Weituo or Guangong – indeed, Edie did not even know the names of four of the deities and he confused Guanyin with another Chinese goddess. Instead, new identities were now imposed; identities as collected objects, possessed by a soldier. Their new owner projected his needs and desires onto these things, effacing the intentions of those who had previously worshipped them (Thomas 1991: 125). We have seen how, as a souvenir, an object ‘represents not the lived experience of its maker but the ‘second hand’ experience of its possessor/owner’ (Stewart 1984: 135). And, it may be argued that the deities now existed to authenticate Edie’s experiences in China. They no longer functioned in relation to each other or in terms of their spiritual efficacy to worshippers. Their meanings instead circulated around him (Stewart 1984: 136).85 Classen and Howes argue that, ‘according to the colonial model of collection, once artefacts have been acquired or “conquered”, they must be integrated into a new social order and made to conform to a new set of values imposed by their governor – the collector or curator’ (2006: 209). Not only did Edie endow them with their next set of meanings, but their future lives also depended entirely on him. It is important to consider how notions of ownership were transformed at this point. As we have seen, the deities were originally revered by a religious community, and in the temple no single person was associated with them: they had no named maker or single owner. But in the 1840s they were transferred to a world where one person was charged with their future. They formed part of a Western cult of naming – Edie’s credentials were prominently emblazoned on the text

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panel in the Great Exhibition. In the 1851 catalogue, he referred to himself as ‘proprietor’ – a legal term indicating title to things. Such ideas of ownership were predicated upon Western concepts of self, individual identity, private possession – all of which were starkly different to the Buddhist worldview. In this phase of their existence, the Putuo Five moved from being publicly displayed and communally owned to being confined to private possession. As we follow their lives in Britain in the ensuing chapters, we shall see that after the Great Exhibition they became commodities, bought and sold at a price between dealers and at auction, before settling into the collection of a public museum, a place that traditionally endows objects with inalienability. The statues may not have been seen by many in Dinghai. Edie must have dismantled them in order to move them off Putuo and he may have left them, stored in boxes, in his quarters. In 1846 they may have travelled with him to India by ship, or perhaps they were sent directly to London to await his arrival. Although the physical conditions may be similar to those experienced by the statues in the second half of the twentieth century in North Wales and Liverpool – where they remained boxed for a period of almost sixty years, dismantled, dispersed and rarely seeing the light of day – their circumstances in a garrison would clearly have been different. For in one man’s private collection, unlike in a public museum, the objects did not need to be visually accessible to anyone except the owner. Only Edie controlled them and their fate. And in the hands of a single individual, they were vulnerable to the kinds of dismemberment and physical treatment that would not be tolerated (at least today) in a museum. Indeed, in one of the most problematic moments in the lives of the Putuo Five, Edie deactivated their sacred powers by taking out the Buddhist manuscripts from inside them. As well as being an assertion of the power of the owner and a violation of the physical integrity of the images, removal of the manuscripts was a de-sanctification – though Edie, of course, would not necessarily have realized this. We saw in the previous chapter how consecration ceremonies transformed five inanimate bronze statues into sacred beings capable of receiving veneration and dispensing mercy. Consecration through insertion of manuscripts and other objects was the means to distinguish deity figures, containing a living presence, from other pieces of sculpted metal. In the temple context these were not ‘objects’ in the Western sense of the term, but active agents, living beings. Their removal from the ‘iconographical programme’ within the temple – a positioning which in itself imbued them with religious power – would have served initially to diminish their numinous qualities, but their sacred efficacy as religious objects would have been even further destroyed by Edie’s act. For some Buddhists, opening up a statue compares with ‘tearing the guts out of a living thing’.86 Other leading Buddhist authors suggest that the ‘opening of a consecrated statue, under ordinary circumstances, anywhere, not only desecrates it, but kills its very essence’.87 Though the tradition of Chinese Buddhism is different from that in Tibet, this action was nevertheless problematic – a mutilation. Vital aspects of the images in the Buddhist worldview were taken from the deity figures as they left Putuo and entered

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new spheres of existence in the West. Perhaps too, in such circumstances, one might conceptualize this forcible opening up of living sacred images as a metaphor for the brutal opening up of China to foreign domination, of which this Opium War was but the first step. Once Edie had ‘obtained’ the objects, he might have used any of the ports the British had forced open – Shanghai, Ningbo, Hong Kong, even those he passed through in India – to transport the collection back to England. Officers did not always send their treasures home however, and Edie may have had the resources to transport them with him around India.88 Little is known of this period in the lives of the Putuo Five in Asia, including how and when they travelled back to Britain. What is known is that within a few years of acquiring them, Edie had them displayed in Hyde Park in a central position in the greatest public spectacle of the age. If the First Opium War was a stark indicator of the increasingly unequal power relationship between Britain and China, the Great Exhibition was yet another: like the Opium War, it too may be seen as a celebration of British might. In a relatively short period of time, then, the Putuo Five became entangled in two key utterances in the mid-nineteenth-century discourse of British imperial power over China. *

*

*

Alberti observes how the moment of collection of an object was often only the first of a number of exchanges en route to a museum (2005: 564). As we shall see, the social lives of the five statues continued long after Edie disposed of them. Ahead of them lay a complex exhibitionary and interpretative trajectory as they were moved through a range of display sites and collections over the course of the next 150 years.

Notes 1. See Menzies (2002: 49, 53, 55). 2. Leibniz, Voltaire and the Jesuits believed China to be a wondrous empire, ‘perfectly governed by an enlightened despot whom Europe might well envy’ (Peyrefitte 1993: xviii). 3. It grew from around 150–180 million to 340 million in only sixty years (Peyrefitte 1993: 320). 4. Images of China had already been embellished with the accounts of the Macartney mission. Though both missions failed in their objectives, they nevertheless enabled insights into the machinations of the imperial court as well as brief glimpses of everyday Chinese life (Peyfrefitte 1993: 488). 5. Robert Fortune, for example, in the 1840s wrote that the Chinese are ‘retrograding rather than advancing’ (1847: 9).

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6. Via Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro, the Cape of Good Hope, St Paul’s, Java Head and Singapore. Edie: Title page to the Log Book of the Grenadier Company. Stafford Regiment Museum, accession number 7764. 7. 5 July 1840. Dinghai was then home to some forty thousand people. 8. Robert Fortune noted how, when this island was first occupied by the British troops, the mortality rate was so high that it was pronounced to be the most unhealthy place in China: ‘Many a brave soldier fell victim to the malignant fever which prevailed at the time’ (1847: 314–15). 9. The 98th was in Lord Saltoun’s First Brigade, along with the 26th, the Bengal Volunteers, 41st Madras, 83 officers and 2,235 men (Fortesque 1927: 319). 10. On 6 July an armada of twenty-six armed ships and forty transports followed on: Edie on the Belleisle was in the Third Division. 11. The handwritten Digest of the Services of the 2nd North Staffs suggests that fifteen men died from sunstroke. Cree wrote that:‘The steady advance of the 98th Regiment, the Sappers and 41st Madras N.I. (Native Infantry) was too terrible for the Imperial troops, who soon wavered and fled … But the sun was more formidable than the Chinese troops, for thirteen men of the 98th Regiment dropped in the ranks from sunstroke and expired before night’ (Levien 1982: 98). 12. See Digest of the Services of the 2nd North Staffs: notes on the battle of Zhenjiang. Even Dr Cree talked of breakfasting on fowl pie and claret (Levien 1982: 84). 13. However, in certain places, the uniform was adapted to local climate (Personal communication: Dr Blakeley, Staffordshire Regiment Museum, 21 June 2007). Cree noted that the Indian troops wore light clothing, but subsequently were freezing in the winter months (Levien 1982: 95), which suggests that on the China campaign the uniforms were not adapted. 14. A tall cylindrical military cap. 15. Including No. 2 Company of the 98th (Massey 1992: 28). 16. From 21–28 July (no page reference). 17. 19 June 1842, Bromley Eames notes how the expedition moved to Shanghai and occupied the city. ‘With three regiments he (Sir Hugh Gough) took up his quarters in the gardens of the Ching-huang temple’ (1909: 508). 18. The botanist Robert Fortune wrote of his stays in temples during his tour of China just after the war. In particular, he recorded a sojourn in the Tiantong temple in Ningbo in May 1844 (1847: 167). 19. Fortune noted this in the city of ‘Foo-chow-foo’ (Fuzhou) (1847: 370). 20. Accession number 93. 21. This is beside a stream, near the Yifong gate. The leaflet notes how, ‘The British army … forced the Qing government to discuss the Treaty of Nanjing four times in the Jinghai temple in August 1842’. 22. Edie: Title page, op. cit. This is confirmed in the Digest of the Services of the 2nd North Staffs, which indicates that the 98th ‘occupied temples at Kuan-yin mun’. 23. Most were knocked down in the 1960s during the Cultural Revolution. 24. It lies at the point where royal junks – most famously, in the eighteenth century, those of the Qianlong Emperor – would dock. 25. Wednesday 7 – Monday 12 September 1842 (Levien 1982: 117–18). 26. However, officers were clearly better nourished and protected than the rank and file. Fortune wrote of how, in 1843, the troops had suffered far more from the climate than

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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from the guns of the Chinese at Amoy and that ‘everyone had lost his comrade or his friend’ (1847: 42). 29 September – 22 October 1842. 29 October 1842. Edie: Title page, op. cit. According to Massey, by the end of 1842 the regiment had buried 283 men and a further 260 were on the sick list (out of 800 originally) (1992: 29). October 1843 – January 1844. Cree wrote on 14 June 1841 that half his ship’s company were on the sick list (Levien 1982: 88). Robert Fortune commented on fatalities to the detachment of troops quartered in the barracks at West Point in Hong Kong in autumn 1843, when Edie would have been there, writing of the ‘deplorable condition of our new settlement at this time; and so malignant and fatal was this disease, that few who were seized ever recovered’ (1847: 24–25). Statement of Services, W031/882 Public Record Office (PRO), Kew. See Fortune (1847: 63). Personal communication, Chen Zhouyue and Hu Lianrong at Zhoushan Museum. There are halls devoted to these deities today. Edward Cree wrote of trips to other islands (Levien 1982: 72). He noted that during the summer of 1844 he frequently explored the islands in the Zhoushan archipelago (1847: 225). Ouchterlony (1844: 519). Dr Maxwell was also stationed in Dinghai (Fortune 1847: 63). For example, on pp. 26 and 27 he talked of the troops stationed in Aberdeen in Hong Kong and the improvements in the soldiers’ barracks (1847). Personal communication, 21 June 2007. Personal communication, Dr Erik Blakeley, 20 September 2006. In 1860, British and French troops looted the Summer Palace outside Beijing. Again, in 1900–1 the appropriation of objects after the Boxer Rebellion has been described as one of the ‘bigger’ plundering campaigns at the turn of the century (Penny 2002: 107). Interview, 31 March 2007. The base weighs 87 kg. The two large bodhisattvas weight over 150 kg each and the smaller deities probably around 100 kg each. I am grateful for Sue Barker, Metals Conservator, National Museums Liverpool for providing this information. The number of wagons depended in social status. I am grateful to Erik Blakeley for his advice on this matter. Fortune too remarked upon how the Confucian Temple in Ningbo was nearly destroyed during the war (1847: 91). 1846 – Calcutta; 1847 – Dinapore, Bihar; 1848–49 – Anballa, Punjab; 1849 – Lahore; 1849–52 – Peshawar. A plain monument was erected in its place after 1949 by the People’s Liberation Army to mark the Chinese dead. Fortune noted the hillside ‘thickly strewn with the graves of our countrymen’ (1847: 315). Quote from Edie’s title page in the exhibition case for the 98th Regiment in the Staffordshire Regiment Museum (but not attributed to him).

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53. I am extremely grateful to Kenneth Tythacott for his diligent work in the Public Record Office at Kew. Statement of services to the 98th Regiment of Foot. 98th Staffordshire WO25/804 sheet 210. 54. 20 April 1926 (Statement of Services, W025/804, PRO). 55. Personal communication, 20 September 2006. 56. 20 April 1826. 57. Smith, 1934: 394–413. For more information on Smith, see Mackenzie (2009: 79–83). 58. ibid: 398. 59. 1884.113.1. I am grateful to Jeremy Coote at the Pitt Rivers Museum for this information. 60. Note concerning Edie and Wallis both of 98th Reg. of Foot regarding purchase of a Company, Statement of Services, WO31/702. PRO. 61. 18 October 1831 (Statement of Services, W031/573 PRO). 62. 29 November 1833 (Statement of Services, W031/702, PRO). 63. The Chartists rioted in Bolton on 16 August 1839, when Edie was there. The Grenadier Troop of the 96th Foot dispersed the rioters. In September 1838 there were protests in Manchester, and 1839 Chartist rallies ended in clashes with the army in Newcastle. 64. His uncle’s address was 13 York Square, Regent’s Park. Edie’s address in London was later 14 Buckingham Street, The Strand. 65. Personal communication, Erik Blakeley, 20 September 2006. 66. ibid. 67. Accession number: 7764. 68. A second title page (in one colour only), has similar Oriental decorative motifs, but with crown designs in the bottom corners and two bird designs with wings open at the top. 69. My thanks to Annemarie Bilclough, Abraham Thomas and Stephen Calloway at the Victoria and Albert Museum for their thoughts on this image. Email correspondence, 29 January 2008. 70. I am grateful to Stephen Calloway, curator of prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum for his feedback on this. 71. Stephen Calloway, ibid. 72. Edie: Title page, op. cit. 73. Accession number: 7764. 74. H. Cole (1851), B. Hertz (1859), C. Gatty (1882). 75. Akin suggests that one of the five main reasons for collecting is to satisfy a sense of personal aesthetics (1996: 108). 76. His 1810 exploration was published in 1821. Sara Atkin’s fictionalized account of his travels went through nine editions between this date and 1841 (Black 2000: 52). 77. The object was therefore part of the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers in 1884 (Personal Communication Jeremy Coote, Pitt Rivers Museum, 8 June 2006). 78. In the early 1850s, Huc described incense burners, ‘made of chiselled bronze, where perfumes are constantly burning’, on altars in front of deity figures in the Puji temple on Putuo (1859: 400). 79. Such silk banners today are hung in assembly halls and shrine rooms in most temples. 80. I am extremely grateful to Marjorie Caygill for bringing this auction to my attention and to Marcella Leembruggen at the British Library for supplying details of the sale. 81. I travelled from Ningbo to Putuo, and with fast modern boats it takes but a few hours.

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82. The death certificate states ‘disease of the bowels’: DYB 452994. The mark of Ellen Boche? is included on the certificate as she was present at the death. 83. No will has been located. 84. The connections between China and the 98th linger today: both the 98th and the 64th North Staffordshire Regiments have adopted the name ‘China Dragon’ as their newsletter. 85. Stewart writes that the souvenir ‘is not a narrative of the object: it is a narrative of the possessor … Such a narrative cannot be generalized to encompass the experience of anyone; it pertains only to the possessor of the object’ (1984: 136). 86. Thubten Jigme Norbu of the Tibet Society, Bloomington, Indiana, USA (Reedy 1991). 87. Reedy, 1991. 88. Personal communication, Dr Erik Blakeley, 20 September 2006.

CHAPTER 3 Articles of Industry: The Great Exhibition of 1851 Imperialism was more than a set of economic, political, and military phenomena. It was a habit of mind, a dominant idea in the era of European supremacy which had widespread intellectual, cultural, and technical ramifications.1

In 1851 the Putuo Five moved from the realm of military imperialism to a highly visible display of imperialist might as part of the most conspicuous display of industrial wealth in nineteenth-century Britain. The Great Exhibition has aptly been described as a ‘national icon’, a symbol, if not the symbol, of the Victorian age (Auerbach 1999: 1). Both the building and the exhibition emerged from the wave of British self-confidence that characterized the mid nineteenth century, a period in which this nation celebrated itself as the pinnacle of technological innovation. Britain was the first and most powerful industrial nation and the exhibition was intended to demonstrate this achievement to the rest of the world (Greenhalgh 1988: 29). By their very presence at this massive spectacle, the Putuo Five became unwitting contributors to its imperial ideology. While this would be the first of their many public exposures in England, for the Chinese statues it was probably their most spectacular. The deity figures, along with an incense burner and a large textile, were given pride of place in the main avenue, near the very centre of Paxton’s monumental Crystal Palace. While this chapter interrogates the display of the Putuo Five at the Great Exhibition, it is also concerned more broadly with the construction of images of China at this event. It is noteworthy that China refused the organizers’ invitation to participate – and it was the only country to do so. Chinese merchants also resisted calls to send in their goods. The result was a small allocation of space in the Crystal Palace and the emergence of the idea of ‘Cathay’ as the antithesis of the country that hosted the Exhibition. China indeed came to encapsulate all that Britain was not – a country steeped in tradition, focused on custom, ritual and stability, not the fast-paced modernizing society that embraced industrial progress. In his book on the Great Exhibition, Davis even characterized the Chinese as the ‘anti-heroes’ of the event (1999: 105).

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The Lives of Chinese Objects

This chapter begins with a discussion of the ideology which underpinned the 1851 Exhibition, and then documents the circumstances surrounding the emergence of the China court. It moves on to explore the exhibitionary arrangements of the Putuo Five – their positioning as well as textual exegesis. Finally it discusses the affinities between this extraordinary exhibitionary site – a place, if you like, of massive secular rituals – and the previous location of the bronzes on the pilgrimage island of Putuo.

Articles of Imperial Ideology As the nineteenth century unwound in Western Europe and later in North America, international exhibitions became mechanisms by which governments and powerful elites presented images of themselves and the world to a mass audience. The Great Exhibition, in particular, was a means for Victorians to define their identity as a nation (Auerbach 1999: 5). The opening ceremony, presided over by Queen Victoria, rang with Rule Britannia and the National Anthem. Prince Albert was pivotal to the conception, organization and patronage of the event.2 Though the Exhibition was not funded by the government – it was a private, commercial venture – the patriotic fervour was unmistakable. It was Henry Cole who had initiated this exposition and it was he who enlisted Prince Albert to preside over the Royal Commission which raised the money. A body of willing sponsors was soon gathered to guarantee the initial funding. With governmental approval, foreign ambassadors were invited to elicit participation from their home countries. In England manufacturers were informed and over four hundred committees were set up around the country to raise funds and organize exhibitors in their local areas (Greenhalgh 1988: 28–29). The prevailing ideology of free trade and the advantages to be gained from international commerce were ruthlessly promoted.3 Here one might have thought that China, the largest and most populous country on earth, would have wished to play a significant role. Although George III had sent the Macartney Embassy to China in 1792 to negotiate trade, the Celestial Empire had steadfastly refused to participate in the burgeoning Western system of commerce. Chinese traditional culture was contemptuous of the products of the English industrial revolution. The Middle Kingdom had been punished for this disdain by the invasion and war of 1839–42. By the time of the exhibition, some nine years later, British trading stations had already been established in a number of coastal cities – a pattern that was to be intensified as a result of the Second Opium War (1856–60). The sub-text of the Great Exhibition was a positioning of countries within a hierarchy, with the Western powers, Britain in particular, at its apogee. At a fundamental level the displays set standards by which countries could measure their relative industrial and technological prowess (Greenhalgh 1988: 15); the British industrial machinery in the West Wing was considered the pinnacle of achievement (Gosden 1999: 26). This was the first international display in which the

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industrial products of different cultures were exhibited and judged (Burris 2001: 27). Governments competed with each other in their displays and individual exhibits were awarded prizes. Not only was it a very public indication of material possession, it was also an opportunity to advertise British goods and develop foreign markets. The primary purpose of the Exhibition, thus, was commercial, and commodities from Britain, and other countries, stood metonymically for the overall economic progress of nations. The concern with trade, industry and competition was fuelled by the Victorian obsession with advancement; Pagani refers to the Crystal Palace as a ‘temple to progress’ (1998: 39). Here, once again, one could find no greater contrast than between this Western obsession and the Chinese cultivation of immutability. China was a country steeped in tradition, seemingly as averse to change as Britain was enamoured with it. The court, the Emperor and the structure of governance disdained the obsessive Western drive for development and, with this extraordinary difference to industrializing nations, the country was generally dismissed as being stationary. Power relations were encoded in the layout of the building itself, dictating both how much space each country was allowed, as well as the location of displays in relation to each other. Henry Cole’s design meant that the frontage for each national court bordered the central avenue, thus giving clarity to the spatial organization. Greenhalgh argues that this differentiation into courts served to emphasize national differences, for with countries placed side-by-side, exhibiting their wares and material achievements, direct comparisons would be made (1988: 18). Each participating country thus presented an image of itself, its history, culture and technological achievements to the world.

Space, Place and Organization In this enormous exhibition the process of allocating space and selecting objects was complex. Many objects were sent from distant places, and display sites for them could not be agreed until they had actually arrived. By locating ‘British and colonial’ exhibits in one half of the building and ‘foreign’ ones in the other, the Executive Committee ‘hoped to limit the disruption caused by this uncertainty’ (Davis 1999: 106). The exhibition was thus both carefully planned and, to an extent, chaotic. The organizers had a general sense of what they wanted the final displays to look like, but did not dictate. Rather they issued guidelines and delegated responsibility for identifying objects to local committees and individual exhibitors (Auerbach 1999: 230). However, as the minutes of the Executive Committee noted, the ‘Commissioners retain absolute power to exclude such objects as are not suited to the objects of the Exhibition’.4 Ffrench argues that as well as the practical difficulties, which could be solved by logic, there were ‘other obstacles, imponderables, arising out of the almost unbridgeable gulf between national mentalities and traditional points of view’ (1950: 2). She cites China as a case in point.

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Although the space allocations remained undecided until the last minute, the overall structure of the Crystal Palace fell neatly into two: British and colonial manufactures on one side, foreign on the other. That is, a full half of the space was devoted to British achievement at home and abroad. Significantly, the ‘imperial’ displays were at the centre. And while the British side focussed on technological achievement, the foreign half was arranged into national courts, where industry was far less prominent: it was the vast and untapped raw materials of these places, instead, that were on display. A dichotomy was thus evident between the ‘uncivilized’ colonies that produced raw materials and those ‘civilized’ enough to turn them into manufactures (Burris 2001: 25). A division, in other words, emerged between the ‘industrial western half ’ and the ‘pre-industrial eastern half ’ and: ‘a picture was produced which, from the point of view of industrial Britain, was remarkably and misleadingly flattering’ (Davis 1999: 110–11). Cole’s introduction to the catalogue explained the organization of the displays and was divided into ‘Raw materials, Machinery, Manufactures (silk, cotton, glass, china), fine arts (sculpture, mosaics)’, then according to country, with the United Kingdom first (Classes 11–30), followed by ‘British Colonies and Dependencies’ listed in Asia, Europe, Africa, America and Australia. In the second half of the exhibition and the third volume of the catalogue, the ‘Foreign States’ were listed. Not surprisingly European countries were most prominent.5 Then came the Americas (Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, St Domingo, the United States); of the Middle East, Persia and Turkey were included. Apart from Egypt there were no exhibiting nations from Africa and the Pacific. China was the only ‘Foreign State’ from Asia (India being a British colony). Altogether, thirty-four nations were on display, with almost fourteen thousand individual and corporate exhibitors and over a hundred thousand exhibits.6 Despite the universalistic aspirations of the Exhibition’s title, there were obvious lacunae. For instance, a Japan court was notably absent: the country had yet to be ‘opened’ to the West, although a few Japanese objects were included in the China displays. Within Asia, a hierarchy was evident, for India, the ‘jewel in the crown’, had the biggest spatial allocation – at thirty thousand square feet, more than any other ‘Colony’, ‘Possession’ or ‘Dependency’ (Kriegal 2001: 151). After Britain, France was the largest single exhibitor. The country was allotted fifty thousand square feet to display its articles of ‘taste, fancy or luxury’ (Ffrench 1950: 243). Certain other European countries fared well: the Austro-Hungarian Empire had twenty-two thousand square feet, and Belgium fifteen thousand. However, original calculations changed, since some nations declined their full allocation while others applied for more. Ffrench notes how Switzerland requested a space out of step with its size and industrial capacities, and that America had applied for forty thousand square feet but was unable to fill them (Ffrench 1950: 119, 237). China, on the other hand was a country whose manufactures could have filled the entire building, but whose final allocation, two and a half thousand square feet, was one of the smallest in the building.7 The British contributions were compared favourably with those of others countries: ‘While an amount of order … reigned on the British side of the Build-

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ing, the state of that devoted to other nations could scarcely be entitled to that term until a month subsequent to the day of opening. Many foreign states had not sent in their catalogues, and the arrangement of their productions was very imperfect’ (Cole; 1851: vi). This was not surprising considering the sheer distance many of the foreign articles had to travel compared with the relative ease of marshalling the host country’s exhibition.8 Images of, and information concerning, the Great Exhibition were published in the Illustrated London News from early 1851 – sketches of the building, the ground plan, the departure of French goods. The opening ceremony was featured in great detail. A number of Illustrated London News supplements also covered the event. As Ffrench notes, it was ‘puffed’ and ‘publicised’ with: ‘The torrent of literature, the press notices, the enormous illustrated supplements, the thousand contemporary ephemera: the souvenirs, the burlesques, the panoramas and the squibs; the articles, the speeches, the pamphlets; the gushing effusions and inept sentimentalities which preceded its arrival’ (1950: 199). Major William Edie, returning from India to London in early 1851, would have been aware of the publicity surrounding the exhibition.9 Yet it seems that the Putuo Five were late arrivals: before the opening, the list of exhibitors was published in the Daily News (17–23 April) and Edie’s name was not included.10 The Putuo Five were also absent from the listings in the first four catalogues, the fourth being published on 15 September. This would suggest that Edie did not lend his collection until the end of that month.11 Yet it is easy to see why the retired officer did participate, considering what had happened with the Chinese displays.12

China’s Refusal In June 1850 China rejected participation in the greatest exhibitionary spectacle the world had ever seen. It was the only country explicitly to do so. In a letter to the British Plenipotentiary, the Chinese Commissioner wrote: ‘the excellence or inferiority of an art depends upon the talent or incompetence of the person. If men have not the ability to master an art, it is not in the power even of their fathers or elder brothers [to make them], far less sense would there be in the Government addressing them publicly on this head. If such of the Chinese, as are skilled in the arts, be willing to trade in their works with your Excellency’s nation, they are of course at liberty to do so.’13 This somewhat cryptic announcement, in which participation as a nation was refused, but individual representation through trade was sanctified, must have astounded the organizers.14 Yet this was not the first time that the Chinese court had snubbed the British Crown, for in the famous letter from the Qianlong Emperor to George III at the time of the Macartney Expedition (1792–94), the Chinese had made it abundantly clear that they had no desire for British manu-

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factures. The Middle Kingdom’s refusal to participate at the Crystal Palace would only have rekindled earlier memories of inflexible non-cooperation. With this response, the organizing committee, in desperation, turned to the British diplomatic presence in China, initially contacting the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Samuel George Bonham. In the minutes of the Organizing Committee in December 1850, a letter from Bonham is quoted in which he is ‘of the opinion that 1,000 sq feet will be sufficient for Articles of Chinese Industry’.15 The next month, the Plenipotentiary suggested that insufficient objects had been found. The Abstract of Letters in the minutes of the meetings summarize a letter dated 6 January 1851 in which the Governor stated that, in fact, no goods will be sent from the colony: H M Plenipotentiary in China, stating that the Canton Committee have found it impracticable to carry out their intention of sending Articles to the Exhibition, but that it is intended to open a subscription towards the general purposes of the Exhibition. Sir S Bonham does not recommend any greater space than 300 sq ft being reserved for the productions of China.16

As Ffrench notes, out of the five thousand square feet originally allocated, this new figure was one hundredth of the space reserved for India (1950: 121). For a colony predicated upon trade with the world’s most populous nation, this assertion that there were ‘insufficient objects’ was rather improbable. The letter from Bonham on 24 December 1850 had mentioned a ‘few specimens of fine crackeryware’ collected by the Chinese merchant, Howqua, in Canton, but the Governor had found them unacceptable. Four days later he informed the Royal Commission that thirty-one packages had been collected. Enclosed in Bonham’s correspondence17 was a long letter from Rutherford Alcock, British Consul in Shanghai, which explained that the British and foreign residents of the city felt there was no possibility of gaining access to the ‘great seats of manufacture or to the producing districts for raw materials’: ‘This placed them in too disadvantageous a position to do justice either to themselves or the resources of this Empire, which could only be very inadequately represented and in a way more calculated to mislead than to instruct, by such objects only as are to be obtained at Shanghai’.18 He added that he would offer his personal encouragement to induce individual members of the community to contribute, and he enclosed a list of objects, mentioning ‘a large collection of samples, procured with some difficulty, from the celebrated porcelain manufactory of Kingtish Chin (Jingdezhen), in the vicinity of the Royal Lake’.19 Alcock acknowledged that what he had provided ‘will of necessity form but a very poor example of what China might and could furnish under other circumstances’.20 By March 1851 the Governor of Hong Kong had changed his mind, as he stated in yet another letter to the Commission: ‘several cases containing specimens of Chinese productions collected by private individuals will shortly arrive’.21 The botanist and traveller, Robert Fortune, was willing to send, from his base in

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Shanghai, a list of botanical specimens.22 But in the end, these efforts seemed to be of ‘no avail’ and it was decided that a great many Chinese objects would be obtained in England by a dealer in ‘Oriental curiosities’ (Wood 1998: 57). It was William Hewett, with his China Warehouse, who scoured the country for the Chinese articles (Green 2002: 42). In a letter to the Royal Commissioners, he complained that he had been: ‘applied to at a very late period by Colonel Lloyd to assist in the Royal Commissioners in filling that space in the Building allotted to China, as it was their urgent wish [that] so interesting a country should not go unrepresented’.23 Hewett, however, did not have enough stock of his own to ‘fill the space’ and borrowed £1,000 for the ‘purpose of purchasing in London and Liverpool, all that was rare, curious and beautiful’.24 He finally succeeded ‘in occupying the whole space’.25 The representation of China was thus to be determined by a dealer procuring ‘rare and curious’ things from the ports of England. Hewett’s name, of course, was to be advertized prominently in the China court itself.

China at the Great Exhibition Images of China The Great Exhibition provided a platform from which to explore, applaud, exaggerate or, in certain cases, to denigrate national characteristics. As we have seen, the First Opium War brought a forcible opening of port cities in China, enabling Westerners to construct new images of the country which were invariably negative. By 1851, Chinese life and culture was, as Davis notes, being ‘ruthlessly lampooned’ for its ‘oppressiveness, and unenlightened character’ (1999: 189). Multiple perceptions of China however were current in the mid nineteenth century. On 30 April 1851, for example, at the Great Exhibition’s opening ceremony, an unknown ‘mandarin’ joined the royal celebrations.26 No one knew his identity, but considering the occasion and his friendly disposition, he was treated as a visiting dignitary from the Celestial Empire. Dressed in embroidered silk with a red cap, peacock feather and a long pigtail he caused a stir during the Hallelujah Chorus when he approached the throne and bowed before the Queen (Altick 1978: 460; Davis 1999: 131). This ‘mandarin’ was even allowed to participate in the procession that toured the building, and was included in the official watercolour of the opening event. However the exotic interloper turned out to be none other than He-Sing, owner of a Chinese junk moored in the Thames, his appearance being simply a publicity stunt intended to increase visitors to his ‘museum of curiosities’ (Auerbach 1999: 178). Such is the dignity bestowed by dignitaries upon their supposed peers. More telling of the general attitude towards China was a poem-book penned by Sutherland Edwards, An Authentic Account of the Chinese Commission, Which

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Was Sent to Report on the Great Exhibition; Wherein the Opinion of China is Shown As Not Corresponding At All with Our Own.27 This fantasy narrative revealed a host of prejudices in which the Chinese were presented not only without a sense of justice but as barbaric to boot. Yet here there was also a certain ambivalence. Sutherland Edwards imagined two ‘Chinamen’ sent by the imperial court to view the Exhibition – one a wise and learned mandarin, the other a criminal. The for-

3.1 ‘Opening of the Great Exhibition by Queen Victoria on 1 May 1851’, by Henry Courtney Selous (1803–90). Oil painting. Copyright: V&A images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

3.2 Front cover of An account of the Chinese commission which was sent to report on the Great Exhibition; wherein the opinion of China is shown as not corresponding at all with our own, Sutherland Edwards, 1851.

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mer praised what he saw, but was misunderstood upon his return home, and was cruelly punished. The criminal, by contrast, utterly disavowed the spectacle and for this he was rewarded by the Emperor. The moral of the story was that though China was capable of producing wise thinkers, its people were held back by a blinkered and cruel governing system. Sutherland Edwards dwelt obsessively on the Chinese consumption of dogs and birds’ nest soup, on the binding of female feet, on men with long fingernails and many wives. His text magnified the idea of the arbitrary, absolute and irrational power of the Emperor, who through a system of reward and punishment, exerted absolute control over his subjects. An image was thus created of Chinese rulers as ruthless and despotic. This extraordinary document not only spoke of a deep hostility towards China, but epitomized too the xenophobic tendencies of the Exhibition as a whole.

China on Display The China court was one of the first national displays which the visitor confronted upon entering the Crystal Palace from the south gate, occupying a position at the centre of the building. Yet while almost seven thousand28 proud exhibitors had contributed to the home country’s displays, a mere handful were responsible for China – and none were actually Chinese. Nevertheless, the catalogue attempted to be upbeat: ‘A very interesting collection of Chinese productions and manufactures, with a few from Japan, has been formed by the contributions of about forty exhibitors, comprising various articles which belong to different classes’ (Cole 1851: 1418). The text went on to describe the types of articles represented: the raw materials associated with the manufacture of porcelain, animal and vegetable materials ‘employed in native and European manufacture, as hemp, cotton, silk &c’; chemical preparations such as arsenic, sulphate or iron; food items such as tea; edible birds’ nest, porcelain, vases, jars, fans, lanterns, screens, elaborate carvings, and paintings – as well as some Japanese and Burmese objects. In the catalogue, the names of the lenders came first. Many were referred to as ‘importers’ or ‘producers’. The emphasis here was on the British traders: Chinese voices were absent. Rutherford Alcock’s contribution, through the Board of Trade, was listed first. It comprised ‘specimens of the raw products of China, which may possibly be made available ultimately as exports’ (Cole 1851: 1418). These included saffron, camphor, hemp, cotton, tobacco, silk, arsenic and wax. Next came a ‘complete collection of the various materials employed in the manufactures of porcelain’, from the ‘Great Porcelain works of Kong-Tin-Chin’ (Jingdezhen) in Jiangxi province. Then we hear from the Horticultural Society of London with its several specimens of indigo and silk. The Honourable East India Company submitted, amongst other things, roots, oils, dyes, wax and ‘brick-tea’. Captain Shea of Con-

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naught Square, Hyde Park, offered his range of souvenirs picked up from travels to the East – a snuff box, mother-of-pearl shells, saucers, a Burmese vase, table and chairs, a lantern and ceramics. J. Reeves Esq. lent porcelain, metal teapots, a tea chest, cakes of ink, bronze vessels and sets of paintings. William Hewett, was, of course, included. His company, based in Fenchurch Street, presented the ‘beautiful curios’ he had so carefully sourced in London and Liverpool – ceramics, ivory carvings, lacquer wares, boxes of toys, a bamboo jacket, wooden screens, carved shells, card cases and samples of cotton. Signs for his company were clearly displayed around the court. Charles Matt Copland had a range of decorative pieces – a writing desk, drawings on rice paper, silk paintings, Japanned screens, chopsticks, and boxes for playing cards. Apart from Edie, the printer P.P. Thomas was the only exhibitor of religious images. He also had a few maps. P. Ripley, based in Canton, exhibited gunpowder and teas. The Baring Brothers made a more substantial contribution with ivory cards, lanterns, handkerchiefs and wooden carvings. Other individuals lent more of the same: more lacquered goods, more specimens of cloth, and more of China’s export ceramics. Here, then, China was represented by a random selection of raw materials, everyday utensils and export wares of questionable quality imported by merchants through the Canton trading system. As Pagani rightly notes: ‘These were not China’s finest manufactures, sent by their proud producers, but appeared rather as a group of odd knick-knacks borrowed from the homes of those who

3.3 ‘The China Court at the Great Exhibition’, by John Absolon (1815–95). Copyright: V&A images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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had travelled to the East’ (1998: 39). They were clearly not representative of the material culture China had to offer. There were no art objects. Nothing here indicated the sophistication of Chinese manufactures or the sumptuous material culture of the elites or the court. There were no objects of any antiquity. The only offerings approaching imperial quality were probably the Putuo Five. British merchants and a handful of collectors, who knew little of the history, culture and traditions of the country, had thus set before six million visitors a threadbare and distorted representation of China. Contemporary depictions of the China court show it from the avenue or transept, rather than documenting details within and, as a result, capture showier exhibits – large porcelain jars, items of furniture, model junks, decorative screens, paintings, and lanterns suspended from the ceiling. The mass of small souvenirs and samples listed in the catalogue are not so evident. Many remarked that China was amongst the most disappointing of the national displays (Auerbach 1999: 176). Fay observed: ‘China … was treated rather as a joke, apart from its tea’ (1951: 88). In the official documentation of the event, China was only mentioned a few times in Tallis’s long and detailed account, and all references are disparaging. Objects were described as ‘knick-knacks’ and Chinese workmanship in general was criticized as overly labour intensive: ‘The Chinese have long been famous for their caprices of invention, and whimsicalities of workmanship, over each article of which the greater portion of the lives of several artisans appear to have been expended’.29 Chinese craftsmen, for him, were ‘unproductive’ and ‘inefficient’. In his coverage of the ‘celebrated ivory balls’, he noted that, ‘the Chinese are capable of wasting any amount of time upon any triviality’: ‘Shee-King, of Macao, delights in wasting his own life, and the lives of others whom he employs, in carving a nest of ivory balls out of one solid ball, instead of obtaining a similar result (if the world must have these toys) by the regular tools, and simple means of ivory workmanship’.30 Tallis was not alone. Gibbs-Smith dismissed Chinese objects at the Great Exhibition as the product of a ‘stationary’ people: The curious workmanship of many articles bears witness to the sort of instinctive leaning which the Chinese have for the most difficult and delicate manual labour; but we need envy nothing they have, unless it be the abundance of some natural productions, especially silk. Their porcelain has been known from time immemorial, and in everything else the Chinese are so stationary that they may be considered as the most ancient workmen on earth. Among the articles which they displayed were some which were produced at a period nearly as remote as that of the deluge, and which, in truth, did not appear to be very dissimilar to those which they manufacture at the present day. (1950: 72)

‘Need envy nothing’ is a significant phrase. Up until the Opium Wars the British had looked upon China as a country full of things they desired. By 1851, the Chinese were considered to be ancient but hardly modern. The Great Exhibition at a fundamental level operated to define those who had and had not embraced this modernity.

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Late Arrivals: Exhibiting Edie’s Collection Probably by chance rather than design, Edie’s bronzes were placed in a most desirable location, indeed a prime position, within the great Crystal Palace. The pictorial record shows them proudly in the main avenue, close to the Crystal Fountain, at the very centre of the building.31 As visitors entered from the Prince of Wales Gate on Kensington Road they walked towards the main south entrance with the arched transept above, over a hundred feet high. This was the most important aisle, the ‘axial line of power’ (Auerbach 1999: 4). Osler’s Crystal Fountain, some twenty-seven feet high, was at the convergence of the transept and the main avenue. From the south entrance, Britain and its dependencies and colonies appeared on the left, with the non-British exhibitions on the right. India was encountered first, that most lavish marker of British imperial power. Opposite was China, the other great Asian civilization but the one that had long defied conventional colonization. As visitors processed via the transept past the Crystal Fountain, with China on their right, then turned onto the avenue, they could not fail to have encountered Major Edie’s collection. Queen Victoria herself visited the exhibition on several occasions, undoubtedly setting eyes upon the bronzes. On 27 May, she ‘walked up and down the whole length of the Nave, admiring the fine statues, and all the other exhibits’ (Fay 1951: 55). She visited the China

3.4 ‘View of the Tunis and China Courts at the Great Exhibition’ depicting the ‘Putuo Five’ from Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Chromolithograph. Department of Prints and Drawings, Tunis no. 3. PLXXXI, u.10.b. Copyright: V&A images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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court six days after the opening. In her own words: ‘To the Exhibition remaining there nearly two hours … We went to the courts allotted to Tunis and China, which are very interesting … In all these compartments there are likewise the raw products, dried fruits, perfumery, in fact everything that can be made in each country’.32 The Koh-i-Noor diamond, the most famous and popular single exhibit, was positioned at the start of the eastern section of the nave – as it happens just in front of Edie’s ensemble. Weighing 186.5 carats, it was guarded by a metal cage over six feet high, locked to the floor.33 An image in the Illustrated London News depicts a crowd gathered around it. Nearby, the Putuo Five bathed in the diamond’s reflected glory. The fact that the bronzes were placed along the avenue, at the entrance to the Tunis court, rather than within the China display itself, might at first seem strange, for they would have sat more logically in the court devoted to the place from which they came. Yet, as Auerbach argues, the separation of everyday, raw materials from more visually stunning exhibits was a recurrent feature and the physical arrangement of exhibits did not always echo the classifications constructed by the organizers (1999: 94). Produce described as ‘more artistic’ was located towards the aisles in order to give it prominence (Davis 1999: 136). The most celebrated exhibits also were gathered in the main nave. Contemporary illustrations reveal that large figurative sculpture – mostly Greco-Roman – occupied key vistas along the avenue. Rows of marble sculptures lined the transept as visitors entered, and were also laid out along the nave.34 Many stood on plinths along the edges of the thoroughfare, with ‘Pompeii-red’ curtains behind. The display of the Putuo Five, in such a fashion, with Edie’s red Chinese textile behind, echoed this design vocabulary. Yet although Edie’s collection was made to conform to the display conventions established for classical sculpture, their dark bronze surfaces contrasted with the white of Greco-Roman marble. Their strange forms also distinguished them from the more naturalistic depictions of the body in the ancient world. While the Edie ensemble undoubtedly presented a striking, visually intriguing display, there may have been another reason for their location. In the Dickinson chromolithograph, a Tunisian textile is seen jutting out above Edie’s silk banner; the fact that this matches the one on its right suggests that the Chinese objects were added after the exhibition had opened, and placed in front of the Tunis court. We noted earlier that Edie’s objects were not included in the various exhibition catalogues until after mid September. When Edie’s name was included, it was as the final China exhibitor – No. 40 – implying that he was the last to come forward with objects. Was the positioning in the main avenue simply due to the fact that there was nowhere else to put them? The three larger figures were put on the highest plinth, with Guanyin at the centre, Puxian on her left, and Wenshu on her right. Below were the two guardians, Weituo and Guangong, located on either side of the incense burner: the latter was in front of the rectangular white text panel. The elevation of these large statues enhanced their effect. The location of Guanyin at the top, flanked by

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Wenshu and Puxian, with the guardians below, was also appropriate in terms of the Buddhist hierarchy. Perhaps Major Edie had a hand in all this: after all, he must have observed the bronzes in situ. Though the Putuo Five were on open display in the main avenue, the area was cordoned off, maintaining the untouchability which they had enjoyed in the temples of Putuo. The backdrop to the whole ensemble was the large red textile with yellow embroidered decoration, framing the bronzes and endowing them with an added sense of significance. In Dickinson’s illustration, a woman with a yellow shawl and small child are shown reading the text to Edie’s Chinese objects as if to signify their power of curiosity to the visitor. Crucially, the labels accompanying this display are included in Dickinson’s depiction. While this was an artistic impression, it is nevertheless possible to make out, ‘Major Edie’, in large letters below the word ‘curtain’. Under this can be read ‘mineral’, and possibly ‘dyes’. The catalogue observed the following: ‘the colours [of the curtain] are supposed to be of mineral dyes, and appear to have the property of renewing themselves by excluding them from light’ (Cole 1851: 1425). There is no indication of where the information came from. Perhaps Edie thought up anything about the textile he considered would add interest. Certainly such a technical concept would have been of concern to the industrially minded organizers of the show. Below, on the label associated with the deity figures, the word ‘PATO’ can clearly be made out. In the official catalogue the following was recorded: Edie, Major – Proprietor. Bronze images from the sacred island of Pato, near the mouth of the Yang-tse-keang, on which river the ancient capital of China, Nankin, is situated. The largest figure is supposed to represent the Buddhist deity ‘Quon Yam’ (or Queen of Heaven). The particulars relative to this group are doubtless found in the interior of these figures, of very great antiquity, which have not been yet deciphered, and which remain in the possession of the exhibitor, who obtained the group from the native priests of the island, and brought them to this country. (Cole 1981: P1425, 40)

It is significant that Edie named himself ‘Proprietor’, a term denoting legal possession. None of the other individuals who lent Chinese objects referred to themselves in this way, but rather as ‘producers’, ‘importers’ or nothing at all. Edie alone seemed to need to underscore the fact that these precious objects undisputedly belonged to him. The details of Putuo’s location, near the mouth of the Yangzi, and the link to Nanjing described here, were all too familiar to this military officer. However, the transliteration of ‘Guanyin’ may provide further clues, for ‘Quon Yam’ is more of a Cantonese romanization than the Mandarin ‘Kuan yin’ (Guanyin). As we saw in the previous chapter, Edie had written ‘Kuan yin’ in his title page. Can we suppose from this that the Major did not construct the entry? He may have been ill and, indeed, as we have noted, he died less than a year after this event. Cantonese is spoken in south China and Hong Kong, and it may have been a resident of this colony who penned the text (although Edie did spend time in Hong Kong

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between 1842 and 1844). The description of the deity, however, is incorrect, for Guanyin is not the Queen of Heaven. The latter is Tian Hou (‘Tin Hau’ in Cantonese), a deity popular among the fisher folk of south China. The entry thus confuses both the identities of the goddesses and the sounds of their names. The text continues: The sacred island of Pato has been frequented from time immemorial by mandarins of great wealth and retired ministers of state, who, disappointed in their worldly expectations, or becoming old, have built temples, decorating them with the most splendid works of art, preparing their tombs in the same, where they were afterwards buried, and various priests, having attached themselves to these places of worship, have tended to their preservation. (Cole 1851, P1425, 40)

Edie, or whoever was responsible, seems to have misconceived the purpose of Buddhist temples. However, it is interesting that his collection had one of the most extensive entries in the China section, a pattern that would be followed over the next thirty or more years whenever the ensemble of bronzes was catalogued.

Interpreting Edie’s Collection We have already noted the aesthetic element to the display and the visual impact of these large figurative sculptures. The Great Exhibition’s selection criteria as conveyed to foreign exhibitors had specified ‘increased usefulness, improved forms and arrangements, superior quality or workmanship … beauty of design in form, or colour, or both with reference to utility’ (cited in Davis 1999: 159). The five Chinese deity figures may have been conceptualized in a similar way to the Greek objects, as sculpture. Yet in originating from an ‘Oriental’ country, they would have ranked lower in the aesthetic hierarchy than the achievements of the Greco-Roman world. Furthermore, while Guanyin was an almost life-size figurative statue, her twenty-two outstretched arms and strange crossed-legged posture doubtless appeared strange, heathen even, alongside the more familiar white marble standing figures of European antiquity, the pinnacles of aesthetic achievement. The Buddhist bronzes, arms in the air, holding unknown symbols, seated on exotic animals, would no doubt have been considered as curiosities. But were they more than this? Edie’s objects may have been viewed in terms of their technical achievements – a central tenet of the Great Exhibition. Davis points out how statuary in the main avenue was used to demonstrate ‘new techniques of colouration or new materials’ (1999: 159). We have already seen how information about the textile in both exhibitionary text and catalogue highlighted the special properties of mineral dyes. Ffrench notes that textiles were generally emphasized at the Great Exhibition, as they neatly demonstrated stages of development. But metalwork specialists would certainly have appreciated the Edie ensemble in terms of the technical achievement in casting bronze. Although we

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saw earlier that works of ‘art’ were placed in the transept and the main avenue, on the whole this was ‘art as applied to industry’.35 In truth, the Putuo Five could have been categorized in any number of ways. The jurors’ reports classed objects in terms of (amongst others), ‘metallurgy’, ‘textile’ and ‘sculpture’, all of which would have been relevant to aspects of the Edie ensemble. They might also, of course, have been interpreted in relation to religion. The exhibition label, the catalogue entry, and even the Illustrated London News all referred to their origins in Putuo. The caption to an image of the part of the avenue where the deity figures were displayed in the Illustrated London News noted them as ‘Chinese bronzes from the Sacred Island’. Pagani notes that Chinese objects at the Great Exhibition were interpreted in different ways: ‘as refined or barbarous, as quaintly timeless or a testimony to a lacklustre civilisation impervious to Victorian ideas of progress. In either case, a comfortable sense of military, and above all social and political, superiority, marked British attitudes to China’ (1998: 39). Despite their location some way from the China Court, the Putuo Five would have been essentialized as from a country subservient to the industrializing powers of the West. These were, after all, the war trophies of a British soldier and in this triumphalist display of Western achievements, they would have functioned fundamentally as symbols of the power of one country to dominate another. Benedict argues that in the display of artefacts as trophies ‘the power relationship is naked. The conqueror displays the conquered and/or his arms’ (1994: 30). Here, Edie was the conqueror, his name emblazoned on the text panel, visible from afar. Whatever the interpretations ascribed to the bronzes – and with so many onlookers there would have been a great many – their previous lives as revered and animate Buddhist deities were now eclipsed by the world’s greatest imperial spectacle.

Judging Edie’s Collection Major Edie did not receive a prize for his display at the Great Exhibition. Neither did the ensemble receive an ‘honourable mention’ in the heavy volumes of juror’s reports. The list of awards was organized alphabetically according to name of exhibitor (all being European). China, though, did not warrant much attention.36 The country which invented porcelain eight hundred years before Europe, was granted merely an honourable mention for this material.37 With their archaic presence and elaborate bejewelled decoration, the Putuo Five may have stood out as excessively ornamented to judges who valued utility and disdained irrelevant detail. In the Buddhist place of worship, the precise iconography of these statues had been of paramount importance in endowing them with meaning. Yet once transported to this Victorian emporium of manufactures, Buddhist criteria were meaningless. The judges simply lacked any yardstick against which these extraordinary religious entities could be measured.

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3.5 ‘Guangong, Weituo and Incense Burner’. Reproduced in the Reports by the Jurors, for the Great Exhibition. 4 vols, MDCCCLI, London: Spicer Bros, p. 1333. Copyright: V&A images/ Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Strangely, however, the two smaller guardian figures – Weituo and Guangong – were photographed and had an entire page devoted to them in the jurors’ reports.38 They appear opposite the ‘Report on miscellaneous manufactures and small wares’, but are not mentioned in the text. The formal judging had lasted six weeks from the beginning of the Exhibition and awards were made known on 16 July 1851 (Davis 1999: 165). Considering this, it is possible that Edie’s collection arrived after the medals were issued, and that the jurors felt that his Chinese objects should still be included in some way. Perhaps Weituo, Guangong and the incense burner were selected as the smallest members of the group, and the easiest to convey to the camera. It would have been time consuming, complex and labour intensive to dismantle and reassemble the three large bodhisattvas, particularly Guanyin with her twenty-two arms, each with a detachable symbol, for an official photograph. This 1851 image is a fascinating record: though the forms are blurred, it enables us to compare their condition in the mid nineteenth century with their state in years to come.

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Pilgrimage and Ritual at the Temple of Industry A thread running through this book is the comparison of the spaces occupied by the Putuo Five during their lives first in China and then in the West. In this section, therefore, I briefly explore some of the similarities between the sacred and reverential environments that surrounded their display in the Crystal Palace with their original location in the Buddhist temple. Drawing on the work of Carol Duncan (1995) in particular, notions of ritual and pilgrimage – fundamental, as we have seen, to the sculptures’ existence on Putuo – will be discussed in relation to this extraordinary exhibitionary event. The first point to note is that the physical construct and space of the Crystal Palace was designed to evoke a sense of awe and reverence as well as to promote the dominant notion of progress: the enormous edifice acted as frame from which to emanate the exhibitionary concerns with grandeur, authority and power. The building clearly signalled the glorification of progress: it was self-consciously a place of enlightenment, an instrument of education and inculcation of belief in Western industry. It was also massive, comprising around nineteen acres and affording space for nine miles of tables (Greenhalgh 1988: 12; Fay 1951: 95). This was the biggest building in London and the largest enclosed space on earth (Auerbach 1999: 32). Its location was also significant – Hyde Park, the heart of London, the centre of the colonial world. In the minutes of the Committee meetings, the city was consciously referred to as the ‘Capital of the Empire’.39 Like the mass of people who over the centuries had flocked to worship Guanyin on Putuo, so this Exhibition became a modern pilgrimage site, a secular cathedral devoted to faith in Western technology. The language of reverence was evident everywhere – the ‘Temple of Industry’,40 the ‘shrine of industry’,41 the ‘shrine to manufactured things’ (Black 2000: 10). It was the satirical magazine, Punch, which gave the ‘Crystal Palace’ its fairy-like name.42 The Times described the opening on 1 May as: ‘the first morning since the creation of the world that all peoples have assembled from all parts of the world and done a common act’. Over twenty thousand visitors mobbed the exhibition on that first day and throughout its duration people from all backgrounds travelled to London (Auerbach 1999: 1, 9). From its inception the organizing committee was concerned to appeal to the working classes. Industrialists made a concerted effort to mobilize their workers to visit, and some even financed the trip. The Exhibition occurred at a moment when Britain’s railways were rapidly expanding and thus was able to attract people from all social classes and from far and wide (Fay 1951: 76). Indeed, over three-quarters of a million travelled to the capital on special excursion trains to visit the event, this representing the largest movement of population ever known in Britain (Auerbach 1999: 139). Overall, the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park drew in some six million visitors, almost a fifth of the entire British population, during its five-and-a- half month lifespan, many of whom had never previously travelled to London, nor even been out of their immediate locale (Auerbach 1999: 1; Davis 1999: 171).43 With these numbers of paying entrants,

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it is not surprising that the Great Exhibition made such a large profit.44 The surplus of £186,000 bought eighty-seven acres of land in South Kensington (Davis 1999: 205). Various writers have characterized such international exhibitions, of which the Great Exhibition was truly the first, as ‘the destination of modern pilgrimages’ (Gilbert 1994: 23); for Benjamin they are ‘sites of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish’.45 A pilgrimage, after all, is a special journey to see or experience something remarkable, especially something of exalted purpose or moral significance. On Putuo Island, year after year, decade after decade, pilgrims had travelled in their hundreds of thousands to bear homage to the Goddess of Compassion. Many of those who flocked to London in their millions in 1851 doubtless found the Exhibition a transforming experience. The Crystal Palace was redolent with the devices of sacred architecture. As with a cathedral, it was structured in a cruciform shape, with a grand avenue, the ‘nave’, crossed at right angles by a ‘transept’.46 Indeed, the interior’s long corridors, interior sanctuaries and extraordinarily high roof, led The Times to make a direct comparison with a cathedral. The acoustics at the opening reminded observers of the aura of such sacred sites (Davis 1999: 126, 134). Stained glass from different countries hung along the northern wall of the gallery of the eastern side and stretched the length of the ‘foreign half ’. There was a sense of altered reality once inside, no doubt stimulated by the glass panels (Davis 1999: 136). Light entered from above and from the sides, bathing the displays during the hot summer months. People spoke of the ‘magical effects created by being in a seemingly transparent building’ (Davis 1999: 134). Queen Victoria found a ‘fairy-like appearance’ created by the sunlight playing through the transept.47 Ffrench referred to the ‘extraordinary luminosity’: ‘Diaphanous, brilliant, scintillating, with the sunlight flooding through the translucent aisles among palms, music, flowers … and statuary’ (1950: 182, 195). While, in some respects, the sense of awe may be related to the lavish and ornate architectural spaces of Chinese temples, visually, however, the intensity of light in the enormous glass palace contrasted sharply with the darkened, incense filled milieu of Buddhist altars. The objects on display, particularly the grand statues lining the avenue, were in some ways analogous to sacred imagery in a church. Those such as Benedict (1994: 28) and Yengoyan (1994: 79) have written of the highly ritualized nature of these exhibitions. Duncan, above all, suggests affinities between the display of art and ritual: ‘The situation resembles … certain medieval cathedrals where pilgrims followed a structured narrative route through the interior, stopping at prescribed points for prayer or contemplation … museums offer well-developed ritual scenarios, most often in the form of art historical narratives that unfold through a sequence of spaces’ (1995: 12). For Duncan, a ritual experience is intended to be transformatory. It has a purpose and an end, it creates or renews a sense of identity. The power of ritual to construct a frame and provide an experience distinct from everyday life is linked to particular features of spaces in which rituals are enacted. We have already seen

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the sequencing of space in the Crystal Palace – the arrangement whereby one half was British, the other foreign, and the organization into national courts. This, in other words, was an environment programmed for ritual through the narrative structure of the site. Just as there exists a route through the Buddhist temple, and particular types of rituals enacted, so too there were expected codes of movement and behaviour around the vast exhibitionary complex of the Crystal Palace.48 In the Great Exhibition many exhibits were placed on plinths, with space around them, not dissimilar to the Putuo Five’s installation in the temple. Some were cordoned off, rendering visitors unable to touch. Such display conventions and exhibitionary technology are designed to create a sense of wonder, just as they are in other sacred sites. This was a new arena for the contemplation of the five Buddhist statues, one that bore some similarities to their first home in China, but one that was clearly predicated upon very different notions of space and value.

China at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham The removal of goods from the Great Exhibition began on 16 October and lasted three weeks. By 11 November the building was empty (Ffrench 1950: 277). Yet this would not be the end of the sojourn of the Putuo Five in the edifice known as the Crystal Palace, for they were included in its even larger secondary manifestation in Sydenham which opened in June 1854, two years after William Edie had died. In his introduction to the sale of the Hertz collection at Sotheby’s in 1859, Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard Gerhard – who purchased the large textile at the sale of the Bram Hertz collection in May 1854 – had noted that the Chinese bronzes were exhibited in the ‘Crystal Palace at Norwood’.49 But here they have not been so easy to find. In its early years Chinese objects were marginalized from the dominant textual and visual documentation of the building. They were not listed in Owen Jones’s detailed list of statuary in 1853, which covered Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Byzantine, Medieval and Renaissance sculpture;50 De La Motte’s evocative photographs of the displays (1851–55) covered the main courts, and not China.51 While Routledge’s guide of 1854 briefly listed a range of Chinese objects, including ‘grotesque figures’, as well as ‘all manner of those curious and grotesque knickknacks and trifles in which the genius and cunning of the Celestial Empire delight to revel’ – it has not been possible to identify the Putuo Five here for sure.52 The following year, The Crystal Palace Herald was reporting that the minor Indian and Chinese courts were ‘hardly known and seldom visited’.53 It is clear that China took up a less prominent position in the overall configuration of space in Sydenham than it had in Hyde Park. Asian objects were not placed in the main courts devoted to the ‘fine arts’ – these were for Pompeii, Egypt, Greece, Rome and the Renaissance. According to Green, a Chinese Room was located off the India court, and, by 1856, this was situated over the Egyptian and Greek courts.54 Yet, paradoxically, the Putuo Five would have suited well the Crystal Palace’s emphasis on life-size, dramatic sculpture. In Sydenham, statues lined the main

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avenue on plinths, similar to Hyde Park in 1851, yet were surrounded by even more imposing plants – and it is possible to imagine the Putuo bronzes on display in south London’s fabulous glass palace amongst this exuberant foliage. *

*

*

This chapter has examined how China as ‘other’ was manufactured in mid–nineteenth-century England. In the ensuing chapters, we explore further images as we follow the trajectories of the Putuo Five through British collections and displays – identifying the different ways in which the idea of ‘Cathay’ was fashioned and refashioned in the West.

Notes 1. MacKenzie, in Greenhalgh (1988: ix). 2. The exhibition was organized by Prince Albert, Henry Cole, Francis Fuller, Charles Dilke and other members of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. 3. See Greenhalgh (1988: 23); Davis (1999: 34); Fay (1951: 8); Ffrench (1950: 19). Karl Marx described the exhibition as a symbol of the capitalist fetishization of commodities. Richard Cobden, leader of the Free Trade movement, served as the Exhibition’s commissioner. 4. February, 1850: 44. 5. This included Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Sardinia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. 6. Both Auerbach (1999: 91) and Gibbs-Smith (1950: 33) give the figures of 13,937 exhibitors: 7,381 from the British Empire and 6,556 that were Foreign. There were over a hundred thousand exhibits. 7. Denmark was allocated the same as China, 2,500 square feet; Belgium had 15,000; Mexico 1,000; Greece 1,000; Spain 2,500; Norway and Sweden 2,500; Holland 5,000; and Peru 500. In terms of the ‘colonies’, Canada had 4,000; Ceylon 1,500; and Hong Kong nil. 8. The minutes outline, in some detail, the practicalities – and difficulties – of organizing the Exhibition. Much was still not received by the opening date of 1 May. The preface to the main official catalogue admitted that many exhibits were not in place; objects were added and changed even during the summer months (Davis 1999: 159). 9. Edie left India in September 1850, arriving in England around March 1851. 10. I am grateful to Colindale Library for confirming this. 11. The first and largest catalogue for the Great Exhibition was published for the opening on 1 May; the 2nd catalogue was on 1 July; the 3rd on 1 August; and the 4th on 15 September. 12. I have been unable to track down the original exhibitors’ forms, which included details and exhibitionary requirements. 13. Extract of a Communication from the Imperial Commissioner to H.E. Her Majesty’s Plenipotentiary, 22 June 1850, Letters 1850–1, Volume V, RA–RC 1851. True extract (signed) Frederick Harvey. Prince Albert’s Archive.

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14. Davis writes: ‘this rejection seemed … both loathsome and absurd’ (1999: 105). 15. Abstract of letters, p. 285. Prince Albert’s Archive. 16. Appendix C (p. 289): ‘The Governor of Hong Kong, showing that no goods will be sent from that Colony, but that a subscription has been made in support of the Exhibition’ (p. 290), ibid. 17. 24 December 1850, 1851 Exhibition Correspondence, 50 (nos 28–69), 10–27 February 1851, ibid. 18. 5 December 1850, letter from Rutherford Alcock, British Consulate in Shanghai, 1851 Exhibition Correspondence, ibid. 19. ibid. 20. ibid. 21. Abstract of Letters, 5 March 1851, p. 314 (appendix E), ibid. 22. ‘The secretary to the EIC, transmitting a copy of a letter from Mr Fortune, at Shanghai, in China, together with a list of specimens of the Natural Productions of that country which have been shipped for the EIC’. Abstract of Letters, January 1851, p. 293, ibid. 23. Letter dated 5 November, from Hewett, 1851 Exhibition Correspondence, 1–5 November 1851, 665 (615–670), Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. 24. ibid. 25. In fact Hewett spent more than £2,000 and petitioned the Royal Commission in this letter to reimburse him. ibid. 26. A Chinese family was also recorded at the Exhibition. Queen Victoria’s diary (18 August) noted: ‘At 12 we went down into the Drawing Room with all the children, ladies and gentlemen to see a Chinese family who have just arrived, coming on purpose to see the Exhibition … I annex a little sketch to give a faint idea of them … The man on seeing me performed the usual very singular salutations’ (cited in Fay 1951: 67). 27. Printed at 15 and 16 Gough Square by Vizetelly and sold by him there for one shilling. 28. 6,861 (Davis 1999: 165). 29. 1852, Div. 1, Vol. 1: p. 118. 30. ibid. 31. Location in the East of Transept, L.M. 40, 41, No. 40–42. 32. Queen Victoria’s diary, 7 May 1851 (Fay 1951: 51). 33. As Kriegel writes: ‘the most celebrated display that was associated with the subcontinent in 1851, the coveted diamond ‘koh-i-noor’, or ‘mountain of light’. In the Crystal Palace, the gem’s ‘worshippers’ made a ‘spectacle of themselves’ as they gazed’ (2001: 165–66). 34. Much of this however was criticized as second rate (Ffrench 1950: 223–24). 35. Davis notes: ‘Few of the objects were there solely for aesthetic reasons but rather to show how new techniques, material or machinery could be used to produce art, or conversely, how art could be used to improve industrial goods’ (1999: 59). 36. It is interesting to note that one of the Associate Jurors, whose name is listed at the front of the book, is Natalis Rondot, France (Juror class XXVI), ‘Late of the Embassy to China’. Reports by the Jurors: 1333. 37. In Class I (p. XXXV III). 38. Reports by the Jurors: op. cit. 1333. 39. February (1850: 55). Royal Commission Archives. 40. The Times gave it this name (Auerbach 1999: 96). 41. Review on Monday 13 October 1851 talked of it as ‘the shrine of industry’ (Fay 1951: 133). 42. Fay (1951: 15) Punch, vol. xix: 183.

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43. The visitor figures are indeed astounding. Over 141 days the number was 6,039,195; with an average of 42,831 per day. By mid June the daily number of visitors was approximately 63,000, a figure that would remain constant throughout the summer until the last week in October when over 100,000 people went in each day (Davis 1999: 171). Ffrench records how there were nearly 110,000 people on 7 October (1950: 273). One million came from London – almost half the city’s population (Davis 1999: 171–72). 44. The receipts at the door amounted to £356,278 (French 1950: 265). 45. Cited in Rydell and Gwinn (1994: 1). 46. A transept being either of the two wings of a cruciform church at right angles to the nave. The Great Exhibition catalogue noted that ‘the nave is a grand avenue 4 ft high and 72 ft wide crossing the transept at right angles’ (Cole 1851: 51). 47. Diary 18 February 1851, from Fay (1951: 44). 48. Duncan refers to the kind of experiences we have in museums as similar to a ritual, though this might be unspectacular: ‘it may be something an individual enacts alone by following a prescribed route, by repeating a prayer, by recalling a narrative’ (1995: 12). Fundamentally, ritual involves an element of performance but a ritual performance does not have to be a formal spectacle: ‘A ritual site of any kind is a place programmed for the enactment of something’ (1995: 12). 49. Gerhard (1859: xxiv). 50. Inventory for insurance, 28 November 1853. P.P.T. 15. London Metropolitan Archives. 51. London Metropolitan Archives: 35.8 CRY. 52. Routledge (1854: 166). 53. November 1855: 540. I am extremely grateful to Melvyn Harrison, Chairman of the Crystal Palace Foundation, for supplying this reference and for all his help with trying to track down the Buddhist images on display at the Crystal Palace. 54. 2002: 83. See also Phillips (1856: 67).

CHAPTER 4 Curiosities, Antiquities, Art Treasure, Commodities: 1854–1867 At each point in its movement through space and time, an object has the potential to shift from one category to another and, in doing so, to slide along the slippery line that divides art from artefact from commodity. (Steiner 2001: 224)

In the two decades following their high profile performance at the Great Exhibition, the lives of the objects took on new and unexpected turns. It was in this period that they passed through the hands of a number of private collectors and as they were bought and sold, displayed in museums and exhibitions, their biographies became ever more distinctive. In this chapter we follow the peregrinations of the statues across the British landscape during the 1850s and 1860s, examining how their meanings were susceptible to change more than at any other time in their lives. During this phase of their existence, the Putuo Five were caught up in new social interactions. Their meanings were reconfigured largely through antiquarian collectors: Bram Hertz (b. 1794), Joseph Mayer (1803–1886) and (briefly) Charles Roach Smith (1807–1890). They passed from one collector to the next, each time gaining in prominence as they entered larger and more renowned assemblages. From William Edie, the almost unknown soldier-collector, they moved to the cabinet of a successful gem dealer, Bram Hertz. From Hertz, they travelled north to the famed museum of the Liverpool goldsmith, Joseph Mayer. During his guardianship, the images were re-conceptualized by two key events: the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (1857) and a Sotheby’s sale (1859). In the private collections and public displays, the Chinese bronzes often found themselves cheek by jowl with a great many other exotic objects, just as they had been at the Great Exhibition. But here, rather than performing as ‘articles of industry’ to an audience of millions, they signified instead the connoisseurship and tastes of mid-nineteenth-century antiquarian collectors. The Putuo Five quickly became seasoned travellers during their first decade in England. They criss-crossed London, from Edie’s Georgian apartments off the

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Strand, packed up for the short journey across London to Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition, and back to the Strand before moving on to the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. At some point they were conveyed by cart or carriage to Hertz’s museum, near the fashionable Regent Street, and then around the corner to Sotheby’s in 1854. In late 1856 or early 1857, they probably enjoyed their first railway ride when they were sent north to Liverpool to Joseph Mayer’s Egyptian Museum. Within months, Guanyin was off again, journeying east to Manchester for a six-month residence as an ‘art treasure’. Here, she no doubt experienced the world’s first passenger railway between Liverpool and Manchester. Two years later, all five were despatched back to the south for a second auction at Sotheby’s. After being acquired by Charles Roach Smith at this sale, they found their way into Joseph Mayer’s possession once more in Liverpool. Though it has been possible to reconstruct some of these journeys, for much of this period one has to simply imagine the precarious movements by carriage and train endured by these large, heavy and multi-faceted bronzes – and in and out of boxes and crates – across the cities and towns of Victorian Britain. This was also the period when part of the Edie ensemble was dispersed, as is often the fate of a collection when their originator dies. The biographies of the individual objects thus developed further as the original collection became scattered. The great backcloth, the incense burner and the manuscripts from inside the bronzes, displayed at the Great Exhibition, did not participate in the prominent collections and exhibitionary spheres that we describe subsequently and have not, to this day, been found.

In the Cabinet of Gems: Objects of Bram Hertz, 1854–1856 At some point between 1852 and 1854, the ownership of the deities was transferred to the German Jewish diamond dealer, Bram Hertz (b. 1794). Hertz had moved from Hanover to London in 1837, the first year of Victoria’s reign. Referring to himself as a ‘sculptor and jeweller’ in 1851,1 he changed this the following year to ‘jeweller and diamond merchant’.2 By 1853, he had dropped ‘jeweller’ altogether – an indication perhaps of success in business.3 Marjorie Caygill has described Hertz as a ‘shadowy figure’– the Edinburgh Magazine, she notes, referred to him derisively as: ‘a little, round, oily-faced German … remarkably fond of tobacco’ (Caygill 2010). The 1851 census records him as living with his wife, Amelia, and two daughters at 32 Argyll Street, St James (Westminster) – a prestigious address, between Oxford Street and Regent Street.4 It would be over the next decade in his newly adopted country that Hertz went on to develop his renowned collection of antiquarian treasures. Hertz was certainly a man with an eye for the beautiful, the delicate, the rare and the expensive, and he defined, through his choice of collection, aspirations to high taste. His public persona was embellished by a loan of cameos to the ‘Exhibition of

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Ancient and Mediaeval Art’ at the Society of Arts in 1850 organized by the great connoisseur, Augustus Wollaston Franks (Gibson 1988b: 11).5 Described as the ‘precursor of the Great Exhibition’, this event drew on the ‘cabinets and galleries of the greatest connoisseurs in the Kingdom’.6 The classical gems that Hertz had lent were more highly valued than Anglo-Saxon antiquities or medieval ivories at this time (Gibson 1988b: 11). Indeed, the collecting of engraved gems had been carried out with passion by scholars of the antique a century before, reaching a peak in the 1770s and 1780s. Cameos or intaglios were considered essential to the understanding of classical history (Rudoe 2003: 132–33). Hertz’s collection, assembled between the 1830s and 1850s, thus represented long-established European taste (Hening 1988: 94). In 1851, Hertz would have no doubt visited the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, which was only walking distance from his home in Argyll Street,7 and he surely noted William Edie’s large Chinese figurative sculptures displayed so prominently in the main avenue. The gem dealer must have made a beeline for the Koh-I-Noor, the largest known diamond in the world and the ‘star’ of the show. Adjacent was Major Edie’s ensemble. One wonders whether Hertz approached Edie to purchase the bronzes or if the retired soldier sought out the dealer and offered them? Perhaps on Edie’s death, in June 1852, his collection was sold off. The Chinese sculptures were not included in Hertz’s collection of antiquities when published as a catalogue in 1851,8 and so, it would seem, he did not obtain them until 1852 at the earliest. In a catalogue to Hertz’s collection in 1857, Dr Koner had expressed the rationale underlying Hertz’s accumulation of objects: The collection of Antiquities, described in the present Catalogue, was formed with the intention of gathering, so far as possible, the scattered monuments of ancient art, in order to illustrate the rise, progress and decline of the Fine Arts, and to obtain satisfactory corroboration of the veracity of ancient traditions respecting the religious habits, arts, and employment of bygone nations and the achievements of illustrious men and heroes. (Koner 1857: iii)

Hertz’s collection thus was assembled with the quest to demonstrate links between ancient artefacts, and to chart the progress and decline of the ‘fine arts’. Bennett notes how the idea of a collection harnessed to reveal an ‘orderly illustration of human history’ was becoming increasingly important in the mid nineteenth century (2004: 167). There was a desire to define the impulse of collectors against the randomness of ‘curiosity’ and towards the purposefulness of illustrating, through judicious choice of artefacts, wider principles of history, development and progress. By 1851, Hertz was a corresponding member of the Archaeological Institute of Rome, and Edward Gerhard, co-director of the Institute, wrote of him that year: That gentleman has lived in London for a number of years, during nearly twenty of which he has most judiciously availed himself of the many opportunities of acquiring

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beautiful works of art, which through the death or satiety of rich collectors, occur more frequently in England than even in Italy … By purchasing beautiful and costly articles belonging to all periods of art, Mr Hertz has acquired a practised eye, and a power of discrimination which he has further exercised by making a selection from the acquisitions he has secured, in order to sift out the collection. (Gerhard 1851: ai)

Hertz thus had a reputation for acquiring ‘beautiful’ objects via the estates of deceased collectors and he may well have obtained the bronzes and the textile after Edie’s death in such a manner. His grouping of gems and antiquities was certainly noteworthy in the museological landscape of the time: the catalogue to the sale of the Hertz collection at Sotheby’s in 1859, in particular, used the terms ‘celebrated’ and ‘well-known’. Gerhard continued: This collection is not indeed to be considered as having been formed on the methodical plan of a professional collector, but rather as a brilliant and instructive display of antiquities of every kind belonging to an important department, being both most valuable and numerous, and suitable to the choices of all collectors, A Cabinet of Gems. (ibid)

Gerhard portrays Hertz as something of a virtuoso and the language is worthy of note – ‘brilliant’, ‘instructive’, a ‘Cabinet of Gems’.9 Considering the description of Hertz’s collection – his interest in small, delicate things – one can imagine rooms filled with drawers, shelves, cupboards and cabinets, into which the cameos and other treasures would have been arranged. The Edinburgh Magazine gave an account of his museum: ‘the most curious repository of nick-nacks the world contains – being the gatherings of thirty years, at a cost of thirty thousand pounds’ stored ‘from cellar to garret’ at Hertz’s premises in Argyll Street and Great Marlborough Street’ (Caygill, ibid). In these Georgian apartments, he may have displayed the Putuo Five, lit at night by oil lamps and flickering candles, in a way reminiscent perhaps of Sir John Soane’s House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Considering the size of many of the objects, one can also suppose that the five dark figurative bronzes – particularly the life-size Guanyin with twenty-two outstretched arms – stood out dramatically. In his discussion of early art collections, MacGregor has noted how ‘the scale of life-size or larger sculptures was quite at odds with the intimate surroundings of the cabinet’ (2007: 71).10 The meanings of the five Buddhist sculptures would now be formed in relation to other objects in Hertz’s collection. Apart from the Chinese bronzes, three fine Mexican turquoise mosaics and one Indian object,11 all other things were from Europe and the ‘ancient world’. The Putuo Five, in this sense, may seem to have sat uneasily in his large ensemble. As well as the gems, cameos and amulets, there were objects made of silver and bronze (Greek, Etruscan and Roman statues), Greek vases, Roman paintings and frescoes from Pompeii and Herculaneum, Assyrian, Babylonian, Sassanian and Persian cylinders and seals, portraits of Roman emperors, Egyptian glass and wooden carvings. Here we see an emphasis

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on detailed craftsmanship, on working with precious materials – silver, bronze, ivory, gems. There were a great many small objects: the set of five cast-bronze statues from Putuo, as we just noted, were possibly amongst the largest, standing out in the mass of objects. Yet, despite their size, the bronzes’ detailed decoration would have accorded with Hertz as a sculptor and jeweller. Some of the five had originally been studded with jewels: both Guanyin and Weituo, for example, had gems in their foreheads, refinements that would have drawn the dealer in precious stones.12 In Hertz’s cabinet, the Chinese sculptures would have encapsulated very different meanings than in the Buddhist temple or the Great Exhibition. Here they were objects of sculpted craftsmanship and of financial value. They would have signified too the taste and identity of this antiquarian collector. It is evident that Hertz possessed the Putuo Five, along with Edie’s textile, by 1854, for they were put up for auction at Sotheby’s from 29 to 31 May that year. The Morning Chronicle on 29 May 1854 made specific mention of the Putuo Five: ‘The famous bronze Buddhist deities which were so prominently displayed in the Chinese Department at the Great Exhibition are included in the collection’.13 The front cover of the catalogue announced, ‘a very interesting portion of the valuable and important collection of antiquities, the property of B. Hertz, Esq., Corresponding Member of the Archaeological Institute at Rome’, with key objects highlighted on the front cover, including: ‘Superb & unique Chinese Bronze figures, From the Sacred Island of Pato, near the Mouth of the Yang-tse Kiang, obtained from the Native priests of the Island. A magnificent embroidered silk curtain, from a temple near Ning po. These latter objects were brought to this country by Major Edie, and exhibited by him at the Crystal Palace in 1851.’14 Inside, the catalogue entry provided a lengthy description of the five deities. It is an interesting comment on salesroom practice that the wording used by Sotheby’s in their 1859 catalogue of Hertz’s collection was identical. In 1854 the Putuo Five were, however, left unsold, though the textile was purchased, as we have seen, by Gerhard. The consequences of the commoditization of these Buddhist deities at Sotheby’s auction house will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter. Apart from highlighting the bronzes in the publicity surrounding the 1854 sale, Hertz also mentioned them in a letter to the statues’ next owner, the Liverpool goldsmith Joseph Mayer, in July 1856. In offering his collection to Mayer, he noted the ‘specimens of Mexican, Chinese and Indian workmanship, the latter three extremely rare’.15 As Hertz had no other Chinese objects of note at the time, this must be a reference to the Putuo set. The dealer had been in correspondence with Mayer earlier that year regarding the disposal of his collection and he had even visited Mayer’s ‘Egyptian Museum’ in Liverpool on 1 July.16 In the letter of 23 July, Hertz wrote of progress in ‘finding gentlemen who would be inclined to promote the purchase of my museum of antiquities’.17 Hertz’s tone revealed a sense of urgency. It seemed absolutely necessary for someone to secure his collection ‘for a public museum at Liverpool, as never a similar opportunity will present itself ’.18 The cost however for Mayer alone was prohibitive and it was acquired instead by a consortium of Liverpool businessmen

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who planned to give the objects, as well as other antiquities, ‘as a complete cabinet’ to the city.19 Having received no response from Mayer, Hertz wrote impatiently – and rather manipulatively – a week later to report on a visit by a representative of the committee of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition: [who] … was quite surprised to find such a complete museum, and gave me to understand, that if it was offered as a whole, he had no doubt that Manchester would purchase it. He said they certainly had only made a plan to make an exhibition of objects lent to them, but then they were not aware that there was such a facility, of obtaining a whole museum at once, an occurrence of which they ought to take advantage of.20

Hertz insisted however ‘flattering the proposal’, he would ‘greatly prefer’ to see his collection in Liverpool ‘as it would be incorporated with your valuable museum, which would add to its importance’.21 This attempt to inveigle Mayer into purchasing the collection was thus predicated in no small way on the old rivalry between these two northern conurbations. While Mayer’s response is unknown, the Liverpool goldsmith had clearly agreed to purchase, for in October 1856 Hertz wrote to Mayer with the address of the bank in London to which payment should be made.22 Later that year, or in early 1857, the Putuo Five would have travelled on their first long-distance rail trip up north to Liverpool to enter the prestigious Mayer Museum. Meanwhile, The Times reported in March 1857 that Hertz was leaving England due to ill health, to search for a warmer climate (Caygill, op. cit.). Mayer’s purchase of Hertz’s objects has been described as his ‘most ambitious, indeed grandiose’ purchase (Gibson 1988b: 11). The gems alone consisted of almost one thousand eight hundred items, both ancient and modern (Hening 1988: 94). The price paid – £12,000 – was exceptionally high and this, it seems, caused the consortium to fall apart.23 White argues that this collapse signified the end of Mayer as a buyer of big collections.24 While ownership remained with Mayer, in an attempt to recoup some of the capital, by March 1857 part of Hertz’s collection was back on the London market, auctioned via Phillips.25 This did not, however, include the Chinese bronzes. As Mayer wrote in the preface to this sale catalogue: To select antiquities judiciously is a difficult task. Not only is much deception practised by unprincipled dealers to baffle which requires an exercised eye and long experience, but the collector has to avoid the danger of encumbering his collection with objects that neither possess merit as works of art, nor represent any mythological or historical subject, and consequently possess no archaeological value … It is because perfectly free of all such imperfection, that the present collection deserves especial consideration; every favourable opportunity of adding to its importance, and completing it, which has occurred within the last twenty years, has been eagerly seized by the proprietor, and the result of his endeavours has received unqualified approbation of the most distinguished archaeologists. (1857: iii)

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Mayer, it seems, had high regard for Hertz’s collection, justifying the dealer’s taste on the basis of the consensus of the ‘distinguished’ archaeological community. When Mayer sold pieces formerly belonging to him he was careful to recognize it as Hertz’s collection, paying tribute to this collector’s judgement. Yet others were not so complimentary, and indeed cast aspersions on Hertz’s ability to distinguish the authentic. For example, King wrote: The sole object of its founder [Bram Hertz] was, in unreasoning emulation of Stosch’s celebrated cabinet, to accumulate every type ever engraved, when it was swollen to its enormous extent by the frequent admission of spurious works (through his want of all critical knowledge) … In truth such a motley assemblage of works of every degree of merit (though perhaps desirable in a national museum, as illustrating in a continuous series the history of art, provided only they be duly classified), is quite out of character with a private cabinet, where the aim of the possessor should be to admit only a limited number of works and those the best of their kind. (cited in Henig 1988: 95)

King wrote elsewhere that ‘the Hertz Collection derived almost everything of value that appeared amidst its multifarious rubbish’ from Dr Nott’s collection (Henig 1988: 95). Not all of Hertz’s objects were esteemed at the British Museum either. In 1848, he had offered a collection of 205 gemstones for the sum of £200, which was turned down.26 Three years later, he proposed ‘Medallions’ for £40 and later that year, a specimen of turquoise for £18. These too were declined.27 Existence in the Hertz collection was a relatively short-lived episode in the biographies of the five bronzes, and their lives certainly took on more meanings following their relocation to Joseph Mayer. In particular, they starred in two key public events. First, in early 1857, Guanyin was transported to Manchester for display at the Art Treasures Exhibition, the largest such temporary event ever held in Britain. Just under two years later, all five travelled back to London and were put up for sale once more as part of the ‘Hertz collection, the property of Joseph Mayer’ by Sotheby’s auction house.

Art Treasure: May to October 1857 A mere five-and-a-half years on from the Great Exhibition in London, Guanyin appeared in yet another extraordinary exhibitionary event, the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition. This show lasted six months and, like 1851, attracted an astonishing number of visitors: over 1.3 million, amongst them the luminaries of the land – Charles Dickens and John Ruskin.28 For the second time in only six years, Guanyin was the object of the gaze of millions – not to mention the Queen of England herself. Not only was the Manchester Art Treasures the largest temporary exhibition ever, it was also the biggest art show ever held in Britain (Rees Leahy 2007: 28; Whitfield 2007: 35). Here, Guanyin performed amongst more objects than in Hyde Park, some sixteen thousand (Whitfield 2007: 15). There

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were almost one thousand lenders, the great majority being dukes, lords and earls, but alongside them the new breed of affluent industrialists, including, of course, Joseph Mayer.29 Exposure here added to the illustrious biography Guanyin had gathered during her first decade in England. As the twenty-two-armed lifesize statue was dismantled once more, crated, and taken from one exhibitionary context – Mayer’s museum of antiquities – to another in Manchester, she was imbued with quite a different aura, that of the world of art. Yet while she might here have been immersed in the domain of aesthetics, this was, as we shall see, a far from straightforward positioning. In a letter from Hertz to Mayer dated 15 January 1857, he wrote: I am highly flattered by your communication that the collections will be exhibited at the Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester and though you are kind enough to attribute to me the merit of having formed the collection, I think that you deserve as great a praise for having had the spirit and the liberality of preventing the dispersion of it.30

Mayer’s acquisition of Hertz’s cabinet had, conveniently, coincided with the opportunity to display a much enlarged collection. Mayer was thus a major contributor: as well as Guanyin, he sent the Féjérvary ivories,31 Anglo-Saxon antiquities, medieval enamels and some of the gems just acquired from Hertz (Gibson 1988b: 12). Case after case was listed in the register of packages from Mayer’s collection:32 it would have been in April 1857 that Guanyin had the privilege of riding on the world’s first passenger railway, to a station especially provided for the Art Treasures Exhibition. A purpose-built covered way had been erected from the station to the Art Treasures Palace,33 and the dismantled and crated goddess was carried along this route, arriving at the exhibitionary site with many other Mayer objects on 24 April 1857.34 The Art Treasures Palace was yet another sumptuous abode for the Goddess of Compassion, covering more than three acres at Old Trafford. The visual codes of display here might at first glance seem similar to those of Hyde Park. The huge metal and glass building, with its extraordinarily high cathedral-like ceiling and transept, was indeed resonant of Paxton’s Palace. The language used to conceptualize space also betrayed a debt to its great exhibitionary predecessor.35 Large figurative sculpture was placed on plinths along the central aisle, echoing the design vocabulary of 1851. But the rationale was clearly different. As the Art Treasures Examiner explained: ‘The object of the Art Treasures Exhibition was to make known to the people of England the art-wealth of their own country, and by inducing a greater familiarity with the beautiful, to increase and extend its refining influences’.36 Guanyin thus no longer functioned as an article of industry or a curiosity in a dealer’s private cabinet, but signified instead one of the nation’s beautiful and treasured things. The exhibition was dominated by paintings, including works by Constable, Gainsborough, Stubbs, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as those of Europe’s Old Masters – Bellini, Michelangelo and Rembrandt. There was a British portrait

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gallery, with sections devoted to historical miniatures, sculpture, watercolour and original drawings, as well as sketches by Old Masters, engravings, photographs and a Museum of Ornamental Art. The latter was divided into sections, largely defined by material type: glass, enamels, porcelain, Oriental china, Majolica ware, bronze sculptures, terracotta, medallions, furniture, ivory carvings, arms and armour, as well as contributions from the British Museum and Marlborough House. Altogether, the Museum of Ornamental Art included several thousand pieces from 668 lenders installed in forty-four cases in the central Great Hall. Listed as part of the Museum of Ornamental Art was the Oriental Court. This was separated from the rest of the displays, having its own room at the far end of the building. It had been arranged by the renowned botanist, John Forbes Royle (1799–1858), who had superintended the Indian department of the Great Exhibition six years before. In Manchester, Royle organized loans of Indian objects from East India House, the headquarters of the East India Company, for whom he had worked.37 He also wrote the entries for the Oriental Court in some of the Art Treasures catalogues. ‘Oriental’ material included paintings, carpets, silks, floor coverings, embroidery and jewellery, as well as works in ivory, stone, lacquer and papièr mâchè. Royle described the India displays, above all others, in detail: Previous to the Great Exhibition of 1851, the great majority of visitors would have been more than surprised at hearing that an Oriental Collection was included among the Art Treasures exhibited at Manchester. But the London and Paris Exhibitions of 1851 and 1855 have shown, not only that the East abounds in varied natural products and rich manufactures, but that it has inherited a knowledge of, and daily practises of various arts of decorative design with taste and exquisite harmony of colouring. And this so much so, that the productions of the East will not only bear, but repay examination, even after a visit to the Art Treasures of the rest of the Exhibition. (1857a: 166)

Royle considered India and China to be two ‘different … very distinct types of the civilisation of the East’ (1857a: 166). Indian objects were arranged on the left upon entering the room from the main transept, while Chinese exhibits were on the right. Some of the walls were covered with textiles – mats, carpets, rugs, floor coverings and ‘chintz palanpores’ from India (Royle 1857b: 194). Royle wrote of how civilization ‘with its attendant arts and manufactures’ had been established early in the East. He then devoted pages to a discussion of archaeological evidence in Babylon, Persia and India. After examining a range of objects from these areas, his text turned to ‘China, Burmah, Pegu and Siam’. ‘Chinese productions’ were listed last, Royle noting somewhat apologetically: ‘China being one of the most early civilised of nations, and its inhabitants remarkable for their ingenuity and patience, claims the first discovery of many arts which the people still practise with unequalled skill, though these are not all adequately represented’ (1857a: 173–74). The absence of representative displays from China is hardly surprising given the political circumstances of the time – just as at the Great Exhibition – and the

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assemblage of Chinese items was, as a result, somewhat random. Silk shawls were mentioned in one case, as well as enamelled vases and dishes. Walls were hung with pictures of Chinese scenery and domestic life. Two large pictures in enamel were ‘curious specimens of the art’ (1857a: 174). Royle noted Case K, containing ‘elaborate specimens of carving the tough jade, which the natives of China are skilful in carving’ (ibid). In Case D were placed ‘fine (Chinese) specimens of a dish and a large bowl from her most gracious Majesty the Queen’ (ibid). No more cases are specifically mentioned as the text turned to a description of metal work: ‘Metallic compounds of various kinds are well-known to the Chinese, as evidenced in their gongs, in what is called their white copper and their bronzes’ (ibid). A ‘variety of excellent specimens’, were from the collections of Hewett & Co – the organizer, as we have seen, of the China Court at the Great Exhibition. Joseph Mayer’s contribution was then mentioned: ‘some large figures of … Quonyem, from the sacred island of Pato, probably Kûan-yin, by some thought to be one of the names of Buddha, and by others that of one of the intelligences proceeding from him, and one no doubt highly honoured in China’ (ibid). As the organizer of the India Court in the Crystal Palace, Royle must have noted this extraordinary life-size sculpture, with twenty-two outstretched arms, displayed so prominently in the main avenue, near his India Court. Royle would have been aware that the Edie collection was described in the catalogue: perhaps he even read the entry. Yet he evidently decided to compose his own description, one that diverged considerably from Edie’s earlier, longer and (unsurprisingly) more accurate account. Though Royle correctly mentioned the island from which the Buddhist goddess originated, he seemed uncertain of how to interpret her. He pondered on two names – one Cantonese sounding (Quonyem), the other more Mandarin (Kuan-yin) – as if to imply they were separate deities. He also confused Guanyin with the historical Buddha, thus rendering the Chinese Goddess of Compassion male. As we saw from chapter 1, Guanyin and the historical Buddha are entirely different, Guanyin being a specifically Chinese adaptation of the Buddhist deity of compassion, Avalokiteshvara. Furthermore, Guanyin is not a Buddha but a bodhisattva. All of this was lost on Royle: he might have had certain knowledge of India, where the historical Buddha and Buddhism originated, but his understanding clearly did not extend to the particularities of Buddhism in China. If Mayer had not provided Royle with sufficient interpretative text for the display, it was not because he did not know more. As we are to learn, the Sotheby’s catalogue of two years later included more detailed information. Some Chinese objects were evidently thought eligible for placement as part of the Museum of Ornamental Art in the nave.38 Guanyin however was excluded. While in Hyde Park, the Buddhist entourage had been placed in the avenue alongside Greco-Roman sculpture, the Putuo goddess was not to operate in this guise in Manchester. A specific display category of ‘sculptures in bronze’ was designated for the Museum of Ornamental Art, for which Guanyin could have qualified: this, after all, was an exemplary illustration of the lost wax process. What

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was not explicitly stated, however, but was taken for granted, was that the exhibition was concerned fundamentally with Western art. All the paintings and almost all decorative arts were European. Though Guanyin was not specifically mentioned in other catalogues, the Oriental Court was discussed in most, and from these descriptions we may construct something of the discourses surrounding Chinese material of the time. J.B. Waring wrote of the, ‘glowing colours and rich ornamentation’ of the objects and the ‘very beautiful examples of Oriental ornament … placed so as to afford an idea of the several varieties of style prevailing in the East’.39 Dr Royle then contributed his text, in much the same format as in the previous catalogue, although, rather curiously in the final paragraphs on Chinese objects, the references to metallurgy and bronzes – including the Guanyin statue – were omitted.40 In ‘A walk through the Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester under the guidance of Dr Waagen’, the Oriental Court was included at the end, a mere paragraph representing it: ‘the account given of this interesting part of the Exhibition by Dr. T. Forbes Royle is sufficient and instructive. I will only observe how much I was struck with the display of this union of richness and splendour with a very peculiar and refined taste, as well as with the wonderful cleverness and skill of execution’ (1857: 76). In another exhibition guide, Jerrold described this ‘room full of Oriental treasures that must keenly interest the untravelled visitor’ (1857: 33). The ‘glowing colours here’, he wrote, ‘obtruded upon the eye’ (1857: 32). The ‘What to see and where to see it? or the operational guide to the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester’ noted that: ‘In the Oriental museum will be found some exquisite specimens of gold and silver filigree work, and other native Indian jewellers’ work’ (1857: 7). In a general section on ‘Metalwork, bronzes sculpture, gold and silverwork’, he drew attention to the ‘idols and bells’ in the Oriental Court, which ‘should be examined, as they evidence great progress in the manufacture of metal’ (ibid.) Could this have been an oblique reference to Guanyin? In many of these accounts the Oriental Court is discussed last. The space itself was located at the far end of the Art Treasures Palace, intended no doubt to be the final thing visitors were to see – or perhaps something they could justifiably miss. Did this physically mark the Orient’s ambiguous position in relation to the Victorian aesthetic hierarchy? The textual interpretations in the catalogues, as well as the layout of exhibits, seemed to articulate a spatial allocation mirroring the ideological positioning of art forms at this time. At the top was Western painting, the most celebrated form of fine art in the West, next was (mainly) Western decorative art, and finally came the products of the Orient. While, on the one hand, it could be argued that Guanyin’s inclusion in the Art Treasures exhibition enabled the sculpture to be considered ‘art’, it is also clear that it sat in a separate room from the rest of the Western art forms. Oriental objects were at once included, yet excluded from this event, eligible to enter yet allocated a liminal status. That India took up a prominent position in the Oriental Court was not surprising. This was a country that had become opened up, absorbed into the British

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4.1 Front page of the Illustrated London News, 2 May 1857, with report on ‘Progress with the China Dispute’ above image of the unpacking of the ‘Art Treasures’ in the Great Hall in Manchester.

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Empire, and hence more able to be classified and displayed. Despite the First Opium War and the British treaties, China, by contrast, had still not yielded to the project of British imperialism. Yet, as the 1850s unfolded and a second Opium War appeared inevitable, the negative images of this country became more vociferous.41 On 2 May 1857, for example, once the Second Opium War had begun, the front page of the Illustrated London News carried a report on ‘Progress with the China dispute’, utilizing the most vituperative language: The most intense ignorance, the most insufferable conceit, and a brutal ferocity … are united in this extraordinary people to a malignity and a cunning for which no parallels can be found among the human race. It is unfortunate that Great Britain should be at war with such a nation; but it must be obvious by this time to the majority of Englishmen … that, being at war, we must chastise them effectually; and that nothing but condign punishment will teach them to respect us.

Significantly, this sat immediately above a three-quarter page illustration of the unpacking of the ‘Art Treasures’ in the Great Hall in Manchester. The juxtaposition of such perceptions circulating in the popular press with objects in this high profile exhibition could not help but predispose the public to a certain image of ‘Cathay’. As an object from China, in 1857, visitors to Manchester would no doubt have partially wrapped Guanyin in these negative and misinformed stereotypes.

Commodities: Sotheby’s, 31 May 1854 and 24 February 1859 Objects are reborn in auctions. They acquire new values, new owners, and often new definitions. Sometimes they even acquire a new history. (Smith 1989: 79)

In late 1857, Guanyin returned to Liverpool from Manchester to be reunited with her four Chinese companions. Eighteen months on, all five were off on their travels again, this time to London as part of Mayer’s sale of the Hertz collection at Sotheby’s.42 Here they were to perform yet again in the guise of commodities – as in 1854 – available for acquisition in the markets of the West. In his discussion of the mechanics of the auction, Smith argues that these places establish the social identities of things, constituting ‘rites of passage for the items that pass through them’ (1989: 48). Myers too characterizes the market as a site of ‘symbolic transformation’ (2001: 19). Auctions certainly function as a point of vulnerability in the economic lives of objects, and it may well be considered that the Putuo Five were in some sense reborn on 31 May 1854 – and again on 24 February 1859 – at Sotheby’s, acquiring new values and new definitions. As we have seen, at both auctions, the entries for the five bronzes were identical and, through an analysis of the language used to describe them, we may ascertain how their meanings and histories were being emphasized in the market place in particular ways.

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At Sotheby’s, the Putuo Five came under the gaze of many of the key collectors, antiquaries, museum curators and dealers in London.43 The 1859 sale, in particular, was an important event: some three thousand of Hertz’s former treasures were offered, the whole lasting an extraordinary sixteen days.44 In his introduction to the 1859 catalogue, penned in July the year before, Gerhard had made specific mention of the sculptures, referring to them as ‘the Five Magnificent Chinese Bronzes brought to this country by Major Edie’(Hertz 1859: xxiv). And it is noteworthy that the Putuo Five were here listed last, on the final page,45 under the heading ‘Chinese and Indian Bronzes’: 3137 Five Figures, the centre one representing the Buddhist Deity Quonyem, 5 ft.7 in. h’. The particulars relative to these figures are doubtless contained in manuscripts found in the interior of these very idols, which have not yet been deciphered. These unique bronze figures were obtained by Major Edie from the priests of the island, and exhibited by him at the Crystal Palace in 1851. The attention of public museums is drawn to these rare works of ancient Chinese art; it is fully believed that no Chinese bronze figures of similar importance are to be met with in any place in Europe. [original emphasis]. (Hertz 1854: 31–32; 1859: 213)

Of course, an auction house, keen to promote objects and increase their market value, would emphasize authenticity and singularity. Yet these objects were exceptionally rare. They certainly stood out in the antiquarian landscape before 1860, for few high-quality Chinese objects had made their way to Europe before the looting of the Summer Palace in Beijing (Harrison-Hall 1997: 222; Hevia 1994: 320–21).46 The majority of objects in British collections at this time were export wares, often of dubious quality, as we saw in the China Court at the Great Exhibition. Yet, it is worth pointing out that the age of the sculptures was not mentioned in the catalogue entries, as it most certainly would be in the auction world of today – the arts of the Ming dynasty then being little known. The ownership of Hertz, along with references to Edie, and to Putuo, was intended to emphasize the bronzes’ distinguished provenance, and increase their market value. But it is only the Western hands through which the objects passed that are deemed significant in these accounts. The names of the deities themselves (other than Guanyin, rendered here as ‘Quonyem’), the makers, the owners or the temples in China, are of course absent. Original context, with biographies stretching over hundreds of years, was subordinated to the exhibitionary pedigree and the Western individuals who possessed them. Foster and Jones have identified a particularly ‘turbulent’ period in the social life of the Hilton of Cadboll which resulted in its fragmentation (2008: 206). Similar processes of disintegration and disposal were experienced by the Putuo Five in the 1850s, for what is notable in relation to the history of the ‘Edie’ collection is that the 1859 catalogue described five objects only – Guanyin, Wenshu, Puxian, Weituo and Guangong. The incense burner, which took up such a promi-

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nent position in the jurors’ reports at the Great Exhibition, was missing, as was the large silk textile, used to such effect as the backdrop to the display. This, as we have seen, was sold in the Sotheby’s auction of 1854. Further, as previously noted, the manuscripts had some time earlier been removed. These were not passed on with the collection to Liverpool Museum, for in a catalogue of 1882, the curator, Charles Gatty wrote: ‘It is said that some ancient manuscripts were found in the interior of these figures; these were probably prayers’ (1882: 98). It is not known if these documents remained with Edie, or whether Hertz or Mayer kept them. Not all of Mayer’s papers were transferred with the collection to Liverpool Museum in 1867 and the manuscripts may well have ended up with his personal effects.47 What is certain is that by the late 1850s, while the bronze shells of the Putuo Five stayed together, Edie’s original group was no longer. The Sotheby’s commentaries also shed light on the state of religious belief in China at this time: ‘It may also be anticipated that during the present Chinese warfare, the party who profess Christianity will, in their religious fanaticism, destroy all the Buddhistic images in the temples, and therefore, these relics of Chinese idolatry would be very valuable to an Ethnological museum’ (Hertz 1854:31–32; 1859: 213). The ‘religious fanaticism’ is a reference to the Taiping Rebellion (1851–64), not only the biggest revolt in Chinese history, but the world’s greatest civil war (Hookham 1972: 277). This was a large-scale peasant movement against the dominant ruling class, the Qing, led by self-proclaimed mystics Hong Xiuqing and Yang Xiuquan. It is estimated to have cost a harrowing thirty to fifty million Chinese lives (Levien 1982: 117). Hong Xiuqing, an unorthodox Christian convert, had declared himself the new Messiah and younger brother of Jesus Christ; Yang Xiuqing believed he could act as a mouthpiece of God (Fairbank and Reischauer 1986: 292). Hong, Yang and their followers established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and attained control of significant parts of southern China.48 As early as 1843, when the Putuo Five were probably still in their temple, Hong set up the ‘God-worshipping Society’ near Canton, and members, intolerant of Chinese religious beliefs, destroyed Daoist and Buddhist images (Hookham 1972: 277; Fairbank and Reischauer 1986: 293). The destruction of Chinese ‘idols’ in this rebellion would have served to underline the significance of the five Buddhist sculptures in the West, for they would be rarer still if the material culture of this religion was under threat. The catalogue entries assert the importance of acquiring things before they were destroyed. Indeed, many museum collections in the nineteenth century were compiled with the idea that the peoples whose material culture was being appropriated would die out (Peers and Brown 2003:1). A number of missionaries in China by the 1850s were specifically commenting on the decay of Buddhist belief. In a book published the same year as the auction, Evariste-Régis Huc, whose observations of Putuo we documented in an earlier chapter, wrote that Buddhists had lost ‘all authority and credit … The people have no longer the smallest respect for them … indeed such is the contempt into which they have

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fallen, that the insurgents have lately thought to render themselves popular by massacring them everywhere on their passage’ (1859: 399). He goes on to argue that ‘decay and want of faith are everywhere perceptible’ (1859: 404). According to this Western trope of salvation, Edie would have been credited with having ‘discovered’, ‘acquired’ or ‘saved’ the images; rescuing them from inevitable ‘decay’, ‘loss’ (Clifford 1988: 220, 231) ‘obscurity’ and ‘neglect’ (Classen and Howes 2006: 209). Their acquisition was thus, by this account, a necessary act, one that preserved material evidence of Chinese belief before it was too late. We may also note an ambiguity in the descriptions in relation to the classification of the objects. Earlier in the entries, Sotheby’s referred to them as ‘unique’, ‘rare’, ‘works of Chinese art’ – words associated with antiquities or the art world. But, by the end, the auctioneers spoke of them as ‘relics of Chinese idolatry’, suitable for an ‘Ethnological museum’. Though they had mingled with antiquarian objects in the museums of Hertz and Mayer, and had even entered the exhibition of ‘Art Treasures’, their origins in China and the fact that they were ‘idols’ seemed to be qualifying them for a relatively new museological category – ‘ethnology’. The entry for the Putuo Five in the 1859 catalogue is the only one to have stars next to it, and indeed it has three.49 This, presumably, signified their importance. While the five deity figures also merited one of the longest and most fulsome descriptions, it is the price relative to all the others that is most extraordinary. The sums achieved for each piece and the purchasers’ names in 1859 were listed in a separate catalogue at the front and it was Charles Roach Smith, the renowned antiquary and close friend of Mayer, who bought the group for an astonishing £225.50 Smith, it seems, attended the entire auction in 1859: he was also one of the most prolific purchasers, acquiring 540 lots in total.51 For the first fifteen days, he paid around £1 for each item, but on that final day he spent more than two hundred times this and won for himself the five large Buddhist sculptures. In the sphere of economics, the status of these objects was exceptionally high; £225 was a significant amount in 1859, considering that almost all other things were sold for around £1. This is by far the highest price paid, and indeed very few antiquities ever sold for this amount at the time.52 There were two other objects that also reached three figures, but were only just over £100 each.53 Appearances at the Great Exhibition and the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition, as well as their origins on Putuo, had all no doubt served to enhance their financial value. However, it must be remembered that in such a heightened sphere of commoditization, monetary ascription is unpredictable. The price of an object at auction is predicated upon two or more people bidding against each other. Unless Sotheby’s was taking bids ‘off the wall’ we can assume that someone else was bidding against Smith for the objects, someone who was also prepared to pay a large sum. Altogether, the 1859 sale of Hertz’s three thousand items fetched over £10,000,54 yet this was still almost £2,000 less than the figure paid to Hertz three years earlier, and Mayer had to pay the auctioneers a commission on top (Henig 1988: 96). Mayer’s friends rallied around him. A letter from Clarke to Mayer some months

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after the sale underlined the complications which had arisen as a result of Mayer’s efforts to repossess certain of the lots from the original consortium: Your letter fills me with vexation. It seems as if the Hertz collection was to be a source of nothing but trouble to you. I have received no missive yet; whenever I do I shall be careful in my answer. I never supposed I was purchasing for you any more than Mr Roche (ie Roach) was, but I hope the bother will soon be over, and then the best way will be to think no more of it.55

The loyalty of Mayer’s friends meant that by at least 1879 a substantial part of the Hertz collection was back in his hands. Henig writes that Joseph Clarke ‘purchased a few gems together with other items on Mayer’s own instructions’, while Charles Roach Smith bought ‘a great many more gems’ (Henig 1988: 94, 96).56 It seems likely that Smith bought the five Chinese deity figures at this auction on Mayer’s behalf. Smith and Mayer had corresponded frequently and many of the letters between these two and Clarke in the 1850s and 1860s were concerned with offering antiquities to each other (White 1988: 124).57 Further, Smith had written to Mayer after 1857 stating that while he no longer wanted to collect for himself, he would be happy to purchase for his friend (White 1988: 132). Michael Rhodes, the leading authority on Smith, believes that the deity figures were indeed bought at the auction for Mayer, as Smith had no interest in Chinese objects.58 Unfortunately, we do not know the mechanics or the moment of transfer back to Mayer. Was it possible that these statues moved temporarily into Smith’s famous Museum of London Antiquities at 5 Liverpool Street? Or did they travel straight back to Liverpool along with the many other objects that Mayer bought back? While it is clear that the Putuo Five left Liverpool for the London auction rooms in January or February 1859, the exact date of their return is not known. What is evident, however, is that Mayer was willing to pay more for them than any other single lot in Hertz’s former collection. In 1854, and again in 1859, the Chinese deity figures were exposed to the mechanism of the auction and were assigned a public monetary value. Indeed, as they were bought, sold, exchanged and moved between these private collectors, their status as commodities became heightened. It is worth pausing here, therefore, to consider the implications of this new identity on these once inalienable images. At Sotheby’s, the five statues entered a foreign world, one where value was no longer predicated on iconography, consecration or placement within a temple but on their potential as commodities in the markets of the West. Once-sacred deities had now become incorporated into a system of law and private property. Of course, it should not be forgotten that the Buddhist images would have had monetary worth when first commissioned in Ming dynasty China, in terms of their cost to the foundry. And they would certainly have functioned to convert the wealth of the men who commissioned them into symbolic status or cultural capital. But at the auction house, in the mid nineteenth century, they became entangled in a very different system of financial worth. In being forced to enter a

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Western system of commodities, they had become the bearers of an exchange value (Kopytoff 1986: 89). Appadurai defines a commodity as ‘a product intended principally for exchange’ (1986: 6). This is a status subject to change; a commodity is not one specific thing, but rather a phase in the life of things (1986: 17). Kopytoff too notes how objects may be treated as commodities at certain times but not at others (1986: 64). It is evident that the commodity status of the Putuo Five was, at this moment, the most intense it had ever been, and that it would most likely ever be in the future, for by 1867 they had entered a public museum, a site of ‘terminal commoditization’ (Kopytoff 1986: 75). The exchange value of the images became (in theory) effaced once they entered this realm, for the museum is an institution that, at the same time as it increases the value of objects, does not declare monetary worth. Appadurai notes that the commodification of objects is realized when sold at auction, in ways that would be considered problematic in other contexts (1986: 15). If the diversion of the deity figures from their ‘predestined paths’ – particularly the removal of the sacred manuscripts by William Edie – was problematic, the commodification of these sacred objects at Sotheby’s was also transgressive. For Kopytoff, the singular and the commodity are opposites: ‘everyone is against commoditizing what has been publicly marked as singular and made sacred’ (1986: 87, 77). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett too argues that commodities are the ‘most alienable of alienable objects’ (2001: 259). Existence in the world of goods was the antithesis of their past lives: ‘ritual objects are one of a few things, along with monuments, royal residences and public lands, that are prevented from being commoditised. Thus, when they are, it is regarded as highly disrespectful, almost sacrilegious as it homogenises the value of these objects which are deemed to be priceless’ (Grimes 1992: 421).

Objects of Joseph Mayer: Antiquities and Curiosities, 1856–1867 It is universally recognised, that nothing can tend in an equal degree to give a healthy impetus to modern art, and to educate, refine, and elevate the taste of the masses, as the study of the antique. (Mayer 1857: iii)

The Sotheby’s episode apart, from 1856 until 1867 the Putuo Five essentially formed part of the Joseph Mayer collection, and it is here that their identities as antiquities came to the fore. Mayer (1803–86) was one of the great antiquarians of his age. Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, he moved to Liverpool at the age of eighteen, where he was initially apprenticed to his brother-inlaw, James Wordley, a jeweller. He soon, in 1844, set up his own business, and opened a shop in Lord Street selling silver, jewellery, clocks and watches (Gibson 1988a: ix). Mayer’s interest in antiquities had begun at an early age and it was success in business that enabled him to indulge his passion. He travelled abroad reg-

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ularly, mainly on business, but also to collect, and there are accounts of him crossing through the principalities and states of continental Europe with wagonloads of treasures (Burman 2003: 59). Particularly in the 1850s, Mayer acquired entire collections in one go. For example, he purchased the Faussett collection of Anglo-Saxon antiquities in 1854, the Fejérváry ivories and prehistoric metalwork in 1855, the Hertz collection, as we have seen, in 1856, as well as the W.H. Rolfe collection of Anglo-Saxon antiquities the following year (Gibson 1988c: 43). By the time Mayer donated his collection to the town of Liverpool in 1867 it covered a wide range, but was particularly rich in Egyptian and early Roman material. It also included prehistoric pottery, Anglo-Saxon antiquities, medieval artefacts, post-medieval pottery, enamels, glass and illuminated manuscripts, Wedgwood pottery, old Liverpool wares and English paintings.59 According to Burman, Mayer was one of the few early systematic collectors of Wedgwood, if not the earliest (1988: 195). However he seems not to have been particularly interested in Chinese things. Out of a total of some sixteen thousand objects, there were only several hundred from this country, and Worrall characterizes these as comprising, ‘mundane material, apparently selected on a technical basis and showing a good widespread selection of techniques of decoration’(1988: 184). The Putuo Five and other Chinese objects moved into his collection more as a result of chance, it would seem, as Mayer acquired larger collections en masse. Nevertheless, considering the paucity of Oriental material in his collection, the group of bronzes must have been noted as some of the largest and finest Chinese objects in his possession. That Joseph Mayer was one of the key antiquarian figures of the day was evidenced by his invitation to exhibit at the Great Exhibition. Mayer was asked to supply ‘works of ancient and medieval art’, though in the end he submitted his own work as a jeweller and silversmith and received an ‘honourable mention’ for a cameo brooch (Gibson 1988b: 7).60 Mayer would surely have cast his eyes upon the Chinese bronzes in the avenue of the Crystal Palace in 1851, little realizing that within five years he would be in possession of them. Burman argues that Mayer saw himself primarily as ‘an accumulator of material for other men’s use’ and that it was as a ‘patron of scholarship rather than as an author that he is most deserving of admiration’ (1988: 200). For Rhodes, Mayer’s collections were assembled because he took guidance from ‘abler minds’, such as Smith (1989: 108). Shore describes him as an assiduous rather than discriminating collector: ‘That his collection contained such important material from the scholarly and artistic point of view was because the time was opportune for acquiring quantities of Egyptian antiquities’ (1988: 66). Mayer collected objects that caught his attention in auction sales and shops as well as through private treaty and gifts or exchanges with friends. Henig suggests he was not a great connoisseur of engraved gems and did not collect intaglios and cameos on the basis of a developed knowledge of style and iconography. Rather he was a jeweller and dealer in precious stones and took opportunities to acquire

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4.2 ‘Joseph Mayer, c. 1840’, by William Daniels. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool.

gems that came into his shop as part of his trade (Henig 1988: 94). Mayer also collected things that appealed to the eye: Perkin argues that he bought manuscripts not for the text but for their decoration (1988: 138). In this sense he surely noted the extraordinarily fine casting and superb decorative embellishments on the Buddhist bronzes. He is even known to have stripped precious stones from some of his antiquities: perhaps he was the one who prized the jewels from the bodies of some of the Putuo Five.61 For Burman, there was an emphasis on utility in Mayer’s ceramic collection, and a moral duty to enlighten the public (1988: 203). Shore argues that it was his

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belief in the importance of ‘visual display as a stimulant to the imagination’, which lead to a desire for knowledge, that encouraged Mayer to open his collection to the public (1988: 66). Indeed both Mayer and his close friend – and temporary owner of the deity figures – Smith, were typical of a certain class of mid-nineteenth-century entrepreneur who spent their newly acquired wealth on antiquities. Objects for them functioned as symbols of prestige and of power. Collecting antiquities had, after all, since the eighteenth century been a pursuit associated with the aristocracy. By the mid nineteenth century, acquiring art objects was a key element in confirming new identity, an ‘effective cultural tool for middle-class ambitions’ (Macleod 1996: 88). Placing one’s private collection on public display, in particular, would have been an essential means to demonstrate one’s taste, as well as to educate and inspire. While Hertz’s motives were largely mercantile, once the statues moved into the orbit of Mayer and Smith they would have been valued not just for their economic worth. The images here were absorbed into a wider system of knowledge prevalent during this period. Syson reminds us that collections of objects ‘should rarely be seen as a matter of neutral accumulation’ but are often ‘built up to make points about the character, wealth, intellectual pursuits and status of the collector, about the universe in which he or (less often) she lived and about his or her place in it’ (2003: 108). Mayer’s collection – and his interpretation of these Chinese statues – must be seen in relation to frameworks of understanding circulating at that time. And for him, material culture provided glimpses into the habits and customs of nations from remote times and places. As he wrote in 1867: ‘I think I hardly need to say that in my collecting I had always had in view to make the Collection as much illustrative of the Arts of the different nations as I could, so as to connect Ancient and Modern Art’ (Gibson 1988b: 20). Mayer was concerned to forge links between the arts of different cultures and, like many others in the mid nineteenth century, subscribed to an ideology of universal development. One of Mayer’s purposes in collecting ceramics, if not his main aim, was to demonstrate the history and development of the art of pottery: ‘underlying it was the concept of progress in the arts’ (Burman 1988: 203). Throughout the nineteenth century, ancient civilizations had been placed in hierarchies, ones in which their aesthetic merits were judged in relation to the absolute standards of Classical art (Jenkins 2003: 177). As early as 1764, the German art historian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann had suggested a model of ancient art in which cultures progressed towards the Greek ideal. The five Buddhist images, deriving from an ancient yet little understood civilization, would no doubt have been inserted into Mayer’s groupings in terms of notions of hierarchy and progress, signifying the relative development of Buddhist religion, and functioning as images with which to evaluate the achievements of Western cultures. Antiquarians had long been interested in gods and myths from around the world and Joseph Mayer was no exception. He would have shared the attitudes of the day to non-Christian religions, which were generally negative and illinformed. Snelling argues that in the nineteenth century: ‘[Buddhism] was almost

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invariably dismissed as benighted idolatry and efforts were made to convert its misguided followers, or even forcible suppression. When efforts were latterly made by missionaries – by Spence Hardy and Samuel Beal, for instance – to study the religion, it was usually with view to finding ways of discrediting or undermining it’ (1987: 224, cited in Chuang 1993: 213). The botanist Robert Fortune, who, as we saw in chapters 1 and 2, had commented on a set of bronzes in a temple on Putuo, talked of Buddhism as ‘heathen idol worship’ (1847: 119). Despite Fortune’s intimate familiarity with Chinese culture, he believed the natives to be ‘poor’ and ‘deluded’ (1847: 91, 185) and that Buddhist monks were, ‘dreadfully ignorant and superstitious’ (1847: 174): ‘no Christian can look upon the priests and devotees of the Buddhist creed without an eye of pity’ (1847: 186). With their unfamiliar physical forms – the multiple arms, misunderstood hand gestures and animal mounts – the Putuo Five would no doubt have represented to Mayer the superstitious nature of ‘pagan idol’ worship in China. The Sotheby’s catalogues, after all, described them as ‘relics of idolatry’. One of the rooms in his Egyptian Museum, as we shall see, was devoted to (amongst other things) ‘idols’, indicating a specific interest in the concept. We have seen how the Great Exhibition catalogue was generous with its descriptions of the bronzes. The statues were also given prominence in Mayer’s sale of the Hertz collection at Sotheby’s. That Mayer went to so much effort and expense in buying them back in 1859 signifies they had importance. Yet, despite this, they were not singled out as special in the later overviews of Mayer’s vast collection.62 And no records appear to exist as to how the five bronzes were actually displayed in his museum.63 However the Mayer Museum was well documented in its early stages by both newspaper reports and a detailed 1852 catalogue, and through this documentation it is possible for us to consider the interpretative realm into which the bronzes were placed in 1856, and again, in 1859, after they had returned from the London auction house.

In the Egyptian Museum: The Rare and the Curious It should be distinctly understood that this exhibition is not a rival of, or competitor with, any other; indeed, there is not any other which can pretend to be compared with it … probably, there is no collection in Europe, belonging to a private individual, which can be compared with that which is now open in Colquitt Street.64

On 1 May 1852, a year to the day after the opening of the Great Exhibition and four years before the Putuo Five came into his possession, Mayer opened his Egyptian Museum at 8 Colquitt Street. There had been insufficient room at the town’s Royal Institution and so he decided to locate it a few doors along, where he charged a modest entrance fee. Liverpool, by then, had collections of natural history but none of antiquity, and so the museum was an important addition for

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the town. Mayer had evidently been inspired by the Egyptian displays at the British Museum and he intended his venture to rival that of the metropolis. As he wrote in the preface to the catalogue of 1852: ‘it is with a view to add his mite to the gratification of those who have not had the opportunity of visiting the great collection of antiquity in the British Museum, where so many of the marvellous works of antiquity are assembled together, that the proprietor of this museum has placed within the reach of the student and the antiquary, the opportunity of examining its contents’ (1852: 2). After the British Museum, the Mayer collection was described as the most important grouping of Egyptian antiquities in England (Shore 1988: 45). Indeed on 7 May 1852, just days after it opened, the Liverpool Mercury referred to it as, ‘the finest private collection in the United Kingdom – probably in Europe’,65 with Revd A. Hume’s article ‘A trip to the pyramids’ noting that: ‘It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of such a collection as this, in the midst of a crowded town like Liverpool’.66 The first, and only, catalogue listed the objects and their locations in detail and, along with illustrations and contemporary newspaper cuttings, constructs a vivid image of the interiors. While it would be four years after this that the five Buddhist statues arrived, it is unlikely that the display regime would have altered greatly during this time. How then was Mayer’s museum arranged? There were six small galleries in the building distributed across three floors, of which three were devoted to Egypt. Upon entering at ground level, one came upon a room filled with Etruscan, Samian, Roman and English pottery, and Anglo-Saxon and Mexican antiquities. Behind this was another room, with Egyptian steles, monuments and a few mummies. On the next floor up was the ‘mummy room’, and beyond this, the front drawing room filled with Egyptian ‘jewellery, vases and idols’ as well as ancient English and medieval objects. There was also the library on this level, and historical pictures placed along the corridors.67 On the top floor were an Armour and a Majolica room, the former containing ‘ethnographic’ objects: ‘articles belonging to various nations are collected and classified according to their use or design’.68 Here sat objects from places as diverse as Afghanistan, Arabia, China, Germany, Greece, India, Japan, Persia, Turkey and even the Sandwich Islands (Mayer 1852: 39–45). There were things as varied as Romano-British shoes, sandals from West Africa and the lace cape and mittens of an eighteenth-century child. The idea that objects had meaning because of their particular associations, either with interesting or historically significant people, had been a feature of many earlier cabinets. The Tradescant collection, which later formed the basis of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, for example, contained such things. Mayer too displayed all manner of artefacts associated with famous people – gloves worn by the Pope and by a cardinal, Cromwell’s boots and drinking cup, the large wheel-lock gun used at the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and a finger from the left-hand gauntlet of Edward the Black Prince (Paton 1988: 174).69 Mayer

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formed – then sold – a collection of Napoleonic memorabilia, including a breast pin containing locks of Napoleon’s hair (Collins 1988: 212–13). The label for the Putuo Five (if it existed) would no doubt have mentioned their acquisition by Major Edie in the aftermath of the First Opium War. In his museum, Mayer placed smaller objects in drawers – another characteristic of the cabinet of curiosity. The catalogue noted that in Drawer 16, No. 4, ‘The Egyptian jewellery, vase, and idol room’, were a mourning locket in memory of Queen Anne, with a portion of her hair, a Saxon gold earring, and an African gold earring and nose ring, amongst many others (Mayer 1852: 23–24). In nearby drawers were ‘curios’ from Afghanistan, Africa, Algeria and Burma (ibid: 24). A ‘painting, on copper, of one of the Emperors of the East’ sat on the ‘Chimney-piece’, and next to it was ‘a pipe in the form of a human hand and skull’ (ibid: 38). Around the walls, windows and on the ‘arch’ of the room, were ‘antient’ vases from Mexico (ibid.: 38). Illustrations survive of the ‘Mummy room’ and ‘Jewellery room’, which are each overflowing with objects. These chambers indeed bore a resemblance to the Egyptian Room at the British Museum – Mayer’s competitor, as we have seen.70 Yet, it seems that Mayer put even more objects on the walls and on top of the glass cases than in London. Mummies lay on pyramid-shaped cases, resting on which

4.3 ‘The “Mummy Room” in Joseph Mayer’s Egyptian Museum, Liverpool’, by Henry Summers, 1852. Reproduced by courtesy of Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries.

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were lines of Greek pots. Along the walls were high glass-fronted cabinets, almost reaching the ceiling, each having several levels of shelving, each shelf in turn crammed with exhibits. On the tops of the cabinets were vases. Any remaining wall space was dedicated to pictures. There was even a crocodile in the ‘Mummy’ room, placed diagonally across one wall, echoing the design vocabulary of previous cabinets of curiosity – for example, Ferrante Imperato’s museum in Naples famously depicted in 1599.71 A large flat desk case occupied the central space in Mayer’s ‘Jewellery room’, next door, with a smaller domed case placed on top. There were vases on the mantelpiece to the right, and the profile of a large Egyptian sculpture can be glimpsed on the left of the illustration. Such a display of abundance, as Moser points out, was intended to enhance a sense of wonder and awe (2006: 50).72 For Moser, ‘curiosities’ are objects ‘presented as examples of the strange and unusual amid larger collections of cultural and natural material. Curiosities were often used to signify something that was unknowable and mysterious’ (2006: 51–52). This certainly fits the description of the Mayer Museum displays. Shore writes: A century earlier Mayer would have been called a ‘curioso’, a collector of objects valued … for their age, rarity or novelty, or for romantic associations with famous and infamous people and events of the past … Though his background was very different, Mayer emulated those gentlemen of education and means who had emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their interests embracing specimens of natural history and geology, ethnographical material, pieces of antiquity, coins and medals. (1988: 46)

Cabinets of curiosities were designed to evoke a sense of the rare and exceptional. There was an interest in objects for their singular qualities rather than for their typicality. As far back as the sixteenth century, precious objects from China had been included in such spaces – porcelain, soapstone, ivory, rhinoceros horn, as well as carvings of ‘idols’. The bronzes from Putuo, particularly the life-size Guanyin with her strange form and twenty-two arms, certainly qualified in this sense as ‘curios’. This was the milieu into which the Putuo Five were placed in the late 1850s and through the 1860s. They no longer occupied shrines, revered within a system of cult figures, illustrating the hierarchy and spatial ordering of the Chinese Buddhist pantheon, nor were they amongst that multitude of manufactures in a spacious and luminous palace in Hyde Park. They were now in a privately owned museum in the centre of the wealthy maritime town of Liverpool, alongside a vast array of curios crammed into drawers, glass cases, cabinets and on mantelpieces. Moser and others have shown how new ‘lives’ for objects may emerge in different exhibitionary settings: ‘New stories are told when certain objects become associated with others’ (2006: 2). The meanings of the Putuo Five would now be read according to their relationships with other objects in Joseph Mayer’s vast and increasingly unwieldy collection.

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After its opening in 1852, Mayer’s museum was embellished by a number of important collections, transforming its profile, though no second edition of the museum catalogue was printed to encapsulate the additions.73 Gibson characterizes the Museum, some fifteen years after this, in 1867, as ‘trembling on the verge of chaos’ (1988b: 3). In 1862, Mayer had changed the name from the ‘Egyptian Museum’ to the ‘Museum of Antiquities’ and, in 1867, it became the even grander ‘Museum of National and Foreign Antiquities’, indicating no doubt the international aspirations of its founder (Gibson 1988c: 8). The same year, the collection was presented to Liverpool, at a blow creating Britain’s most important public museum after the British and South Kensington Museums (Rhodes 1989: 108). Yet once integrated into this esteemed Liverpool institution, the bronzes’ associations with antiquarian collectors were played down as they become absorbed into the ideological beliefs and exhibitionary ambitions of museum curators. In the next chapter we will see how the dominant meanings of these objects shifted once more, this time from ‘curios’ and ‘antiquities’ to ‘specimens’, as they entered the seemingly more orderly world of the publicly funded museum.

Notes 1. He was then based at 11 Gt Marlborough Street (Watkin’s Commercial and General London Directory and Court Guide, 1851: 790). 2. ibid (1852: 861). 3. The small edition of the Post Office London Directory (1853: 861). 4. 1851 census (Public Records Office, Kew). 5. According to Gibson, these indicated the range and quality of his collection (1988: 11). Joseph Mayer, to whom Hertz was later to sell the Putuo Five, also exhibited a cameo brooch. 6. Mack (1997: 37). There were 142 lenders to this exhibition (Caygill 1997: 57). 7. Count Alfred Potocki is quoted as saying that he could not discover anyone he met who was not coming to London for the Great Exhibition in 1851 (Ffrench 1950: 149). 8. Bram Hertz (1851). 9. The term ‘cabinet’ was first used in the Renaissance to denote a cupboard, with shelves and drawers, containing a collection of small things, often specially constructed to hold particular objects. In England, the word tended to be used for a closet where ‘curiosities’ were displayed for close friends and guests to inspect (Hooper-Greenhill 1992: 86–88). 10. This is with reference to Roman marbles. 11. ‘An antique Indian lamp … finely patinated’ ( p. 213, 3136) which sold for £5. There is no indication of date or detailed provenance, unlike the deity figures which follow in the catalogue. 12. These were noted in Gatty’s 1882 catalogue (see chapter 5). 13. I am extremely grateful to Marjorie Caygill for bring this to my attention. 14. British Library microfilm (Mic.B.740/11/7). I am grateful to Marcella Leembruggen for supplying this information.

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15. Letter dated 23 July 1856 (Mayer collection, 920 MAY, accession number 2528, Liverpool Record Office). 16. Visitors Book, Egyptian Museum, Colquitt Street, 1852–1867 (Mayer Collection, ibid). 17. op. cit. 18. op. cit. 19. Gibson (1988b: 11) and Henig (1988: 95). Gibson suggests that a major specialized collection such as this acquired by Mayer was generally via private treaty, with the help of Mayer’s acquaintances in London. 20. Letter dated 31 July 1856, op. cit. 21. ibid. 22. There are only letters from Hertz to Mayer in the Liverpool Record Office. 23. Henig (1988: 95–96); Southworth (1988: 92). 24. White writes that Mayer’s ‘losses wiped out his capital’ (1988: 31). 25. The sale lasted from 24 to 26 March. Gibson refers to this as ‘a relatively unimportant portion, that may indicate no more than rationalisation’ (1988b: 11). 26. 29 January 1848. 27. The medallions were offered on 10 May 1851; the turquoise on 13 November 1851. I am grateful to Stephanie Clarke at the British Museum for providing this information. 28. On the busiest day they had thirty thousand visitors (Whitfield 2007: 15). 29. There were 981 individual lenders (Whitfield 2007: 19). 30. Letter dated 15 January 1857 (Mayer collection, 920 MAY, accession number 2528, Picton Library, Liverpool). 31. Named after the original collector of the ivories. 32. Manchester Central Library (M6/2/31/1). 33. On the Manchester South Junction and Altrincham Line to bring passengers from London Euston on four daily trains. 34. Register of Packages, op. cit. 35. Terms such as ‘nave’, for example, were used (The Art Treasures Examiner, 1857: vi). 36. The Art Treasures Examiner: A Pictorial, Critical and Historical Record of the Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester in 1851, Manchester: Alexander Ireland + co, 1857. 37. Register of Packages, op. cit. 38. This included Chinese ceramics. 39. In his section on the ‘Museum of Ornamental Art’, he noted that ‘crossing the north end of Transept, the Visitor enters Saloon G – containing the oriental museum’. Waring (1857: 194). 40. Royle (1857b: 198). No mention was made of the Oriental material. It was divided into glass and enamels, metalwork, and carved work. 41. Green argues that China occupied a ‘more prominent position in the British imaginary at moments of military engagement’ such as during the First and Second Opium Wars (2002: 8). 42. Bram Hertz (1859). The sale lasted fifteen days and had been arranged and promoted by F.R.P. Bőőcke (of Oxford and London) (Southworth 1988: 87). 43. The list of purchasers at the front of the 1859 catalogue, for example, notes The Duke of Manchester, Brompton Boocke, Rev C.H. Hartshorne, Capt Douglas, Thomas Bateman, Charles Bale and the British Museum, amongst others. 44. The 1854 auction lasted three days and comprised 461 lots. 45. In the 1854 sale the Chinese deities were listed on the second to last page.

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46. On 7 October 1860, Anglo-French forces ransacked the imperial Summer Palace north of Beijing. They smashed vast quantities of porcelain and other objects and much of the remaining booty was auctioned off and found its way into Western museum collections (see Hevia 1994: 321–22). 47. Gibson notes that Mayer retained the records of purchase and provenance (1988b: 20). My search for these manuscripts has not been fruitful, however. I have checked in the World Museum Liverpool, the Liverpool Record Office, the special manuscripts collection of the Sydney Jones Library at the University of Liverpool, Bebington Library, the Williamson Art Gallery and the British Library. They also do not appear in the Branch & Leete sale of Mayer’s objects at the Hanover Gallery in Liverpool on 15–16 December 1887 or in the Sotheby’s and Leete auction catalogue in London on 20–21 July 1887. 48. ‘Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace’ is a more literal translation. 49. In the 1854 sale, the entry for the bronzes also had three stars against it, but so did other lots. 50. Catalogue of the Hertz collection of Antiquities, the property of Joseph Mayer, Esq, FSA, of Liverpool with the prices and purchasers names. MDCCCLIX. Charles Roach Smith (1806–1890) was a notable amateur archaeologist, who played a key role in the development of British archaeology in the 1830s to 1860s. He was a founding member of the British Archaeological Association (1843). See Rhodes (1992). 51. His name appears every day at regular intervals. 52. I am grateful here to Michael Rhodes. Email correspondence, 29 October 2007. 53. For example, a cameo (Lot 2229) went for £126. 54. £10,011 2s 6d (Gibson 1988b: 11). 55. 27 April 1859. Quoted in Henig (1988: 96). 56. Southworth too suggests that objects were bought back again at this sale on Mayer’s behalf (1988: 92). 57. There is warmth and intimacy evident in many of their letters in the Picton Library. Gibson notes about: ‘Mayer’s acquaintance with Roach Smith, which grew into a lasting friendship that was still vivid in the final years of Mayer’s life’ (1988b: 7). Smith also visited Mayer’s Egypt Museum on 30 August 1853 (Visitors Book, Egyptian Museum, Colquitt Street, op. cit.). 58. Email correspondence, 29 October 2007. 59. The collection of prehistoric pottery, medieval artefacts, post-medieval pottery and local antiquities was, according to White, one of the finest and most varied of its type (1988: 118). 60. Mayer came to know Augustus Wollaston Franks, who was appointed at the British Museum in 1851. Like Hertz, Mayer contributed to Frank’s Exhibition of Ancient and Medieval Art at the Society of Arts in 1850 (Gibson 1988b: 7). 61. Jewels, for example, were taken out of the back of the Kingston Brooch. Personal communication, Claire Sedgwick, National Museums Liverpool (NML), November 2007. 62. For example in the newspaper reports of the collection in 1867, when it was given to Liverpool Museum, or in the early guides to the Liverpool Museum in the 1860s and 1870s. 63. Gibson writes that the Egyptian Museum received the Hertz collection of gems, ‘with perhaps also some antique bronzes’ (1988c: 43). 64. ‘The Egyptian Museum, Colquitt Street’, 6 May 1852. Newspaper article in NML stores, no author or publisher included. 65. 7 May 1852.

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Liverpool Mercury, 7 May 1852. NML archives. ‘The Egyptian Museum, Colquitt Street’, op. cit. ibid. ibid. Illustrated in 1838 (Moser 2006: 159), and in the Illustrated London News in 1847 (Moser 2006: 198). 71. An image of Ferrante Imperato’s (1550–1615) museum was first published in 1599 and is believed to be one of the first representations of a museum. 72. This is with reference to the British Museum. 73. Gibson indicates that while some material may have been transferred to Mayer’s private accommodation at Rock Ferry (1857) and Bebington (1860), the four major collections were probably kept intact (1988c: 43).

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

CHAPTER 5 Specimens of Ethnology and Race: Liverpool Museum, 1867–1929

From Private to Public Having traversed a range of representational spheres for almost two decades, in 1867 the Putuo Five eventually arrived at Liverpool Museum and were formally absorbed into the institution as part of the Mayer donation.1 As we have seen, this would not be the first time that they had been classified with a range of other objects in a museum-like space, but the move proved, unlike all the others, to be permanent. Over the next 140 years of their life in the museum, the bronzes were to be subjected to very different frameworks of interpretation. In this chapter we examine the meanings placed upon them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during a period when notions of race and social evolution were coming to the fore. Though the sculptures now resided in the public realm of the museum, paradoxically their visibility was to be less pronounced than in their previous spheres of representation. Back on Putuo, over the centuries, they had been exposed to the veneration of millions. Once in England, the ensemble had enjoyed a prominent position in the Great Exhibition, while in 1857 Guanyin had been revealed to the British public in Manchester as an art treasure. In Liverpool’s civic museum, however, their exhibitionary careers were periodically arrested. Indeed, during the twentieth century, the bronzes languished in the stores for decades, their documentation lost, their origins unknown. Despite confinement to a single institution, the arrival of the statues in Liverpool Museum would not be the end of their classificatory trajectory, for they were shifted around the various departments, categorized and re-categorized during the course of their museum lives. In fact, the re-conceptualization of these objects was more complex than for many ethnographic artefacts in whose classificatory group they initially found themselves. Collections from Africa, the Americas and the Pacific remained within one category at Liverpool Museum – ethnology. But Chinese and other Asian collections received different treatment, as was the case

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in many other museums in Britain, as well as across Europe and North America. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the deity figures were shuffled from departments of ethnology to archaeology to antiquity, then oriental antiquity, back to ethnology and, most recently, to Asian collections, moves which testify to the ambivalence with which Chinese material culture in Western museums has been viewed.

Sacred Spaces On 3 May 1852, a year almost to the day after the opening of the Great Exhibition, an Act of Parliament was passed to allow the establishment of a public library, museum and gallery of art in Liverpool. It was formally opened on 18 October 1860 in William Brown Street.2 Seven years later, on 6 February 1867, Joseph Mayer’s collection was given to the town. With the Mayer donation, the character of the Museum, now the Liverpool Free Public Museums, changed dramatically: it was transformed from one based on natural history to a more encyclopaedic institution representing both the human and natural worlds. We have already seen the composition of the Mayer collection, with its range of extraordinary antiquarian and ethnographic artefacts. The authorities in Liverpool were clearly aware of the significance of the gift: the 15th Annual Report of the Committee of the Free Public Library, Museum and Gallery of Arts in 1867 boasted of the ‘acquisition of the magnificent collection of Historical Art Treasures, given to the town by Mr J Mayer, FSA … it is no exaggeration to say, [it] is the finest of the kind ever presented to the public’.3 The collection of the 13th Earl of Derby, which had been bequeathed in 1851, comprised equally impressive contributions from the natural world. A large square central court in the western wing, with three tiers of galleries surrounding it, was set aside for the Mayer objects and a curator was designated for what was known as the ‘Mayer Museum’ (Hope 1903: 15).4 The newly configured museum opened to the public on 10 June 1867, and recorded an astonishing sixteen thousand visitors on its very first day.5 Yet one wonders what impact the transition to this opulent architectural space might have had on the once-sacred Buddhist deities. Indeed, I shall argue here that we can detect affinities between their new Liverpool abode and the spaces they originally inhabited in China. The Liverpool Museum was a grand architectural statement, built in a neoclassical style characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century civic architecture, approached by an impressive flight of steps, leading to a portico of six Corinthian columns. The temple façade of the ancient world had become the almost universal symbol of the public museum during the nineteenth century (Duncan 1995; Prior 2002; Giebelhausen 2003). The façade, the steps, the porticos, the columns and the ornamentation all echoed the historical values of ancient Greece and Rome, forging an image of Western civilization associated with order, authority and knowledge (Prior 2002: 49). The monumentality and design of the Liverpool

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5.1 Exterior of Liverpool Museum. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool.

Museum was, above all, intended to convey the scale and importance of the collections within. During their early lives in China the Putuo Five had been housed in sumptuous display realms, and were placed in other remarkable structures in their first decade in England – the extraordinary Crystal Palace in Hyde Park and its even larger manifestation in Sydenham, as well as in the Manchester Art Treasures Palace. In the temples of Putuo, other types of sacred and valuable objects had been stored and displayed alongside them. Describing the objects in one of the temples near Putuo, an observer commented that it was, ‘one of the most complete cabinets in the empire’ (Wright 1843, Vol. I: 54). Such a comparison was not indeed unusual, for there has always been an affinity between religious edifices and museums. Ames, for example, argues that the modern museum plays a role comparable in some ways to the cathedral of the Middle Ages in articulating the values and worldview of society. He likens museums to ‘public temples’ within which significant and treasured things are enshrined (1992: 21–24). Pomian too suggests that museums and churches are places where those with a common culture participate in worship (1990: 43).6 Such affinities may indeed be extended. Sacred objects and sacred buildings are often set apart from other things in society – and so it is with museums. Both museums and temples are distinct, not just in their monumental architecture, but through their positioning. We saw in chapter 1 how Buddhist temples are always

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sited in specific places in the landscape. Late-nineteenth-century museums too were carefully located in key urban sites, often with public spaces around them such as parks or gardens. They formed part of the ‘symbolic geography of power’ along with other imposing buildings (Giebelhausen 2003: 5). In Liverpool’s case, the museum was built with the gardens of St George’s Hall in front and a cluster of monumental civic buildings in the same neoclassical style adjacent – the Picton Library, the Walker Art Gallery, the County Sessions House. Just as temples in Putuo were positioned in relation to a symbolic geography of power in the landscape of Buddhist belief, so too Liverpool Museum was positioned in accordance with the symbolic geography of power in the burgeoning civic realm of nineteenth-century Liverpool. This museum had other features that were similar to the original home of the deities. Its elevated entrance, for example, was a key feature, as we saw in chapter 1, of Chinese temples – height often signifying the transition from the everyday to more reverential domains. Furthermore, in both temples and museums one seldom goes straight to the most important objects. There is usually a boundary, a liminal or orientation space, that acts as the threshold between one world and the next. In chapter 1, we discussed the spaces of Chinese temples, which function as an outer shell protecting the deities inside. Chinese temples always have special entrances – the spirit doors – which serve to demarcate the boundary between inside and out. Museums too usually have imposing entrances – large doors, lobbies, circulation areas – which function as transitional spaces, reinforcing for the visitor that they are entering a place marked off from the everyday. But it is not only in the construction and the function of the external architecture in which we find affinities between museums and sacred sites. Further inside, the use of space, the arrangement of objects, the lighting, the colour schemes, are codes that help to regulate conduct in both the Western museum and the Chinese temple. To Carol Duncan (1995), a key function of the museum is to inculcate in the visitor the particularities of a certain type of ritual. For her, museums function as ‘scenarios’ for visitors to perform: they are places where individuals step back from the practical concerns of everyday life and encounter a different quality of experience, one of contemplation (1995: 13). It is not only the grandiose architecture that removes objects from everyday life, but the atmosphere, the hushed conversations, the slow movement, the windowless rooms, the layout of galleries, the sequencing of collections, the emphasis on revering objects, placed up high, on exhibition, out of reach, carefully lit – all may be related to the spatial configurations of religious buildings. One can imagine, for example, the dramatic effect upon the Victorian visitor when stepping into the entrance gallery of the Liverpool Museum filled with Egyptian statues. The high ceilings, the columns, the processional route carved out through the centre – all seemed deliberately to evoke the environment of a tomb. Yet, clearly, museums are not sacred spaces, but secular buildings, and their purpose is worlds apart from those of the Buddhist temple. I draw these comparisons in order to reflect upon the opulent spaces and sites of reverence occupied by the

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Putuo Five during the course of their exhibitionary careers. The values bestowed in the nineteenth-century museum were very different from those of the temple, and it is to these new and distinctive meanings that this chapter now turns.

Objects in the Museum Transition into a museum is a key moment in the life of any object. Museums, after all, are the places where things are singled out from the mass of material culture in order to fulfil a public service. A museum existence – whether on show or in store – inevitably charges objects with potency. Macdonald writes of artefacts becoming ‘sacrosanct’ once they enter a museum collection (2002: 65). These are institutions that both increase the value and change the meanings of material things. Clearly the museum is one of the most prestigious spaces for objects in the West, just as the temple in Putuo was one of the most prestigious homes for the five deities in China. And Liverpool Museum in the late nineteenth century was renowned. We have seen its impact as an architectural statement; the opulence of its design reflected Liverpool’s status as one of the wealthiest towns in Britain. The Putuo Five had already been placed inside museum-like spaces during the 1850s and 1860s – in the private collections of Hertz and possibly Smith in London, and Mayer in Liverpool. But Liverpool Museum was different, for this was a public institution, and one of their chief characteristics is permanence (Pomian 1990: 42). We saw in the previous chapter how the Putuo Five were sold while inhabiting the cabinets and museums of both Hertz and Mayer. In the public museum, by contrast, things are supposed to be kept out of circulation, forever (Pomian 1990: 9). The expected life cycle of these images in 1867 had thus changed. They were not destined to be released onto the market to be sold, auctioned or exchanged as commodities again. While other items in the original ensemble – the textile, the incense burner and the manuscripts – still had the potential to circulate in the world outside, the bronze statues had now entered a more stable world. Yet, even though they may have come to rest in this new domain, their interpretative lives, as we shall see, were destined to change dramatically. Kopytoff reminds us that all societies preclude certain things from being commoditized (1986: 73). These deity figures, as sacred objects in a temple, were inalienable in their first sphere of significance. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that museums return to objects their inalienability by removing them from the market (2001: 264). Indeed the bronze sculptures could be said to have been ‘re-singularized’ in Liverpool Museum after their phase of heightened commoditization in the 1850s (Kopytoff 1986: 73).7 One of the techniques used by museums to achieve ‘singularization’ and to formally de-commoditize objects is to confer upon them a unique and permanent number.

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The Rituals of Consecration: 12908 ‘Egypt and Miscellaneous’ Registration is the first and seemingly, the most objective, and factual means of elucidating an object, more denotation than connotation. However, as each object enters a registration system it acquires the potential for a new set of (institutional) meanings to be transposed onto it. (Lidchi 2006: 98)

The transition of an object into a museum has to be marked in particular ways. In the nineteenth century this was often immortalized by an inscription in indelible ink in a register, recording such things as the date of acquisition, the donor, a brief description, even a basic sketch.8 Objects would then be allocated accession numbers, attached in the form of a label or marked in some way on the surface. At an early point in their new lives in the museum, the Putuo Five would have undergone such a christening – a ritual that identified them physically and conceptually. Just as consecration in Buddhist China had signified the transition from inanimate sculpture to sacred, living deity, so this museological procedure marked the statues’ entry into the world of the museum. From now on, the images could assume particular functions, either remaining confined in store or brought out to ‘perform’ on public display. While no doubt subjected to this rite of passage, there is, unfortunately, little evidence left of it having taken place – no labels or marks on the surfaces of the bronzes have been left today to indicate their absorption into the early museum.9 The original keeper of the Mayer Museum, Ecroyd Smith, was the first of many guardians to have set eyes upon the Putuo Five in Liverpool Museum and, indeed, it was he who in all likelihood performed the accessioning. In the strong room of the museum today can be found two copies of the Sotheby’s catalogue of the Hertz sale of 1859, both of which have annotations in ink next to the entry for the Chinese deities.10 One indicates the price paid for the images; the other, in a different pen, notes the page number where they appeared in the Great Exhibition catalogue. Someone, possibly Ecroyd Smith, had been through these documents, giving objects their Mayer numbers, as well as noting the price paid and the buyers’ names. Yet strangely the five deity figures, which have such a prominent entry, were not given a new museum number in either document, suggesting either that it was not realized they had been re-purchased from Sotheby’s by Mayer and moved to Liverpool Museum, or possibly that their new accession number had not, by that date, been allocated. It would seem that Ecroyd Smith worked quickly to impose order onto the collection by creating accession numbers in different categories. However, by December 1871, he had resigned (West 1981: 2).11 Charles Gatty succeeded him in 1872–73, as assistant curator, then curator of the Mayer Collection, and continued with the classificatory scheme that his predecessor had set up (Burman 1988: 201).12 Ecroyd Smith had established four and five digit museum accession numbers in fifteen different categories. For example, 1 to 5,131 was Medieval, ivories, pot-

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tery and miniatures; 6,000 to 7,999 was British Antiquities; 10,000 to 10,999 was Greek and Roman; 12,400 to 12,999 was Egypt and Miscellaneous. However, and rather oddly, the accession number given to the bronzes – 12,908 – indicated allocation in this last block. The next set, running from 13,000 to 13,499 was ‘Ethnographical’. As other Chinese objects were listed at the beginning of the ‘Ethnographical’ set, one wonders whether Gatty had intended to classify the bronzes as part of this category but, when he ran out of numbers, decided to use available space in the previous category instead.13 Or, was he consciously classifying the Putuo Five as ‘Miscellaneous’? By at least 1873 a paper slip had been made out for each artefact, which was then stored by department (West 1981: 2). The blue paper slip for the Putuo Five can still be found today. It reads: ‘MAYER COLLECTION: Chinese Buddhist figures (5), see ethnographical cat.’14 There is a handwritten accession number at the bottom (12908). Over time, the set was also given the letter M at the end of their number to indicate their former lives in the Mayer collection.

The Museum Age When Liverpool Museum opened in 1860, a new type of institution was appearing as never before – the ethnographic museum (Bennett 2004: 33; Shelton 2006).15 The emergence and development of this new museum type was at a fundamental level predicated upon the power relations of imperialism. The colonial world was expanding dramatically: by 1856, the British Empire included one in every five people on earth (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 24). By 1897, not only had one-fifth of the world turned pink on the imperial map, but the British dominated one quarter of the global population.16 The late nineteenth century, in particular, was a time of continuous growth in objects arriving from the colonies to museums in the towns and cities of Europe and North America (Peers and Brown 2003: 1). The vast quantities of ethnographic objects converging on the imperial centres of Europe were fed by an informal network of collectors spread across the colonized globe (Henare 2005: 71). Objects were being moved in order to be studied, examined, classified, interpreted and occasionally displayed, but more likely just stored, in the new ethnographic museums in the West. Being located close to a major maritime port, a great many objects were arriving at Liverpool Museum at this time: the Annual Reports throughout the first fifty years of the museum’s life make frequent reference to the dramatic increase in collections and the constant lack of space for storage and display. This was also a time when many academic disciplines – anthropology, archaeology, botany, zoology – were centred on physical things, and when objects played a crucial role in the production and transmission of knowledge (Bennett 2004: 98).17 The information imparted via artefacts indeed was believed to be objective; their ‘truth’ was unquestioned, for things were considered unmediated by words and the subjective interpretations of travellers, missionaries and administrators

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(Henare 2005: 215; Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 106). Museum collections, in other words, were scientific ‘facts’, and objects from ‘primitive’ cultures functioned as proof of the ‘backwardness’ of the societies from which they originated. NonEuropean objects symbolized the people who made them, standing metonymically for entire cultures.18 As Ettema argues: Museum artefacts seemed to actually contain abstract moral qualities that would be self-evident in their appearance. The physical nature of artefacts was merely a reflection of their spiritual nature. By exhibiting the best products of human civilization, museums would communicate those vital qualities to the public. Since the important lessons were in the objects themselves, no further explanations were really necessary. (1987: 66, cited in Moore 1997: 32)

In 1875 Pitt Rivers urged fellow researchers to consider material culture as the ‘outward signs and symbols of particular ideas in the mind’.19 Charles Gatty in Liverpool, seven years later, referred to the ethnology collection thus: ‘The collection illustrates to a certain extent the arts and appliances of uncivilised races both ancient and modern, and forms an object-lesson in a branch of the great science of Anthropology, or the study of mankind’ (1882: vi). Objects were referred to as ‘specimens’ at Liverpool Museum, a term that increasingly replaced words such as ‘curio’.20 The deity figures, previously considered ‘rare works of Chinese art’, ‘images’, ‘figures’, ‘idols’ and ‘antiquities’, were now re-conceptualized linguistically. The term specimen21 carried with it a certain perspective, an interest in classifying and organizing things into groups, rather than focussing on singular qualities. Specimens were samples or examples, representing things of a similar type (Dias 1994: 166 in McCarthy 2007: 20). In this sense, the Putuo Five, as we shall see, were to become part of a wider system of signification.

Classifying China It is unlikely that the five bronzes were on display when they first arrived at the museum. Of the many newspaper reports that describe the gift of the Mayer collection, none refer to the bronzes specifically, nor to any other Chinese objects. The first museum Guide of 1869 did not mention them either. By 1874, Gatty was reporting that the collections were increasing so rapidly that ‘the Museum is greatly cramped for want of space … The Mayer collection cannot at present be displayed in the manner which its great value and historical interest imperatively require’.22 In 1880, the importance of the ethnology collection was recognized in a temporary exhibition of ‘Prehistoric Antiquities and Ethnography’, staged in the lower suite of rooms at the adjacent Walker Art Gallery. This opened with a ‘conversazione’ attended by more than five hundred people and displays that aroused considerable public interest (Gatty 1882: iv).

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Only fifteen of the multitude of Asian objects were included in this display of ethnography, however, with origins in Afghanistan, Malaya and Burma. According to Gatty, this was due both to ‘limited time’ and to the fact that, ‘the large majority of Asiatic civilizations are too cultivated to be of much interest to the ethnographical student’ (1880: 47). While ‘Asiatic’ objects were listed in Gatty’s accompanying catalogue to a display in 1882, once more he questioned the inclusion of ‘Oriental’ objects in a category reserved largely for ‘primitive’ culture: As most of the Asiatic races from whom these objects come, are, or have been, in a highly cultivated state, it has not been considered necessary to be so particular – with regard to the arrangement and description of these specimens, as has been the case with those from more primitive tribes. Indeed many of the Asiatic pieces can hardly be said to fall strictly within the limits of an ethnographical collection. Some of course are of great interest and importance to the ethnographer, especially those from aboriginal races, such as the Hill Tribes of India and Ainos of Japan. These are however exceptions to the general rule. (Gatty 1882: 86)

Gatty thus distinguished Asia’s ‘highly cultivated’ races, that were not part of ‘ethnology’, from the ‘aboriginal races’ that were – a perception of Asian cultures that was in fact characteristic of the time. The distinction between the material culture of ‘civilized’ and ‘primitives’ peoples was embedded within the organizational schema of Western museums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and objects from China (and from other parts of Asia too) often straddled these disciplinary boundaries, being classified as either ‘ethnography’ or ‘decorative art’. Everyday Chinese objects tended to be placed in ethnographic museums in order to illustrate the relative progress of cultures. By contrast, things such as porcelain, jade, metalwork, ivory, furniture, glass, cloisonné and textiles, which testified to sophisticated technology and craftsmanship, were deemed suitable for admission into ‘decorative arts’ collections. As far back as 1850, Masson’s guide to the British Museum had noted that the antiquities of China, India and Japan should be separated from the material culture of more primitive peoples (Clunas 1998: 45). In the twentieth century, the divisions continued. In the layout of the Ethnology gallery at Manchester Museum in 1958, for example, there were two separate exhibitionary spaces – one for ‘Asia: Civilizations’ (which included China, Japan, Ceylon, Siam, Burma and India) and one for ‘Asia: Tribes’ (‘The Naga’ and Indonesia) (Willet 1958). Today, in the two museums that come under the auspices of are administered by the University of Manchester, Chinese material culture is still divided, with the bulk of ‘ethnographical’ artefacts located at the Manchester Museum, while textiles are placed separately at the Whitworth Art Gallery. Not far away, at Warrington Museum, Chinese ceramics are located in an entirely different department to the rest of the material culture from China – that is, in ‘decorative art’. The same is true of the collections at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter.

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Even in Liverpool, the home of the Putuo Five for the past 150 years, Chinese objects have been distributed between ‘ethnology’ in the World Museum and ‘decorative arts’ at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, on the other side of the River Mersey. Until 2005, Asian material culture at the British Museum had also been placed in different departments – namely, Ethnography and Oriental Antiquities. Wider afield, in places such as Paris, these divisions often remain unchanged. At the Musée du Quai Branly, the ethnographic museum of France, which opened in 2006, only certain elements of Asian material culture are displayed – for example, textiles and puppets mainly from South East Asia, the kinds of objects that Gatty had classed as ‘ethnographic’ or ‘primitive’ in the 1880s.23 It is necessary to visit the Musée Guimet for the art – Buddhist and Hindu stone carving, Chinese porcelain, cloisonné and lacquer.24 At the time of writing, this was also the case in Berlin, with the Dahlem Museums dividing Chinese collections between two institutions – the Ethnographic Museum and the Museum of Far Eastern Art. Although both museums are housed in the same complex, visitors must walk the length of the building to see the two entirely separate China galleries, where the same kinds of objects are represented in both. How then might Charles Gatty have positioned the Putuo Five in the early 1880s? Somewhere between ‘ethnology’ and ‘antiquities’ perhaps, but not as ‘decorative art’, and certainly not as ‘fine art’. The incorporation of the material culture of China into the Western canon of aesthetics only came in the twentieth century, as we will see in the next chapter. Although certain Chinese creations had been labelled as ‘works of art’ in the nineteenth century25 – the bronzes had previously resided in collections devoted to antiquities, and Guanyin was eligible to enter the Art Treasures exhibition – almost none had made their way across the disciplinary boundaries into public fine art galleries. There was nothing from China in London’s National Gallery, despite the culture’s highly refined scholarly tradition of painting and calligraphy (Vainker 2000: 9, Clunas 1997: 9). Although Gatty was aware of the visual properties of the sculptures, and he demonstrated some resistance to classifying them as ‘ethnology’, they were nevertheless placed within the ethnographic department in Liverpool Museum, where they remained for the next seventy years. Gatty’s 1880 exhibition was a profiling exercise, with the aim of demonstrating the significance of the burgeoning ethnology collection to the public and the museum’s internal management.26 He hoped that the interest aroused ‘may lead to the arrangement of a permanent local educational gallery of ethnographical objects, attached to the Mayer Museum’ (1880: v). Indeed his strategy was so successful that soon after the exhibition came down, the Library and Museum Committee erected a temporary wooden annexe at the back of the Walker Art Gallery to display the permanent Ethnographical collection of the Mayer Museum (Gatty 1882: v). It opened in 1882 and this time the Putuo Five were placed on display.

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At the Back of the Walker Art Gallery and in Gatty’s Catalogue: 1882 Between 1877 and 1883 Gatty wrote an astonishing seven catalogues to the Mayer collections (Gibson and Wright 1988: 228), an output never matched since by any curator at Liverpool Museum.27 The preface to his catalogue ‘Mayer Museum II: Prehistoric Antiquities and Ethnography’ (1882) noted that it was compiled as a guide for visitors to the collection.28 The Putuo Five were first on the list in the section on China and were honoured with an extensive description. Gatty clearly held the bronzes in high esteem, for he devoted over a thousand words to them and, with no Major Edie on hand to advise, he drew on previous catalogue descriptions as well as information gleaned from recently published work on Chinese temples and religion. The entry summarized their biographical trajectories, describing the history of the images, their acquisition by Edie and their subsequent display in the Great Exhibition, borrowing from the 1851 text: Five bronze figures of Buddhist Deities; obtained by Major Edie from the Buddhist temples on the island of P’uto near the mouth of the Yang-tsze-keang. It is said that some ancient manuscripts were found in the interior of these figures; these were probably prayers. In the Official Catalogue of the Exhibition of 1851, vol iii, p.1425, a description is given of these figures, and it is stated that the sacred island of P’uto has been frequented from time immemorial, by Mandarins of great wealth, and retired ministers of state, who, disappointed in their worldly expectations, or becoming old, have built temples, decorating them with the most splendid works of art, and preparing their tombs in the same, where they were afterwards buried. Various priests have attached themselves to these places of worship, both the temples and their contents have been carefully preserved. (1882: 97)

Unlike those responsible for entries at the Great Exhibition, Gatty had undertaken his own research, for he went on to discuss the monasteries and Buddhist religion of Putuo, providing a detailed description, in particular, of the iconography of Guanyin: Unlike the older Chinese Buddhist temples, they have for their patron deity Kwan-yin, the patron deity of Thibetan Buddhism, instead of Shakyamuni Buddha, the ordinary principal Chinese Buddhist deity. The central figure of this group represents Kwan-yin, seated cross-legged on a lotus dias supported on a throne with open-work sides, decorated with figures of dragons, demons, phoenixes, etc., and wearing on her head the P’i-lu crown. The hands are folded in a devotional attitude, the eyes are half closed and in the forehead is a gem. Beyond the two arms of the goddess with folded hands project twenty-two other arms, eleven on either side, each hand holding a religious symbol. Amongst the symbols are a pearl with flames, i.e. the jewel of omnipotence; lotus flower, shrine, wheel, bottle or vase, etc. (1882: 97)

In 1882, then, Guanyin held a symbol in each hand and had a gem in her forehead. At the time of writing, only seven symbols had been located and the gem is

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missing. The material decline of these figures over the last hundred or more years is discussed in detail in chapter 7. It should be noted at this point that Gatty’s transliteration of the main deity is different from that of the Great Exhibition catalogue – his term, ‘Kwan-yin’, being a more accurate romanization in terms of Mandarin.29 The Great Exhibition text, as we have seen, referred to her as ‘Quon Yam’, approximating to the Cantonese pronunciation. The name inscribed in the Manchester Art Treasures catalogue six years later and at Sotheby’s in 1859 was different again – ‘Quonyem’. Such changes not only testify to the perennial problem of the transliteration of Chinese names, but to the shifting linguistic identity of this figure. In the terms used between 1851 and 1859 we see the dominance of Cantonese, no doubt linked to the fact that Hong Kong was the only British colony in China at that time. By 1882, with the infiltration of Europeans into the mainland, Mandarin was becoming better known. Gatty, by referring to contemporary publications, thus endowed the goddess with the most appropriate transliteration of her name into English – ‘Kuan-yin’ – a rendering in the Wade-Giles romanization.30 Gatty discusses in detail the worship of Guanyin and quotes at length a liturgy translated by Beal. Considering the extent of knowledge about Buddhism at this time, as well as the number of objects in the museum for which he was responsible, he provides an extraordinarily deep and detailed account. Other entries for Chinese objects in his 1882 catalogue had two lines at most. Significantly, Gatty describes the positioning of the four other figures in relation to Guanyin. His Preface had explained that the catalogue was intended as a guide for museum visitors and that the collection was on display in the annexe at the back of the Walker Art Gallery. We can therefore deduce that this entry described objects in situ. First, there was Guangong: ‘On the right of Kwan-yin is a standing figure of a bearded man wearing the P’i-lu crown, and draped in armour. His right hand points towards Kwan-yin. This is evidently one of the secondary Buddhist deities’ (1882: 98). Then a brief mention of Weituo: ‘On the left of Kwan-yin is another figure evidently of a secondary deity, wearing helmet and armour, and a gem in the forehead’ (1882: 98). Finally, he identified the names and position of the two larger bodhisattvas in relation to the central figure: Beyond these figures are two others of a larger size. On the right is P’u-hien [Puxian], a fabulous Bodhisattwa, and the god of action. The principal seat of his worship is Womei Shan [Emeishan], in Si-ch’uen [Sichuan]. P’u-hien is represented riding on an elephant, which it is said indicates care, caution, gentleness, and weighty dignity. On the left side is Wen-Shu [Wenshu], another fabulous Bodhisattwa and the god of wisdom. The chief seat of his worship is in Shan-si [Shanxi]. Wen-shu is represented riding on a lion, which it is said symbolises boldness, bravery, and a fresh, eager, and advancing spirit. (1882: 99)

Unlike the authors of contributors to all the other catalogues discussed so far, Gatty is the only one who managed to identify Puxian and Wenshu, presumably

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based on iconography – something Edie, who lived in China, Hertz and Mayer could not. Above all, the Putuo Five were described in relation to each other, with Guanyin at the centre, flanked by the others. Gatty must have known from Edkin’s book that Guanyin took central position on the altars of Putuo, and he positioned the statues in 1882 appropriately. The location of Wenshu on the left and Puxian on the right was the same as in the Great Exhibition in 1851 and the World Cultures gallery in 2005. Yet, unlike these displays, Gatty placed the smaller guardians next to Guanyin and the two larger bodhisattvas further away. As they were removed from their original sacred abode, and as they passed through the hands of Westerners and exhibitionary regimes, not only were their names transformed but the grammar of their display was also, understandably, modified. Gatty’s entry testifies to the fact that knowledge of and interest in these objects had increased substantially in the late nineteenth century compared with twenty or thirty years earlier, due to the growing presence of Europeans in China. Yet, ironically, as the lives of the Putuo Five unfolded in the museum in the twentieth century, less and less information seems to have been recorded. It was at this moment, in 1882, that they appear to be at the peak of their interpretative careers in the West – that is until now. Finally Gatty turned to matters of value and size in his entry, both of which are worthy of note: These figures were bought in for £225 at the sale of the Hertz Collection at Messrs. Sotheby’s in 1859, and are described under No 3137 in the sale catalogue. H of central figure, 5ft. 6 ½ in, H of side figures, about 3 ft. (1882: 99)

We already remarked on the significance of this sales figure in the previous chapter and here, fifteen years later, Gatty was also at pains to supply details of dimensions and value. Yet such commercial costs are usually concealed in the museum’s public representation of its collections, unlike, and in opposition to, the art market, where commodity status is promoted. It is worthy of note that while many of the other objects in the catalogue were given dimensions, none have a price. This is surely another means by which the significance of the Putuo Five was emphasized. For Sherman and Rogoff, museum labels, catalogues, and other interpretative material provide a ‘context’ in which an object can be read (1994: x–xi). Gatty’s detailed description, in this sense, may be seen to have deposited a new layer of meaning upon the Putuo Five. In his narrative, aspects of the previous lives of the figures were revisited – their origins in Putuo, their appropriation by Edie, their display in the Great Exhibition, ownership by both Hertz and Mayer and the prices achieved at Sotheby’s. Overall, Gatty prioritizes sacred qualities, locating the images in relation to Buddhist religion. Aspects of their biographies associated with Edie were played down. The fact that they were obtained during the First Opium War, for example, is not mentioned. Nor is the Manchester Art Treasures

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Exhibition or Smith’s role in acquiring them at auction. In this new interpretative sphere, they are objects of Buddhist worship, placed in a geographically organized exhibition. This is not so dissimilar, as it happens, to their display in the World Cultures gallery over 120 years later. What is different, however, is Gatty’s curatorial worldview. His perceptions were steeped in the epistemological framework of his time, one in which notions of evolution were gaining prominence. Although aware of the ideas of Pitt Rivers (one of the most influential expounders of evolutionary ideas), Gatty’s organizing principle in this exhibition was deliberately not typological.31 As he noted, the arrangement was effected ‘not with the view of exemplifying any particular theories of civilisation, such a mode of classification being considered the most serviceable for the student of ethnography … The student can here compare for himself race with race’(1880: vii). We see here an interest in ethnology, in the diversity of cultures and links between them, views that were informed by the growing influence of ideas on social evolution. Later in this text, Gatty became more explicit: ‘it remains certain at present, that races have passed from lower to higher grades of culture, and from higher to lower’ (1880: viii). He wrote that objects ‘illustrate the peculiarities of the different races … [and] … the discovery of these gradations in civilisation has given additional interest and value to all objects from savage and uncultured races’ (1880: ix, viii). The Chinese deity figures, in Gatty’s schema, were no longer identified as ‘rarities’ or ‘curiosities’, but were now increasingly viewed in relation to emerging ideas of cultural, technical and religious development. In fact this display may be considered a forerunner to the more overt racial classifications that emerged at Liverpool Museum in the early twentieth century, which we examine in the next section. The location of the Putuo Five at the back of the Walker Art Gallery was a temporary halt on their trajectory within this museum. Despite Gatty’s energy and dedication, the ethnographic collections were still displayed on the margins of the museum, in a temporary annexe behind the Art Gallery. It would not be until 1895 that a dedicated Ethnographic Gallery would be created in Liverpool Museum. Gatty had left its employ by 1885,32 and with his departure, progress towards a permanent display was put on hold (West 1981: 4).33 Demands were consistently made in the Annual Reports for the development of space for the growing ethnographic collections, and the practice for the next few years was to place objects on temporary exhibition in table cases in the Main Hall (Hill 2005: 113; West 1981: 5). The Putuo Five were probably not cased at this time, for they were too large; they were most likely placed on open display, used decoratively along corridors and in stairwells. It was not unusual to find imposing sculpture in circulation areas in the nineteenth-century museum. In the Grassi Museum (now the Museum fűr Vőlkerkunde) in Leipzig, for example, a group of monumental Buddhist deity figures from Japan was placed on plinths in the vestibule rather than in the Asia gallery on the second floor (Penny 2002: 175–77). The Putuo Five are so prominent that every curator under whose care they came throughout the history of the Liverpool Museum must have been well aware of their magnif-

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icence. Yet, paradoxically, their obviousness may have been the very thing that excluded them from close documentation, for they did not need the detailed levels of monitoring required for smaller and less ‘significant’ artefacts. In 1891, the inability to adequately display the ethnographic collections was again noted in the museum’s internal documents. Three years later, in 1894, however, the Annual Report triumphantly announced: After a period of ten years the Ethnographical collection is to be placed on exhibition in rooms especially prepared for its reception. During the time it has been stored away, numerous interesting groups of objects have been added by donation and purchase, and the Collection, when set out, will, it is believed, rank next in importance to that of the National Collections. (1894: 24–25)

Once again the rare bronzes found themselves in good company, one which ranked highly in the museological esteem. This time, however, they would be made to perform in rather less elevated circumstances.

Objects of the ‘Mongolian’ Race: 1894–1929 Henry Ogg Forbes (1851–1932) took up the post as director of Liverpool Museum in February 1894, and under his leadership the Putuo Five travelled through yet another new sphere of meaning: in his new regime they were re-conceptualized in relation to a newly articulated Western classification, the ‘Mongolian’ race. Forbes was a well-known ornithologist and traveller. Before taking up his position in Liverpool, he had been director of the Canterbury Museum in New Zealand (1891–93). Despite his varied management responsibilities, he demonstrated a particular interest in ethnology and spent much of his first year in Liverpool rearranging the collections. A new ethnographical gallery opened in 1895, occupying the basement of the museum, and representing an important shift of objects out of store and into the main museum building.34 The main focus of ethnographic collections at Liverpool Museum by the late 1890s was Africa. The collections from this continent were increasing dramatically due to the large and regular deliveries by Arnold Ridyard, chief engineer of the Elder Dempster Shipping Line (Coombes 1994; Tythacott 2001; Kingdon 2008). Indeed Coombes characterizes the African collection during this period as one of the largest and fastest growing in Britain, second only to the collection at the British Museum (1994: 129). The quality of the Museum’s collections matched their quantity, and they were again acknowledged to be some of the finest in the country (Guide to Liverpool Museum 1993: 3). With the seemingly relentless increase in numbers, by 1898 Forbes was reporting on the complete congestion in the new exhibition rooms. In 1899 and again in 1900, the West African displays were expanded at the expense of others.35

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In Forbes’s former museum in New Zealand, Julius Haast in 1874 had proposed extensions in the form of a purpose-built wing to exhibit the ethnological collections.36 Haast was a supporter of Darwin’s recently enunciated theory of evolution and conceived a display regime that reflected the growing influence of developmental theory: ‘Beginning in the lower part with pre-historic remains, antiquities and ethnological collections and advancing gradually to a gallery upstairs built for the purpose with lights from the top to contain works of art, showing the gradual advancement of the human race from the manufacturing of rude implements to the highest productions of great artists.’37 Forbes may well have known of Haast’s ‘ideological stratigraphy’ (Henare 2005: 175), for this seems to be a model upon which he created new displays on the other side of the world some twenty years later. In 1894, for example, Forbes had written that the public should find the Museum, ‘a book with its pages open and its narrative so clearly set out, that they are unawares following a connected story, unfolded from room to room before their eyes’ (Ford 1955: 11). The ‘method’ used to realize this, he argued, ‘is to present the visitor the lowest forms of life in the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms on entrance, gradually, introducing him from room to room those of nearest affinity, in ascending order till the highest are reached’ (Forbes 1901: 5 in Bennett 2004: 73). A hierarchy was thus to be mapped onto the organization of space, with floors distinguished in terms of the relative stages of progress. While Forbes was familiar with the arrangements of the Pitt Rivers Museum and other contemporary ethnographic displays, he decided to organize the humanities collections not according to geography or typology, but rather racial type.

The Caucasian, Mongolian and Melanian Races By the mid-1890s the language used to describe indigenous peoples had assumed overt racial overtones. From 1895, the year after Forbes arrived, the Annual Reports began to describe the ‘Ethnographical collections as chiefly of barbaric races’ and this term continued in official documents up until 1906.38 The following year, in the Annual Reports, the listing of accessions according to race was initiated. Three main races were itemized – Melanian, Mongolian and Caucasian – corresponding closely to those identified by A.C. Haddon in The Study of Man, which in turn had been developed from A.H. Keane in Ethnology (1896) and Man: Past and Present (1899; reprinted in 1920) (Coombes 1994: 141). In the latter, Keane divided humankind into three racial groupings: the ‘Negro’, ‘Mongols’ and ‘Caucasic’ peoples.39 The ‘Negros’ were the lowest division of humans (Keane 1920: 41). Next in the hierarchy came the ‘Mongols’: ‘Somewhat sluggish, with little initiative, but great endurance; cunning rather than intelligent; generally thrifty and industrious … moral standard low, with slight sense of right and wrong’ (1920: 164). Finally, the ‘Caucasians’ were placed at the top: ‘Bril-

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liant, quick-witted … sociable and courteous … All brave, imaginative, musical, and richly endowed intellectually’ (Keane 1920: 439).40 The ‘Melanian’ objects listed in Liverpool Museum’s Annual Reports included accessions from Africa and the Pacific – places such as New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, Polynesia and Micronesia.41 ‘Caucasian’ comprised predominantly European things, from the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal and Cyprus. Collections of ancient Egyptian material as well as European pottery (including Wedgwood) were part of this, and selected countries in Asia (India and Nepal), the Middle East (Palestine and ‘Babylonia’), the Americas (the USA and the Sandwich Islands), and the Pacific (New Zealand) were also deemed to be from people of this racial category.42 By 1908, the ‘white’ racial group was combining ancient Greek, Etruscan and Roman acquisitions with objects from places as far apart as the Canary Islands, Jerusalem, Shetland and Somaliland. The third racial type, the ‘Mongolian’ or the ‘yellow’ race, consisted of a diversity of peoples from the Americas (Peru and Mexico), Africa (Madagascar) and Asia (China, Japan, the Malay archipelago, Burma, Siam, Tibet, Java, Sumatra, Sarawak, Borneo, Lombok and the Philippines).43 The Putuo Five would undoubtedly have been thrust into this last classification and, as such, designated a position somewhere between the ‘civilized’ white and the ‘uncivilized’ black races of the world. Such distinctions were not based on geography, for the material culture from Asia, for example, was split. Many Asian objects were displayed as ‘Mongolian’, but some – from India and Nepal – were ‘Caucasian’. This classification of peoples into a hierarchy of racial types was typical of the age, and indeed the positioning of the Chinese in relation to ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ races had been articulated over previous decades by a number of scholars. Well-known figures such as Thomas Huxley, Pitt Rivers and Tylor, in their differing ways, characterized the Chinese as part of a racial stock that was conservative, as well as technically and culturally backward.44 Yet the exact positioning of China was not always clear. We saw earlier a sense of ambiguity in the placement of the material culture from this country in Western museums, and this is evident in the positioning of the Chinese ‘race’ in anthropological discourse. In 1865, for example, Huxley had discussed the ‘two great stocks’ of the Xanthrocoi (mainly the Chinese) and the Melanochroi (mainly the Western Europeans) who have ‘originated everything that is highest in science, in art, in law, in politics, and in mechanical inventions’ (in Bennett 2004: 58). In 1867, in a lecture on ‘Primitive warfare’, Pitt Rivers described four broad ‘divisions’ of which the ‘semi-civilised Chinese and Hindoos’ were placed second behind the ‘Caucasian races of modern Europe’. Yet here Pitt Rivers argued that China was ‘unwilling to develop’. He lamented the ‘slowness [of the] ‘progression’ of the race, ‘their incapacity for improvement’, which is ‘proportioned to the low state of their civilization … They are the living representatives of our common ancestors in the various stages of their advancement’ (1906: 50). Tylor too ranked societies in descending order below Europeans and North Americans – for example, Italian, Chinese, Aztec, Tahitian, Australian (Gosden, 1999: 65). Despite the diversity of

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approaches, the Chinese ‘race’ was consistently placed above African and Oceanic peoples, but below Europeans.45 At Liverpool Museum, by the early twentieth century, the categories that were initially articulated in the accession lists of the Annual Reports of 1896 became the overall organizational classification for the galleries (Tythacott 2001: 161–62). The 1901 Annual Report, for example, noted that specimens in the Mayer Museum were arranged, ‘under the three great ethnic divisions of the globe, namely, the Caucasian (white), the Mongolian (yellow) and the Melanian (black)’ (1901: 27). The Mayer Museum was now housed in three galleries in a large central court in the west wing of the old building, as well as in the main hall and its balcony surround. Here the West African and other ‘Melanian’ objects had remained in the old ethnographical galleries in the basement. The Egyptian antiquities stayed in the main entrance hall on the ground floor, with other examples of ‘Caucasian’ art displayed around them.46 It was the ‘Mongolian’ objects from Asia and the Americas that were moved from the basement to the top floor, and it was here that the Putuo Five would have been placed on public display.47 The Fifty First Annual Report of 1903 announced progress made specifically in the development of the Mongolian displays.48 By 1905 the arrangement of this gallery was complete and most objects had been labelled.49 The Annual Report of 1903 had also recorded that the three galleries were being organized: with the objects of Mongolian (the Chinese, Japanese, and Malayan &c) handiwork occupying the upper floor. Those of the Caucasian origin (practically those of the chief civilised races) are arranged in the main hall and its surrounding balcony, while the anthropology of the Melanian (Negroid, Papuan, Australoid, &c.) peoples is being placed in the basement and the adjoining gallery parallel to it. (Hope 1903: 16–17)

There are some interesting linguistic distinctions here. While the ‘Mongolian’ race had ‘objects’ and ‘handiwork’, Caucasian material culture was of the ‘chief civilised races’; the word ‘anthropology’ was reserved for the ‘Melanian’ race alone. In the Annual Report of the previous year, the terms ‘history’, ‘art’ and ‘craft’ had been used for ‘Caucasian displays’; ‘history’ and ‘handiwork’ for the ‘Mongols’; and ‘ethnology’ for the Melanian basement.50 By 1905, ‘history’, ‘art’ and ‘craft’ now described the Mongolian objects.51 The Chinese race, in this interpretative framework, thus had ‘history’ and demonstrated ‘handiwork’, and to some extent had ‘art’, but were placed conceptually outside the remit of ‘anthropology’. In her study of Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850–1914 (2005), Kate Hill argues that racial types at Liverpool Museum were articulated via distinctive display styles. While the basement displays emphasized social life, the galleries devoted to ‘Caucasian’ and ‘Mongolian’ races were concerned more with the actual objects. Furthermore, she argues, the Egyptian (Caucasian) display was ‘intensely historical’, whereas African ethnography was not: ‘An arrangement by dynasty such as was used in the Egyptian Hall, stresses individual agency; whereas the Africans were grouped communally, as “tribes”’ (2005:

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5.2 Egyptian Entrance Gallery, Liverpool Museum, early twentieth century. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool.

115). Caucasian displays invited a more ‘subjective, personal response to exhibits, rather than acting to popularise scientific, objective ideas’ (2005: 115). While there was an emphasis on the body and degeneration in the Melanian gallery, a more formal emphasis on objects as art or antiquity was evident, she notes, in the Caucasian exhibition: ‘The invitation is to view this display [(Caucasian)] in terms of form and aesthetic qualities, rather than, as in the case of the African displays, as a direct reflection of the physical, social and moral qualities of the manufacturers’ (Hill 2005: 114115). Though she does not comment on the Mongolian gallery, it may be assumed that this fell somewhere in between. It is noteworthy that the physical arrangement of the galleries did not match the hierarchy of race. The Caucasians were considered superior, yet displayed in the middle. The Mongolians were conceptually in the middle yet located on the top. Only the Melanian displays were in this sense in the ‘right’ position, at the bottom of both the museum building and the ladder of progress. In order to properly follow the racial hierarchy, it would have been necessary, as Hill points out, to retrace one’s steps (2005: 96). While it is not clear why Forbes designed the space in this way, it may well have been practical limitations. In particular, it may not have been feasible to relocate the Egyptian displays. These were, after all, the initial and very popular attraction for visitors upon entering the museum. The bulk of the ‘Melanian’ specimens, as we have seen, were already in the basement

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and so it would have been easiest for Forbes to remove Asia and the Americas to the top floor.52 Furthermore, Coombes points out that the Caucasian gallery would have been the first grouping that the (almost entirely Caucasian) audience would have seen, ‘functioning as the standard against which to judge the relative stages of “civilization” of the other sections’ (1994: 141). From this, visitors climbed to the floor above to visit another ‘less civilized’ racial type and descended to the basement to see the lowest race of all.53

Race and Racism In organizing material culture in this way, Forbes was making visual statements that reflected the dominant belief system of the time. He constructed the displays in these particular configurations in order to perpetuate what was then a universal truth – that races were unequal and that, through their material culture, they could be ranked. The galleries thus functioned as a visualization of evolutionary ideas, physically mapping the relative progress of peoples. The museum’s larger narrative structure would have stood as a frame that endowed individual objects with their dominant meanings. The Putuo Five here thus performed as an ‘utterance’ within this Euro-centric discourse of race. The culture of ‘looking’ had also changed, for as Bennett notes in the evolutionary display, the relationships between things were important, not necessarily the things themselves (2004: 270). This was different from the ‘pure gaze’ of connoisseurship and the practices of looking in the earlier, Enlightenment museum (ibid.) This was also distinct from the modernist aesthetic approach of the 1930s at Liverpool Museum, which focused on individual objects (see chapter 6). Liverpool Museum was clearly not alone in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in translating evolutionism to the spatial layout of the museum. The relationship between museums and imperialism, and the role evolutionary display played in legitimizing colonialism has been well recognized in the museological literature (Bennett 1995, 2004; Bouquet 2001; Coombes 1994; Edwards, Gosden and Phillips 2006; Henare 2005; Levell 2001; Kreps 2003; Peers and Brown 2003; Shelton 2000). The role of the ethnographic museum, as an instrument of ideology, increasingly became to position cultures in relation to others, with Europe always at the apex of the hierarchy of development. Classen and Howes write of the museum as ‘a model of an ideal colonial empire in which perfect law and order was imposed upon the natives … The visitors can come and go as they please. The collection remains trapped, captive – the canoe hangs still from the ceiling, the drum is silent on the wall, the amulet is powerless in its case’ (2006: 210–11); and the Putuo Five sat on plinths, demonstrating the world-view of the Mongolian race. Evolutionism indeed was one of the most enduring exhibitionary paradigms for the display of non-Western material culture in museums (Coombes 1991: 199), and can still be found in certain ethnology galleries today.54

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So what might this have meant for the Putuo Five? The connotations bestowed upon them by the organizers of the Great Exhibition and the Art Treasures Exhibition fifty years earlier would have been overridden as this ideology of racial evolution displaced their implied affinity with industry or art. They had also been shifted over the previous forty years from rarities and curiosities in private collections to part of a systematic and much larger public exhibitionary complex. Just as they had been carefully placed according to a hierarchy of significance within the temples in Putuo, so they were now located within a different hierarchy of significance in Liverpool Museum. The set of images, once again, was sorted, organized and positioned in relation to a wider ideological system, placed within another ‘iconographic programme’ (Seckel 1989: 84). This time, however, Guanyin and her entourage lost their elevated status. In the temples of Putuo, their positioning demonstrated their status within the Buddhist pantheon. Now, sixty years later, they were conspicuously demoted. Their incorporation into a gallery devoted to the ‘Mongolian’ race, along with the products of other ‘yellow’ races around the world, conceptually signified a subordinate position to ‘white’ races within the evolutionary ladder. We have seen that Chinese things were not at the bottom of this racially motivated system – the Melanian ‘specimens’ from Africa and Oceania occupied this place – but they were much lower down in the overall pantheon of cultural objects than they had been a half century or so before when venerated on Putuo. In this display realm, on the top floor, in the Mongolian gallery, they were intended to demonstrate to the visitors not the efficacy of sacred imagery, or the beauty of Buddhist sculpture, or even the high level of technological sophistication of Ming bronze casters, but the fact that China was considered less civilized than the West.

In the Top W.C. Chinese Cabinet, No. 2 Forbes resigned in 1910 and the following year, Dr Joseph Clubb, a naturalist and long-time assistant curator, was appointed curator of Museums.55 The continued organization of at least some of the galleries according to a racial typology was evident throughout his tenure. In 1913 he wrote an article in which he focused on the ‘art and archaeology’ collections and here he described galleries devoted to the work of ‘Caucasian’ and ‘yellow races’ … ‘important specimens of the yellow races … a rare and valuable Mexican codex and some remarkable potted water vessels of large size, from the Upper Amazon’ (1913: 170). Ten years later, he published an article where the terms are repeated: he wrote of ‘the gallery devoted to the work of Caucasian races’, and noted ‘collections illustrative of the Yellow Races’ (1923: 157–58). Under a new director, Dr Douglas Allan, in 1929 the inventory of the Mayer collection (fourteen thousand objects) was finally completed and in this list we at last find written reference to the Putuo Five. Yet this entry could so easily have

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been overlooked. They are described simply as ‘Chinese bronzes’. That there are five and they are large in scale is not even mentioned. Nor is the fact that they are Buddhist images, their acquisition by Edie, or their display at the Great Exhibition. Only their accession number identifies them for sure. This inventory locates them on the ‘Top W C’ Chinese Cabinet No. 2, where they sit next to three other groups of Chinese figurative carvings from the Mayer collection.56 They are clustered here according to both race and type. There is a “7 inch” high wooden carving of an ‘Old Man standing with a Basket of Fruit, Octagonal base and ornamented stand in rosewood … a Chinese bronze figure on horseback’ and ‘three Chinese deities, on carved wooden stands’. The simplicity of the description of the Putuo Five is surprising when comparison is made with the other objects in the Mayer inventory, the dimensions and other attributes of which are explicitly mentioned. In their earlier lives in English displays, they had always been accorded fulsome descriptions. Now they received less attention than many seemingly ‘insignificant’ artefacts from the Mayer collection. Could this be a sign that they were by now so well known that they did not need extensive description? The bronzes’ 1929 location, given as ‘Top WC’, was almost certainly on the top floor, where the Mongolian gallery had previously been.57 Nearby were cabinets for Burmah, Chinese, Japanese, South American, North and Central American, North American (Eskimo), as well as a case for the ‘Naga’ – all of which were formerly classified as Mongolian. As for the material from Africa and Oceania, it was in a newly named ethnographic room, still in the basement.58 The residual organizing structure lingered even if the outmoded nomenclature had been overtaken. The tripartite racial classification continued in the Annual Reports of the museum until 1927 when it was finally dropped.59 This is the same year that Clubb resigned. Such changes ushered in a new phase in the conceptualization of non-Western objects at Liverpool Museum, for by 1926 the Museum was hosting an autumn exhibition of ‘Primitive Art’, offering a glimpse of a paradigmatic shift to come.

Notes 1. Gibson suggests that the value of the collection was reputed to be £75,000 but that it could well have fetched much more on the open market (1988b: 20). 2. The foundation stone was laid in 1857 (West 1981: 1). 3. A description of the Liverpool Free Public Museum, including the Derby Collection of Natural History and the Mayer Collection of Antiquities and Art, Liverpool (1869: 23). 4. There was already a curator for the Derby collection. 5. Nicholson and Warhurst (1983: 8). 6. Black also refers to museums as ‘secular cathedrals’ (2000: 19). See also Duncan and Wallach (1980). 7. Kopytoff distinguishes between processes of commoditization and singularization (1986: 73).

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8. A register was begun for the Mayer collection in 1873 containing the basic details on every object. Gatty reported on this system in November 1875, after he had been using it for two years (West 1981: 2). Unfortunately this register can no longer be found. 9. There would also have been a legal transfer document from Mayer to Liverpool Museum but I have been unable to locate this. I am grateful to Claire Sedgwick, Registrar at NML, for her help. 10. I am extremely grateful to Zachary Kingdon, curator of African collections at NML, for bringing these to my attention. 11. He wrote to Mayer to inform him that he was ill, and left soon after that. It seems that the curators knew Mayer well. In a lecture on the Mayer collection entitled ‘An educational possession’ to the Liverpool Art Club on 5 November 1877, Gatty referred to Mayer as his friend. 12. Meanwhile, T.J. Moore was responsible for the natural history collections and was supported in his work by a number of assistants in the natural history section (see West 1981: 2–3). The first assistant in Antiquities and Ethnology was probably Peter Entwhistle. He started in 1876 (West 1981: 3). 13. Nicholson and Warhurst note that not all the numbers in each block were used (1983: 8). 14. The typed number on the side of the slip is A380/2000. 15. Shelton, for example, notes how museums constructed to house ethnographic collections in Europe and North America were built in two waves: 1849–1884 and 1890–1931 (2006: 64). 16. By the end of the First World War, Europeans dominated 85 per cent of the earth’s land surface (Said 2003: 123). 17. Hooper-Greenhill writes of ‘object-based epistemologies’ (2000: 107). Henare refers to this time as an age of ‘thinking through things’ (2005: 153). 18. Witcomb argues that non-Western artefacts were believed to embody the ‘essence’ or ‘spirit’ of a people (2003: 105). 19. Lecture, ‘On the evolution of culture’ (Pitt Rivers 1906: 23). 20. Moser notes that curiosities were perceived as objects that ‘provided shallow gratification, rather than functioning as a source of learning and study’ (2006: 226). 21. Though deriving from natural history, it was increasingly used for all types of objects (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 106). See also Pierson (2003: 235) and Green (2002: 185) for use of the term for Chinese objects. 22. Twenty Second Annual Report of the Committee of the Free Public Library, Museums, and Gallery of Art of the Borough of Liverpool, for the year 1874, Liverpool: Henry Greenwood Printer, 1874, 6. 23. Formerly the collections of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro and the Musée d’arts de Afrique and Océanie. 24. There are two other Asian art museums in Paris, the Musée d’Ennery and Musée Cernuschi. 25. Green notes that since the mid nineteenth century, Chinese porcelain and bronze had occasionally been described as ‘Chinese works of art’ at London auction sales (2001: 121). 26. In 1880 the museum was renamed Free Public Museum of the City of Liverpool. 27. Burman notes the Liverpool Museum owes an enormous debt to Charles Gatty for his contribution to the care of the Mayer Museum (1988: 201). See also West (1981) on the 1880 Mayer Museum.

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28. ‘Each object described has its number in this Catalogue, and a similar number will be found attached to the specimen. The numbers given at the end of each description are the Museum registration numbers’ (Gatty 1882: v). The Chinese deity figures were given a number – 869 – which was found on display. 29. Edie had referred to her in his title page as ‘Kuan yin’. 30. Wade-Giles was one of the chief means of transliterating Chinese in the English-speaking world for most of the twentieth century, before Hanyu Pinyin was adopted as an international standard in 1979. 31. In his first catalogue of 1880, Gatty refers to books by Col. Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers), Pritchard and Latham, amongst others (1880: 19), and quoted Pitt Rivers at length in the introduction. 32. There is no curator of the Mayer Museum listed in the Annual Reports. 33. Hill notes that the ethnology collections were not displayed at all between 1886 and 1890 (2005: 113). 34. Forty Third Annual Report of the Committee of the Public Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery of the City of Liverpool, for the year ending 31 December 1895, Liverpool: J R Williams & Co printers, 1896, 2. 35. Forty Seventh Annual Report of the Committee of the Public Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery of the City of Liverpool, for the year ending 31 December 1899, Liverpool: C. Tinling & Co, printers (1900: 62). Also see the Forty Eighth Annual Report of the Committee of the Public Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery of the City of Liverpool, for the year ending 31 December 1900, Liverpool: C. Tinling & Co, printers (1901: 58). 36. Sir Julius Haast (1822–87) was a geologist and explorer, Professor of Geology at the University of New Zealand, and New Zealand Commissioner of the India and Colonial Exhibition in London (1886). See A.H. McLintock’s entry in The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand (1966). www.teara.govt.nz/1966/H/HaastSirJuliusVonKcmgFrs/en – 19k (accessed on 12 July 2008). 37. Haast, ‘Proposal for Museum Extension’, 1874, in Canterbury Museum Records, 4/1, Folder 10, cited in Thomas, ‘Professional amateurs’. See Henare (2005: 173–75). 38. Forty Third Annual Report of the Committee of the Public Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery of the City of Liverpool, for the year ending 31 December 1895, Liverpool: J.R. Williams & Co, printers (1896: 22). The comment was repeated in subsequent years. 39. The ‘Negro’ races were subdivided into ‘African Negro: I Sudanese; II Bantus-NegrilloesBushmen-Hottentots’, ‘The Oceanic Negro: Papuasians (Papuans and Melanesians) – Negritoes-Tasmanians’. The Mongol race consisted of the ‘Southern Mongols’ (of which the Chinese were a part); the ‘Oceanic Mongols’ (Malays, Javanese etc.) and the ‘Northern Mongols’ (Koreans, Japanese). 40. Coombes argues that Keane’s racial theories had a formative impact on curators in Liverpool Museum (1994: 141). The emphasis on physicality and the merging of physical, moral and psychological characteristics was a recurrent feature of anthropological discourse at the time: racial characteristics were believed to be fixed and linked not only to physical features but mental and moral modes of being (Coombes 1994: 141). 41. Yet two years after Forbes established this system, the term ‘Melanian’ was replaced with ‘Ethiopian’, although the areas from which the objects derived remained the same (Africa, Melanesia, British New Guinea, Dutch New Guinea, New Britain, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Fiji, Polynesia, Micronesia). The new word was used until 1901, when Melanian was reinstated. The other two terms remain constant. 42. See McCarthy (2007: 41) for a discussion of the status of Maori objects at this time.

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43. Some things were shifted from one classification to the next, although this was usually a demotion in terms of the racial hierarchy. For example, ‘Babylonia’, which was initially categorized as ‘Caucasian’, became ‘Mongolian’. Similarly, in 1914, India was reclassified from ‘Caucasian’ to ‘Mongolian’. 44. Keane wrote: ‘Chinese culture may still, in a sense, claim to be the oldest in the world, in as much as it has persisted with little change from its rise some 4,500 years ago down to present times’ (1899: 208). 45. As early as the 1840s, for example, Fortune had noted that although the Chinese were ‘much less in advance of the nations of the West in science, in the arts, in government, or in laws; yet they are certainly considerably in advance of the Hindoos, Malays and other nations who also inhabit the central and western portions of Asia’ (1847, 1987: 11). 46. ‘The objects of Caucasian origin (practically those of the civilised races, and, of course, more numerous than the others) will be placed in the Main Hall and its surrounding balcony: The Mayer basement and the adjoining Ethnographical Gallery contained the Melanian specimens, from the peoples of Africa, Melanesia and Australia’. Forty Eighth Annual Report of the Committee of the Public Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery of the City of Liverpool (1901: 55). 47. Although it has not been possible to identify object lists for the Mongol gallery, the Putuo Five were included in an inventory in 1929, where they were located on the top floor alongside objects from Asia and the Americas. 48. ‘The Mongolian Department, to which the Upper Mayer Gallery has now been assigned, considerable progress has been made in displaying the collections, numerous specimens, being now, for the first time, exhibited after being stowed away for many years’. Fifty First Annual Report (1903: 58). 49. Fifty Third Annual Report of the Committee of the Public Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery of the City of Liverpool, for the year ending 31 December 1905, Liverpool: C. Tinling & Co, printers (1905: 76). 50. The Fiftieth Annual Report of the Committee of the Public Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery of the City of Liverpool, indicated that the Upper Gallery of the main Liverpool Museum was being developed to illustrate ‘the history and handiwork of the various families of the Mongolian race. The balcony of the Main Hall, the Main Hall itself and the ground floor of the Mayer Museum are all devoted to illustrations of the History, Art and Craft of the Caucasian peoples. The basement is now exclusively Melanian ethnology’ (1902: 58). 51. ‘In the upper floor can be found illustrations of the history, art and craft of the various families of the Mongolian Race’. Fifty Third Annual Report of the Committee of the Public Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery of the City of Liverpool (1905: 76). 52. Bennett also notes that, ‘Visitors were obliged to constantly retrace their steps and visit galleries out of sequence if they were to follow the ascending orders of nature’s continuity’ (2004: 73). Forbes had been aware of the specific problems in this building of the layout of the galleries spatially according to evolutionary hierarchy. He complains in a report of 1901 that they are ‘far from being well constructed for the purposes of a museum as they might be’ (in Bennett 2004: 73). 53. The Mongolian gallery in Liverpool was not intended for Chinese people or for Buddhists but for the predominantly white Westerners, most of whom had little knowledge of the beliefs of Asian cultures, but who would take away the key racial – and racist – messages. 54. For example, at Warrington Museum. 55. After Forbes resigned on 31 March 1910, the title changed from ‘director’ to ‘curator’.

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56. There may, of course, have been other Chinese objects in this cabinet that were not part of the Mayer collection. 57. ‘WC’ may have stood for West Corridor, West Court, even West Corner – but not toilets, as these are referred to as lavatories. 58. There are, however, some references to Indian objects in the basement. 59. Seventy Forth Annual Report of the Library, Museums and Arts Committee for the City of Liverpool, for the year ended 31 March 1927, Liverpool: C. Tinling & Co, printers (1927).

CHAPTER 6 Objects of Art, Archaeology and Oriental Antiquity: Liverpool Museum, 1929–1996 In the previous chapter we saw how the deity figures were conceptualized in relation to the dominant interpretative framework of the late-nineteenth and early–twentieth-century museum, that of evolutionism. In the twentieth century their ideological meanings changed once again due to wider cultural shifts in the perception of non-European objects. Here, in a new interpretative regime in Liverpool Museum, the aesthetic impact of the objects became more important than their religious function, curiosity value or positioning in relation to race. In this chapter we examine how the bronzes assumed new identities in the twentieth century, as aesthetically powerful sculpture as well as objects of ‘archaeology’, ‘antiquity’ and ‘Chinese metalwork’. While chapter 5 examined the construction of anthropological ideas around the Putuo Five, this chapter addresses the construction of art historical and archaeological knowledge. The first section will explore the impact of the modernist revolution on the interpretation of Chinese things, then turns to examine the translation of modernist ideas to the displays at Liverpool Museum in the 1930s. The second half will map the peregrinations of the bronzes in the mid–late twentieth century after they narrowly missed being bombed during the Second World War. This is a time when they were shifted, in great haste, to emergency storage in North Wales and Liverpool, and when information about their previous lives became lost. Despite being confined to boxes for over sixty years, they remained conceptually active, moving in and out of a range of museological classifications – ‘ethnology’, ‘archaeology’, ‘antiquity’ and ‘Oriental antiquity’. As this book is concerned to examine the ‘dynamics’ around the objects, rather than ‘static’ moments of definition (Myers 2001: 8), we will see here how these bronzes become, more than at any other time, objects of shifting institutional and disciplinary practices.

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Chinese Objects as ‘Art’ The Aesthetic Revolution In the first decades of the twentieth century a new discourse emerged which profoundly reconfigured the perception of non-Western objects and their display in Western museums. The modernist avant-garde in Europe appropriated the imagery of exotic cultures in order to subvert the established taste of bourgeois society. From 1914 on, the Cubists and Surrealists, amongst others, placed new emphasis on objects from other cultures, initially those from Africa and, later on, from Oceania and the Americas (Tythacott 2003). As well as absorbing the formal imagery of certain types of exotic things into their creative artworks, many, particularly the Surrealists, collected, displayed and wrote about the power and beauty of so-called primitive art. James Clifford has referred to the redefinition of a large group of non-Western material culture in this short period of time as a ‘taxonomic shift’ (1988: 196): just as a new category of ‘primitive art’ emerged, so too exotic objects became relocated, conceptually and physically, in the museological spaces of the West (Clifford 1988: 228). The reinterpretation of ‘Oriental’ and, specifically, Chinese objects as ‘art’, however, underwent a different trajectory to that of African, American and Oceanic material culture. Asian objects did not figure highly on the modernist avant-garde’s list of exotic concerns, perhaps because they were considered to be the products of ‘civilized’ cultures and not in need of subversive reappropriation.1 In addition to this, the category of ‘Chinese art’ had, according to some, already been ‘invented’ by the early twentieth century (Green 2002: 202).2 The ‘Exhibition of Early Chinese Pottery and Porcelain’ at London’s Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1910 is believed to have stimulated a transformation in the perception of Chinese material culture. This was the first time that early wares from China had been shown in Britain, and the exhibition was remarkably successful in positioning them on the Western aesthetic map (Clunas 1997: 5; Green 2002: 65). Chinese objects, of course, had been collected in Europe for centuries and ornately decorated porcelain had been a feature of much Victorian praise. With the looting by British and French regiments of the Summer Palace in 1860, many imperial pieces had found their way to Europe for the very first time. More came with the widespread and prolonged plundering from 1900 to 1901 after the Boxer rebellion (Hevia 2003). Furthermore, in the early decades of the twentieth century, different kinds of Chinese objects were appearing, such as archaeological material uncovered during the construction of China’s first railways (Green 2002: 66). After the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912, hitherto unknown imperial treasures were also taken to Europe.3 All of these had a formative impact on Western connoisseurs. As the availability of excavated wares and tomb figures increased, so the perception of the range of China’s material culture, and of the sense of its history,

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expanded. The new taste in ancient objects was constructed, to some extent, in opposition to the collecting habits of the previous generation, which had favoured the ornate porcelains of the early–mid Qing (1644–1911).4 It was both the archaeological as well as the imperial objects that precipitated this shift in taste. By 1915, Hercules Read of the British Museum was writing that it was ‘hard to recall so fundamental a revolution in the opinions of the world of art as the marked change of attitude towards Chinese art among the leaders of artistic thought’.5 Along with his colleague R.L. Hobson, Read was at the forefront of discussions around the aesthetics of ancient wares. By the early 1920s a coterie of dedicated collectors and connoisseurs had emerged, who wrote articles, organized exhibitions and, in 1921, formed an influential club, the Oriental Ceramic Society (OCS), which functioned as the mouthpiece for their beliefs.6 Collectors associated with this society, in particular, went on to dominate the taste in Chinese art in Britain over the following decades (Pierson 2003: 2). Yet only certain things qualified for the new category of art. We have seen the preference for ‘early’ objects, initially those of the Ming (1368–1644), later on the Song (960–1279), Tang (618–907) and Han (206 BCE – 220 CE) dynasties (Green, 2002: 64). Collectors sought out things that fitted their pre-existing ideas of ‘primitivist’ aesthetics – the formal and chromatic simplicity of Song dynasty stoneware, modelled pottery figures from the Han and Tang dynasties, grave goods removed from tombs and, significantly for this study, ancient carved or cast Buddhist sculpture. The growing interest in Chinese art in Britain is exemplified in the collection of the influential art critic, Roger Fry (1866–1934). His sculpture of Guanyin is well known, purportedly dating from the Northern Wei or Sui (fourth to seventh centuries ce). Purchased in 1913, it was displayed at (another) exhibition of Chinese art at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1915.7 By the early 1930s, the institutionalization and professionalization of Chinese art in Britain was also taking place. In 1930, for example, a Lectureship in Chinese Art and Archaeology was created at the University of London – a subject ‘extremely specialised’ at a time when Western art history was not even on offer (Pierson 2003: 3, 34).8 Two years later the post was transferred to the Courtauld Institute of Art, where a chair in the subject was established (Pierson 2003: 55, 252; Clunas 1998: 49).9 In the Courtauld’s first year of involvement (1932–33), W. Perceval Yetts taught a course entirely devoted to ‘Buddhist sculpture’ – a new and specialized area.10 The first study of Buddhist sculpture in English had only been published in 1924. The author was Leigh Ashton, who would go on to become the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. His work was followed by Osvald Siren’s four volumes on Buddhist art in 1925 (Pierson 2003: 54). As Ashton wrote in his introduction: ‘There has never been any appreciation in China of the sculptor’s art. Hardly any serious recognizance of the objects themselves was made before the 18th century, and even then it was probably more the association of history and the antiquity of inscriptions which interested the connoisseur. Buddhist art has received no admiration till comparatively recent times.’11

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Judith Green notes that Chinese sculpture was difficult to acquire in the West and rarely found in private collections in the interwar period (2002: 202–3). The five remarkable and rare deity figures from Putuo would have fitted the developing tastes of the OCS and their circle. The fact that they were large cast figurative statues and that they derived from ‘ancient’ China rendered them eminently translatable into the canon. In 1929, the proposal to create an ‘Oriental Museum’ in London, which would combine the Asian collections of the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, illustrates well the new emphasis on the aesthetics of the East. In the end the concept was never realized (Pierson 2003: 19). The taste in Chinese objects arguably reached a climax six years later in the great Royal Academy event, ‘The International Exhibition of Chinese Art’ (1935–36). Other changes followed. In 1946, the British Museum finally disassociated its Asian objects from ‘Ethnography’, placing them in a newly formed Department of Oriental Antiquities. Four years later, in 1950, the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art was established.12 By the mid twentieth century, the study of Chinese art was flourishing (Clunas 1998: 49): collections, galleries, academic departments, dealers and specialists, as well as a new aesthetic discourse, were all much in evidence. This epistemological shift was accompanied by changes to the visual and spatial organization of Chinese material culture in the museum. By the mid century, a number of museums and galleries were displaying connoisseurs’ collections of ceramics, jades, bronzes, cloisonné and lacquer.13 ‘Oriental’ objects were being exhibited in ways that emphasized their individual, visual, formal, as well as historical, qualities – a trend evident in Liverpool Museum as early as the 1930s.

From ‘Mongolian’ to ‘Oriental’ We noted earlier that the racial classifications at Liverpool Museum had been dropped in 1927. Two years later, the entire departmental structure was reorganized.14 These changes ushered in a new chapter in the history of the institution. The Mayer Museum was divided into two: ‘Ceramics and Ethnology’,15 and ‘Archaeology and Shipping’.16 The former was based on collections from the old ‘Melanian’ and ‘Mongolian’ classifications – Africa (except ancient Egypt), the Pacific, the Americas, India, Japan and China, and Liverpool ceramics (which had previously been ‘Caucasian’). Archaeology and Shipping incorporated what had been ‘Caucasian’ material from the ancient Mediterranean world, alongside British pre-historical and medieval collections, arms and armour, and artefacts of Liverpool’s history. As the collections were disentangled from their racial sets and reconfigured in new guises, so the Putuo Five became part of a different classification. Dr Douglas Allan was appointed director in June 1929, and he made other adjustments, shifting Ceramics to Archaeology and, in 1931, Shipping to Ethnology. The five bronzes that sat briefly in a classificatory scheme with Ceramics, now shared a new category with objects associated with Shipping.

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The reorientation of Liverpool Museum’s Asian collection in relation to the broader changes just outlined was explicit. In the news section of the Museums Journal, a paragraph on ‘Liverpool Museum: Oriental Ethnology’ noted: ‘while London is discussing some future Asiatic Museum, Liverpool is setting to work. The Introductory Room at the Liverpool Museum is to become a museum of Oriental Ethnology in five sections: China, Japan, Burma, India and Malaya (1931: 213). Once again Liverpool Museum was concerned to position itself in relation to London. We also see a change in terminology here. Instead of ‘Mongolian’, ‘Oriental’ was now used. Although less explicitly racial, this nomenclature nevertheless formed part of a well-established perspective. Edward Said famously documented how ‘Orientalism’ was part of a Western nexus of knowledge and power, enabling the West to define the Orient as its ‘other’ (2003: 27). Seemingly impartial academic disciplines, he argued, had been vital in the production of forms of colonial subjugation (Young 1995: 159–60). To Said, the ‘Orient’ on display in the Western museum – an institution which manifests dominant ideologies – would have functioned as part of this ‘formidable structure of cultural domination’ (2003: 25). Liverpool Museum, in the 1930s, operated as an undisputed authority on the public representation of other cultures, and an Orientalist discourse, in one form or another, surrounded its display of objects from the Far East. The Western missionaries who travelled to colonized parts of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were also, inextricably, part of the imperial project. Missionaries carried with them a righteous set of values which they juxtaposed against the ‘heathen’ beliefs of those they went to save. Take the Reverend Lee of Everton. For seventeen years he lived amongst the peoples on the SinoTibetan border. Upon his return, in the late 1920s, his rare experiences were harnessed by Liverpool Museum when he was invited to work on the Chinese collections.17 With such a long standing exposure to Chinese people and religious beliefs, one wonders whether he would have known the identities of the Putuo Five – and may even have taken a particular interest in interpreting them for display.

Thomas’s Aesthetic Modernism The art of display is primarily a question of communicating an aesthetic experience. (Thomas 1939: 11)

In Liverpool Museum’s Oriental Ethnology Gallery, which opened in 1935, we see a clear transformation from the high-density display environment of the previous regime to the simplicity of twentieth-century modernism. Not only was there a desire to dismiss the visual clutter of earlier exhibitions, but an explicit rejection of the ideology of evolutionism. Interestingly, instead of adopting new anthropological approaches,18 the museum drew upon aesthetics to reconceptualize the collections. Although the director, Dr Douglas Allan, was aware of broader

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changes to the perception of non-Western objects, it would not be until the keeper of ethnology took up his post that the shift to the new regime would be most forcefully articulated. By the early 1930s, with Trevor Thomas’s arrival, the line between ‘ethnography’ and ‘art’ at Liverpool Museum was shifting. Thomas joined the museum as keeper of the Department of Ethnology, the month after the publication of the Museums Journal article of 1931,19 and his appointment represented an injection of energy into an institution that had suffered, like so many others, in the aftermath of the First World War. Thomas at once defined himself in opposition to the outmoded practices of his predecessors. He was a self-conscious modernist and modernizer, aware of the new values ascribed to non-Western objects, and his interests were translated into the galleries in the 1930s, where he initiated new patterns of display that were fundamentally opposed to the evolutionary approach of the previous decades. Prior to Thomas’s arrival, the museum’s Annual Reports of the late 1920s and early 1930s had complained repeatedly of the lack of space within the displays, and plans for new exhibitions were discussed. Comparative anatomy and zoology were removed to make way for Asian material. The 1931 report noted that in the new gallery, ‘there will be displayed groups of specimens from India, Burma, Malaya, China and Japan, so that the room as a whole will give a general idea of the customs, religion, arts and crafts of the Orient’.20 The gallery was to be on the top Mayer Gallery, in the same location as the old ‘Mongolian’ displays.21 In 1932 the Department of Ethnology was said to be ‘passing through a period of difficulty, for the accumulation of material has necessitated a complete re-organization of the plans for the display of specimens’.22 A new Africa gallery had been completed in the basement by the time Thomas arrived and so he turned his attention to developing the Oriental displays, which occupied most of his energy between 1934 and 1935. China and Japan were finished first, by 1935, assisted no doubt by the earlier interpretative work of the Reverend Lee.23 By 1935 it was noted: ‘Out of the chaos, resultant on schemes of re-arrangement and transfer of storage accommodation, some order is emerging’.24 Between 1936 and 1937 the labels for the Chinese objects were prepared and it was proposed to add new ones for each region annually.25 There are no extant object lists from this period, for reasons that will become apparent, and so, unfortunately, it is not known for sure if the Putuo Five were on exhibition. Yet whether or not Thomas chose to include them, as curator his interests and interpretations inevitably became attached to these statues. The remarkable thing about Thomas was that he left much evidence of his approach to display. His views were set out in four articles in the Museums Journal between 1933 and 1939, as well as in lectures and newspaper articles26 – and it is upon these I draw in order to construct a sense of the new interpretative world the Putuo Five entered in the years immediately before the Second World War. In the first of his Museums Journal articles, ‘Modernism in display’ (1934), Thomas described the galleries he encountered upon arrival at the museum:

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from four to five of these shelves were set up in a case and crowded with specimens. Fabrics were nailed to the whitewashed walls, each shelf was piled with objects set one behind the other, and, finally, specimens and photographic illustrations were nailed to the front edges of the shelves. After looking at half a dozen of such vases the spectator was left with an overwhelming sense of fatigue and a confused mental impression of a mass of uninteresting material. (1934: 221)

Thomas’s displays were to be a departure from these over-crowded and ‘depressing’ cases arranged along racial lines.27 One of the problems was that information labels in the past had been affixed, sometimes at the edge of a shelf, sometimes leaning against the objects, and this inhibited the viewing experience. The function of the museum, for Thomas, was as ‘an arbiter of aesthetic taste’ (1934: 221), and in his view the Asian collections were eminently suited for a formalist approach: ‘In recent years, the Liverpool Public Museum have pursued a consistent policy of experiment in their methods of attractive display. One of the latest developments of this policy has been the reorganization of the Oriental Gallery … this section with its objects of intrinsic beauty would lend itself admirably to modern settings’ (1934: 221). New words are suddenly heard: Oriental objects had ‘intrinsic beauty’. The terms ‘formalized’ and ‘individual’ were used too by Douglas Allan, the Director, who reiterated the suitability of ‘Oriental’ objects for aesthetic treatment.28 Allan chose to illustrate his 1937 text with cases depicting Chinese porcelain figures of Guanyin. Another small sculpture of this Chinese goddess had been used three years earlier in a sketch of one of Thomas’s cases (1934: 223). Here was evidently an object type suitable to demonstrate the modernist approach. Thomas was concerned to elevate Oriental objects, and a series of interchangeable plinths or ‘blocks for staging’ were constructed, which he referred to as ‘cubic units’.29 Thomas intended for each object to be seen ‘isolated’, ‘against a field of neutral grey’, not ‘obscured in a jumbled mass’ (1934: 225). In another article in the Museums Journal, ‘Penny plain two pence coloured: the aesthetics of museum display’, he wrote of being, ‘cursed by the tradition of the shelf. The shelf is the great shackle on museum display, and until we can escape from these fetters museum showmanship is doomed to be rigid and overcrowded (1939: 7). The shelf, after all, encourages comparison within groups of things set out in a horizontal space – evolutionary displays were all about arranging things into particular classifications. Thomas’s formalist approach, by contrast, intended to focus attention on individual objects: in the general scheme of display, with the use of cubic elements in place of shelving, I was aiming particularly at avoiding any impression of overcrowding. The ultimate effect had to be severely architectural, almost sophisticated in its simplicity; each specimen had to stand alone, with beauty of colour and quality of line emphasized by the gentle character of the pale grey background. As far as possible no specimen could be allowed to overlap another. (1935b: 2)

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Objects here were isolated, highlighted, individualized. The museological devices used to perpetuate this approach are immediately recognizable – the plinth, the frame, the spotlight – tools employed in many museums to influence the way visitors relate to objects.30 The Chinese Buddhist statues by their very size would have resisted the shelf and, if moved by Thomas onto plinths in his Oriental gallery, must have shifted, at the same time, into this new paradigm of display. Colour schemes were also important. Thomas insisted that each object should be placed against a ‘clear background, an uninterrupted field against which to express its character’ (1939: 10). He stressed light colours, clean lines, a simple design, no decorative effects.31 The neutral backgrounds were deliberately intended to highlight the colours of Oriental objects. As the director wrote in 1937: ‘The general scheme of the gallery is a cool series of greys to act as a foil for the striking character of some of the exhibits’ (Allan 1937: 20). Thomas emphasized ‘quiet pastel shades’ (1934: 222; 1939: 11), and back walls were painted lavender-grey distemper. It is certainly the case that light colours are used as the marker of the aesthetic in the vocabulary of museum display; pure white being the signifier of modern or contemporary art. Oriental material culture, even today, is usually displayed within spaces that have a slight shade – grey, salmon, magnolia, lavender. This of course was worlds apart from the visual realm of the Buddhist temple, where the Putuo Five had been surrounded by a darkened atmosphere and colours that had specific symbolic meaning within the Chinese religious system. Deep and dark reds would have been used on columns to suggest happiness and yang principles (Lip 1986: 17); ceilings would be painted in a palette of gold or red to represent power and glory (Lip 1986: 12). Black or dark blue may well have been the colour of the walls. The insipid pastel shades of Thomas’s 1930s designs would have been highly inappropriate – white, above all, being inauspicious, associated in China with death and mourning. Thomas’s physical reconfiguration of space carried with it ideological messages. Indeed, many authors have argued that the identification of an object as art is a cultural construction, promoted, through (amongst other things) museological devices of display. The criticisms of this approach, once imposed upon non-Western objects, have been well rehearsed (Clifford 1988; Foster 1985; McEvilley 1992; Price 1991; Vogel 1989). In this new realm in Liverpool Museum, the Putuo Five may well have travelled up the Western hierarchy – for objects of ‘art’ have a higher status than objects of ‘ethnography’ – yet this interpretation contravened the original world they were created to inhabit. Buddhist sources rarely apply aesthetic criteria to deity figures. Kieschnick observes that Buddhist images were hardly ever ‘purely decorative’; ‘It is only in modern times that this tendency to consider Buddhist images valuable, even if they do not contain sacred power, has come to the fore’ (2003: ,79). The original meanings of the deities were constructed within a Buddhist exhibitionary system where they were an inextricable part of a broad ‘iconographical programme’: they were understood within the ‘total context of this religious world of ideas and moods’ (Seckel 1989: 63). Seckel argues this is especially true for the cult images

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which, ‘stripped of their pedestals and halos – are viewed in the cold and pathetic loneliness of bare rooms built perhaps centuries later, or even worse in the sterile atmospheres of museums’ (1989: 63–64).32 With the new focus on aesthetics and the new display techniques, the conditions of viewing also changed – aesthetic modernism after all is an interpretation that tries to regulate a particular mode of looking. As we saw in chapter 1, the five deities were not intended to be seen in isolation, as singular entities, but belonged within a complex system of signification. Their formal imagery, their shape, size, the symbols they held, all had particular meanings and endowed them with their identities within Buddhist belief. Their symmetry and design was constituted so that they were to be looked at from the front and below, not the sides, the back, or at eye level – and this was intentional. Gell argues ‘One cannot see God from back, because if he is not watching us, he is not God’ (1998: 192). On their shrines in the Buddhist temple, the backs of deities are obscured by partitions. The idea of being able to walk all the way around such images, placed on plinths, encased in glass, being able to go up close and inspect them as three-dimensional sculpture, transgresses the scopic and symbolic regime they were created to exist within. As with the lives of the deity figures under Edie, Hertz, Mayer, Gatty and Forbes, the meanings assumed by the objects in the 1930s reflected the personal interest of their caretaker. Here, their past in a Chinese temple, their acquisition by Edie and their earlier location within a racially structured institution would have been superseded by Thomas’s interpretation. The links between the objects and their cultures were probably played down. There may have been little interest in original sacred function, and certainly no questions would have been raised about their appropriation or their journey from temple to museum, even though at the time such details may have been available. Yet, while modernist aesthetics was the dominant framework in the 1930s, it is also important to remember that these bronzes had already accrued an amalgamation of meanings. Foster and Jones argue that objects are never located within single frameworks of meaning (2008). As we saw in the introduction, material culture may be considered from a range of perspectives, being read concurrently as one thing and as another. This is particularly the case when an object is on display and subjected to the gaze of multiple visitors. But objects in storage too lend themselves to diverse readings. Before the displays were set up in the 1930s, Reverend Lee was no doubt primarily concerned with the religious significance of the deity figures. As no labels from the Oriental gallery exist, we cannot be sure if previous interpretations were entirely obliterated, contradicted or distorted in the 1935 display. Considering this it makes more sense to conceptualize the statues as palimpsests onto which multiple layers of meaning had already been inscribed.33 Such a concept enables us to acknowledge the social patina accrued by the bronzes over the years and to consider how they were in the process of continuously gathering new meanings, rather than shedding and negating older ones. The new interpretations bestowed in the 1930s may thus have been overlaid upon previous histories, perhaps not entirely effacing them – that is, until the aftermath of the Second World War.

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In July 1940 Thomas was appointed director of Leicester Museums,34 and Miss Jameson (who had been seconded to school loan service) returned to Ethnology, as acting keeper (West 1981: 12). The outbreak of war in Europe had further profound consequences for the lives of the Putuo Five.

Objects in War and Store: ‘An Exhibition of Official Neglect’ Images and records that are relegated to the closed store-rooms of a museum are relegated to obscurity. (Ames 1992: 22–23)

Worshipped for hundreds of years in a temple on Putuo (a ‘cathedral of Buddhism’35) and performing so prominently at the Crystal Palace (the ‘Temple of Industry’36) where thousands of eyes had been laid upon them, the Putuo Five were now to suffer an ignominious demise in the backwaters of Liverpool Museum. In 1939 they were shifted hurriedly as a result of yet another war, this time into storage, and they were to languish in this state for almost sixty years. The upheaval in a time of crisis resulted in most of the records of their lives for the past eighty years in Liverpool being lost. Guanyin and Wenshu (at least) were dismantled and the Putuo Five were separated and kept in appalling conditions for a great many years. From 1939, Liverpool Museum’s collections had been moved to the safety of mansions in nearby Cheshire and North Wales.37 Handwritten lists appear to suggest that the Chinese sculptures went to Galltfaenan Hall, Trefnant, Denbighshire in North Wales.38 This was just as well, for on 3 May 1941 the adjacent library was hit by an incendiary bomb that spread to the museum and devastated the main building. The oldest part was gutted, and the largest area, comprising the horseshoe galleries, was burnt. Tragically some of the collections stored for safety in the basement were engulfed by fire (Millard 1988: 71; Allan 1941: 106).39 Although the Asian objects were largely saved, certain Chinese enamels, Ming jades and Tibetan pieces were destroyed, as well as some of the collection archives (Martin 2005: 78). The Liverpool Museum building remained in a state of disrepair for decades, just as the temples at Putuo had been during phases in their history, particularly after the devastations in the Opium Wars. Only the neoclassical frontage – the temple façade constructed in the nineteenth century – remained to signify the former opulence of the city’s museum. This magnificent building, referred to variously as a ‘place of pilgrimage for international historians and antiquaries’, a ‘temple of the muses’ and a ‘temple of the spirit’, had now become an eyesore in the city for all to see (Whittington-Egan 1957a; 1957b: 85; Allan 1941: 107). The collections had been moved to Wales in great haste.40 Although the precise conditions of storage are unknown, some parts were accorded special attention. In 1942, for example, it was reported that ‘Delicate ivories, lacquer and bronzes

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6.1 Interior of Liverpool Museum after the bombing, 1941. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool.

from the Department of Ethnology’ were ‘treated’ at Galltfaenan.41 Life for the Putuo Five in this large Regency villa in beautiful surroundings, however, was relatively short, for seven years later the collections were transported to Carnatic

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Hall, outside the centre of Liverpool.42 From June 1946, the museum had leased this imposing building from the city’s university for the storage of collections, and it remained the basis of operations until 1966 (West 1981: 13). Dr Allan, Mr Perry and Miss Tankard shared curation of the ethnology collections during what must have been a very difficult time.43 Allan resigned in 1944 and Perry in 1947, leaving Tankard the only curator in charge of the massive collection (some hundred thousand objects). She became keeper of both archaeology and ethnology. Indeed, no reappointment to ethnology was made until 1960, twenty years after Thomas had resigned. Judging from handwritten notes in the museum stores, whatever was at hand was used as packing material for the collections. Objects were placed in oak chests, cartons, cardboard boxes, even cereal packets.44 Dr Dorothy Downes, keeper of antiquities from 1966–1978, has described how the objects were stored in ‘assorted cardboard boxes of various kinds’.45 For the Putuo Five, storage itself was not unusual. As we have seen, they had been on and off display since their arrival at the museum in 1867, and occlusion from public view is not, after all, a particularly extraordinary fate for any museum object – most museums have space to exhibit only around 1–5 per cent of their collections. The problem in Liverpool was the condition of storage and the fact that hardly anything at all was on display – a situation made explicit by the local press. A photograph of Miss Tankard, standing by a table in the stores surrounded by ‘treasures’, holding up an object, found its way to the Liverpool Daily Post (17 June 1956). The dramatic headline read: ‘Threat of decay to Liverpool treasures: they escaped German bombs – now the menace is mildew and dust’. Richard Whittington-Egan, on a campaign to highlight the state of Liverpool’s collections, warned readers that priceless objects were ‘in danger of rotting’ in store: Here, museums officials are fighting a constant and losing battle against mildew, damp and dust. Carnatic Hall has acted for the past decade as a kind of assembly centre to which all the rarities which were stored in the country houses of North Wales, together with what was salvaged from the smoking debris of the ruined museum, have been returned … Here, in conditions of indescribable chaos, is gathered a heterogeneous hoard of valuable specimens which make of what was once the tree-cloistered home of a wealthy privateer something which looks suspiciously like the greatest junk shop in England. But these things are not junk and that is the tragedy, for unless something is done about rehabilitating them many of them will undoubtedly become junk … Everywhere, swathed in cotton wool, bedded in straw and sawdust or packed in neatly labelled boxes, lay the nuclei of Liverpool’s magnificent collection. Priceless objects of gold and silver were hidden in haphazard cardboard cartons which had once been dedicated to nothing more exciting than breakfast cereals.

This, then, was the fate of deities that had been revered for centuries on the most important pilgrimage island in China, and which had performed so prominently in the main avenue of the greatest public spectacle of the mid nineteenth century. The following year, in 1957, the Daily Post again highlighted the state of the

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6.2 Storage of collections at Carnatic Hall, c. 1950s. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool.

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bombed-out museum and its neglected collections, and the headline this time was equally dramatic: ‘Liverpool’s priceless relics rot in storage’. unless the public of Liverpool stirs itself to a fine burst of indignation the indications are that the rebuilding of the Museum will be further pushed back into the future until there will come a day when no one will remember that Liverpool once held an honoured place among the cities of the world that have some regard for antiquity. (Elgin 1957)

By the late 1950s, despite the efforts of a new director, John Henry Iliffe (1902–1960), the government had not financed a new building. Even he became scathing, ‘The major part of our priceless, irreplaceable collections are mouldering and disintegrating in packing cases in cellars and warehouses in different parts of the city’ (Elgin 1957). Iliffe’s desperation became ever more strident: ‘Better to give them [the collections] away to museums in other cities who would care for them and put them on show to the public than to let them crumble into destruction as is happening now ... How ironic that many of these relics which escaped the fury of bombs and fire are now endangered by Liverpool’s own neglect (Elgin 1957). Members of staff were galvanized into action. The following month Miss Tankard gave an address to the Liverpool Soroptimist Club, where she too reported on Carnatic Hall as,‘hopelessly inadequate for our purpose, it provides an administrative centre and some storage space. But in two years’ time, our lease expires: the university wants the space for a students’ hostel, and they are already building in the area. In the very near future we shall be turned out. Where shall we go?’46 She pleaded: ‘The Liverpool Museum is too great and too important to be allowed to fall into obsolescence; and that will be its fate, unless you and people like yourselves choose to save it. It has drifted downward now for sixteen years: twenty years will see its end’.47 Two days later yet another newspaper, the Liverpool Echo, took up the story, announcing to its Merseyside readers: Museums are not for junk, but Liverpool Museum, which survives as a largely hidden store of valuables, is an exhibition of official neglect and decay. This is not through any fault of its staff, but because of lack of sufficient funds and will power to rebuild it to something of its former glory … Liverpool Museum must no longer remain largely dust and ashes in the community’s throat.48

Dust, damp, neglect, decay, rot, mouldering, disintegrating, crumbling into destruction – all emotive words for the conditions of objects in storage, articulated in an exceptionally public way.49 By the mid twentieth century most museums operated on the basis that certain things should be accessible to the public – the relatively small percentage of objects selected by a curator, carefully prepared and interpreted for display. Then there is the remainder of the collection, seldom revealed to the outside world. It is almost always the case that the mass of museum things are enclosed, sequestered and sep-

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arated, not only from their original cultural contexts, but from the world outside. Stores are forbidden places where only museum officials and a few outsiders can go. The buildings themselves may be removed from the main museum site, placed on the fringes of towns or cities, at undisclosed locations. There is usually no signage. Nothing must indicate the wealth of treasure inside. Security officers may be on duty to inspect those who enter. There are the rituals of entry and exit performed to secure the privilege of access: identification may be presented, registers signed, keys handed out. As well as the regulations surrounding the crossing of the threshold, there are codes of behaviour once inside. ‘Behind the scenes’ is a mysterious place to those uninitiated. Interiors often have little natural light and are even further removed from everyday life than public displays in museums. They are usually silent, devoid of people. Above all, they are filled with the most unimaginable groupings of things from all over the world. These live out their existence crammed in boxes, flattened into plan chests, massed in cupboards, stacked on shelves, sitting in aisles. In Carnatic Hall in the 1940s and 1950s, tens of thousands of precious things were divorced from their original contexts, languishing in store, awaiting attention from overworked curators. Ancient Egyptian statues, Greek pottery, African masks, Chinese ceramics, rare moths, birds, and musical instruments, to name but a few, lived here alongside the Putuo Five – crammed together, haphazardly arranged on Dexion shelving, some in Weetabix boxes, verging on chaos. One can imagine the despair and exhaustion of Miss Tankard as she roamed restlessly through the aisles in the dark decades of the 1940s and 1950s, with no one listening to her desperate pleas for help as she attempted the Herculean task of bringing order to the infinitude of chaos around her.50 This is how the deity figures lived out their existence for almost sixty years – separated from each other, dismembered, dusty and corroded, forgotten by the world. All this was far from Buddhist tradition, by which images are taken as an extension of the body of the Buddha. Respect is demanded, particularly in terms of handling. Placing Buddhist objects on the floor is particularly disrespectful (Chuang 1993: 218). Jigdal Dagchen of the Sakya Monastery in Seattle asserts that Buddhist images should be kept elevated. Sacred Buddhist objects should also be in a dust free area.51 The temporary museum stores were far from clean, and the large and heavy cast bronze sculptures were almost certainly placed on the floor. When they travelled to the next place of abode in the 1960s, they were located in boxes on the steps in a cold and draughty stairwell.52 Some thirty years later, when I first encountered them, some were still on the floor (albeit in a less ventilated position) in an old warehouse by the Liverpool docks. Despite this physical confinement to the stores, these bronzes were to gather yet more museological meanings in the decades to come, as well as a lot more dust. As bleak as this situation was in Western museological terms, it should be pointed out that the images were at least safe – which is more than can be said for the religious relics that remained on Putuo. Between 1966 and 1976 the Cultural Revolution wrought a devastating impact on the temples, deities and monks on

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Guanyin’s sacred island, resulting in destruction on a massive scale. Had the deities remained in China, it is more than likely they would have been destroyed, melted down for Mao’s great industrial endeavour.

Objects of Archaeology: 1940–1966 … the reading and significance of the materiality of objects is variable according to who is reading. (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 114)

It was at this point, just after the Second World War, that Elaine Tankard (1901–1969) began to extend her curatorial remit to the Ethnology Department, focusing with particular alacrity on the Oriental material.53 Tankard had arrived in 1931, the same year as Thomas, and in 1935 she became keeper of archaeology and ceramics (West 1981: 10). Thomas’s post was not filled after the war even though major acquisitions arrived during this period from Burma, Tibet and China, as well as from the Wellcome Institute and Norwich Castle Museum.54 Tankard was in charge of this growing collection, in addition to campaigning for better storage and (ultimately) a new museum building. After Thomas left, she became the guardian of the Chinese deity figures, and with her background in archaeology would no doubt have engaged with them in a particular way.55 It is certain that the five magnificent bronze bodhisattvas, the largest and most prominent Buddhist objects from China, would not have escaped Tankard’s attention. Her curatorial specialism was in the ancient, the archaeological and the religious, and under such custodianship, the statues would have taken on interpretations different from those of the modernist aesthete, Thomas. As these objects moved into the orbit of this curator, so the epistemological framework that surrounded them changed: in Tankard’s regime, the Putuo Five were designated ‘archaeological’, valued for their testament to traditions of Buddhist belief and bronze casting in ancient China. The expansion of the Himalayan collections in the 1940s and 1950s reflected the passions of this curator. Tankard was fascinated by Tibetan Buddhism and expended much energy obtaining Tibetan material from renowned political officers and collectors, such as Charles Bell and Francis Younghusband. In 1953, she mounted the groundbreaking ‘Tibet’ exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery.56 She also saw China as an essential focus. Soon after her arrival, she set to work on the Oriental ivories (West 1981: 9), and later, in 1956, wrote a note on the loan and display of the Sassoon collection of Chinese ivories for the Museums Journal.57 In an associated illustration, amongst the groups of carvings, images of ivory Guanyins are notable.58 That year she penned a handbook on the Chinese pottery collection to accompany a small archaeological exhibition (some thirty objects from the Han to the Ming), demonstrating her knowledge of ancient wares.59 Tankard had much richer information to draw on than previous curators respon-

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sible for the Oriental material, for Chinese exhibitions were becoming more specialized by this time. In 1955, the Oriental Ceramic Society (OCS) organized an exhibition of Tang (618–907 ce) material at the Arts Council, their first exhibition focusing on a single period. The same year, the British Museum mounted ‘Art under the Mongol dynasties’, which was followed by other key OCS exhibitions: ‘The arts of the Ming dynasty’ (1957) and ‘The arts of the Sung dynasty’ (1960) (Pierson 2003: 231–33). Pierson argues that these were important indicators of a new trend, focusing on specific dynasties and representing a new period in the understanding of Chinese art in Britain (2003: 231). Like most of the other objects in Liverpool Museum’s collections, the sculptures were not on display during this time. The museum was still a burnt-out shell and selected collections were only shown as part of temporary exhibitions, usually at the Walker Art Gallery next door.60 However, it is evident that some of the deity figures were visited in the stores, for the tail of the lion upon which Wenshu sat was relabelled under Tankard’s documentation programme in 1955.61 The fact only one fragment had a new number suggests it had already been separated from the rest of its body – and it is likely that the other bronzes too had been dispersed. Although it has not been possible to ascertain when the original accession numbers went missing, it is more than likely that it was during this period in store.62 Keith Priestman, keeper of conservation, remembers seeing the statue of Guanyin in Carnatic Hall in the 1950s. At that time he says that only a ‘handful’ of people had the ‘onerous task of unpacking and checking the condition of all the material kept in storage, in various locations, since the beginning of the war’. This was, he notes, ‘an enormous job’ and, as a result, progress was quite slow.63 Improvements to collections management were introduced, however. ‘History Files’ for the Liverpool collections, for example, were created in the 1950s – large brown envelopes on which the accession number, a description, the source and collector/donor was written. A black and white photograph was also occasionally attached to the front and relevant documentation placed inside. These were then filed numerically by accession number in a fireproof metal cabinet. While such files would no doubt have been created for the deity figures, at the time of writing the originals, unfortunately, could not be located. In January 1956 part of Liverpool Museum re-opened with small exhibitions in the Lower Horseshoe gallery. In May that year, David Boston was appointed special officer in Ethnology, a temporary post renewed annually. The bulk of the ethnographic material had been left unclassified and awaiting attention since 1941 (West 1981: 14). In 1959, when Iliffe resigned, Tankard acted as keeper in charge until T.A. Hume took up the directorship in January 1960.64 That year, finally, the keeper of ethnology job was re-established after a break of more than twenty years. In the absence of a specialist custodian, Tankard had, over the years, extended her curatorial remit to aspects of the collections which interested her and, despite the new keeper of ethnology post, a large section of the Asian collections remained in Archaeology. Tankard released certain things to the new incumbent,

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objects predominantly from South East Asia: Indonesia (Bali, Sumatra, Borneo, Java), Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and parts of India (the Andaman and Nicobar islands, the ‘Naga’). Yet even then not all South East Asian material was transferred. Items considered in some way to qualify for ‘decorative arts’ (in that they demonstrated high craftsmanship or used high quality materials) or that could be seen as ‘antiquities’, stayed with her – silverware, lacquer ware and an imperial ivory throne from Burma, as well as Hindu and Buddhist stone sculpture from Thailand and Java. The newly formed collections from Tibet (Tankard’s great passion) as well as collections from India, Japan and China too remained in Archaeology. This dismemberment of the Asian collections seems to have been predicated not only upon the proclivities of the curatorial regime but in relation to more deeply rooted separation that we have encountered before. We had seen Gatty’s suggestion of a division of Asia in his catalogue of 1882 and this was reinforced eighty years later with the splitting of the collection into separate departments. Asian material culture seems to have been divided into things deriving from ‘civilizations’ considered to have ‘history’ and ‘art’, and those that did not. While we examine the institutional articulations of these differences in the next section, suffice it to say here that the Putuo Five had crossed a boundary. This was the first time since their arrival at Liverpool Museum almost a century before that they were no longer assigned the classification ‘ethnology’. The personal interests of Tankard apart, the transformation of the epistemological framework that surrounded ancient Chinese material culture must surely have been another factor in the ability of the Putuo Five to become ‘archaeology’. This had emerged in the Chinese context as a discipline in the 1920s with the first tentative excavations.65 By the 1930s, the Guomindang government had put in place its Academica Sinica, the development of which though was severely curtailed by the Japanese invasion. Only after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 did serious archaeological research begin. In the 1950s an Institute of Archaeology was established and large-scale excavations were initiated across the country (Magnusson 1974: 8). Over the following decades, one spectacular discovery after another was revealed to the outside world.66 The result was the transformation of the study of Chinese archaeology in the West. In 1955, the Chinese art course at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London was placed within Archaeology,67 and it was now possible to study an Academic Diploma in Chinese Archaeology or an MA in Chinese Art and Archaeology (Pierson 2003: 71).68 As the archaeology of China became institutionalized and professionalized in both the East and West, a new period in the understanding of Chinese objects began. By the 1950s, the possibility of conceptualizing the Putuo Five in archaeological terms thus existed as never before.69

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Objects of Antiquity: 1966–1996 In 1966, the year the Cultural Revolution began in China, the bronzes were transported, with the rest of the collections, from Carnatic Hall to an old dockside warehouse near the centre of the city, known within Liverpool Museum by its location at 63 Blundell Street. Built in 1882, ‘Blundell Street’ straddled four large floors in an old warehouse bordering one of the most neglected areas of the former city docks. One approached it from the street monitored by an obscure security camera. The rusty steel door had a small bell and, after a period of minutes, it would be opened by one of the (usually part-time) storemen. Immediately in front were narrow stone stairs, leading up three flights. As one ascended, each floor was entered through an iron fire door. These large spaces had worn wooden plank floors, high ceilings, rusty cast iron beams and columns, and row upon row of Dexion shelving overflowing with the boxes relocated from Carnatic Hall. Windows dimly illuminated one side of the building only and most were barred, letting in very little light. Between the windows in the centre on the upper floors were large rusty iron shutters, and derricks which swung out over the road below and were used for lifting large crates into the building, for the stairs were too narrow. On the ground floor, as one entered, were piles of querns, the tearoom and toilets. The floor above was for ‘antiquities’, next came ‘ethnology’, and on the top floor could be found an assortment of objects from both the antiquities and ethnology collections. Blundell Street was a veritable treasure trove, an Aladdin’s cave, stuffed with the most extraordinary objects, of which the locals were blissfully unaware. Dorothy Downes described the way that everything was crammed in here when she arrived in the 1960s to take up the post of keeper of antiquities after Elaine Tankard retired. The Putuo bronzes were initially placed in the cold, stone stairwell, not the most respectful of places, she notes, ‘but at least they were safe’.70 The position assumed by Dr Downes in 1966 had transmuted from keeper of archaeology to keeper of antiquities.71 It is not clear why this occurred but it does seem something of a retrograde step, harking back to nineteenth century nomenclature. Antiquities was the generic term for ancient objects used at the time of Joseph Mayer’s ownership of the Putuo Five, redolent of the classical antiquities of Greece and Rome and other Near Eastern civilizations. Schnapp relates that archaeology began with the collecting of antiquities and developed in the nineteenth century from the antiquarian concern with the recording of ancient monuments (1996: 163). Many antiquities have also of course been recovered by archaeological excavation. But the connotations of the two are distinct: ‘antiquities’, the older term, tends to focus on objects; archaeology is linked to an academic discipline. It might be argued that as archaeology was considered a discipline and a process, it would not have been as suitable as ‘antiquities’ as a collective name for ancient objects in a museum.72 Furthermore, antiquities may have been a partic-

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ularly suitable title for these objects in Liverpool Museum by the 1970s for it distinguished this section from the Field Archaeology Unit.73 In a guide to Liverpool Museum in 1993, the differences were put into print. Antiquities were described as ‘everyday items or artistic treasures from ancient civilisations’, while ethnology was the ‘study of peoples and cultures from around the world, and specifically Africa, the Pacific Islands and the Americas’ (1993: 29). Antiquities thus emphasized ‘items’ and ‘artistic treasures’; ethnology was concerned with ‘people’. Antiquities had a historical dimension, an interest in the ‘ancient’. Ethnology, it would seem, did not. Terms such as ‘civilization’, ‘art’, ‘treasure’ and ‘Asia were excluded from ethnology, a discipline considered to be of relevance, in this context, to Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. One can detect a hierarchy here, with the ancient and technologically accomplished objects placed above the more recent (usually late nineteenth to early twentieth century), organic, natural, simpler things. The five Chinese deity figures, now consigned to antiquities, thus qualified as ‘artistic treasures’ from an ‘ancient civilization’. Yet if, as Pye argues, ethnology is about objects of the other, while archaeology is concerned with objects of the past (2000: 110), it is easy to see how the Putuo Five confuse classification. Distinguishing between objects of art and those of antiquity, Green also notes: ‘Whereas, the singularity of the art object has been identified with its intrinsic qualities, the singularity of antiquities derives from their extrinsic relationship to a particular historical moment of which they are evidence’ (2002: 188). What differentiated these Chinese objects in the late twentieth century from their earlier interpretations, according to this, would be a sense of history. By this time, the separation between the two departments at Liverpool Museum was manifested in the organization of stored material culture, with ‘Antiquities’ on the first floor and ‘Ethnology’ on the second floor of the Blundell Street warehouse. While the Putuo Five were originally placed in the stairwell, they moved with the rest of the Oriental material to the top floor in the early 1970s, and by the 1980s were relocated two floors down to join antiquities. This now represented a more or less geographical divide, with Europe, the Middle East and Asia on the first floor, and Africa (excluding Egypt), the Americas and the Pacific in Ethnology on the floor above.74 In 1974, the City of Liverpool Museum and the Walker Art Gallery were transferred to Merseyside County Council and renamed Merseyside County Museum. The main display floors at the museum were completed two years later, but still the bronzes remained in store (Tythacott 1998: 33). Nothing from Asia was included in the new ethnographic gallery, as most of the collections were now administratively in a different department – Antiquities. In 1986 Merseyside County Council was rescinded and on 1 April the museum service became the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (NMGM), the first central-stateadministered museum in England outside London. The sculptures were, despite themselves, now elevated to a higher status in the hierarchy of British museums. The same year, an internal re-organization was implemented, and the collections

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in Antiquities, Ethnology and Field Archaeology were merged into one department – Archaeology and Ethnology.75 Still the Putuo Five were separated one from another: no one recognizing them to be a set. Throughout the 1980s the unwrapped torso of Guanyin sat on a stool at the end of one of the aisles, facing the barred and dirty windows. Her throne was in pieces and scattered over the building. So too were her arms. The other four bronzes were placed some distance away, at the opposite end of another aisle, on the floor. The animal mounts for Wenshu and Puxian were separated from the bodhisattva figures and the four separate sections had become shapeless forms – wrapped in thick polythene, caked in layers of dust. The guardians, Weituo and Guangong, lay nearby.76 Guanyin, at least, was the object of a degree of attention, for the statue was ‘cleaned’ between 1985 and 1986, most likely by one of the assistants under the direction of a curator in the stores.77 However this resulted in the patina being removed from her knee.78 Keith Priestman also recalls that dust was removed from Guanyin and the statue was lightly buffed with a wax polish around this time.79 In 1986 the Putuo Five were omitted from a major exhibition devoted to Joseph Mayer (May 1986 – May 1987). In 1988, the most comprehensive account of the Mayer collection, edited by Gibson and Wright, also failed to mention them. Eldon Worrall, who, as we shall see, was the first person in the 1970s to examine the various components in detail, was unaware of their histories and did not include them in his chapter on Mayer’s Oriental collection (Worrall 1988). A 1988 handbook entitled Sculpture on Merseyside was published by the Tate Gallery, and NMGM was silent on the subject, despite the fact that many other life-size figurative bronzes were illustrated. Most were European – but there were some non-Western sculptures from Africa, the Americas and Oceania. Indeed, throughout the 1970s and 1980s very little of Asian material culture was exhibited at Liverpool Museum. This is not altogether surprising, for after Miss Tankard had left, in over a quarter of a century, there was no single Asian specialist employed at this large institution. Nonetheless, significant changes took place in terms of the collections. In 1991, NMGM purchased an outstanding group of nineteenth-century China trade objects – the Dorothy Worrall Collection – resulting in a significant expansion of the Chinese collections, which hitherto had been overshadowed by Tibetan material. The acquisition also changed the profile of the Asian collections in general, for there was now much greater emphasis on colonial trade links with Liverpool. This, as we shall see, became a key theme for the 2005 World Cultures gallery. Around this time a new post, curator of Oriental collections, was taken up by Christina Baird, the first time in the history of the institution that a position entirely devoted to Asian collections had been created. The 1993 guide to the Liverpool Museum described the ‘Humanities gallery’ in which the ethnological and antiquities material was combined in order to demonstrate the ‘study of people and their widely differing art, life-styles and customs’ (1993: 29). The five Chinese deity figures were now part of the Oriental

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collection, listed after ethnology rather than with antiquities; the Oriental collection was described as one of the largest in the country (ibid: 30). Despite this, the only Asian objects on display were three ‘Chinese’ kites made for the International Garden Festival in 1984 – these suspended from the ceiling of one of the museum’s galleries (ibid: 42). The late 1980s and early 1990s, however, saw a greater interest in Buddhism in British museums. In 1985, the ground-breaking exhibition ‘Buddhism: Art and Faith’ was held at the British Museum. In 1991, a travelling exhibition from the British Museum ‘Living Buddhism’ went on loan to Liverpool Museum. ‘The Sacred Art of Tibet’ was mounted at the Royal Academy the following year (1992). Also that decade, the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art opened in Glasgow. However, as Chuang points out, there was still no single museum or gallery devoted to Buddhism in the UK (1993: 163).

6.3 Guanyin’s crown, 1980s. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool.

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Guanyin Rediscovered: Objects of Chinese Metalwork and Connoisseurship, 1970s–1990s They were in relative obscurity, filthy, dirty and corroding away. (Eldon Worrall discussing the state of the Putuo bronzes in the 1970s and 1980s, interviewed in 2008)

In the 1970s, in this dilapidated warehouse by the Liverpool docks, the forlorn and dismembered bronzes found themselves subjected to yet another regime of interpretation. In 1975, the lid of Guanyin’s box was removed and the Goddess of Compassion saw the light of day for the first time in many years. Eldon Worrall, a local antiquarian with an interest in Oriental metalwork, had contacted the director that year to enquire if there were collections from China. The keeper of archaeology, Dr Downes, offered to accompany him to the stores to investigate. At the time, all the Oriental material was on the top floor. Worrall remembers opening one box after another, gazing in astonishment upon a vast array of precious things. He specifically recalls coming across Guanyin, crammed into a wooden crate, its numerous pieces on a bed of straw. While Worrall had not connected all the Putuo Five as part of an ensemble, he did recognize Wenshu and Puxian, and Weituo and Guangong, as pairs. Astonished by the quality of the objects, he was inspired to begin compiling a catalogue of Liverpool Museum’s Chinese metalwork collection.80 A quarter of a century later, he was still a Research Associate at the Museum, with a doctorate in Chinese metalwork based on Liverpool’s collection (Worrall, 1993). Reflecting on his role in ‘discovering’, and then caring for, the Goddess of Compassion over the past thirty or so years, Worrall has referred to himself as the ‘guardian of Guanyin’.81 Worrall’s main ‘mission’, as he called it, was to locate the separate pieces of the multiple armed goddess and reconstruct her from the component parts scattered around the stores. It took him years to find all the dismembered bits, and put the statue back together. Early on Worrall had discovered a box, made from pine, probably dating to the nineteenth century, specially constructed to hold Guanyin’s twenty-two slightly bent arms. This was, alas, empty. Some years later, he found the crown and some of the arms on the second floor of Blundell Street, interspersed amongst collections of the Decorative Arts department.82 Even later, he came upon two of Guanyin’s arms in a safe in Liverpool Museum.83 It took a decade at least to identify the parts and indeed, as we will see in the next chapter, they were not all located in time for the 2005 display. When Worrall first encountered the bronzes in the 1970s it was in a changing climate, one in which such Chinese objects could be read in ways distinct from the earlier archaeological gaze of Tankard. A discourse of connoisseurship and new forms of specialist knowledge had emerged which enabled the Putuo Five to be considered as ‘masterpieces’. Indeed Worrall has noted how his own perception of the bronzes shifted through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, as more was understood about Chinese Buddhist sculpture in general. When Worrall first set eyes upon the Putuo Five, the transformation in the appreciation of Chinese objects as ‘art’ had more or less taken place. Up and down

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the United Kingdom, Oriental art galleries were now to be found and Chinese ceramics and sculpture were the subject of an established scholarly discourse. Chinese art, as Clunas puts it, had become the object of a ‘whole apparatus of knowledge’, with a maturing language of connoisseurship, particularly in relation to ceramics. Alongside this was a ‘thriving commercial market’ led by specialist dealers (Clunas 1997: 3). British auction houses, such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s, held regular specialist Oriental auctions. Chinese art now had a scholarly respectability and its own discipline. As knowledge of Chinese objects expanded, so the vocabulary used to describe things changed. Chinese material culture was discussed in relation to dynasties – the preferred Chinese way of organizing history.84 Within the dynasties, there was a concern to identify the particular imperial reign more precisely, so that with regard to the Qing dynasty, for example, an object would be described as ‘Kangxi’ (r. 1662–1722), ‘Yongzheng’ (r. 1723–1735) or ‘Qianlong’ (r. 1736–1795). When I first heard Worrall discuss the figure of Guanyin in the 1990s, for example, the important thing was that it was of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368). Of what exactly did such connoisseurship consist? While the discerning connoisseur of Chinese art emerged later than the Western paintings specialist, their approaches were predicated upon similar methods. Brewer argues, in reference to paintings, that connoisseurship could be characterized as a ‘science’ based on system and order, and focusing on the meticulous analysis and classification of things (2009: 55). Scrupulous visual identification, usually at close range, was important. This was a science, if you like, of observation and discrimination (2009: 55). It was practical, based on direct experience – seeing and (possibly) handling one object after another (Brewer 2009: 74). Emphasis was placed on rigorous, attentive observation, on cultivating a trained ‘eye’ (Brewer 2009: 73). Connoisseurs had the ability to identify patterns, decorative details and specific elements, all of which were important in enabling authentication. Training took place, as Brewer notes, not in the classroom but out in the field (2009: 72) – or, in our case, in the museum stores. Yet Brewer points out that apart from a rigorous, systematic and ‘scientific’ approach, successful connoisseurs also needed to have artistic sensitivity and to be able to respond emotionally to the particular qualities of works of art (2009: 74). All of this can be related to Worrall. He had undertaken his initial training in the auction rooms of the North West of England and had translated this visual literacy to the stores of the museum. When I first met him in 1996, his ability to identify Chinese objects had already been well tuned through decades of hands-on experience. On the occasions when we went around the stored collections together, he was adept at identifying the particular patterns on Chinese ceramics, and at knowing what to look out for in terms of construction marks and the wear and tear on Chinese metalwork. He often focused on fragments and details – craftsmanship, decorative techniques, the quality of the casting. He used a particular language to describe things – ‘piece’, ‘bronze’, ‘sculpture’, for example, for the Chinese bronzes. Like all connoisseurs, Worrall was fundamentally preoccupied with distinguishing the real from the fake, the ancient from the new. Ascription of age, in particular, was the means to authenticate objects – especially the Putuo Five – and to enhance their sense of rarity and value.

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Although the Putuo Five had, since the 1850s, been part of antiquarian and then later of antiquities collections, in none of the descriptions was there an attempt to date them. The Great Exhibition catalogue talked ‘of very great antiquity’ (Cole 1851: 1425); Sotheby’s referred to them as ‘rare works of ancient Chinese art’ (Hertz 1854 31–32; 1859: 213); Gatty wrote of ‘ancient manuscripts’ found in the interior (1882: 97). Worrall was perhaps the first to be explicitly preoccupied with their dynastic age. However, when he first encountered Guanyin, he was not able to give a definite attribution. He knew it was pre-Qing, but could not designate it as Ming or Yuan.85 It was only in the 1980s, after he had seen an image similar to Guanyin in a Sotheby’s catalogue, that he felt more confident in a Yuan dynasty attribution.

6.4 Guanyin’s arms, 1980s. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool.

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These new perceptions coincided with the exposure of the bronzes to a range of specialists, many of whom had cultivated the trained ‘eye’. In the late 1980s, Worrall arranged for Rose Kerr, the key expert on Chinese metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum, to examine Guanyin. She agreed with the Yuan dynasty dating. In 1977, he had worked with Margaret Medley, curator of the Percival David Foundation at London University, to research Liverpool Museum’s collection of Chinese ceramics.86 Although not an expert on metalwork, Worrall recalls Medley’s remark when shown Guanyin: ‘fantastically important’.87 A Chinese acquaintance of Worrall’s, Wei Ting, studying at the University of Liverpool, visited the stores in 1989 to confirm the identities of Puxian and Wenshu. In 1993, images of Wenshu and Puxian travelled to China when Worrall wrote to a keeper at the Forbidden Palace Museum in Beijing, asking for information and enclosing photographs. Worrall was interested, above all, in identifying the metallurgical origins of Chinese objects in the museum collections, and so the five Chinese deities, scattered around the stores, became absorbed into his research on the material and the technology of construction. His doctoral research had focused on the categorization of wares and technical processes, and he was an expert in the precise composition of various alloys in what the Chinese call the ‘tong’ family, in particular paktong (baitong), in export goods from the seventeenth century. Worrall documented the Putuo Five separately as part of his catalogue of Chinese metalwork. Analytical techniques were applied and samples were taken from objects to determine exact chemical structure. In the 1980s, for example, minute samples were removed from interconnecting parts of Guanyin (such as the arms), which were sent to a metallurgical specialist at the University of Liverpool to determine the composition of the alloy.88 In examining the Putuo Five from the perspective of metallurgy and connoisseurship, each component merited study, sometimes in microscopic detail. An extension, and embodiment, of the interest in physical manufacture was a set of photographs commissioned by Worrall in the 1980s for his metalwork catalogue. These depict the Chinese bronzes in fragments. Rows of Guanyin’s arms are laid out, each next to another. Fragments from the throne and the crown were placed in front of the camera for documentation, each individually framed, photographs which today remain as a vivid record of the state of dismemberment of the once pristine figures. These statues, that originally had meaning in relation to their position in their set, now had new meanings given to each individual, and often dismembered, component. *

*

*

This chapter has examined how the interpretations of the Putuo Five were refracted through the changing norms and regimes of art history and archaeology from the 1920s to the 1990s. It has documented the formation and reformation of departments at Liverpool Museum in order to indicate the shifting systems of classification (and associated knowledge) to which these images were subjected. It

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has also charted the very different perceptions of the ‘guardians’ of the Putuo Five during the twentieth century, demonstrating how these bronzes participated in yet new systems of meaning, taste and connoisseurship. Alberti notes how a collection’s association with a benefactor may ‘wax and wane’ as links may be forgotten and then rediscovered, ‘thus establishing a frame of meaning’ (2005: 565). This was certainly the case with the Putuo Five, which remained unknown in the collections, disassociated from Mayer, Hertz, Edie and Putuo during most of this period. As these ‘unknown’ bronzes moved from ethnology to archaeology and then on to antiquities, they shifted from one classificatory framework and academic discipline to the next. Hill observes that: ‘any category referred to [in a museum] is not an absolute division corresponding to a ‘real’ group in the material world, but rather an imposition on that world created by structures of knowledge’ (2005: 73). In 1996 the five deities went through yet another shift in classification. Soon after I arrived at Liverpool Museum, the collections were reorganized and the dismemberment of Asia was ‘resolved’. Oriental material was moved back (conceptually not physically) to ethnology and renamed ‘Asian collections’. The interpretations of the Chinese deity figures would change yet again over the ensuing years as research on their iconography began to expose more about their identities, age and significance, although their origins in China had, by this time, been erased. During the next phase of their existence they would be moved out of the stores and into the bright lights of the newly built Conservation Centre in Liverpool, one of the most advanced institutions for the care of objects in Europe. From there they would travel back to Liverpool Museum to take up a prominent position in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery. And, in an uncanny act of fate, their positioning, as we shall see, would closely echo (visually) the display arrangements at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park over 150 years before.

Notes 1. Notable omissions being the material culture of Tibetan Buddhism and certain cultures in South-East Asia. 2. Green notes that references to Chinese art were rare before the twentieth century, although the term Chinese ‘works of art’ was used (2002: 199–200). In 1878, for example, the Fine Arts Club at Burlington House had exhibitions of Chinese porcelain, followed by large-scale exhibitions in 1895 and 1896 (see Hevia 2003: 134). 3. Particularly the Percival David Collection. See Pierson (2003) and Green (2002: 67). 4. For example, Salting and Lever. See Clunas (1997: 5) and Pierson (2003: 83). 5. C. Read, ‘Introduction’ in Catalogue of a Collection of Objects of Chinese Art, London: Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, 1915, p. ix. Cited in Green (2002: 65). 6. Men such as Eumorfopolous, Hobson, Barlow, Percival David, Raphael, Gray, Binyon, Jenyns and Waley.

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7. Fry had written notes for the 1910 Burlington Fine Arts Club exhibition on ‘Early Chinese Pottery and Porcelain’. See Green (2002: 68). 8. The position was taken up by Walter Percival Yetts (1878–1957). Pierson believes that this established ‘a new academic discipline in Britain’ (2003: 34). 9. Pierson notes that the Courtauld Institute first began offering a BA Honours degree in History of Art, focussing on Western Europe, in 1933. 10. It consisted of twelve lectures. See Pierson (2003: 54) for details of this course. 11. L. Ashton, An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Sculpture, New York: Scribner’s, 1924, xvii–xviii. Cited in Pierson (2003: 54). 12. Opening to the public in 1952. See Pierson (2003). 13. As well as the Percival David Foundation, the British Museum and Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge shared Oscar Raphael’s Chinese collection after his death in 1941. Glasgow received the Burrell collection in 1944 and started building a museum at Pollocks Country Park in 1967. The Oriental Museum in Durham, comprising ceramics and jades, was built in 1960, and the Barlow collection of ancient Chinese bronzes and ceramics was given to the University of Sussex in 1974. 14. There was still a department of archaeology and ethnology in 1928. 15. Under the keepership of Peter Entwhistle, who remained Deputy Director. 16. Under the keepership of Charles Carter. Seventy Sixth Annual Report of the Library, Museums and Arts Committee for the City of Liverpool (1929: 31). 17. Seventy Eighth Annual Report of the Library, Museums and Arts Committee of the City of Liverpool, for the year ending 31 March 1930, Liverpool: Tinling & Co, printers (1931: 35). 18. The structural-functionalism pioneered in Britain by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown was by now established, wherein societies were conceptualized as functioning like biological organisms. 19. 10 September. Seventy Ninth Annual Report of the Library, Museums and Arts Committee of the City of Liverpool (1932: 17). 20. Seventy Eighth Annual Report of the Library, Museums and Arts Committee of the City of Liverpool, for the year ending 31 March 1930, Liverpool: Tinling & Co, printers (1931: 37). 21. African and Oceanic material was still in the basement. ibid. 22. Seventy Ninth Annual Report (1932: 21). 23. India, Burma and Malaya were not ready until 1939. 24. Eighty Second Annual Report of the Libraries, Museums, Arts and Music Committee of the city of Liverpool, for the year ending 31 March, 1935, Liverpool: Tinling & Co, printers (1935: 39). 25. Eighty Fourth Annual Report of the Libraries, Museums, Arts and Music Committee of the City of Liverpool, for the year ending 31 March, 1937, Liverpool: Tinling & Co, printers, (1937: 44). 26. He also gave a variety of lectures on ‘Primitive aesthetics’ at the museum. 27. He refers to these as ‘overwhelmingly depressing’ (1934: 221). 28. ‘displayed in a new gallery with modern methods of display technique, for the specimens are of a character which is admirably suited to formalised treatment. The more usual system of shelves has been replaced by a scheme of display cubes which permits almost every specimen to be set against its individual background’ (Allan 1937: 20). 29. He wrote that, ‘All cases were fitted with a basic staging of plywood set on wooden battens so as to raise the level 20 inches above the floor, and the front face was given a backward slope of about 80 degrees’ (1934: 222).

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30. Hooper-Greenhill, for example, has referred to the plinth as the signifier of art (2000: 76). 31. He removed the ‘Gothic’ woodwork and ornate cornices so that the wood and metal beneath could be exposed (1939: 6). 32. Seckel however notes that when the Buddhist works were made, people certainly judged them by aesthetic criteria: ‘but aesthetic values at that time had not attained independent status nor were they considered as being of primary importance’ (1989: 201). 33. This is a term Ames uses to encapsulate the ‘layered nature of objects’ (1992: 141, 145). 34. He continued to write about modernism and art: for example, he wrote reviews of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1941) and of a Moore-Piper-Sutherland Exhibition (1942). 35. Wright (1843: 29). 36. Auerbach (1999: 96). 37. Ethnology specimens had been dispersed to Galltfaenan, Trefant, Denbighshire; Halkyn Castle, Halkyn, Flintshire; Ness, Cheshire; Tatton Park, Knutsford, Cheshire; The Rookery, Tatton Hall, Cheshire; and Gyrn Castle, Llanasa, Mostyn Hall and Rhewl, all in Flintshire (Ethnology Collection in the War – undated and unauthored document). 38. The ethnology packing lists for ‘China and Japan … etc’ were evacuated to Galltfaenan in 1939 and returned to Carnatic Hall in 1946. From handwritten evacuation lists in the stores. 39. This included cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals, old Liverpool pottery, Anglo-Saxon bowls and Egyptian antiquities, as well as the Pacific material. A report in June that year stated: ‘The Hittite and Aegean Room, the Oriental Galleries, the Mayer Galleries (archaeology and ethnology) which formed the basis of the original Museum … have all gone, and lie reduced to a scorched and blackened mass of debris’ (‘Liverpool Museums destroyed’, in the Museums Journal, June 1941: 55). A further review in the Museums Journal (August) confirmed the damage: Dr Allan reported on destruction to the ‘Economic Botany Gallery, the Palaeontology Gallery and the Oriental Room’ (1941b: 105). The fire had started in the ‘African Basement’ and the adjoining Pacific Room. The basements (or vaults) had been considered bombproof and safe for the storage of collections (Note on Documentation). 40. The director and the keepers of the departments of Vertebrate Zoology and Archaeology were based at Galltfaenan. Ninetieth Annual Report to the Libraries, Museums, Arts and Music Committee (1943: 23). 41. Eighty Ninth Annual Report to the Libraries, Museums, Arts and Music Committee (1942: 31). This was reported under the section on ‘Department of Archaeology and Ceramics’, not ‘Ethnology and Shipping’. 42. From handwritten war documents in the stores. 43. In August 1941 Miss Jameson (Mrs Fullard) left: she was appointed Lecturer in Geography at the University of Leeds. Eighty Ninth Annual Report to the Libraries, Museums, Arts and Music Committee (1942: 27). 44. Handwritten lists in store. 45. Personal communication, 20 December 2007. 46. Liverpool Daily Post, 12 June 1957. 47. ibid. 48. Liverpool Echo, 14 June 1957. 49. Whittington-Egan wrote of the ‘ravages of the all-pervading damp and dust’. 50. Letters written by Tankard in the 1950s reveal her sense of anguish about the state of the collections and about how overworked she was (in stores). 51. Reedy, 1991. 52. Personal communication, Dorothy Downes, 20 December 2007.

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53. Museum dates: 1931–1966. 54. However there were temporary assistants in Ethnology and Archaeology (West 1981: 14). 55. Elaine Tankard was awarded a degree in Classics from Liverpool University in 1923, and when a student at the British School at Athens she worked in Northern Greece and Sparta. She also studied antiquities in Florence and Rome (Hood 1998: 87–89). In 1935, both Tankard and Thomas wrote articles for the Liverpolitan in which their different perceptions were evident. While Thomas’s text was anthropological in focusing on culture and race, Tankard’s discussion of the Department of Archaeology and Ceramics described it as a ‘Home of unique and valuable treasures’. She wrote of Joseph Mayer’s taste in high craftsmanship and highlighted individual antiquities – the Kingston Brooch, the Ramesses girdle, the Fejérváry ivories, a Celtic tankard (1935: 35) – referring to objects throughout as ‘treasures’. 56. A large room on the ground floor of the Walker Art Gallery was offered to the museum for temporary exhibitions (Tankard 1953: 181). 57. See ‘News and Notices’ in the Museums Journal, February (1956: 287–88). 58. ibid: 289. 59. Many early pieces of Chinese ceramics arrived at the museum between the late 1930s and the 1950s. Ninety pieces were donated by Miss Jane Weightman in 1938, which included fine Song wares, many of which had been bought at Bluett & Sons in London (Worrall 1980: 14). Her taste fell squarely into that established by the Oriental Ceramic Society. In 1950 Captain Buckley donated a range of Han and Tang objects. Purchases of Chinese ceramics were also made during this period (Worrall 1980: 15). See Worrall (1980: 14–15) for a history of the Chinese ceramic collection. 60. I have checked the titles of exhibitions during this period and none seem to have included Chinese objects. 61. It was given a separate accession number – 55.8.5 – indicating that it was renumbered in1955, probably by Miss Tankard, or someone working under her guidance. No other information was included. 62. The Hundred and Tenth Annual Report for the Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee, noted that many ‘specimens’ had lost their inventory numbers as a result of the blitz (1961: 41). 63. Email, 8 June 2009. 64. Tankard had been acting director in 1952 when Iliffe was excavating in Cyprus and at that time was the only woman museum director in England (Hood 1998: 88). 65. The first major excavations took place at the beginning of 1928 (Cuno 2008: xxi). 66. Chinese archaeology developed rapidly after 1976. The Archaeological Society of China was established in April 1979. 67. Though Pierson suggests that this was because SOAS did not have an Art History Department. 68. Pierson adds that a new BA in Archaeology of China was due to start in October 1968 (2003: 72). 69. While they may have been conceptualized in relation to their age, it must be stressed that at this point the age of these deities would still be unknown. Neither metallurgical testing nor iconographical identification of Chinese deity figures had yet been developed. 70. Personal communication, Dorothy Downes, 20 December 2007. 71. The registers note the department as Archaeology up to 1965, but after that it is referred to as ‘A’ (which is probably Antiquities but could also stand for Archaeology). I am grateful to Claire Sedgwick for this information.

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72. I am grateful here to Piotr Bienkowski, former curator of antiquities at Liverpool Museum. 73. The Merseyside Archaeological Survey (forerunner of Field Archaeology) was established in 1977 and funded by Merseyside County Council. Since the abolition in 1986 of Merseyside County Council the unit undertook more research and became the Field Archaeology Section. Personal communication, Piotr Bienkowski, 2 July 2007. I am also grateful to Rob Philpot for information on this (personal communication, 11 February 2008). 74. Although the South East Asian material, still in Ethnology, remained on the second floor. 75. My thanks to Fiona Philpott (email, 11 February 2008). Rob Philpott adds that including all three in the departmental name (‘Archaeology’, ‘Antiquities’ and ‘Ethnology’) would probably have been too cumbersome. 76. Interview, Worrall, 12 July 2008. 77. Email from Sue Barker, 12 October 2007. This may have been Margaret Warhurst or Ed Southworth. 78. Interview, Worrall, 12 July 2008. 79. Email, 8 June 2009. 80. Initially working alongside Mrs Wolf from the University of Liverpool. Interview, Worrall, 2 November 2006. 81. Interview, Worrall, 12 July 2008. 82. Interview, Worrall, 12 July 2008. 83. Interview, Worrall, 12 July 2008. 84. Although Tankard had been aware of this, by the 1970s and 1980s it had become more refined. 85. Interview, Worrall, 12 July 2008. 86. Published by Worrall in 1980 as Precious Vessels. 87. Interview, Worrall, 12 July 2008. 88. Interview, Worrall, 12 July 2008. Worrall asked permission to have a metallurgical examination by the University of Liverpool, and the Trustees eventually agreed. However, I have not been able to locate the paperwork associated with this test.

CHAPTER 7 Objects of Curation and Conservation: Liverpool Museum, 1996–2005 Like all the events in the lives of these images, this account will inevitably be partial and constructed. Yet the subjective nature of the story is more evident in this chapter, and this must be borne in mind by the reader, for I describe the movements of the Putuo Five through worlds with which I was familiar. Between 1996 and 2003, I developed a particular bond with the bronzes as their ‘curator’, and I find it difficult to disentangle my subjective experiences from the narrative that I construct. Barbara Bender, amongst others, has written of the challenges of maintaining objectivity and a sense of perspective when one is deeply involved in a project (1998: 149). While I have drawn inspiration from anthropological studies of museums,1 my circumstances were clearly different, for I did not work at the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (NMGM)2 as a researcher, observing, recording and investigating the institution as a self-conscious outsider. Rather I was an ‘insider’: the focus of my activities as the head of ethnology and curator of Asian collections was the curation and project management of a large and complex lottery-funded gallery. Instead, I utilize a genre of writing known as auto-ethnography or reflexive anthropology (Reed-Danahay 1997). In this chapter, I place myself within the context of the institution and by writing myself into the story of the Putuo Five in their next exhibitionary incarnation the curatorial voice is not silenced, as is so often the case in the museum. I critically consider here not only the broader institutional practices but how my own activities and perspectives influenced the new interpretations placed upon the Chinese bronzes. In 1996, when I first came across the Putuo Five, they were dispersed around the stores and their biographical associations, documented in previous chapters, had all vanished. And so, as they were shifted around the various museum premises in the late 1990s, they were almost ‘unknown’ things. Perhaps this made them even more susceptible to reinterpretation, allowing them to be overlaid with new significance and to be redefined in accordance with my concerns as a curator as well as those of a wider institutional agenda. As we shall see, the bronzes were made to function (yet again) to serve the purpose of the museum, yet this was an institution in a new incarnation – less object-centred and more visitor-

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focused and management-dominated than ever before. Paradoxically, for three of the images, while they were captives of a museum service that was moving away from the primacy of collections, this was also a phase in their lives when they gained more intense museological attention than ever before. In this chapter I describe how the bronzes became enmeshed in changing ideologies, changing discourses of significance and changing representational practices at NMGM. I document their physical as well conceptual treatment and track their trajectories into spaces that endowed them with yet more museological meaning. I planned the itineraries of three of the images – Guanyin, Wenshu and Puxian – out of the stores, across town to the Conservation Centre and, for the first time in many decades, encased and offered to the public gaze. During this process, Guanyin had a crisis of identity when she was labelled Japanese. The bronzes’ rediscovery as key objects propelled them into a prominent place in the NMGM fundraising campaign, which extended as far as China itself. Three of the Putuo Five underwent intensive physical examination: they were weighed, measured, cleaned, polished, waxed, scanned with lasers, replicated and reconstructed. Finally, after sixty years of seclusion and obscurity, three were called on to perform as iconic objects in a new World Cultures gallery. The final half of the chapter will thus highlight the exhibitionary processes that rendered Guanyin, Wenshu and Puxian visible and accessible to the public in 2005.

New Identities Unknown Objects When I first encountered the Putuo Five in the museum stores they bore no visible traces of their former lives in China, nor for that matter of their 150-year sojourn in Britain. Their records had become detached and they were endowed with new accession numbers in documentation programmes during the 1980s and 1990s. They were relabelled one by one:3 Wenshu and Puxian in 1980 (1980.134.5 and 1980.134.3 respectively).4 The other pair were given new identities the following year – Weituo 1981.876.112 and Guangong 1981.876.111 – indicating that they too were close together on the first floor of the Blundell Street stores. But the different dates within their new numerical identities suggest that the bronzes were not then identified as a set. Guanyin had to wait many years before she was endowed with her new numerical identity. Indeed, the Goddess of Compassion and her throne were given such different ‘temporary’ numbers that they too must have been scattered around the building.5 Many of Guanyin’s symbols and some of the parts of the throne had been lost, as we saw in the previous chapter, and may exist, even to this day, with unrelated accession numbers. This all raises the question of what happens to the perception of objects when nothing is known of their provenance. Clearly options for interpretation are more

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limited. The easiest choice is to display this sort of Buddhist sculpture, with its strong formal qualities, as art, as Thomas would have done sixty years before. Yet I felt uneasy with an aesthetic point of view alone. Although, at that point, I knew nothing of their histories, I was able to identify them, and I decided that their religious meanings within the Buddhist system of belief would be the dominant way in which they could be interpreted. The question, however, remains, how might I have chosen to display them had I known what I have since discovered. Indeed, as it turns out, their extraordinary biographies would have fitted the overall framework being developed for the displays. For many other objects in the collections, particularly the Tibetan deity figures and certain of the West African sculptures, the specialists and curators who came into contact with them had left their mark on the labels and through odd inscriptions – a reminder of the multiple interpretations which had coalesced around them. Apart from the new numbers just described, however, the Chinese bronzes had no trace of such encounters. Their physical forms displayed only evidence of neglect – dirt, corrosion, loss of symbols and gems – all a token of long residence in the museum stores. In losing their original accession numbers and, along with this, knowledge of their history, their previous biographical associations had been erased – their relationships with Putuo, Edie, the Great Exhibition, Hertz, Sotheby’s, the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, Smith, Mayer, Gatty, Forbes, Thomas, Tankard, and many others, were unknown. The only information I had indicated they had arrived in the museum in the early 1980s and 1990s. Indeed in an article published on the Asian collections in Orientations in 2005, Emma Martin (who succeeded me as head of ethnology), wrote that Wenshu and Puxian were acquired in 1980 and that: ‘further research to ascertain their whereabouts before they entered the collection will be needed’ (2005: 82). Interestingly, she chose an image of Wenshu as one of the illustrations for her text (2005: 80, Fig. 5). In the late 1990s, I had arranged for the bronzes to be examined by a number of specialists. In 1997, for example, I commissioned a leading authority from the Asia Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Ming Wilson, to compile a brief survey of the Chinese collections. Here she commented specifically on the ‘extraordinary group’ of bronze statues: Two magnificent statues of Manjusri Bodhisattva (riding a lion) and Samantabhadra Bodhisattva (riding an elephant)6 together with the pair of four-lobed incense burners (1980.134.3), are reminiscent of the bronze vessels in the Forbidden City. They are certainly no ordinary objects, and it would be interesting to find out more about their history before they entered the Liverpool Museum. (Wilson, 1997)

This was a prescient observation. She also mentions the ‘equally impressive’ Buddhist guardian deities (Weituo and Guangong), although she did not know that what made them so was that they may well have been cast in the same foundry. The statue of Guanyin was excluded from her survey, however, as it was then believed to be Japanese.

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The Goddess from Japan Between 1997 and 2003 a range of scholars were invited to visit the collections and a number of them were taken to the Conservation Centre to look at Guanyin. I made a particular effort to invite every Far Eastern specialist who visited Liverpool to comment on this enigmatic sculpture and, as I documented the many differing views on her date and provenance, it became apparent that opinion was divided. Some believed the statue to be Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), others suggested that it was later, Ming (1368–1644), or even Qing (1644–1911). There was also speculation that this multiple-armed bronze might not be Chinese at all, but rather Japanese. Indeed this was the view of the curator of Asian collections at this time, Christina Baird. When the figure was moved from conservation to the stores in January 1994, for example, it was classified as ‘Antiquities Oriental (Japan)’ and dated ‘17th century’. The comment at the bottom of the conservation work report stated: ‘This figure was thought to have been Chinese but is now considered to be Japanese. The base, however, is Chinese in origin’.7 In one sense, this view was not surprising, for, as we have seen, few large bronzes have survived in China. By contrast, Japan has a strong tradition of preservation. Furthermore, Japanese craftsmen were known to copy earlier bronze styles from the Yuan period. The renowned authority, William Watson, remained non-committal when he examined the figure in 1998, and did not discount the possibility that it was Japanese. A year earlier, John Larson, the head of inorganic conservation, had contacted a Japanese specialist at the Victoria and Albert Museum, who also suggested that it may have originated in Japan; he dated it to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.8 And so it was that in 1997 Guanyin was transported from the Conservation Centre and placed on display in the splendour of nearby St George’s Hall as part of a fundraising event associated with a Japanese group.9 It was now relabelled ‘Kannon’, the Japanese rendering of Guanyin. However, my own intuition throughout this period was that the statue was Chinese.10 By contrast, there was little or no disagreement about Wenshu and Puxian. All specialists considered them to be Chinese and most dated them to the late Ming dynasty – that is, the early seventeenth century. As we have seen, an authority from the Victoria and Albert Museum speculated that they were similar in quality to those from Beijing’s Forbidden City, and might therefore be imperial artefacts. Yet no one knew, or even suggested, that they could be linked to the Guanyin statue. Weituo and Guangong were the subject of relatively little attention. I did not select them for display and they remained in the stores.

Symbols of Regeneration When I joined Liverpool Museum in August 1996 an outline redevelopment bid to the UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) was being devised. In 1997, Lottery assessors were taken around the ethnology and archaeology stores to evaluate the

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quality of the collections. I removed many of the smaller objects from their boxes and arranged them on tables so that they could be viewed as a sort of mini-display. Larger things, including the Chinese bronzes, remained in the aisles and were visible as the assessors walked around the building. On that important day the Putuo Five – still separated, corroded and covered in dust – met the gaze of those who were making key decisions about their future. In 1997 the HLF announced that NMGM would receive a grant of almost £24 million towards the redevelopment of several of its sites. This was the second largest sum ever voted by the HLF, and the greatest amount ever awarded to a museum project.11 Not only was NMGM to receive funds to build new galleries and redisplay the collections, but a further £1 million was provided specifically to move the stored ethnology and archaeology collections. They were to leave Blundell Street, the old warehouse which by this time had a leaking roof and buckets filled with dripping rain water, and travel to a better equipped, larger building to the north of the city centre. Soon after the HLF’s announcement the collections began to be documented and packed and the transfer of some one hundred thousand objects took place between 1999 and 2000. Liverpool itself was undergoing a significant period of change in the late 1990s. The city had suffered tremendously in the decades before, with deprivation, poverty and unrest. As a sense of civic regeneration started to emerge, so the ‘cultural assets’ – and the national museum service in particular – were harnessed as part of a strategy to improve the urban landscape. It was significant that the museum service had been designated ‘national’ in 1986 in recognition of the outstanding quality of the collections. Not only that, but NMGM became the UK’s largest grouping of nationals outside London. By the 1990s, the museum complex, covering seven sites, was clearly becoming a key instrument in the city’s changing identity. The redevelopment project was initially known as ‘NMGM 2001’, this marking the 150th anniversary of the founding of Liverpool Museum. However, by 2001, with the galleries nowhere near completion, the project became known as the more nebulous, yet conspicuously safer ‘Into the Future’. The lottery project planned to create new attractions across three museum buildings and to redevelop four sites.12 The centrepiece was the refurbishment of Liverpool Museum. The original building was to be enlarged by acquiring the lower floors of the adjacent Grade II listed extension, the Mountford Building. A new street-level entrance would lead to a dramatic six storey atrium at the centre of the complex. The project consisted of a range of galleries: a Discovery Centre, intended to be an interactive space complementing the successful Natural History Centre by exploring the archaeology and ethnology collections; a Treasure House, where pre-booked groups would be able to handle and examine objects; a Bug House, an interactive space devoted to the lives of insects; an new aquarium, refurbished and moved to a different floor; and a World Cultures gallery, the single largest component, devoted to collections from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania. Although planned for 2001, the new museum displays did not actually open until May 2005.

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7.1 Guanyin in the photographic studio, 1997. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool.

As the project slowly unwound in the late 1990s, it became increasingly evident that the institution needed to raise considerable supplementary funds and, not long after the HLF’s announcement, the Chinese and Japanese collections became the focus for NMGM’s fundraising campaign. The three largest bronzes – Guanyin, Wenshu and Puxian – were moved into visual prominence as they were taken out of the stores to the photographic studio, reconstructed temporarily and positioned under bright lights for high-quality photography. A full-length image of Wenshu was then chosen to take pride of place on the cover of the official NMGM development brochure promoting the Chinese displays: a photograph of Puxian was placed inside (National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside 2001: ‘150th Anniversary Development Programme’, ‘Chinese Dis-

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plays’, 1997). The first page included a summary (in Chinese) and the remaining text highlighted the quality of the Chinese collections across the museum sites, emphasizing links between the objects and Liverpool’s Chinese community, reputedly the oldest in Europe. During this time NMGM produced other detailed documents that testified to the international significance of the Asian collections.13 All of these were devised as part of a plan to obtain sponsorship from individuals and organizations in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 1997 I travelled to China on a fundraising mission.14 Our schedule included meetings and interviews with prospective sponsors in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei. As well as being reproduced in the official brochure, large glossy colour prints of the bodhisattvas were incorporated into a detailed object pack. These were shown to museum curators, directors, collectors and dealers, and the brochure was handed out to a range of potential sponsors. In this context, the images were discussed and promoted as ‘star’ pieces, and used to demonstrate the quality and international significance of the collections. Thus in an extraordinary turn of fate – and after more than sixty years of confinement, neglect and obscurity – hopes for a new museum started to hinge on the efficacy of the images of the deities. Although we were not able to disclose their insurance estimates, they clearly functioned here in the realm of economics – not merely in terms of their actual worth, but as indicators of the ‘value’ of the institution. Their problematic histories, however – the removal of the statues from Putuo by a British soldier – were unknown and so we remained silent on how, when and why they had journeyed to Liverpool Museum.15 It is of course, on reflection, ironic that images of objects taken – or, in all probability, stolen – after the First Opium War were being used to persuade Chinese people to give money for contemporary redisplays in the West: rather like asking the Greeks to pay for the redisplay of the Parthenon (or Elgin) Marbles in the British Museum.

Objects of Conservation Guanyin Reconstructed in general, museums construct wholes from parts. (Black 2000: 23)

In 1989 an internal report had concluded that almost two thirds of NMGM’s collections were in need of conservation – a statistic not surprising given the problematic conditions in the decades after the Second World War. Guanyin did not have to wait long for her turn. In 1992, her various parts were packed up and moved out of the Blundell Street store and transported to the conservation department on the third floor of the nearby Merseyside Maritime Museum, where she remained for over a year and a half.16 Some of the corrosion was removed by hand. The torso and arms were swabbed, and wax was applied to the entire figure.17 Samples of copper corrosion were also taken and sent to the British

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7.2 Guanyin in the Conservation Centre, 1997. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool.

Museum for analysis.18 We saw in the previous chapter how samples from Guanyin had been studied in the 1980s at the University of Liverpool. Once more, a decade later, parts of the goddess were removed and subjected to scrutiny via scientific tests, minutely scattering elements of the original statue. On 12 September 1997 Guanyin was again transported from the stores to conservation, this time making a different journey, to the new conservation centre in a converted Victorian warehouse, the Midland Railway Depot, in the centre of Liverpool’s business district. Opened the year before by the Prince of Wales, the new facility was judged to be the most advanced centre of its kind in Europe, and awarded European Museum of the Year status in 1998. In the atmosphere of a state-of-the-art, spacious, white and brightly lit laboratory, shining with scientific instruments and machines, the goddess was analysed afresh, this time from the perspective of a highly trained metals conservator. The statue intrigued Steve

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Newman, head of metals conservation: his attachment to it was signified by the fact that it lived in this studio for over five years. The Goddess of Compassion had thus become the object of a new scientific gaze – the only item in a prominent position on his laboratory table. Whenever I visited in the late 1990s, Newman was always keen to discuss the latest work he had undertaken on this piece. Soon after Guanyin’s relocation to the Conservation Centre, a detailed condition report was prepared (Kitto 1997). This noted that spots of green copper corrosion had broken through the patina. Old repairs on the wrists and elbows were documented, some of which were coming apart, exposing the lead solder and wire inside. Also identified were cracks and the remains of solder on the hands where symbols had been attached. The figure overall was described as ‘generally dusty’. Copper corrosion was removed and individual segments were cleaned with acetone, although ‘stubborn areas’ were extracted with ‘careful scalpel work’. The piece was then given two coatings of wax. A further detailed record was jointly composed by a conservation team during this sojourn, noting that Guanyin had been cleaned again and given another protective coating of colourless wax (Newman et al., undated). We saw in the previous chapter how Guanyin’s arms had lain strewn around the stores for many years and that, in the 1970s and 1980s, Eldon Worrall had carefully gathered many of them together. By the time the torso was moved to conservation in 1992, a total of twelve of her arms had been located.19 During the 1990s more were found and, by 1997, there were twenty. Two were still missing by the time of Guanyin’s Japanese display at St George’s Hall, and so two new copper ones were fabricated and added to ‘9 Hole Down (left)’ and ‘8 Hole Down (left)’.20 The original arms, however, were later discovered in the stores and replaced the facsimiles.21 In trying to establish which arm belonged where, the conservators noted that a number had been engraved on each one in Chinese characters. The torso of Guanyin also had numbers running top down on either side next to sockets into which the arms were inserted, yet these were in arabic numerals.22 In other words, one to twenty-two had been punched onto the body of the bronze goddess. These Western numbers were adjacent to the remains of lead and tin solder, suggesting that Guanyin’s arms had, at some point, been soldered on. Evidently this must have been done after the figure arrived in Britain, and could have been accomplished by any of the people with whom Guanyin had a close relationship – Edie, Hertz, Mayer, Roach Smith, Gatty, Forbes, Thomas, Tankard or the range of museum assistants who were responsible for this goddess during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The makers in fifteenth century China would have devised their own method for inserting the arms and they only needed to do this once, for Guanyin was intended to stay in her temple. Punching numbers onto the body in such a way indicates a desire to remember the ordering. One can imagine the organizers of the Great Exhibition requesting such a numbering system so they could be sure how to assemble the sculpture in the correct way –

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7.3 Guanyin without arms, 1980s. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool.

perhaps they even instructed Edie himself to fix the arms to the goddess’s torso. Maybe it was Gatty, fascinated by Guanyin in the late nineteenth century, who did this. It could have been Tankard who wanted to impose order on the chaos in the stores in the 1940s and 1950s. Whatever their origins, these marks testify to the mobility of the statue in Britain, memorializing the processes of construction

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and dismantling engendered by life in multiple exhibitionary and storage realms. By punching numbers onto the sculpted body of this goddess, the imprint of a Western system has been left, indelibly. The two sets of numbers from different times and places thus attest starkly to the multiple identities that have been bestowed upon this piece. All of Guanyin’s twenty-two symbolic objects arrived at Liverpool Museum in the nineteenth century for they are described in Gatty’s 1882 catalogue. On display in 2005, Guanyin held a mere seven: in other words, fifteen were missing, presumed lost in the stores. The conservation report of the late 1990s noted: ‘there are five loose symbolic objects which have solder remains, but only two appear to match old solder remains on the hands’ (Newman et al., undated). And thus a lotus flower was adhered to arm ‘No. 15’ and a bell to ‘No. 18’.23 Guanyin had a gem in her forehead when she was exhibited in 1882. This too has since disappeared.24

Replications Over the years Worrall and others had identified the many dispersed pieces of Guanyin’s throne and some had been sent to conservation by 1997. A conservator’s report noted that one of the figures on the middle section of the throne, one

7.4 Guanyin’s throne in the Conservation Centre, c. 1998. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool.

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of the panels on the upper section and the heads of dragons on the back and the front of the middle and upper sections were missing.25 ‘Six straps of flat copper’, were also remarked upon, ‘made from rolled sheet with a chemically patinated surface’, which, it was suggested, must have been manufactured in more recent times – perhaps later in the nineteenth century.26 These may well have been used to fix Guanyin in position. Gatty, Forbes, Thomas and Tankard all come to mind as the possible constructors of this security contraption. Not surprisingly the throne was covered with layers of dirt and dust, and it was cleaned and waxed. An old solder repair, which had come apart during cleaning, was re-soldered and shaped, then colour matched.27 The year after I left the museum, elements of the throne underwent more radical reconstruction. In September 2004, a research scientist, Annemarie La Pensée, created copies of missing parts in nylon using a laser technology process pioneered by the Liverpool Conservation Centre. Most notably she constructed a small bronze figure, originally located on the front corner, by copying one still in place opposite, believed to be a mirror image.28 This figure was made out of white nylon, hand-finished, sealed, patinated and sealed again to make it look like bronze.29 La Pensée also replicated a 5-cm-high dragon, which she illustrated in an internal NML report. Three white nylon replicas are also illustrated in the report – one in the original orientation (on the right hand side) and two produced from the mirrored data. In another photograph, the original bronze dragon was shown with the three replicas to demonstrate their similarity. They do indeed appear identical. The research scientist noted that: ‘The replica (of the bronze figure) is to be a mirror image of the original and it is to look like bronze – but it is to remain clear that the replica is a restoration’. In a paper published in 2006, she and fellow specialist conservators emphasized that the replicas had been deliberately made in a modern synthetic material so that they could be distinguished in the future, ‘but patinated to look sympathetic… It is a premise of conservation that from two metres away a repair/restoration cannot be identified, but that at closer than half a metre, the restored element should be identifiable. In addition, in later years, it should be totally clear what is original and what is not’ (2006: n/n). Other conservators too confirm that when restoration is undertaken it must be ‘readily detectable’ even if not ‘immediately apparent on superficial examination’ (Pye 2001: 33). Although clearly not needed for structural reasons, after discussion with the curator, the conservators justified their interventions by noting that the replicas ‘would enhance the legibility of the sculpture on display’ (La Pensée, Cooper and Parsons 2006: n/n). These facsimiles, then, were intended to visually restore the throne, to construct the whole when only parts had been found (Pye 2001: 148). In 2004, in preparation for display, Guanyin’s throne was thus modified to suit the standards of the twenty-first century, where physical integrity is considered important. However the label in the gallery gave no indication that elements of the object had been reconstructed. Can it be the case that, with the nylon replicas added, the throne – and by extension Guanyin – is no longer authentic? Clearly bits of the statue are no

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longer ‘real’, but rather have been fabricated to match existing elements. Authenticity in the West is often associated with things that are genuine in terms of materials, manufacture, workmanship, authorship and date – in other words, that an object is what it says it is. Guanyin (with her throne) is no longer completely bronze, as indicated on the associated label. Yet authenticity in this case is more complex, for while the statue may have started life in China as an ‘authentic’ sacred being, the series of dramatic interventions over the centuries led to multiple changes in iconography, physical integrity and meaning. The moment Guanyin was removed from the temple, as soon as the manuscripts were taken out from inside her, it could be argued that she ceased being truly authentic in Buddhist terms. Previous chapters have charted how this complex, multiplearmed statue has been assembled, dismantled and interfered with on numerous occasions during her eventful life in the West: bits have been broken off, jewels prised out, fragments scraped away, samples removed. The dramatic contextual changes (the religious, social, cultural and exhibitionary, as well as physical transformations) mean that the authenticity of this bronze can never be entirely recouped. Nicholas Thomas observes that objects ‘are not what they were made to be but what they have become’ (1991: 4) – an apt observation, and one that we shall explore further in the concluding chapter. The bronze fell into the care of a new conservator, Sue Barker, in 2002 and, after almost eight years in the Conservation Centre, it was finally moved to the World Cultures gallery on 8 March 2005.30

The Conservation (or not) of the Paired Bodhisattvas Wenshu and Puxian were not decanted from the Blundell Street stores to Metals Conservation until 1999, thus encountering the world of conservation some years later than their illustrious companion.31 One of the condition reports indicated that the outer ear of Puxian’s elephant had been previously repaired – a section had been broken off, revealing soft solder. Some of the damage was re-soldered.32 In the Conservation Centre, both bodhisattvas were cleaned, waxed and polished with a soft cloth.33 I accompanied them from the Metals studio across the corridor of the Conservation Centre to the Library in 1999, which was then being used as a temporary store. I watched as they were expertly lifted and weighed by technicians to assess their suitability for their designated case.34 Instead of being transported directly to the gallery, they journeyed to a newly refurbished store in a different part of the city in March 2001 and mingled with some of the collections they had existed alongside for the past seventy or more years.35 But this time they were in a different guise – clean, waxed, polished, packed and waiting, along with the fifteen hundred other chosen objects, before travelling to the new gallery for display in March 2005.36 In their case in the World Cultures gallery, however, the breaks and fractures are still just visible: decorative elements, for example,

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have been broken off Puxian’s left-hand shoulder and the left-hand tusk of the elephant upon which he sat has a break across it, at the top. In 2007, as part of the research for this book, I revisited the figures of Weituo and Guangong in the stores and was taken aback by the amount of damage they had sustained. The auratic photograph taken in 1851, despite its blurry edges, provided a clear marker of their early physical condition. Weituo had lost the long point off the top of his helmet as well as the ‘diamond sword’ he once held in front of him. Parts of the decorative effect behind, on the right, had also broken off. Guangong had fared slightly better, losing decorative embellishments in three small places on the front. The feet, however, were badly cracked. Both had suffered corrosion and their surfaces were badly tarnished.

Conservation – a Very Western Idea Sir Richard Foster, director of NMGM until 2001, was in the habit of referring to the Conservation Centre as the institution’s ‘hospital for sick objects’. With the dreadful storage conditions after the Second World War, a great many things must indeed have been diagnozed as rather unwell. This analogy between conservation and medicine has been noted elsewhere: Pye observes that conservators ‘deal with the remedial treatment of individual objects, just as a medical doctor advises and treats individual patients. The general processes are very similar’ (2001: 25). Just like doctors, conservators are transformative, with a capacity to profoundly affect the object of their study. Much expert attention was indeed lavished on the physical well-being of three of the bronzes in the late 1990s. They were treated with great care by a range of highly trained and dedicated specialist staff when being handled, weighed, measured, cleaned, waxed, polished, scanned with lasers, transported in vans, carried into the museum and installed in their climate-controlled case. They also experienced extreme physical modification and underwent ‘emergency surgery’ when arms were slotted back into position, bits were soldered on and missing parts were reconstructed. Here, then, we can see how the museum was attempting to efface the signs of damage and ageing suffered by long decades of storage and neglect so that the statues would look well cared for on public display. As Clavir notes, conservation not only makes objects look well presented, but makes institutions look good too (2002: 37). Furthermore, she argues, it represents a value increasingly evident in the late twentieth century: ‘the desire to always appear young and to live a long life’ (2002: 37).37 Despite Guanyin being almost six hundred years old, and all three suffering physically by travelling half way around the world, by a life of major public exhibition and then demise in the hidden recesses of the stores, the Putuo Three were clearly transformed by this intensive museological make over, and did indeed look stunning (and possibly much younger) for their twenty-firstcentury debut.

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Yet such a physically intrusive world obviously transgressed the original spheres inhabited by these once-sacred things. Conservators, with their technical backgrounds, have a particular way of perceiving objects (Clavir 2002: 35).38 Their distinctly Western method of manipulating material culture is predicated upon what Clavir terms a ‘rationalist scientific approach’ (2002: 43). Objects at their most extreme are reduced to chemical composition and abstract numbering systems, as we saw in the case of Guanyin’s arms. Conservators traditionally focus on the visible not the invisible, the tangible rather than intangible aspects of material culture. Social, cultural, religious, conceptual and metaphysical significance are subordinated to the material (Clavir 2002: 245). That is not to say that contemporary conservators are ignorant of historical contexts39 or that they are culturally insensitive, but that the worldview with which they operate is predicated fundamentally upon materiality. Just as these conservators had carefully removed the dust and corrosion from the surfaces of the bronzes, so too they were depositing more layers of meaning upon the bodies of three of the Putuo Five. In the temple, in China, as we saw in chapter 1, the bronzes were not inanimate objects, but sacred entities. They were believed to be active and living: their ‘eyes’ were open and they had ling or efficacy. Vital elements of the images were things that were non-material and unseen – the manuscripts and the spirit of the deities inhabiting the sculpted forms. Once consecrated and placed in their abodes on Putuo, they were supposed to be free of physical interference. Seckel remarks on the consequences of the modification of Buddhist sculpture: ‘We never deal with “mere” form alone ... Any change of form, be it ever so slight, would also change content and meaning. Form creates and completes meaning. In the religious sphere it may even attain a kind of magic function’ (1989: 183). ‘Magic function’ is not of primary concern to conservation. The world which the bronzes traversed in the late twentieth century was yet another ‘regime of value’ (Appadurai 1986: 4) – a necessary museological space which all objects inhabit these days (albeit temporarily) en route to public display. At the same time as the images underwent an intense physical analysis, the interpretative framework into which they were to be placed in the gallery was also being actively developed. It is to the exhibitionary process that the remainder of this chapter now turns, beginning with general concepts for their gallery, then moving to the specific circumstances around the display of three of the Putuo Five.

Objects of ‘Contact’ and ‘Encounter’ As a result of her ethnographic fieldwork in the Science Museum in London, Sharon Macdonald noted that the processes involved in constructing exhibitions are rarely documented in detail: most of the literature focuses on the finished product – the displays – rather than the internal negotiations and power struggles involved in their creation (2002: 7). Shelton too highlights the sometimes fraught and complex nature of exhibition-making. Drawing on his extensive experiences

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of curating ethnographic displays, he notes how they inevitably emerge from the ‘conjunction of innumerable narrative, social, ethical, political, economic and technical circumstances and conditions’ (2003: 181). In the remainder of this chapter I will describe the shifting parameters, constraints and compromises that surrounded the display of three of the Putuo Five in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. By documenting the processes that enabled them to be selected for exhibition in a new World Cultures gallery, I tease out some of the issues involved in the run up to their most recent exhibitionary performance – complexities which inevitably remained hidden in the interpretations left in the World Cultures gallery when it opened in 2005.

Conceptual Frameworks: ‘Contact’ and ‘Encounter’ Ideally the history of its own collection and display should be a visible aspect of any exhibition. (Clifford 1988: 229)

The initial recommendations from the Heritage Lottery Fund in 1997 asserted that the new ethnographic displays should focus on the strengths of the collections. Since the Second World War only a tiny part of the ethnology collections had been displayed in Liverpool Museum, and curators were eager to get as many of the objects out as possible.40 Emphasis was placed on the neglected collections in the stores, and there was to be no funding for new acquisitions. Furthermore, the HLF indicated that the museum should focus on the ‘best’ objects, though the definition of ‘best’ was never clearly articulated. At the same time, a meaningful thematic approach and coherent interpretative framework was essential: themes and stories had to be woven around the ‘best’ objects for the displays to make sense. Shelton argues that exhibition-making is always a dialectical process made possible by having a deep knowledge of collections, combined with the different narratives their various parts may tell (2003: 188). My first task therefore, as a relatively new curator of ethnology, was to profile the collections in order to work out what they could and could not say. The ethnology collections consisted of approximately thirty-four thousand objects from Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific, many of which had been collected by Liverpool travellers and traders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from various parts of the colonized world. A good proportion of these had arrived as a result of Liverpool’s position as a major nineteenth-century port, thus reflecting the connections between the city’s maritime history and its links with the wider world. The African collection, in particular, was strong in artefacts obtained from coastal areas of West and Central Africa due to the twenty-one years of dedicated collecting by Arnold Ridyard, Chief Engineer on the Elder Dempster Shipping Line (Tythacott 2001; Kingdon 2008a & b). The same pattern, though to a lesser extent, applied to the Asian collection.41

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When I arrived at the museum in 1996, it was generally considered that the ethnology collections were ‘comprehensive’ and that the displays could ‘represent the world’. Indeed there was a suggestion that the new gallery should be entitled ‘Peoples of the World’. This idea of collections being ‘encyclopaedic’ would have chimed with the previous custodians of the figures – Tankard, Thomas, Forbes, Gatty, Mayer, Smith and Hertz. Indeed, in chapter 4, we saw the Hertz collection described as a ‘complete cabinet’, though it included only a handful of Chinese items. Yet in recent times, Macdonald (2002: 73), amongst others, has pointed out that this aspiration for comprehensiveness is not viable and that museum collections can only ever be partial and historically contingent. Along with colleagues, I gave presentations on the history and diversity of the collections to museum staff, which included maps of the world highlighting the places from which objects had originated. This demonstrated that the entire world could not be represented, and enforced my contention that the displays could never tell a ‘comprehensive’ story. Such mapping of collections also served to highlight links between collecting and imperialism, for many of the museum’s objects had originated from parts of the world colonized by the British between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth century. Instead of exhibiting ‘all’ peoples, the best we could do, I argued, was to represent, through material culture, specific places where Europeans had collected. Once we dispelled the aspiration to cover the world, an alternative approach began to be articulated. The 1990s witnessed a period of major change in the ethnographic museum, rooted in the epistemological crisis of anthropology of the previous decade. It was the work of James Clifford (1986), in particular, which caught the spirit of the times, for he was the first to suggest that rather than being a neutral, scientific and truthful account of another culture, the ethnographic description – or monograph – is inevitably a partial representation, mediated by the subjective responses and the interests of the ethnographer. Clifford, in other words, was the first to analyse the artificial nature of ethnographic writing and, he argued, it was incumbent upon anthropologists to reflect upon their position and intellectual engagement in the fabrication of ‘the other’.42 The discipline thus started to question the way in which it had constructed its subject, and the ‘reflexive’ turn, as it came to be known, filtered its way to anthropology’s material culture counterpart, the ethnographic museum. Alongside the notion that the representation of another culture was culturally mediated, emerged a recognition of the constructed nature of ethnographic displays. By the late 1980s, certain museums were indeed beginning to reflect upon their representations of other cultures, and the historical formation of museum collections was explored in public exhibitions and academic texts.43 Wherever possible, I wanted the displays in Liverpool to be ‘reflexive’ – to attempt to explain how and why the objects had moved between cultures and why they had ended up in the museum. After a series of lectures by external advisors on ‘re-presenting cultures’ and a two-day workshop exploring possible exhibitionary themes in early–mid 1997, it was agreed that the new gallery would

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examine the history of the formation of the collections and, in particular, Liverpool’s links with the wider world.44 The displays were to be arranged along geographical routes, following the long and narrow dimensions of the ‘Horseshoe gallery’, with Asia and Africa taking up the two long legs (as the largest collections) and the Americas and Pacific at the far end.45 Influenced by the work of Kopytoff and Appadurai (1986), I was also keen to explore object biographies in the gallery, although, inevitably, the biographical approach applied to non-Western objects in Western museums raises issues – in particular, the unequal relationships in the collecting process in an age of colonialism. But the aim was to expose, rather than conceal, stories of appropriation.46 The displays were intended to chart aspects of the social histories of artefacts – no matter how unpalatable – as they moved from their original culture to the museum. The British punitive expedition to Benin in 1897 and the looting of the royal palace at Mandalay in Burma in 1885 were, for example, addressed in text panels. Yet the displays also intended to articulate a more nuanced approach to collecting by documenting different stories of encounter embodied in the lives of things. A Burmese throne which was taken from the imperial palace in 1885 by British soldiers was juxtaposed in the same case with a gold bowl which had been presented by the King of Burma to a French Infantry Officer in 1874. Similarly, a Benin bronze horse and rider that had been gifted to a Liverpool merchant by the Oba was displayed with Benin material that had been looted. Had the histories of the Putuo Five then been available, they too would have fitted such a biographical approach. In proposing a perspective that focused on the social lives of things, Kopytoff and Appadurai acknowledge that objects have multiple meanings as they shift through different realms of significance. The objects in the World Cultures gallery too were intended to be displayed, where possible, in relation to their ‘polysemy’ (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 111). Curators incorporated different perspectives and reading codes, and a range of voices was included in the text panels.47 A great many consultants were also brought in. For the Asia section alone, at least twentythree specialists were contacted.48 The subjectivity and authored nature of interpretation was introduced through quotations on texts panels, which included the voices of indigenous and historical people. Quotations by Maori, Northwest Coast groups, Buddhists, former Shanghainese seafarers based in Liverpool, and other source communities were integrated, their comments being italicized and placed prominently at the tops of the panels. While I had hoped that interesting stories would emerge from the biographies of individual objects, it became evident that the museum’s neglected collections were not always capable of yielding information. The Putuo Five were not the only objects to have lost their documentation: other large and significant pieces of Asian sculpture, also selected for display, had no accession numbers. Amongst these were a set of four rare twelfth- to fifteenth-century Javanese sculptures carved from volcanic stone, an important large tenth-century stone carving of Vishnu from India, and an almost life-size gilded Buddhist figure of Amitabha

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from Kamakura period (1186–1333) Japan.49 Furthermore, objects that did have accession numbers often lacked all but the most basic accompanying details. Few had been researched in any depth due to the decades of neglect. Then there was the unfamiliarity of recently appointed staff with the collections, the short timescale for selecting objects for the new gallery, and the increasing lack of interest by the institution itself in detailed research on collections.50 In the end, a broader thematic approach was devised in which objects were conceptualized as embodying more general ‘encounters’, rather than demonstrating detailed biographies. This looser framework meant that we could include the lives of objects (where known) but also interpret things where accession numbers and object histories had been lost. Overall the aim of the gallery was to explore relationships and exchanges between cultures, which enabled the inclusion of objects from the Silk Road (spanning China to Europe over two thousand years ago) in the Buddhism section, for example, as well as those things associated with Africa in the Americas, such as Haitian voodoo flags.

The Asia Gallery: the Arts of Cultural Encounter In the previous chapter we discussed the formation of the Asian collection at Liverpool Museum and how the Putuo Five were conceptualized in the twentieth century firstly as ‘art’, then ‘archaeology’, and then ‘antiquities’. During this time the Asian collection had occupied not only different locations in the stores and internal departmental classifications but also had a distinct epistemological framework to the rest of ethnology. Its complexion was therefore different – more similar to the Asian collections at places such as the Victoria and Albert Museum. There was a range of older things (some dating back to the first century CE), as well as objects that might be considered decorative art – furniture, ceramics, porcelain, silverware, ivory carvings, embroidered silk textiles and sculpture. The Asian collection had not been put together in assemblages documenting particular ways of life, as had elements of the collections from the Pacific or the Americas. Rather, individual things tended to have been acquired on the basis of decorative style or manufacture. After the Asian collection (originally Oriental Antiquities) was transferred from Antiquities to Ethnology in 1997, it became clear that it would not be possible to construct meaningful cultural representations or ethnographic displays with such disparate objects (apart that is from the extensive Tibetan collection), and so the challenge was to highlight the strengths of the collection yet, at the same time, create links with the theme of ‘contact’ and ‘encounter’ already established.51 The collection was particularly rich in commercially traded items from China, Japan and Burma, as well as things transformed or adapted as a result of the great religions – Buddhism and Hinduism. There were objects that spoke physically of their ‘encounters’ between different worlds, the ‘hybrids’: Gandharan stone sculpture made in North West India and Pakistan in the first century CE, which

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combined Greek and Buddhist imagery; a detailed carved ivory throne from the Royal Palace in Burma designed in a European style; exquisite Burmese silver napkin rings, cigarette cases, plates, powder boxes, menu holders and card cases made for the British; Chinese export porcelain and furniture manufactured in Western styles. With such collections, the Asia gallery could highlight the stories objects tell as they travel from place to place, not only within the continent but as a result of their journeys to the West. The gallery was divided into four. Firstly, an introductory area set up as a sort of ‘conversation’ between East and West. Here were cases devoted to ‘Asian images of Europeans’, including a pair of late-eighteenth- to early-nineteenth-century Chinese pewter candlesticks caricaturing European gentlemen in top hats, a seventeenth-century Indian ivory carving depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and a Chinese portrait of George III on glass. ‘European images of Asia’ were explored through cartography (including one of the earliest known maps of China) and chinoiserie-style objects. A Chinese robe, arms outstretched and cut in Tibetan style, was the first thing visitors saw upon entering, which was intended to function as an iconic object that reinforced the themes of the gallery. The associated text panel gave a summary of its biography – its origin as a bolt of silk in China, its construction as a fur-lined robe in Tibet, its gift to a British political officer and the route it had taken to Liverpool. Had I known then what is now known about the Putuo Five, clearly they would have been obvious candidates for this case. Next came sections devoted to China and Japan. The focus for the former was trade, as this reflected the strength of the collection. There was a large case filled with Chinese ceramics exported to Tibet, Japan, South East Asia and the Middle East, as well as nearby, another large case which contained furniture adapted to European tastes. For Japan, sword guards, netsuke and inro were dominant in the collection – objects that had been divorced from their original cultural function and collected by Europeans as ‘decorative art’. (The third area devoted to Buddhism will be discussed below.) The fourth section included displays from India and South East Asia, where emphasis was placed on objects that fused Islamic and Hindu motifs, as well as ‘hybrid’ export wares from Burma.

The Buddhism Displays The area devoted to Buddhism might seem anomalous in a gallery organized mainly according to cultural areas, but there were reasons behind it. First of all, it was evident that the Tibetan objects were much more extensive than those from China. Yet once NMGM decided to target China for its fundraising campaign in the late 1990s, a large section devoted to Tibet suddenly seemed problematic, for potential sponsors would no doubt have wanted to subsume such collections into a China section (Tibet being considered an Autonomous Region within the People’s Republic). The idea of a separate Buddhism area thus emerged as a way to

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transcend the problem of how to locate Tibet. It was also clear that the strength of the Chinese collection was export goods and that such objects adapted to European styles might have sat uneasily next to traditional Buddhist religious images. The museum had a large and important collection of Tibetan artefacts associated with Buddhism, many of which were relatively well documented. Alongside other Buddhist objects from Afghanistan, Bhutan, Burma, China, Japan, Korea, Ladakh (and, of course, the Putuo bronzes) a substantial display examining the origins, histories and diversity of this religion persuasively suggested itself. Furthermore the Buddhism displays fitted the overall theme of ‘contact’ and ‘encounter’. The main interpretative approach was of the movement of material culture and the transformative impact of the religion on the cultures encountered. The displays were organized according to both geographical and historical narratives, beginning with the life of the Buddha in India in the fifth century BCE, and turning, in a section on ‘The Movement of Buddhism’, to the migration of the religion as a result of material culture – portable shrines, manuscripts and deity figures. The displays then moved on to the three dominant traditions: Theravada in Thailand and Burma; Mahayana in China and Japan; and Vajrayana in Tibet and Bhutan. I had intended to arrange these chronologically with Theravada first, as the oldest system, followed by Mahayana, then Vajrayana. However this sequencing of cases was not possible due to space constraints – there were rela-

7.5 View of the shrine in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery, 2005. World Museum Liverpool. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool.

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tively few Theravada objects and they were dwarfed by the large case already allocated adjacent to ‘The Movement of Buddhism’. Instead, for practical reasons, this was devoted to Mahayana. One of the few authorities who has written specifically on the exhibition of Buddhist objects in museums recommends that displays should highlight the meanings of sacred things in their original context (Chuang 2000: 116). Seckel too believes that ‘cult’ figures must be shown in relation to their function in Buddhist religious life (1989: 5). The Buddhism area in the World Cultures gallery indeed endeavoured to provide something of a reverential aura. The area was semi-enclosed, demarcated by a white sloping wall, evocative of Himalayan monastic architecture. Amulets were placed in small ‘boutique’ cases embedded on the outside of this structure, each carefully lit. Two bronze Nepalese guardian lions flanked the threshold, positioned as they would be at the entrance to Buddhist temples. Inside, walls were painted deep burgundy and red, and the darkened atmosphere – necessary in fact to reduce light levels on delicate paintings – was punctured by shafts of light. An architectural feature – a roof structure with wooden slats – was suspended from the ceiling. Space was allocated in front of the main shrine where worshippers would normally sit in a Buddhist temple. This ‘shrine’ was a large and imposing case enclosing a series of stepped plinths upon which Tibetan objects were placed. Its sixty-six objects were located according to their original position within a temple, and so, rather than imposing Eurocentric categorizations and Western aesthetic codes on the artefacts, it deliberately echoed the Tibetan classificatory schema. A contemporary sculpted image of the historical Buddha, commissioned from a metalworker in Nepal, was positioned centrally on the top plinth – this had been consecrated and brought into the gallery with its eyes covered in accordance with Nepalese tradition.52 Tangkas (religious paintings) were hung from the walls and on the plinths lower down in front were ritual objects – butter lamps, stupas, a prayer wheel, cymbals and offering vessels. Two small tables were at the front of the display, on the floor, with a bell, tea-bowl and stand, skull cup, thighbone trumpet, ritual dagger, drum and manuscript on top. Indeed, these very tables had been made to hold such objects in Tibet over a hundred years before. I was concerned to include senses that formed part of the atmosphere of the Buddhist temple and not simply to privilege the visual (Edwards, Gosden, Phillips 2006: 22). In a museum, Chuang suggests that the figure of the Buddha should always be placed: ‘on a shrine with flowers, candles, incense, fine cloths and offering bowls, providing a focus for devotional and meditative practice’ (2000: 116). My hope of including flowers, candles and incense, however, was ruled out for understandable conservation reasons, although other attempts were made to ‘reinvigorate the sensorial regime’ (Edwards, Gosden, Phillips 2006: 21). As we saw in chapter 1, the Putuo Five were once a focus of ritual: prayer halls came alive during monastic ceremonies and the deities would have been surrounded by the sounds of gongs, bells and the recitation of the scriptures at particular moments in their lives – by a richly evocative multi-sensory environ-

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ment. In the World Cultures gallery, soft Buddhist throat chants were designed to emanate from behind the shrine case, evoking the atmosphere of temples. A space was left in front for activities and ceremonies, and seating was placed so that worshippers could contemplate the images. Buddhist practitioners have indeed used the gallery as a space for meditation.53 The Buddhist displays were developed in consultation with practitioners. Zara Fleming, President of the Tibet Society UK, herself a Buddhist, was chiefly responsible for identifying objects and drafting the interpretative text for Tibetan objects. Other Buddhists were involved – notably, the 14th Dalai Lama gave his ‘blessing’, his words being placed at the top of the main introductory text panel for the Buddhism display space: ‘We say that for a Buddhist practitioner the function [of objects] is to support faith, because they encourage the aspiration to acquire the qualities the images represent’.54

Interpreting the Putuo Three: Objects of Mahayana Buddhism The ‘shrine’ case was placed to the left of the entrance to the Buddhism area, while another large case, which the three Chinese deity figures occupied, devoted to the Mahayana tradition, was opposite, these two visually powerful spaces being deliberately constructed to balance each other. The designers considered the three Putuo images to be some of the most aesthetically stunning artefacts in the Asia

7.6 Mahayana Buddhism case in the World Cultures gallery, 2008. World Museum Liverpool, 2008. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool.

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collection.55 Placed as a triad, in the centre of this case, they were to function as a focal point, their size and stunning sculpted forms drawing visitors into the area. Yet, I had no idea at the time that this particular exhibitionary configuration – the arrangement of three deity figures and the red backdrop – closely echoed their display at the Great Exhibition of 1851. I decided to place Guanyin – the largest and most visually engaging sculpture – in the middle of this case, with Wenshu on her right and Puxian on her left. While I had no inkling of their past relationships, Guanyin’s elevated status in the pantheon over Wenshu and Puxian is well known. Furthermore, the latter two were clearly a pair, their arms sculpted in such a way as to suggest they would naturally flank a larger image. I also chose a red background to evoke the atmosphere of Chinese temples, again unknowingly echoing the display in 1851. Four other Mahayana objects were placed in this case next to them: two carved heads (one of Guanyin56 and another, the historical Buddha57) and a figure of Omituo Fu, the Buddha of Infinite Light from China.58 The final image was an almost life-size wooden sculpture of the Buddha Amidha from Japan.59 All were positioned to be viewed frontally, their backs obscured, as they would be in the temples. Some were on plinths and each was allocated much space. I had planned a higher density display and a greater variety of religious objects – portable shrines and items from Korea, China and Japan. Yet due to major cost cuts in 1999, curators were asked to de-select half the objects in the World Cultures gallery. As the Asia displays were by then the most developed, more objects and planned cases were de-selected from these than from any other part of the gallery. How then were the arrangements of the objects finally arrived at and, specifically, what were the processes involved in designing the new exhibitionary positions of the three members of the Putuo Five selected for display? There was relatively little contact between the curators and the design company during the redisplay process. Designers were flown in once a month from Toronto, spending most of their time in management meetings in the project office. As a result of this lack of interaction – and almost no time allocated to looking at the objects – it was left to curators to sketch out the configuration of cases. The rudimentary drawings were conveyed to Toronto as prompts for discussion. Much to our surprise, they were integrated (with almost no modification) into portfolios, and presented at project meetings. After a period of time, our designs filtered their way down the hierarchy to curators for comment. This, it has to be said, resulted in something of a ‘flattened’ display. The Asia gallery – and the Mahayana case – lacked depth; not surprising considering they had been based on the two-dimensional sketches of untrained ‘designers’. In their abode in this Mahayana case, the Putuo Three were endowed with new values not only through their positioning in a visual and spatial narrative but also through textual exegesis – the production of meaning through language being an important museological form of representation. A clearly articulated four-tier system for text had been agreed for the entire World Cultures gallery in the late 1990s,60 and the organization of text for the Buddhism area was devised to con-

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form to the layering of word counts. The main introductory panel in the Buddhism space, with its quotation from the Dalai Lama, was intended to explain why the displays had been created (mainly because of the rich collection on this subject) highlighting how the exhibition was developed in consultation with Buddhist practitioners. It discussed the origin of the religion, its migrations across Asia, and the three dominant traditions – Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana. Another text panel, entirely dedicated to Mahayana Buddhism, was to be placed on the wall next to the case to serve as an introduction to the tradition. This was to describe how the religion had travelled to China, Korea and Japan, noting the adaptation of Mahayana to other beliefs, such as Daoism (China) and Shinto (Japan), all of which added to the interpretation of the Putuo Three. A second, shorter panel was created for one of the plinths inside the case, this explaining the bodhisattva, a manifestation specific to the Mahayana tradition: the bodhisattva’s worldly appearance being contrasted with the simplicity of the Buddha. Finally, there were the object labels, which provided basic information. Each began by describing the physical and material characteristics of the statues (‘Cast bronze figure of ’). Where applicable the original or indigenous appellations were introduced. The label for Guanyin, for example, used the Sanskrit name of this deity, Avalokiteshvara, followed by both the Chinese and Japanese terms (uncertainty still prevailed). It briefly touched upon the deity’s qualities ‘she comforts, heals and protects’. A tentative date of ‘14th century?’ was added.61 Labels for Wenshu and Puxian endowed them with more certain dates. Two sentences described their characteristics and explained why they sat on their animal mounts. There was to be further interpretative information, in seating areas for example, and more interactives. Yet much of this was subsequently edited out by the institution.62 Indeed the text for the World Cultures gallery was reduced dramatically in 2003, after I had left the museum’s service. Despite almost everything being drafted by a team of curators, external specialists and indigenous groups, then carefully edited over the years by a text-writing consultant, and the overall text being ‘signed off ’ as completed by the project office in 2002, a new director in 2003 requested that the word count be cut by half and the target reading age be lowered from twelve- to fourteen-year-olds down to nine-year-olds throughout the entire gallery. This entailed an extensive re-writing project, which my successor, Emma Martin, and the three other curators implemented under considerable pressure. Almost everything was re-worded. The introductory panel for the Buddhism space was substantially revised. Words were omitted or rearranged – in particular, the key point that the displays had been curated in consultation with Buddhist specialists was deleted. Three large separate panels for Mahayana, Theravada and Vajrayana were merged into one devoted to ‘The Three Paths of Buddhism’. Fifty words, rather than the previous hundred and fifty, now explained the Mahayana tradition. On the smaller label, for the bodhisattva, every sentence was re-written to conform to the lower reading age. Elsewhere in the Asia gallery, text panels, labels, flipbooks and detailed information cards (which were intended to provide information on Liverpool’s Chinese and Indian

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communities) were cut or revised, offering a relatively threadbare and disjointed information framework. That the narrative I had suggested was partially punctured by the events after I left was not surprising given the contingent nature already evident in Liverpool’s exhibitionary process. What was surprising, however, was the suddenness of this decision-making, after so much time and thought had been devoted to agreeing a reading age and the sequencing and style of written text. Despite more than five years work on the galleries by dedicated curators, source communities and a highly trained museum language expert, a new regime was imposed from above. Yet it is not particularly unusual for original ideas to end up changed as a result of the vagaries of the exhibitionary process (Macdonald 2002; Shelton 2006). Although I had tried to fix the interpretation of the Buddhist images through a single narrative framework and particular textual interpretation, intended display meanings are today seldom defined by one individual: multiple curatorial voices are usually heard.63 Macdonald highlights the complexities, ‘the disjunctions, disagreements and surprise outcomes’ in exhibitionary processes, describing how one exhibition in particular, at the Science Museum, ended up different from the original intentions of the organizers (2002: 8). This was certainly the case with the World Cultures gallery. The final product was moulded by constraint and compromise: conservation restrictions, cost–cutting, reduction of case sizes and de-selections of objects in 1999, editing and deletion of interpretative text in 2003. We have seen throughout this book how complex layers of information have been inscribed upon the five Buddhist bronzes over the centuries. In Liverpool Museum, in the early twenty-first century, new layers of knowledge were clearly being overlaid once more. Yet here it is possible to trace how the deity figures became a site of contested and reinterpreted knowledge, as new meanings were generated by different curatorial and management regimes. What final identities, then, did Liverpool’s displays confer upon Guanyin, Wenshu and Puxian? The enforced amendments to text in 2003 in fact did not radically disrupt the overall framework into which they were placed – the textual interpretations originally intended were not entirely subverted in the gallery that opened in 2005. The three bodhisattvas were still inserted in a particular visual and textual narrative: ‘reassembled’, as Bennett puts it, ‘in new configurations’ (2004: 74). Guanyin was even placed on display with a new and ambiguous cultural identity, for the label, as we have seen, described her as ‘either’ Chinese or Japanese. All three images were interpreted in relation to a specific form of Buddhism, Mahayana, and their wider exhibitionary context told of the movement and diversity of Buddhist belief and of the ‘encounters’ embedded in the material culture of Asia. The visual layout and juxtaposition of these images with the other sculptured Buddhist forms; the deployment of a particular type of language on the interpretative text; the red backdrop; the placement of objects on plinths; the lighting; the size, scale and positioning of the Mahayana case; the sequencing of this case in an exhibitionary narrative between ‘The Movement of Buddhism’ and Theravada; the construction of a temple-like environment in the Buddhism area; and the

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location of this display space in relation to the Asia displays and to the World Cultures gallery as a whole – these were all elements which determined the way in which the bronzes were now to be perceived. The atmosphere of the Buddhism display area in particular attempted to mould impressions and channel visitors’ viewpoints (Karp and Wilson 1996: 260). The final display reflected multiple perspectives: the interests of myself as curator (throughout most of the process), as well as the predilections of the designers, the consultants who selected objects, and those responsible for amending the text in 2003. The three images were inscribed with a construct of religion, but this was a Buddhism, ‘framed and transformed through Western institutions and Western technology’ (Shelton 2003: 188). This display must be seen as one more representation, another interpretative framework placed upon the bronzes. As we have seen, in previous exhibitionary incarnations they had been arranged with industrial manufactures (1851), Oriental art treasures (1857), antiquities (1856–1867), objects of evolution (1882), and had been of the ‘Mongolian’ race (1905–1929) and of Oriental ethnology (1935). This was the first time since their journey to the West that they had appeared on display alongside other things associated with Buddhism in China. Yet, it could be argued, this was as contingent and partial as the narratives that had been constructed around the Putuo bronzes during their previous exhibitionary performances in Britain. *

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In this chapter, we have addressed the new and contested meanings given to the objects between 1996 and 2005, charting how their display was caught up in the shifting priorities of a national museum service during this period. We have seen that as ‘unknown’ objects they were endowed with new identities – Guanyin was even considered to be Japanese – and how two of them were utilized as marketing symbols for the NMGM’s fundraising campaign in China. The shift from storage to display activated new meanings. The intensive processes of conservation altered their appearance – the resources lavished upon their physical welfare reflecting the invigorated institutional emphasis on conservation, linked to the new and technologically innovative Conservation Centre. We have also documented how the display of these images was made possible by the Heritage Lottery Fund grant, a pool of funds that many museums drew upon to make redisplays possible from the mid–late 1990s onwards. The paucity of knowledge about objects in the collections led to a move away from a biographical approach to a more thematic World Cultures gallery, exploring ideas of ‘contact’ and ‘encounter’. Practical, technical and managerial constraints too had an effect on how these bronzes could be shown in the new gallery. On display, in 2005, they were mobilized to illustrate a particular form of Buddhism, and the meanings they finally carried were constructed through a combination of textual exegesis and positioning with other objects in the space. These interpretations were, inevitably, entangled in new institutional power games resulting from a changed

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management regime – one less concerned with objects per se, and more with social inclusion and access (hence the lower reading age). The sometimes fraught and ambivalent processes of cultural production touched upon here, however, are seldom revealed in the final polished display. In the case of the Putuo bronzes, their extraordinary cultural histories documented in previous chapters also remained invisible. The final exhibition of cleaned, reconstructed and beautifully presented statues in 2005 belied the histories of neglect and the narrow escapes experienced during their lives in both China and Britain. Their earlier meanings, as a set and from Putuo, were overlooked, for I was, of course, unwittingly guilty of a dismembering of the original ensemble – not only had the manuscripts, the textile and incense burner been disassociated en route to Liverpool Museum, as we have seen, but two of the guardian figures were not included in the 2005 display. While Guanyin and her throne, and Wenshu and Puxian were refurbished – fabricated even – to look good in the gallery, the other two (Weituo and Guangong) remained in their dilapidated state in the stores. And yet even though three of the images had been liberated from the Blundell Street stores to this new public position, they were, nevertheless, still enshrined in the sealed glass case of a museum display. As Fred Wilson so eloquently observes: The history of an object, the obsession that may have impelled its acquisition, the brutality with which it may have been removed from its original location are left unreported … spans of time or geography or the hostility and tension between artists, communities, cultures or countries are nullified as diverse works repose serenely side by side. (1993: 8)

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The Buddhism section of the World Cultures displays was not too far from the former Mongolian gallery, and so, it seems, they came to rest close to their location of a century before. This was the latest stage of their exhibitionary careers but their story hardly stopped there, not least because two of the Putuo Five were not exhibited and parts of the objects – the symbols, the gems, the manuscripts – had not been found. It is to reflections on their possible future life in Liverpool, or in China, that the concluding chapter now turns.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Particularly the pioneering work of Sharon Macdonald in the Science Museum. Now National Museums Liverpool (NML). The first four digits in the numbering systems at this time indicated the year. The object in between – 1980.134.4 – was Japanese. Perhaps it was simply located near them.

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5. DPTemp 3811 and DPTemp 3955 respectively. This was in the late 1990s. 6. The Sanskrit names of Wenshu and Puxian. 7. It then had an accession number A1590. Email from Sue Barker, Metals Conservator, NML, 2 October 2006. 8. Gregory Irvine, senior curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum specializing in Japanese metalwork. In an email some years later, however, Irvine wrote that if it was Japanese it had a ‘curious mix of very Chinese attributes’. Email from Sue Barker, 12 October 2006. 9. It arrived at the Conservation Centre for treatment in preparation for display at St George’s Hall. Email from Sue Barker, 2 October 2006. 10. In 2000, I stated on a conservation work report that the figure was from ‘China?’ and dated to the ‘14th century’. ibid. 11. The overall cost of the scheme was £33.72 million. 12. Liverpool Museum, the Walker Art Gallery, the Museum of Liverpool Life and new storage for the Archaeology and Ethnology collections. 13. I wrote a number of these documents and worked closely with the development officer, Kathryn Smith, who also authored some of these texts. 14. With the keeper of Liverpool Museum, Loraine Knowles, and the development officer, Kathryn Smith. 15. In fact no one ever asked us about this. 16. Guanyin arrived at Conservation on 5 May 1992 and returned to Blundell Street on 25 January 1994. Email from Sue Barker, 2 October 2006. 17. Email from Sue Barker, 2 October 2006. 18. Samples of copper corrosion were sent to the British Museums for analysis by Lorna Green, conservation science officer. A diffraction test (XRD) found copper sulphate and copper acetate, indicating that the corrosion was not active. Letter from British Museum, 2 November 1993. Email from Sue Barker, 12 October 2007, and personal communication with Steve Newman, 16 February 2009. 19. Email from Sue Barker, 2 October 2006. 20. ibid. 21. Email from Sue Barker, 12 October 2007. 22. Left side: 1–11 (top), and right side: 12–22 (bottom). 23. ibid. A photograph taken in the 1980s shows three wheels which are not on the statue at the time of writing (N1987 0245). 24. The conservation report comments: ‘Possibly there were precious stones or glass mounted in the round “knobs” of metal between the scrolls of the crown and on the ornaments on the body’. ibid. 25. Other bits were loose and only three lions remained. Conservation Record, S. Barker, undated. 26. ibid. 27. ibid. 28. 17 cm high. Seckel refers to these as the demons who squat below the Buddha throne (1989: 32). The missing figure had holes for fittings (La Pensée, Cooper and Parsons 2006: n/n). It took five hours to scan and forty-two hours to process (NML report). A panel depicting a dragon from the throne was also scanned, produced as a nylon copy and treated as the others. H 75 mm x W 265 mm x D 10 mm. 29. Production marks were removed using a scalpel. 30. Email from Sue Barker, 2 October 2006. 31. 18 May 1999.

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

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Conservation record, S. Barker, undated. Conservation record, G. Langford, November 2000. It was necessary to weigh such objects to see the load bearing capacity of cases and floors. Email from Sue Barker, 2 October 2006. ibid. Bouquet also notes how conservators resemble make-up specialists in beauty parlours (2001: 189). Clavir remarks how conservators often adopt the language and image of scientists: workspaces are often called ‘laboratories’ and contain scientific equipment, such as microscopes; some wear white lab coats (2002: 39). In my experience, most conservators request information on context from curators. At the time curatorial staff consisted of myself, the curator of ethnology, responsible for the African collections; Lynne Heidi Stumpe, curator of Oceanic and Americas collections; and Christina Baird, curator of Asian collections. As we saw in the previous chapter, in 1991 the museum acquired a large group of China trade artefacts, many of which were provenanced to Liverpool shipping families. As early as 1986, for example, he wrote that ethnography is ‘always caught up in the invention, not the representation of cultures’ (Clifford 1986: 2). ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ at the Royal Ontario Museum in 1989 being the most renowned and controversial example. The four lectures took place between February and March 1997 (Craig Clunas, Charles Hunt, Anthony Shelton and John Mack). The workshop on the ‘Representation and display of other cultures’ was from 30 June to 1 July 1997. Memo dated 6 January 1997. After devising this initial plan and key messages, we organized focus groups in 1998 with members of Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities. I sat in on these sessions, and it was clear that people were keen for the displays to explore histories of collecting. The World Cultures gallery was organized into four continents, with one curator responsible for each – Zachary Kingdon for Africa, Joanna Ostapkowicz for the Americas, Lynne Heidi Stumpe for Oceania and myself for Asia. This included Richard Blurton, John Clarke, Craig Clunas, Susan Conway, Zara Fleming, John Guy, Clare Harris, Mike Hitchcock, Greg Irvine, Ralph Isaacs, Amin Jaffer, Roger Keverne, Daniel Quall King, Jane Moore, Steve Smith, Sue Strange, William Watson, David Weldon, Andy West, Ming Wilson, Verity Wilson, Brian Wong and Eldon Worrall. Although we searched for information on these in the early museum stock books, nothing was revealed. Zachary Kingdon, curator of African collections, arrived in June 1999 and Joanna Ostapkowicz, curator of the Americas collections, started in November 1999. The tight deadlines created by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the design company and the project managers resulted in curators having relatively little time to spend researching the collections. Furthermore, although the HLF had stressed an object-centred approach, the institutional focus by the late 1990s had shifted from objects to an emphasis on visitors. One of the internal documents that I wrote for the redisplays was entitled ‘The Asia gallery: the arts of cultural encounter’ (September 2002), and it argued that wherever possible the gallery should explain how and why objects moved between cultures and why they ended up in Liverpool Museum. Personal communication, Emma Martin, 21 August 2007.

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53. 54. 55. 56.

Personal communication, Emma Martin, 21 August 2007. Letter to the museum in 1997. Reich and Petch Design International (RPDI) based in Toronto, Canada. Painted wood, dating to the Song dynasty (960–1280 CE). 54.85.185. Collected by Harry G. Beasley. Carved wood, possibly sixteenth century, Ming dynasty (1368–1644 CE). 1981.876.2. Sanskrit: Amitabha. Eighteenth-century gilt copper alloy figure. 1968.361.1. Collected by Sir Francis Younghusband. Dating to the Kamakura period (1185–1333 CE). 1982.93.1. Level 1s consisted of the main introductory panels to both the gallery and to the four areas (Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas, and also Buddhism). Level 2 texts were those that introduced countries or major concepts (‘China’, or ‘Mahayana Buddhism’). Level 3s were for themes (‘Chinese ceramics’ or bodhisattvas’), while Level 4 texts were the object labels. Each level was circumscribed by a specific word count, a format that was agreed upon at stage team meetings. Doubts about origins or dates were made explicit in the gallery as a whole, rather than the curatorial team assuming that they could know everything. All three of the labels included the 1980s or ‘temporary’ accession numbers (a requirement of the display). For example, there was to be a flexible performance and demonstration area for children’s activities, stories and gallery talks. I suggested a range of audio visuals – sound wands, music, computer points with access to the Internet, projection facilities for films (memo, 9 July 1997). However, at an early stage in the late 1990s, there were cuts to audio-visual elements for the whole World Cultures gallery when the Walker Art Gallery building works went over budget. Macdonald notes that if exhibitions are ‘historical signatures of their times’, more than one hand must hold the pen (2001: 138). Furthermore, exhibitionary changes and ideologies, as Shelton identifies, are as likely to be mediated today by a manager, or educationalist, as a curator (2003: 181).

57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

63.

Future Lives: Liverpool or China On Objects The Lives of Chinese Objects The game of tracing the life of a much-travelled object is fascinating. But it is seldom easy to do. Unfortunately museums still have the habit of labelling their treasures in the simplest way possible. They give us the name of the creator, the date of creation and possibly a mention of the previous owner. It’s as if no object has ever had life to speak of prior to arriving in this grand and important repository. And the assumption of course is that it will stay there forever. We should know better. (Pitman 2006: 283)

A visitor to the World Cultures gallery after it opened in 2005 would have had no idea of the extraordinary lives experienced by the Putuo Five. In their new incarnation in a museum display, the layers of meaning deposited onto the bodies of the deity figures are invisible. Only upon close inspection are hints of their traumas apparent. If you go up to the display case and peer in, you will see bits missing, symbols absent, the patina worn away in places. Yet the labels give no indication of once animated lives now stilled behind glass. By any measure the statues have accumulated long, complex and multi-faceted histories. For centuries, untold millions of pilgrims cast their eyes upon them in China. During the past two hundred years alone they have been gazed upon by an impressive audience: Buddhist worshippers, British soldiers, visitors to the Great Exhibition in their multitudes (Queen Victoria and Karl Marx amongst them), the crowds who attended the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (Queen Victoria for a second time, John Ruskin and other nineteenth-century luminaries), as well as antiquarian collectors, museum curators and retired missionaries. Then there were Chinese metalwork specialists, and conservators, as well as the many different visitors to Liverpool Museum. In the West, we know of Edie, Hertz, Mayer, Gatty, Forbes, Thomas, Tankard and Worrall, whose personal biographies intersected and overlapped with the biographies of the Five. Their succession of owners and guardians endowed them with what Pitman calls a ‘rich patina of ownership’ (2006: 148). Such bronzes have durability. They lived on – with threats to their existence on Putuo – while the great Ming dynasty came and went. They saw in the first several hundred years of the Ming’s successor, the Qing, witnessing the reigns of some of

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the most renowned Emperors of China – Kangxi (r. 1662–1722), Yongzheng (r. 1723–35) and Qianlong (r. 1736–95). They survived the First Opium War and later, in Liverpool in the twentieth century, two World Wars. They have outlived almost all the human beings with whom they have been familiar. Wrenched from one context and re-inscribed with others, the deity figures have been ushered time after time into new domains. Taken from their original home – the Buddhist temple – they were sequestered in private collections and a public museum for over 150 years. Once in England, whether on display or in storage, they were moved from one visual and interpretative category to the next, cast and recast into new ‘regimes of truth’. From their sanctuary of the Buddhist temple, they were hidden from view as military trophies and soon after performed as ‘articles of industry’ in London’s Hyde Park, in the most brilliant building of the new age. They experienced a brief excursion as curiosities in an Egyptian Museum and even briefer moments at Sotheby’s as highly priced commodities. For six months Guanyin enjoyed the appellation of art treasure. After exposure in an evolutionary display in 1882, the Five became signifiers of the Mongolian race. Through the twentieth century, their fortunes changed once more as they functioned as objects of Oriental art, archaeology, antiquities, metallurgical analysis and conservation. By the 1990s, having lost all her associated documentation, Guanyin even had a new identity forced upon her and temporarily became Japanese. As the bronzes moved through different systems of value, diverse meanings were bestowed: they were at times revered, at others forgotten, stripped of previous identities. By the 1940s they had become confined to the stores of Liverpool Museum where their fragmented bodies lay, separated from each other, forlorn, dismembered and corroded, covered in dust, unknown to the outside world. Hooper-Greenhill argues that shifts in the meaning of objects might be the result of the violence of wars or the consequence of the minutiae of management decisions (1992: 196). The lives of these statues have certainly been affected by all these. This book has explored the narratives that surrounded the figures, how their reception at different times has been conditioned by their changing milieux. The shifting positioning, labelling and systems of categorization used to frame them in Western exhibitionary environments in particular have been chronicled, for the Putuo Five, as we have seen, did not easily translate into the museological classifications of the day. Above all, the Five were converted from sacred objects into categories of material culture devised in the West. They were removed from Putuo’s vibrant, multi-sensory and ritualized environment to the scopic and sonically quiet world of the museum. We have seen how the images were once considered alive and efficacious to Buddhist worshippers but then deactivated through their removal from the temple. We have also seen how Liverpool Museum gave them new lives and animated them in different ways. Despite their seclusion for so many years, they were still things in motion and had a varied social existence. This book has documented the range of ideas deployed to frame them, noting how once within the museum’s protective walls they were subjected to particular processes – accessioning,

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classification, storage, conservation, replication, interpretation, display, dismemberment and fragmentation. They were demarcated, separated, organized and marked in specific ways, absorbed into various institutional cultures and disciplinary frameworks. The museum curators, in whose care they have resided, placed quite differing interpretations on them – Gatty, with his evolutionary perspective; Forbes, with his theories of race; Thomas and his aesthetic modernism; Tankard and her passion for Buddhism; Worrall and his focus on metallurgy; and my interest in object biography. In the late twentieth century, after three of the statues travelled to Liverpool’s Conservation Centre, their dismantled bodies were analysed under a new regime, one predicated upon science. Here three of them were reassembled, cleaned, waxed, measured and weighed by the new guardians of their physical well-being, the conservators. Some of their parts were re-attached, and missing bits replicated with laser technology. These bronzes have been marked physically by their long and complex journeys around the world and by the many exhibitionary sites through which they passed. They were born in the heat of the foundries of Ming China, and made to come alive magically through physical modification – the insertion of manuscripts and the dotting of the eyes. At some point in the mid–late 1840s, they were subjected to a traumatic mutilation when their base plates were taken off and the manuscripts that had been stored inside them were removed. Their bodies were dismantled and reassembled, packed and repacked for one journey after another, by boat, wagon, carriage and train: Guanyin’s arms were wrenched from her and reinserted; Wenshu and Puxian were wrenched from their mounts on numerous occasions. While the original Edie grouping was dispersed, over the course of time, other fragments of the ensemble were prized out or separated. We have seen how life in the museum stores in the twentieth century resulted in physical suffering, and how three of them underwent material interference and emergency surgery in Liverpool’s Conservation Centre. Yet the Putuo Five also had privileged moments in their careers. They were born into a sophisticated and wealthy culture and were transported to another, very different, but astonishingly rich industrializing world. In the 1850s they were conveyed by rail before many people had experienced this innovation. They were coveted, protected and written about for decades, especially in the mid nineteenth century. In the twenty-first century it is certain that if they were to set off on their travels again, they would be packed in costly crates, insured for high sums, guarded and accompanied by personal couriers. They would journey in expensive climate-controlled, air-ride vehicles and be surrounded by high levels of monitoring and security. They are today recognized by the National Museums Liverpool as world treasures. But this has not always been so. The five have had precarious moments in their existence. On more than one occasion they were placed in grave danger. They could have been melted down during the Ming dynasty for financial gain. Guanyin survived despite the fires and the ransacking of Putuo by Japanese and Dutch pirates. She made what was no doubt a perilous journey by boat from

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Ningbo to Putuo, and from Putuo to Dinghai and then back to the mainland with William Edie. Unlike many other temple images, the bronzes avoided destruction in the First Opium War. Anything could have befallen them during the long maritime journey to the other side of the world. With the uncertainties of sale on the open market in London in 1854 and 1859, they could have ended up anywhere – the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum perhaps, or in the possession of a private collector, never to be seen by the public again. They narrowly missed the bombing in the Second World War and they survived the terrible conditions of storage in the decades after. But had they remained in China, they almost certainly would have been destroyed, melted down by the iconoclasts of the Cultural Revolution. They are indeed remarkable survivors.

Sacred, Open and Distributed Objects My account has been concerned with the transformations, transgressions and distortions of the original meanings of the Putuo Five, emphasizing how through the course of their lives they were manipulated to promote different messages. As we saw in the introduction, such a way of viewing material culture relates to the growing body of literature on the polysemy of objects. Yet perhaps it is worthwhile considering the limits to the semantic flexibility of things.1 In her analysis of Egyptian objects on display in the nineteenth-century British Museum, Moser argues that it would be unfair to characterize the collections as ‘sponges’ that ‘simply took on the meanings assigned to them’: ‘These were also objects that possessed unique abilities to assert their own meanings’ (2006: 230). Can this be the case with the Putuo Five? In the displays that we know of – the Great Exhibition, the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition, Gatty’s evolutionary display, the World Cultures gallery – their affiliations with Buddhism were always remarked upon. This begs the question of whether such religious statues can be made to predominantly signify anything other than the sacred. While I have argued that they were placed in a range of museological spheres – as antiquities, curiosities, art treasures, commodities, specimens of race, objects of art, archaeology, metallurgical analysis, scientific conservation and of cultural encounter – these are not, after all, incompatible with religious interpretations. Although their meanings as Buddhist objects may have been noted throughout their lives, the Western understanding of this belief system clearly changed. We saw, in chapter 2, William Edie’s misapprehension in wrongly identifying Guanyin, describing her as the ‘Queen of Heaven’ in the Great Exhibition catalogue. He was unable to name the other four deity figures. The Illustrated London News supplement of 1851 remarked upon them (rather vaguely) as ‘Chinese bronzes from the Sacred Island’. At the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition in 1857, John Forbes Royle misinterpreted Guanyin, referring to her as one of the ‘names of the Buddha’. In the late 1850s the Putuo Five were characterized as ‘idols’ by the antiquarian collector Joseph Mayer, and considered evidence of

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pagan religious worship in the Sotheby’s catalogues of 1854 and 1859. Their first documented record in Liverpool Museum in 1874 gave little away, describing them succinctly as ‘Chinese Buddhist figures’. Eight years later, Charles Gatty formulated a thousand-word, scholarly account of their iconographies and meanings. Once placed in the ‘Mongolian’ gallery in the early twentieth century, race became their dominant signifier. Yet here reference to religion would not necessarily have been excluded. By 1929, the Mayer inventory labelled them simply as ‘Chinese bronzes’, their affiliation with Buddhism disappearing entirely. Soon after, the Reverend Lee, a Liverpool missionary back from his seventeen year sojourn in China, clearly focused on their religious qualities. Some decades later, Elaine Tankard doubtless wove them into her extraordinary fascination with Buddhism. By the 1970s Eldon Worrall was treating them with care – reverence even – through his detailed and sustained investigations into their physical being. Many others who cast their eyes upon them in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (including myself ) interpreted them, first and foremost, as important religious deity figures. By 2005, they were placed on display in a gallery devoted to Buddhism. The curator of ethnology who succeeded me, Emma Martin, has a strong interest in this religion. We have seen similarities between the spaces they have inhabited, and noted the links between the ceremonial buildings the bronzes resided in, the rituals of consecration in both the temple and the museum, and the reverence in which they have been held over the course of their lives. Enshrined and displayed, they were frequently the subject of pilgrimage and worship: they lived in the temples of Buddhism and the temples of Western material culture. We have seen the visual grammar of their display replicated in such different environments. Was this because Edie had seen the statues in situ on Putuo and positioned them accordingly at the Great Exhibition? Was the similar arrangement by Gatty due to mere chance, or had he somehow familiarized himself with the Buddhist hierarchy? As for my own placement of the deity figures, my earlier research on Chinese temples in Hong Kong must have subconsciously informed me. But there is certainly something about the modelling of the three larger figures that makes them want to sit together in a particular way. Yet despite echoes of the religious morphology which were found in the secular displays, it is clear that the images will never recapture the same meanings they had in China. Shelton reminds us: ‘Nothing again can ever be like the conditions under which … objects were once used, venerated, worn, bartered, treasured or reviled by those who collected them’ (2003: 188). Museum objects, he argues, are (inevitably) ‘fragments’; ‘masks without costumes; figures without shrines; shrines without sacrifices; architectural pieces removed from their buildings, which can never provide the kind of general survey or re-totalise a particular aspect of history or culture that museums so treasure’ (2003: 187). For Nicholas Thomas, too, the identities of material things are not fixed in their structure and form; objects change ‘in defiance’ of ‘material stability’ (1991: 123). Gosden and Knowles argue that we should not be misled by the ‘apparent

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singularity’ of objects sitting in glass cases or museum stores: they should be viewed as ‘indicative of process, rather than static relations’ (2001: 4–5). In denouncing essentialist notions, Thomas, Shelton, Hooper-Greenhill, Gosden and Knowles are concerned with the mutability of things. When viewed as ‘indicative of processes’, the Putuo Five become more than just physical statues, with their hard bronze shells. Hooper-Greenhill reminds us that even though objects may be seen as ‘solid, reliable and unchanging’, their materiality is unstable (2000: 114). The Putuo Five were imprinted with their pasts for they bear the residue and the physical scars of this today. But these histories are not just evident in material form. The patina they acquired over the centuries is not only physical, but is conceptual. Stored within the cast hollow statues are centuries of adventure and adversity, elements of which have only recently been unlocked. Throughout the chapters I have documented the processes of layering down meaning, and the bestowing of multiple identities onto the Putuo Five. They functioned as palimpsests, subjected time and again to inscription and re-inscription by those who came into contact with them. Barbara Bender would no doubt argue that such objects must now be seen to embody traces of people’s experiences and beliefs (1998: 6). How far we can go in endowing objects with agency, however, is a moot point. While throughout this book I have drawn upon the work of Gell (1998), it should be noted that, even for him, agency does not actually inhere in objects themselves, but rather is realized through the impact of things on people’s lives. It does seem to be the case, however, that human characteristics – even human feelings – have been attributed to objects, and especially paintings. When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, for example, many talked of losing ‘her’, and characterized the event as a ‘kidnapping’ (Brewer 2009; Scotti 2009). In her research into Raphael’s ‘St George and the Dragon’, Pitman suggested that the painting had assumed a character and humanity all of its own (2006: 38). Clearly, it is easier to anthropomorphize objects when they depict the human form. In this book, I have tried not to impute intentions onto the deity figures, although I nevertheless recognize and respect the beliefs of Buddhists who do. And yet, while I do not consider these statues to have intrinsic efficacy, they have certainly impacted themselves upon me, with such fascinating and complex lives absorbing much of my time and energy over the past few years. Gell conceptualizes objects as ‘person-like’ in that they have affinities and relationships with other things. We saw in chapter 1 how the Putuo Five were originally embedded in an interconnected system of religious meaning, and I interpreted them here as composites, rather than individual, discrete and bounded entities. In the ensuing chapters, we documented the way in which they were torn from this framework and separated, not only from each other, but from parts of themselves – the manuscripts, the jewels, the bits broken off. In his discussion of objects as ‘distributed’, Gell characterizes Malangan carvings from New Ireland as ‘temporarily dispersed objects’ which ‘mediate and transmit agency’ between past and future; as ‘socially distributed memory images’ (1998: 226). In a similar vein we may extend the lives of the Putuo

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Five to include not only the physical elements but the documents, discourses and memories that have been explored in this book, and which have now gathered around them, all of which form parts of their story.2 In terms of the material aspects, the manuscripts could still exist elsewhere; the stones may have been disposed of by Hertz or Mayer, and perhaps are now part of a set of jewellery, a ring or an earring. Further symbols and other bronze cast decorative parts may still be hidden in the museum stores. Their physical forms have been iterated: they are today incomplete and open.3 Most poignant is the fact that three of the Putuo Five went on display in the World Cultures gallery in 2005 without their fellow guardians, without their manuscripts or their jewels, with parts of their decorative elements missing and with almost none of their extraordinary lives revealed to the public gaze.

Recovering Meanings, Constructing Biographies This study has been a process of recovering many of the meanings of objects once lost. We have seen how their histories lay dormant in the museum, seemingly forgotten for many years, and only recently resurfaced. In my research I have been able to retrace some of the journeys and partly reconstruct some of the values that were attached to the bronzes. But, in places, I have been unable to locate information, piece together periods of ownership, or the precise transfer of objects from one collector to the next. I have traced some, but not all, of the routes that they took. This, then, is not a complete story: no biography ever can be. There are things still unknown due to the gaps in the historical record. Details about the highly significant characters in the lives of the Putuo Five may never be recovered – the people who commissioned them, the artisans who made them, the laymen and monks who performed ceremonies to consecrate them, the abbots or temple keepers in charge of the buildings where they once resided. There would have been particular monks for whom they were especially revered, but who remain anonymous. There are so many other things left unknown. When, how and why did Edie ‘obtain’ them? When were the manuscripts removed and where are they now? Did the Putuo Five travel to India in the late 1840s, or go by ship directly from China to England? Where did they initially reside in England – in Edie’s apartments in Buckingham Street, off the Strand in London, or at St James Terrace, Winchester? Precisely when did they move into Hertz’s ownership – and how much did this dealer pay for them? Who removed the jewels, and where are they all now? What were the reactions of some of those who viewed them at the Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, Mayer’s Egyptian Museum and Liverpool Museum? Precisely where were they located in Liverpool between 1882 and the Second World War? What was written on their exhibition labels at different times? At which point did the information about them and their accession numbers become detached? Why did their history file at Liverpool Museum go missing?

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Where are the symbols and the other parts that were broken off them? These gaps in their story are, in themselves, most revealing. The lives presented here have been woven together through archival research and fieldwork and the resulting text must be seen to reflect my particular interests and methods as a researcher. Information about the bronzes was scattered in museums and archives in Britain and in China, and sometimes there were only hints or traces of what might have happened to them. Frustratingly, I often worked for days in archives amongst piles of documents but found no direct evidence of the Putuo Five. My search for the manuscripts in particular led me up many dead ends.4 In the end, I constructed a history from what was available and what I was able to find and interpret: disparate snippets of information were woven together; fragments of information uncovered were turned into narratives. As I mobilized the evidence to make it serve my purposes, I no doubt emphasized some meanings and down played others. I certainly arranged the documentation in an order that made sense to me, placing it in a chronological structure: the division of the lives of these objects into particular time frames and neat conceptual sections was devised to fit them into chapters that, in turn, satisfied the requirements of a book. The ‘chapters’ in their lives, in other words, were forced to fit the format of an academic publication. Overall then this has been a process of ‘opening up’ these objects to far deeper and more detailed meanings than they possessed before their ‘discovery’ on the Internet in 2005. Before this, we might characterize them as relatively ‘closed’ artefacts, with little accompanying documentation and relatively few possibilities for interpretation. This process of recovering meanings, of course, is ongoing: further identities will be illuminated or emphasized. Sitting in their glass case in the gallery in Liverpool they will be picking up new meanings and connections all the time (Gosden and Marshall 1999: 170). Since I began researching and writing this book, and discussing their lives with students in seminars and workshops, a number of people have been inspired to visit them, equipped with a great deal more knowledge of their lives than is yielded in the present display: ‘The lack of definite and final articulation of significance keeps objects endlessly mysterious – the next person to attach meanings to it may see something unseen by anyone else before’ (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 115). *

*

*

With the new information uncovered by my research, and the interest aroused in China, the Mahayana case in the World Museum Liverpool may not be their resting place forever. Now that some of their histories have been revealed – especially their appropriation by a British soldier after the First Opium War – questions have been raised about the possible repatriation of the bronzes to China. It seems inevitable, therefore, that the final part of the book should ponder their location in the future, in Liverpool or China.

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Future Lives: Liverpool or China Changing China Objects have the power to carry the past into the present by virtue of their ‘real’ relationships to past events. (Pearce 1992: 24)

Post-colonial debates associated with museums have emphasized the traditional areas of ethnographic concern, namely the material culture from Africa, the Pacific and the Americas. China, by contrast, has largely been excluded from the literature. Furthermore, displays devoted to Chinese collections have generally been subjected to far less scrutiny than those representing African or Oceanic objects. While Chinese material culture – ceramics, jade, bronzes, cloisonné – has occupied aestheticized spotlit spaces with little critical commentary, the incorporation of African objects into the Western art history paradigm has, for several decades, been problematized.5 Furthermore, calls for the return of objects taken under unequal power relations have largely emerged from the traditional ‘ethnographic’ parts of the world with, as yet, few utterances from China. This is an extraordinary situation considering the historical relationship between Britain and China in the nineteenth century. China, however, is changing. In the three decades after Mao’s death, the country underwent a rapid transformation. Alongside the unprecedented economic growth, levels of freedom of expression emerged. With the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, in particular, the eyes of the world were focused upon the country as never before. It is evident that China will be one of the most economically influential and powerful countries as the twenty-first century progresses – and alongside the new wealth comes the expression of nationalist sentiment. To the People’s Republic, the Opium Wars are perhaps the most sensitive and painful reminders of the unjust subjugation of China by foreign powers. They still evoke anger, for this was the first time that the country was forcibly confronted by the outside world.6 As we have seen, the Putuo Five were obtained as a result of the movements of a British soldier in the wake of the First Opium War, and are precisely the kind of objects that could be embroiled in political controversy. The time is clearly approaching when China might press strong claims regarding its lost heritage. For the first time in two hundred years, the country is looking outward and embracing, with alacrity, Western ways of being. Chinese people are becoming more politically active, and historically and culturally conscious. The fortunes of outstanding objects, such as the Putuo Five, thus have to be considered within the context of these changing power relations between China and the West.

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Museums and Restitution Restitution is a complex, contested and politically charged subject, perhaps even more so when the objects concerned were once imbued with great religious significance. It raises issues of cultural identity, power, authority, ethics, ownership and the control of culturally sensitive material. Unlike in the United States, in Britain there is no legislation covering the return of museum objects. Each request needs to be assessed on its own merits.7 Nevertheless, standard criteria are often used to inform decision making. In the pages that follow, I examine arguments both for and against the return of the Putuo Five under a series of headings – legality of ownership, access, preservation, universalism, nationalism, post-colonialism, continuity of beliefs, politics and belonging.

Objects in Liverpool Legality of Ownership We do not know exactly how the statues were acquired.8 Even though many Chinese people with whom I have discussed the issue believe they must have been stolen, I have not found any precise evidence to confirm this. Yet, even if the statues were looted, John Henry Merryman, Professor of Law, and a key figure in restitution debates, reminds us that until the twentieth century such appropriations did not actually violate international law (2006: 11). The bronzes were taken from China long before any of the major conventions on the restitution of artefacts, such as the UNESCO Convention of 1970 on the means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, or the 1995 Unidroit Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects.9 The latter limits claims on stolen cultural artefacts to within fifty years of their theft. Neither convention can be applied retroactively. The Chinese government, therefore, would have scant legal claim on these statues in international courts. Furthermore, there is nothing to suggest that Mayer did not purchase the bronzes from Hertz in good faith in 1856. Sotheby’s sold them on his behalf, again in good faith and legally in 1859, and they were transferred legally to Liverpool Museum in 1867, along with the rest of the Mayer bequest. In offering his collection to the town in 1867, Mayer had stipulated at a town council meeting that the collection should be in his name and not be dispersed.10 A newspaper reported that the ‘collection shall be carefully preserved and pass by his name’.11 In common with all artefacts pertaining to NML, it is the trustees who act as ‘owners’. However, their rights of ownership are restricted for, unlike Edie, Hertz, Smith and Mayer, they cannot sell or exchange the bronzes. Rather, the trustees ‘own’ the deity figures on behalf of others and, as this is a national museum serv-

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ice, it is on behalf of the British nation. In a sense, therefore, the British people are the symbolic owners of the statues.

Universalism: They Belong to the World A broader view would take culturally and aesthetically important objects as the property of all humanity. This approach was embedded in the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict of 1954, the preamble of which states that certain objects are the ‘cultural heritage of all mankind’, and that ‘everyone has an interest in the preservation and enjoyment of cultural property wherever it is situated’ (cited in Merryman 2006: 106). Thus, as part of humankind’s cultural heritage, the Putuo Five do not belong exclusively to the particular geographic location where they were made, used or found. This argument would hold that they should not be confined to temples on a small island off the coast of mainland China, but instead must be treated as world treasures. A further approach might consider that the statues now form part of British and global heritage. Liverpool Museum has been the custodian of the deity figures for over 140 years. Similar to the British Museum’s argument that their collections are for the world, this museum is nationally administered, and its collections are ‘owned’ by the British nation.12 It might be considered that the Putuo Five belong to everyone and that they should be looked after in a world-class institution, such as NML. The idea that all objects somehow naturally ‘belong’ in the country where they were made has come under increasing scrutiny in the literature on restitution. The premise that key objects necessarily need to go back to their originating place seems unsustainable. Siehr, for example, asks whether every Raphael painting should go back to Italy, every Dürer to Germany, or Goya to Spain (2006: 129). In the same vein, one may ask whether all Chinese antiquities need to be in China, especially in an era in which the Chinese government has allowed huge quantities to be exported via Hong Kong. In Who Owns Antiquity? (2008), James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, is critical of the declaration that historical artefacts found within the borders of modern nation states should be the property of that country. For him, retentionist cultural property laws, such as those exemplified by China, restrict the world’s access to objects (2008: 117). Furthermore, he notes, nationalist retentionist cultural policies force national identities onto objects that were sometimes created before the nations they came from were actually formed. China has vast collections of antiquities and treasures stored and displayed in its numerous museums. For more than a century, the country’s arts and culture have been appreciated and held in great respect by scholars all over the world, especially in the West. The revolution in appreciation documented in chapter 6 would arguably not have occurred if the superb examples of Chinese material culture had not travelled to Europe and North America. From this perspective, the fact that Chinese objects left their country of origin has been crucially important, for it has educated others about the astonishing achievements of this great civilization.

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Post-Colonialism: A Role for Liverpool? Today, in the West, there is increasing emphasis on museums not as owners but as custodians of objects. Rather than putting an end to the social lives of things, museums have become ‘nexi for their ongoing relations with people’ (Henare 2005: 8–9) or ‘contact zones’ (Clifford 1997). Henare, for example, believes that museums enable objects to ‘continue to move through time’ and enact new relationships with the present (2005: 48). Artefacts, even in the stores, have the potential to participate in exhibitions, loans and research projects. Even though they may seem inactive, they are visited, studied, conserved, kept ‘alive’ and put to valuable ‘work’ (Henare 2005: 48). For Henare, ethnographic objects in Western museums are vital as educators about processes of imperialism and post-colonialism (2005: 257). If the Putuo Five were used to explore issues of imperialism, of war, of collecting, they would be fulfilling an important task. In this way, the Chinese bronzes could be re-interpreted in the World Museum Liverpool in relation to their problematic histories. National Museums Liverpool is an institution that has encouraged controversial discussion and debate surrounding the restitution of cultural property.13 It is well positioned to tell the contentious stories of the Putuo Five. When I spoke to Emma Martin, the head of ethnology, she indicated she would be interested in updating the labels to include their complex biographies. A flipbook on an ‘inforail’ (similar to other cases in the gallery) is one obvious way in which detailed information could be made available. The two guardians – Weituo and Guangong – could be conserved and placed with their former companions on display. Martin also noted that she would be keen to liaise with the Buddhist monks on Putuo on the appropriate display of the deity figures.14 Such objects that derive from a colonial discourse thus have the capacity to enter into a neo-colonial discourse: rather than forming part of a colonial history, the Putuo Five could be used to participate in the construction of anti-colonial subjectivities (Hevia 1994: 335–36). We saw earlier how their original meanings can never be entirely recaptured, even if returned to Putuo. However, it seems likely that their stories of appropriation and colonialism would be addressed if left in Liverpool.

Preservation The account of the treatment afforded to three of the Putuo Five by the Liverpool Conservation Centre demonstrates the crucial care and preservation functions of the modern museum. By contrast, the People’s Republic of China does not have a particularly good record of looking after its cultural heritage. During both the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution, religious beliefs were brutally suppressed and more than 90 per cent of China’s temples were destroyed. ‘Without destruction there’s no construction’ was a prominent slogan. Monasteries were ransacked and razed to the ground. Buddhist effigies

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were replaced by images of Mao, as one form of worship gave way to another. Yet even before the Cultural Revolution, valuable works of Buddhist art had, over the centuries, been disfigured, destroyed or melted down. Seckel laments the sheer quantity of China’s sacred objects destroyed as a result of wars, revolutions or religious persecution; as a result, few large bronze deity figures have survived (1989: 3, 93).15 He writes that in contrast with the Japanese, the Chinese: ‘have been much more wasteful and careless and occasionally even reckless in handling their cultural legacy, because of their unshaken confidence in the inexhaustible creative powers of their unbroken tradition. Invaluable and irreplaceable treasures, particularly of Buddhist art, have thus been lost to mankind’ (1989: 50). The Putuo Five would almost certainly not have survived had they remained in China.16 Although the conditions of storage in Liverpool Museum have been far from perfect, they were at least preserved. Thus it could be argued that the Putuo Five exist today precisely because of their removal from their place of origin.

Access Three of the Putuo Five are on prominent public display in one of the largest national museums in the north of England, which receives over half a million visitors per year.17 Liverpool is a multi-cultural city, celebrated in 2008 as the European Capital of Culture. For most non-Chinese, this is a more accessible place than a small island off the coast of mainland China. Furthermore, there is nothing to stop believers from worshipping the images at their display in Liverpool. As we have seen, the World Cultures gallery was devised to evoke the atmosphere of a Buddhist temple, and since 2005, a number of Buddhists have indeed worshipped the three statues enshrined in this new abode. In 2008, for example, Xing Boliu, 7th Grand Master of the Shaolin Monastery in China, fell to his knees in front of Guanyin and prayed to her for over two hours.18 National Museums Liverpool has an active programme of international loans, and the expertise and experience to facilitate a major loan of the Putuo Five to China. The images could also be made accessible in other ways, for example through digital technology.

Politics: The Chinese Government Remains Silent The Chinese government has not demanded the return of these Buddhist images, and in fact, the People’s Republic of China has submitted very few official requests for restitution. Hevia believes that there has not been one instance of the true repatriation of objects to China since 1901 (2004: 332). Most examples of return are private people purchasing antiquities and art works on the open market and donating them to Chinese institutions.

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Belonging: Where in China Would the Objects Reside? These deity figures once functioned as an integral part of a Buddhist temple which no longer exists in its original form. If returned to Putuo, the figures might not even be placed in one of the reconstructed shrine halls. Several senior Putuo monks with whom I spoke believed that they are now historical sculptures, more suitable for a museum. Would there then be a distinction between such a semi-secular exhibitionary environment on Putuo and their display in Liverpool Museum? During the course of my research, it was clear that two groups in Zhejiang province were interested in a possible return of the bronzes. Apart from the religious community on Putuo, the municipal museum of Ningbo expressed strong interest in having the bronzes on display. If a demand for restitution were issued at governmental level, the bronzes might – as internationally important treasures – even be requested as display items for a museum in Beijing.

Objects in China Illegality of Ownership: Removal was a Form of Theft Urice contends that one of the key factors in assessing requests for return is the circumstances under which an object left its place of origin. Objects taken during periods of colonial occupation, he argues, require ‘special scrutiny’ (2006: 147). Others have noted how many of the methods of collecting during the nineteenth century would be questionable by today’s ethical standards (Ames 1992: 140). In the 1840s, the main British garrison in China was based on Dinghai, just to the north of Putuo. When Edie travelled to the sacred island and got hold of the deity figures he was part of an occupying army. Regardless of whether or not the bronzes constituted ‘loot’, they were obtained as a result of unequal power relations after a brutal, imperialist war. The fact that they were taken as a consequence of the First Opium War and its ‘unequal treaties’ renders them exceptionally potent, for this was the first great infringement of Chinese sovereignty in a century of humiliation by foreigners. Artefacts removed from China at that time are regarded by the Chinese as especially problematic.

Continuity of Belief: Future Worship on Putuo Merryman has two criteria for establishing essential propinquity: the first is that the original culture that gave the object its cultural significance must still be alive; the second is that the object must be used for the same religious or ceremonial function as originally intended.19 The five deities meet these criteria, thus constituting a ‘special category’, and requiring the ‘highest level of sensitivity and scrutiny in cultural property disputes’ (cited in Urice 2006: 153–54).

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There are unassailable links between these deity figures and the country from whence they came. This is the ‘nationality’ of the objects or their ‘home’ (Siehr 2006: 128). The nationalist retentionist politics which Cuno criticizes thus do not hold true for the Putuo Five, for they were made when China was still China. With many antiquities – from Egypt, Greece, Babylonia – the belief system into which artefacts were made no longer exists. By contrast, if the Five were returned to Putuo they would be integrated into a living religion and a culture of Buddhism similar to that from which they were wrenched. We saw in chapter 1 how Buddhists today share the same fundamental values and beliefs as their ancestors in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Preservation The history of the care of the bronzes in the West has not always been good. We have documented what happened to them in the museum – they were badly damaged over the years in the stores. Whatever the conditions of their return, in the new era of museum development in China, they would almost certainly be treated with great respect and looked after by the Chinese, in the same way as they now are by the British.

Access Urice writes that: ‘At its core, the access value asserts that a work should exist where it is most easily available to the largest audience’ (2006: 148). Unlike the celebrated Parthenon Marbles, which have been publicly displayed for almost two centuries, the Putuo Five have been hidden from view for much of their existence in Liverpool Museum. Visitors to Putuo are continually increasing, to over three million in 2007. Home to one-fifth of the earth’s population, China also has the largest number of Buddhists on the globe, all of whom are potential pilgrims to Putuo. Furthermore, when the devout visit this island, they journey specifically to see images of the Goddess of Compassion. Whether in a temple or in a museum on Putuo – unlike in Liverpool – the five deity figures would be sought out as revered objects of worship.

Politics: China May Ask For Them Back Over the past decade Chinese entrepreneurs and businessmen with close government ties have acquired a number of historic items at auction and donated them to Chinese museums and institutions. Stanley Ho, the billionaire Macao casino operator, for example, acquired two bronze animal heads that had once been part

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of a twelve-animal zodiac water clock created for the Qianlong emperor by Jesuit missionaries, and which were looted from the Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace, in 1860. In 2003, Ho bought a boar head at a private sale and donated it to the Poly Museum in Beijing. In 2007, he purchased a horse’s head at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong for US$ 8.9 million and also gave it to the same museum. The Polygroup itself has been purchasing objects from foreign collections and displaying them in their museum in Beijing, returning them, as they note, ‘to their native place, putting an end to their wicked fate of wandering without proper shelter’ (cited in Cuno 2008: xviii). The Chinese government too has become more active in trying to stop formerly looted artefacts from being sold on the open market. The bronze animal heads taken from the Summer Palace in 1860 are, once again, key examples. In 2001, the People’s Republic of China formally protested when Christie’s in Hong Kong included two of the same set of zodiac heads, a monkey and an ox, in a sale. At the same time, Sotheby’s was responsible for selling a bronze tiger head. When the auction house refused to withdraw them, Chinese companies intervened and paid over $6 million, three times the asking price (Hevia 2004: 332). The purchaser was one Yi Suhao, a representative of the Polygroup, which had been instructed by the Chinese government to acquire them for the Poly Museum. In March 2009, two more bronze sculptures – the heads of a rabbit and a rat – were auctioned at Christie’s in Paris as part of the Yves Saint Laurent collection. A month-long dispute between Christie’s and China over the fate of the bronzes had preceded this high profile sale. The Chinese government had challenged the auction in the French court, demanding the objects’ return. But a French judge ruled that the sale was legal.20 The movie star, Jackie Chan described the sale as ‘shameful’, and a spokeswomen for China’s Foreign Ministry stated that as the bronzes had been taken by ‘invaders’ they should be returned. China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) moreover announced that the auction was unacceptable, and ‘harmed the cultural rights and hurt the feelings of China’s people’. The government warned that the sale would affect Christie’s development in China. Yet the auction went ahead and the global art world was shocked when Cai Mingchao bid £27 million and then refused to pay up on the grounds that the bronzes had been looted. Cai himself was an adviser to the Lost Cultural Relics Recovery Foundation, an organization overseen by China’s Ministry of Culture that helps to retrieve plundered treasure.21 His bid, he declared, was a patriotic act.22 Once the histories of the Putuo Five are more widely known, they too might be the focus of anger and political protest. It would not be surprising if China wanted to reclaim these bronze Buddhist deity figures, for like the bronze heads from the Yuanming gardens, the Putuo Five are objects that mark China’s national humiliation at the hands of foreigners (Hevia 2004: 343).

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Post-Colonialism: Establishment of Relationships between China and Britain Repatriation is not merely a one-way process. While it clearly benefits the receiving community, it also has the potential to foster long-standing relationships with the museums that return artefacts. A key element in the restitution process, therefore, is the entangled interests created between people and cultures. If the Putuo Five were repatriated, the National Museums Liverpool would certainly be enriched by the activation and development of ties with Buddhist communities and the exchange of information.

Cultural Nationalism and Identity: The Significance of the Bronzes to Chinese People Cultural nationalism would maintain that in order to create a strong sense of group identity, people must be exposed to, and feel a sense of ownership of, their history, particularly material culture (Merryman 2006: 102). According to this argument, artefacts become vital to cultural definition and to developing a shared sense of community. Cultural property thus forms part of a nation’s economic and cultural capital (Urice 2006: 151), and a people deprived of their past material culture are impoverished (Merryman 2006: 102–3). Objects thus are important in conveying a sense of group identity and belonging. As Lyons writes: ‘Cultural heritage – one’s own or a nation’s heritage – is central to a sense of purpose and place in the world. Artworks, religious icons, monuments, literary manuscripts, traditional myths, and rituals hold the power to create a profound sense of belonging’ (2002: 116). Lyons notes the manner in which material from the past is harnessed to create a sense of belonging and as a focus for the negotiation of identities. Barkan and Bush have also illustrated how objects gain more potency and symbolic capital when they are taken from their country of origin: the identity of the group is consolidated through the loss and longing for cultural property (2002: 1). It is evident that well-known historic objects have taken on great significance for groups of people, even for nations: some are considered so important that they have come to embody the idea of the state for certain groups.23 Neil Curtis of the Marischal Museum, Aberdeen, explained the motivation for the return of a ceremonial headdress to the Kainai Nation in Canada as: ‘demonstrating its significance as something other than a museum object – it turned out to be one of their most sacred bundles. The decision was therefore based on setting that significance against its significance to the museum’ (in Burnet 2007: 25). It could be argued that the Putuo Five would have far more significance to the Buddhist community on Putuo than to Liverpool Museum – indeed this museum service has demonstrated the relatively low esteem in which these objects have

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been held, by not exhibiting them, by storing them in poor conditions and by losing the associated information about them for decades. Many today have asserted that museums need to become more sensitive to different beliefs in other cultures (Curtis, in Burnet 2007: 25). The Chinese/Buddhist point of view on the appropriation of the Putuo Five and their sacred qualities here, therefore, is crucial. While we have seen how religious practice was almost eradicated in China during the Cultural Revolution, beliefs did not die out and are stronger today than ever. Buddhism is flourishing in this previously repressive regime; there is a new sense of freedom of expression and of religious identity. Putuo, as we have seen, is once again a major pilgrimage site. In fact, discussions with many Chinese people on the subject of the Putuo Five suggest a strong desire to see them returned – and that there is an increasing sense of the importance of exerting control over China’s lost heritage. If repatriated, the Putuo Five would have the capacity to ‘bolster cultural identity and foster healing’ (Peers and Brown 2003: 6). As Peers and Brown put it: ‘Artefacts prompt the re-learning of forgotten knowledge and skills, provide opportunities to piece together fragmented historical narratives, and are material evidence of cultural identities and historical struggles’ (2003: 6).

Belonging: The Importance of the Bronzes to Putuo Island Cultural nationalism suggests that key objects belong in the place where they were made (Merryman 2006: 102–3). We have seen how the deity figures – especially Guanyin – have a deep attachment to this particular Buddhist island. It could be argued that this is the best, and only, context in which to view them – that they belong on Putuo. Furthermore, the bronzes are now extremely important for the history of this renowned pilgrimage site for, if returned, they would be Putuo’s earliest deity figures. Unlike the Parthenon Marbles, of which substantial amounts remain in Greece, Putuo has no other ancient sculptures apart from a single stone obelisk dating to the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368). Everything else has been recreated since the 1980s. This stark fact alone is clearly a powerful argument for their return.

Postscript: Confessions of a Former Curator My perspectives regarding restitution have changed considerably during the process of researching and writing this book. Museums in general have a strong presumption against disposal, and the first reaction of a curator, as the primary carer of objects, has traditionally been to want to keep hold of things. If I still worked at Liverpool Museum I would probably be resistant to returning these bronzes to China. Since leaving the museum, my relationship with the deity fig-

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ures has clearly been reconfigured. Teaching museology at the University of Manchester has enabled me to think through arguments from a variety of perspectives. I have had the opportunity to discuss ideas for and against return in seminars and workshops, and consistently heard the most powerful arguments for the Putuo Five to go back to China. Perhaps the most significant impact on my views was the trip I made to China in 2007 – to Ningbo, Putuo and Dinghai – when I became sensitized to the feelings of local people and their indignation at what had happened to these Buddhist bronzes. It was Chinese people, above all, who made me think deeply about where these statues belong. We tend to project part of ourselves onto objects. At the museum, I was drawn to the statues because of my previous experiences of studying religious imagery in China, because I had been adopted into the family of a Chinese temple keeper and spent many hours amongst deity figures in their original sacred environments. As a result of these experiences, my teaching in Manchester, and my research on Putuo, I am inclined to want to see the Putuo Five returned to a Buddhist temple. Only time will tell what will happen in the future. Their biographies will continue to unfold, no doubt, in unexpected ways. Their lives will be immersed in yet new discourses, new debates about where they should go, who should own them and what they mean. This is not the end of their story.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Henrietta Lidchi for this expression cited in her paper ‘Great expectations and modest transactions: art, commodity and collecting’ at the ‘Extreme Collecting’ conference at the British Museum, 31 March 2008. 2. I am grateful to Elizabeth Hallam for these ideas. 3. On open objects, see Elizabeth Hallam (2011). 4. I investigated the World Museum Liverpool, the Mayer papers and auction catalogues at the Liverpool Record Office, the special manuscripts collection of the Sydney Jones Library at the University of Liverpool, Bebington Library, the Williamson Art Gallery and the British Library (Sotheby’s and Leete auction catalogue). 5. Particularly in the late 1980s, in the aftermath of the ‘Primitivism’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 6. Hevia discusses ‘national humiliation’ days in China, when people remember the injustices of the past at the hands of foreigners (2003: 334). 7. Under the section on ‘Repatriation and Restitution’ of the Acquisitions and Disposal Policy of the National Museums Liverpool it is stated that: 10a. NML’s governing body, acting on the advice of the museum’s professional staff, may take a decision to return human remains, objects or specimens to a country or people of origin. The museum will take such decisions on a case by case basis, within its legal position and taking into account all ethical implications. 10b. The MMGO and the 1992 Act generally preclude NML from conceding title in objects or specimens to countries or cultural groups overseas but we will treat any requests

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8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

The Lives of Chinese Objects

with respect and sensitivity. Every effort will be made to develop a positive relationship with the requesting party, allaying as far as possible any concerns about the future care of the material. Yi-Lin Wu of the Institute of History and Philology, at the Academica Sinica in Taiwan, has examined the Putuo gazetteers for mention of looting during the Opium Wars, but has been unable to find reference to the removal of the five bronzes in the 1840s. China signed the 1995 Unidriot Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects, which stipulated that any cultural object looted or lost because of reasons of war should be returned without any limitation of time span. Newspaper clipping, author unspecified (c.1867), ‘Presentation of the Mayer collection to the Town’, NML. Newspaper clipping, author unspecified (c.1867), ‘Art and antiquities in Liverpool’, NML. These were the arguments forwarded by those who signed the 2003 ‘Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums’. For example, a debate about ‘museums and cultural property’ took place at the Merseyside Maritime Museum (part of National Museums Liverpool) in 2005 and 2006. The latter focussed on the repatriation of African objects as part of Black History Month. Personal communication, 3 April 2009. Kieschnick writes of how frequently the Chinese ruling powers called for the melting of Buddhist images to fill state coffers or for use of the military (2003: 10–11). Emperor Wuzong of the Tang dynasty in the 840s, for example, ordered the destruction of huge numbers of images. During the Great Leap Forward in 1958 scrap metal was obtained from Buddhist images, and again during the Cultural Revolution many metal deity figures were melted down (2003: 70–71). This is similar to the argument that the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles might have been damaged during the Greek War of Independence and that they would have been destroyed by pollution in Athens had they remained there. Approximate visitor figures are: 2003/2004 – 359,557; 2004/2005 – 319,654; 2005/2006 – 582,643 (reopened fully on completion of ‘Into the Future’ project); 2006/2007 – 553,095; 2007/2008 (April to January) – 594,457. I am grateful to Jane Duffy, senior project officer, for supplying these details. Personal communication, Worrall, 12 July 2008. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in the US (1989) specifies that objects in museums should be returned to native communities if there are links to the belief system and culture that originally used them. On 10 February, a team of eighty-one Chinese lawyers wrote to Christie’s in an effort to stop the sale and to persuade the owner (Pierre Berge) to return them to China. They threatened to sue Berge if they received no positive feedback. Five of the other fountain heads have been bought by Chinese business figures and repatriated, while the whereabouts of the five others is unknown. This was the first time that anyone has backed out of a winning bid to make a political statement. The Flatejarbok Codex, the Bust of Nefertiti, the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon Marbles and the Lindisfarne Gospels are some of the most renowned.

Bibliography Archives and Museums Consulted British Library (BL) British Library Newspapers (BLN) British Museum (BM) Bromley Library Bebington Library Crystal Palace Foundation Dinghai Museum General Register Office (GRO) Hampshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS) London Metropolitan Archive (LMA) Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries (LRO) Manchester Art Gallery (MAG) Manchester Central Library (MCL) National Army Museum National Art Library (NAL) National Museums Liverpool (NML) Pitt Rivers Museum Public Record Office (PRO) Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 (RCE) and Prince Albert’s Archive (PAA) Royal Geographical Society Staffordshire Regiment Museum (SRM) University of Liverpool Archives University of Liverpool: Sydney Jones Library Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) Westminster City Archives (WCA)

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Primary Sources Chapter 2 Title page to the Log Book of the Grenadier Company written and designed by Captain Edie. Accession number 7764. SRM Digest of Services of 2nd North Staffs, 1824–1910. Accession number 1027. SRM Army Lists. PRO: 1827–1831 – Ensign 1832–1833 – Lieutenant 1834–1845 – Captain 1845–1850/1 – Major William Edie, Statement of Services, WO25/804 (sheet 210). PRO William Edie, Statement of Services, WO31/882. PRO William Edie, Statement of Services, WO31/702. PRO William Edie, Statement of Services, WO31/573. PRO Poor rate return for 14 Buckingham Street, Parish of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields (Exchange Ward), Westminster, July 1851. WCA William Edie, death certificate: DYB 452994. GRO Obituary: The Hampshire Chronicle, 26 June 1852. HALS Obituary: The Winchester Quarterly, June 1852. HALS Obituary: The Morning Chronicle, 25 June 1852. BLN Obituary: The Era, 27 June 1852. BLN Obituary: The Belfast News-letter, 30 June 1852. BLN

Chapter 3 THE GREAT EXHIBITION

Dickinson’s ‘Comprehensive Picture of the Great Exhibition of 1851’. Originals Painted for HRH Prince Albert by Messrs Nash, Haghe and Roberts RA. 196. Tunis no.3. PLXXXI, u.10.b. Department of Prints and Drawings. V&A Extract of a Communication from the Imperial Commissioner to H.E. Her Majesty’s Plenipotentiary, True Extract signed Frederick Harvey, 22nd June 1850. Letters 1850–51, Volume V, RA–RC 1851. PAA Abstract of Letters, 1850–51. PAA 1851 Exhibition Correspondence. RCE Reports by the Jurors, for the Great Exhibition, 4 vols, MDCCCLI, London: Spicer Bros. RCE

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THE CRYSTAL PALACE IN SYDENHAM

Owen Jones’s ‘Lists of Statuary’ in Inventory for Insurance at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, 28 November 1853, P.P.T.15. CPT/15–16. LMA De La Motte’s Photographs of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, 1851–1855 SC/PHL/02/947–949 3.5.8.CRY. LMA

Chapter 4 BRAM HERTZ

1851 census. PRO Post Office London Directory, 1853. London: Kelly and Co. WCA Watkin’s Commercial and General London Directory and Court Guide, 1851. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman. WCA Watkin’s Commercial and General London Directory and Court Guide, 1852. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman. WCA Letters from Bram Hertz to Joseph Mayer, 1856, Mayer Collection, 920 MAY, accession number 2528. LRO Visitors’ Book, Egyptian Museum, Colquitt Street, 1852–1867, Mayer Collection, 920 MAY. LRO MANCHESTER ART TREASURES EXHIBITION

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Letters from Joseph Mayer to Charles Roach Smith, Mayer Collection, 920 MAY, accession number 2528A. LRO ‘Mr C. Roach Smith’s Museum of London Antiquities’, Illustrated London News, 3 May 1856. JOSEPH MAYER

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‘The Egyptian Museum, Colquitt Street’, 6 May 1852 (no author or publisher). Hume, A., ‘A Trip to the Pyramids’, Liverpool Mercury, 7 May 1852. ‘Egyptian Museum in Liverpool’, The Mail, 8 May 1852. ‘Museum of Egyptian Antiquities’, 17 May 1852 (no author or publisher). ‘Presentation of the Mayer Collection to the Town’ (no author, date or publisher). ‘Art and Antiquities in Liverpool’ (no author, date or publisher). Letters dated 23 July 1856 and 15 January 1857, Mayer Collection, 920 MAY, accession number 2528. LRO Visitors’ Book, Egyptian Museum, Colquitt Street, 1852–1867, Mayer Collection, 920 May. LRO

Chapter 5 Liverpool Free Public Library and Derby Museum: Reports on Fitting up the New Building from the Librarian, the Curator and the Rev H H Higgins, (1859). Liverpool: T. Brakell Printer. A Description of the Liverpool Free Public Museum, Including the Derby Collection of Natural History and the Mayer Collection of Antiquities and Art, 1869. NML. Ceremonies connected with the opening of the building for a Free Public Library and Museum presented by William Brown Esq. to the Town of Liverpool (1861). Liverpool: Geo. McCorquodale & Co Printers. LRO Paper slips for the Mayer collection, c.1873. NML Gatty, C. 1877. The Mayer collection in the Liverpool Museum considered as an educational possession, a paper read before the members of the Liverpool Art Club, 5th November, 1877 by Charles Gatty. Liverpool: printed for private circulation. LRO Mayer Inventory: Ethnology. NML

Chapter 6 Ethnology Collections in the War. NML Notes on Documentation. NML Handwritten Evacuation Lists in Second World War, c.1939. NML ‘Filthy conditions, says Liverpool museums official’, Liverpool Daily Post, 12 June 1957. ‘City’s hidden treasure’, Liverpool Echo, 14 June 1957. Whittington-Egan, R. 1956. ‘Threat of Decay to Liverpool Treasures: They Escaped German Bombs – Now the Menace is Mildew and Dust’, Liverpool Daily Post, 17 June 1956. Elgin, G. 1957. ‘Liverpool’s Priceless Relics Rot in Storage’, Liverpool Daily Post, 1 May 1957.

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Index A accessioning, 140, 224 aesthetics, 11, 113 Chinese objects and, 144, 163–64 collecting and, 81 modernist, 13, 15, 165, 167, 169 Alcock, Rutherford, 88, 91, 104 Allan, Douglas, 155, 164, 165, 167 Ames, Michael, 72, 137, 140, 188, 236, 250 anthropology, 6, 141, 142, 152, 192, 208 reflexive, 208 antiquarian collectors, 13, 106, 131, 223 antiquities, 12, 14, 16, 121, 184, 218, 224, 226, 237 Anglo-Saxon, 108, 113 at British Museum, 143 Chinese, 233, 235 dealers, 69 Egyptian, 152, 189 Hertz collection of, 107–12 See also Hertz keeper of, 172, 190 late 18th century–early 19th century collectors of, 71 Liverpool Museum, 142, 145, 150, 156, 178–82, 186, 210 See also Liverpool Museum Mayer’s collection and museum of, 5, 113, 122, 123–31, 133, 141, 189 See also Mayer Oriental, 144, 164, 195 See also Oriental antiquities Appadurai, Arjun, 7, 8, 16, 123, 206, 209 archaeology, 6, 141, 180, 186, 210, 224, 226 British, 133 in China, 178, 190

Chinese archaeology, lectureship, 163, 178 field, 179, 190 keeper of, 12, 172, 179, 183 at Liverpool Museum, 5, 136, 155, 161, 176–78, 180, 188, 189, 195, 196, 220 and Shipping (department), 164 asana, 22 Ashton, Leigh, 163, 187 Asian collections at British Museum and V&A, 164, 210 curator of, 181, 192, 195, 221 at Liverpool Museum, 12, 135, 136, 167, 177, 181, 187, 194, 198 and World Cultures gallery, 192 authenticity, 119, 204 Avalokitesvara, 21, 24, 115, 216 B Baudrillard, Jean, 69, 70, 76 Bennett, Tony, 10, 11, 108, 141, 150, 151, 154, 159, 217 bodhisattva in Buddhist beliefs, 21–22, 34, 35, 115, 216 conservation of, 198–206 Guangong, 31–32 See also Guangong Guanyin, 22–26 See also Guanyin at Liverpool Museum, 3, 49, 68, 80, 99, 146, 147, 176, 180, 194, 198, 216, 217, 222 Puxian, 27–29 See also Puxian Weituo, 29–31 See also Weituo

268

Wenshu, 26–27 See also Wenshu Bonham, Samuel George, 88 Boxer Rebellion, 80, 162 British Museum, 226 African collection at, 149 ‘Art under the Mongol dynasties’ exhibition, 176 Asian collections at, 144, 164 ‘Buddhism: Art and Faith’ exhibition, 181 Chinese collections at, 187 conservation, 220 Egyptian displays, 128, 129, 134, 226 Elgin Marbles, 198 and Franks, 133 and Hertz’s objects, 112, 132 ‘Living Buddhism’ exhibition, 181 and Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, 114 Masson’s guide (1850), 143 and Read, 163 and Sotheby’s sale, 132 and universalism, 233 bronze casting, 31, 176 Buddhism, 13, 21, 24, 48, 127, 146, 225, 226, 227, 237 in China, 18, 19, 35, 26, 77, 115, 127, 240 displays in World Museum Liverpool, 3, 5, 15, 187, 210, 211–19, 222 See also World Museum Liverpool exhibitions in museums, 181–82 Mahayana, 2, 214–18 See also Mahayana and Putuo, 37, 38, 63, 170 See also Putuo Tibetan, 176, 187 worship, 43, 46 Buddhist art, 26, 163, 168–69, 188, 194, 235 community, 239 imagery, 4, 18, 21–35, 120, 211 images, Sri Lanka, 33 island, 3, 63 manuscripts, 77 monks, 13, 18, 33, 62, 63, 127 practitioners, 24, 214, 216

Index

teachings, 26 temple. See temple worship, 4, 43–48, 50, 51, 62, 147 Bukenqu temple, 35 C cabinets of curiosities, 129–30 Campbell, Colin, 59, 62 Canton (Guanzhou), 53, 54, 88, 92, 120 Cantonese, 96, 97, 115, 146 Carnatic Hall, 171–75, 177, 178, 179, 189 casting (bronze), 19–21, 97, 125, 176, 184 Guanyin, 22 Weituo, 31 Caucasian race galleries at Liverpool Museum, 13, 15, 152, 153, 154, 155, 159, 164 Keane’s classifications, 150, 151 Chinese art, 162–64, 177, 178, 183, 184, 187 curator of, 26 the Putuo Five as, 119, 121, 142, 184 Christie’s, 183, 238, 242 Chusan. See Zhoushan classifications (in museums), 11–13, 161, 167, 180, 186, 187, 210, 224, 225 and connoisseurship, 184 of ethnology, 178 at Great Exhibition, 95 racial, at Liverpool Museum, 15, 148, 149–54, 156, 159, 164 at Sotheby’s, 121 Clifford, James, 121, 162, 168, 207, 208, 221, 234 Clubb, Joseph, 155, 156 Cole, Henry, 68, 81, 85, 86, 87, 91, 97, 103, 105, 184 collecting, and antiquarians, 108, 126, 179 and Edie, 64–75 and imperialism, 208, 209, 234, 236 and Mayer, 126, 163 See also Mayer and Ridyard, 207 seals on Putuo, 44 theories of, 62, 68, 69–74, 81 commodification, 14, 16, 52, 85, 103, 118–23, 139, 224, 226 connoisseurship, 106, 154, 182–86

Index

consecration, 14, 18, 33–34, 49, 77, 122, 140, 227 conservation, 15, 205–6, 213, 217, 218, 224, 225, 226 of Guanyin, 195, 198–204, 220, 221 keeper of, 177 of Wenshu and Puxian, 204–5 Conservation Centre, Liverpool, 11, 34, 187, 193, 195, 199, 200, 202, 204, 205, 218, 220, 225, 234 laser technology at, 203 metals conservators at, 2 conservator, 13, 202, 203, 205–6, 221, 223, 225 of metal, 2, 80, 199, 204, 220 ‘Contact zones’, 234 Coombes, Annie, 10, 149, 150, 154, 158 Courtauld Institute of Art, 163, 187 Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, 2, 3, 83–105, 110, 115, 119, 124, 137, 170 Crystal Palace, Sydenham, 4, 102–3, 107, 229 cultural nationalism, 239, 240 Cultural Revolution, 4, 38, 63, 79, 175, 178, 226, 234, 235, 240, 242 curator, 2, 5, 12, 13–14, 63, 76, 119, 131, 148, 174, 192, 194, 198, 203, 218, 223, 225, 240 of African collections, 157, 221 of Asian collections, 192, 195, 221 of Chinese art, 26 of ethnology, 1, 12, 13, 207, 221, 227 Gatty, 25, 120, 148 See also Gatty at Liverpool Museum, 145, 155, 156, 159, 175, 181, 207, 209, 215, 216, 217, 222 See also Liverpool Museum of Mayer Museum, 136, 140, 158 See also Mayer Museum of Oriental collections, 181 of Staffordshire Regiment Museum, 61, 64 See also Staffordshire Regiment Museum Tankard, 172, 176–78 See also Tankard Thomas, 15, 166 See also Thomas

269

curiosities, 12, 14, 16, 97, 148, 155, 157, 226 in Mayer’s collection, 123–31, 224 See also Mayer Oriental, 89 D Dalai Lama, 214, 216 Daoism, 48, 216 dharma, 25, 26, 29, 31, 46 dian (prayer hall), 35, 40, 41 Dickinson, 15, 94, 95, 96 Dinghai, 4, 241 during First Opium War, 55, 59, 60, 61, 68, 69, 71, 74, 77, 79, 80, 226, 236 distributed objects (Gell), 226 Dorothy Worrall collection, 181 Downes, Dorothy, 172, 179, 183, 190 Duncan, Carol, 10, 100, 101, 105, 136, 156 Dutch pirates, 36, 225 E East India Company, 53, 91, 114 Ecroyd Smith, 140 Edie, William, 3, 14, 106, 169, 186, 194, 200, 201, 223, 226, 232 battle of Zhenjiang, 54, 55–57, 80 career in army, 64–67, 72, 75, 81, 103 collecting, 69–74, 121, 123, 129, 145, 147, 156, 226, 229, 236 collection, 51, 74–75, 107, 108, 109, 110, 119, 146, 225 commission in army, 65 Crystal Palace, 102 First Opium War, 55–64 Great Exhibition, 68, 73, 78, 87, 92, 94–99, 108, 110, 115, 227 title page, 66–67, 79, 80, 81, 158 Egyptian Museum (Liverpool), 107, 110, 127–31, 132, 133, 134, 224, 229 elephant, 1, 9, 16, 28, 29, 49, 146, 194, 204, 205 ethnology, 12, 13, 121, 135, 144, 148, 149, 150, 152, 162, 178, 179, 180, 186, 187 collections of, 5, 12, 136, 142, 143, 144, 158, 164, 172, 179, 180, 188, 189, 190, 195, 196, 207, 208, 210, 220

270

curator of, 1, 12, 13, 15, 157, 165, 177, 192, 195, 207, 221, 227, 234 department of, 166, 170, 176, 188 gallery of, 143, 154, 159 ‘Oriental ethnology’, 165, 218 evolutionary gallery/display, 5, 14, 154, 167, 224, 226 evolutionism, 11, 154, 161, 165 F Fayu temple, 38, 41, 42, 45, 46, 50 First Opium War, 2, 3, 14, 37, 51, 54, 55, 56, 58, 72, 78, 89, 118, 129, 147, 198, 224, 226, 230, 231, 236 Forbes, Henry Ogg, 13, 149, 169, 194, 200, 203, 208, 223, 225 career, 149–50 and racial displays, 150–55, 158, 159 Fortune, Robert, and Buddhism, 78, 127 in China, 38, 50, 69, 74, 75, 79, 80, 159 and Great Exhibition, 88, 104 and Putuo, 3, 15, 37, 43, 49, 60, 61, 62, 68 Fry, Roger, 163, 187 G Galltfaenan Hall, 170, 188, 189 Gatty, Charles, 13, 140, 169, 194, 200, 201, 203, 208, 224 1882 catalogue, 25, 81, 120, 131, 143, 145–49, 158, 178, 184, 202, 227 and accession numbers, 141, 157 curator of Mayer Museum, 140 and ethnology, 142, 144, 225, 226 ethnology exhibition, 142, 143, 144 and Mayer, 157 Gell, Alfred, 7, 8, 16, 17, 18, 20, 33, 34, 39, 47, 49, 169, 228 George III, 37, 52, 84, 87, 211 Gerhard, Eduard, 74, 102, 105, 108, 109, 110, 119 God of War, 31–32, 70 Goddess of Compassion. See Guanyin Great Exhibition of 1851, 1, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 14, 63, 73, 74, 78, 83–105, 106, 108, 110, 112, 120, 121, 124, 135, 136, 145, 194 architecture of Crystal Palace, 100, 102

Index

catalogue, 3, 68, 77, 86, 87, 91–92, 95, 96–97, 98, 103, 105, 115, 127, 140, 146, 184, 226 China Court, 91–93, 115, 119 China’s refusal, 87–89 displays, 74, 76–77, 107, 147, 156, 187, 215, 226, 227 Edie’s collection, 94–99 images of China, 89–91 Indian display, 114 opening ceremony, 89–90, 127 organization, 84, 85–87, 155, 200 origination, 84 visitors to, 100, 101, 131, 223, 229 Grenadiers, 56, 65, 67 Guandi, 31 Guangong, 3, 8, 16, 19, 21, 30, 76, 183, 194, 195, 234 1607 gazeteer, 36 accession number, 193 Gatty exhibition, 145–47 at Great Exhibition, 94–99 mythology and iconography, 31–32 photograph at Great Exhibition, 99 prayers to, 46 at Sotheby’s, 118–23 in storage, 181, 205, 219 temples devoted to, 41–42 worshipped by soldiers, 70 Guanyin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 42, 60, 62, 63, 70, 71, 76, 225 1607 gazeteer, 36 commissioning, 18, 19 conservation of, 198–204, 205–6 Gatty exhibition, 145–47 at Great Exhibition, 68, 94–99, 100, 226 Guanyin men, 58 Guanyin temple in Nanjing, 58–59 in Hertz catalogue, 109, 110 at Liverpool Museum, 135, 144, 145, 146, 147, 155, 163, 167, 170, 175, 176, 177, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 193, 194, 197, 198, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 224, 235 at Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, 107, 112–18, 226 in Mayer’s collection, 123–31

Index

mythology and iconography, 22–26 at Sotheby’s, 118–23 of the South Sea, 41 in storage, 180 thousand-armed, 41, 46, 47 in World Cultures gallery, 214–18 worship of, 43–47 Guanyu, 31 H Haast, Julius, 150, 158 Han dynasty, 31 Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), 195, 196, 197, 207, 218, 221 Hertz, Bram, 106, 107–112, 126, 139, 146, 169, 186, 194, 200, 208, 223, 229, 232 collection, 74, 107–12 and Mayer, 113, 124, 131, 132 Sotheby’s catalogue, 81, 102, 108, 109, 110, 119–21, 127, 131, 132, 133, 140, 147, 184 Sotheby’s sale, 118–23, 132 Hewett, William, 89, 92, 104, 115 Hong Kong, 1, 24, 31, 44, 54, 55, 59, 61, 67, 68, 69, 78, 80, 88, 96, 103, 146, 198, 227, 233, 238 Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean, 7, 10, 11, 13, 16, 76, 131, 141, 142, 157, 176, 188, 209, 224, 228, 230 Huc, Evariste-Régis, 37, 38, 49, 50, 63, 81, 120 Huiji temple, 36, 44 I iconography, 17, 20–32, 35, 98, 122, 125, 145, 146, 187, 204 iconometric diagram, 20 Iliffe, John Henry, 174, 177, 190 Illustrated London News, 134 and Crystal Palace, 87, 95, 98, 226 and Manchester Art Treasures, 117, 118 imperialism, 6, 54, 75, 83, 118, 141, 154, 208, 234 J Japanese pirates, 35, 36 Jinghai temple, 58, 64, 79

271

K Kangxi Emperor, 36, 184, 224 Keane, A.H., 150, 151, 158, 159 Kieschnick, John, 18, 19, 33, 34, 38, 43, 46, 48, 49, 50, 168, 242 Koh-i-noor diamond, 2, 95, 104, 108 Kopytoff, Igor, 7, 8, 19, 123, 156, 209 L label (museum), 11, 12, 140, 147 at Great Exhibition, 96, 98 for Guanyin, 15, 195, 203, 204, 216, 217 at Liverpool Museum, 2, 166, 167, 169, 177, 193, 194, 216, 222, 223, 229, 234 in Mayer Museum, 129 Lady Lever Art Gallery, 144 lalitasana, 26, 28 laser technology, 193, 202–4, 205, 225 lay worship, 18, 44–6 Lee, Reverend, 165, 166, 169, 227 lion, 1, 26, 27, 49, 177, 194, 213, 220 Liverpool Museum, 1, 2, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 25, 36, 74, 120, 133 Blundell Street stores, 178–80, 183, 193, 196, 198, 204, 219, 220 foundation, 136 fundraising, 195–8 modernist displays, 166–70 nineteenth century displays, 135–60 twentieth century displays, 161–91 war damage to, 170–75 World Cultures gallery, 206–19 loot, 68, 70, 209, 232, 236 origin of term, 61 and Putuo, 61–63, 242 of Summer Palace, 64, 73, 80, 119, 162, 238 lost wax process, 20, 116 M Macartney Embassy, 37, 52, 53, 57, 78, 84, 87 Mahayana Buddhism, 2, 3, 48, 212, 213 in World Cultures gallery, 214–8, 222, 230 Maitreya (Milofu), 29, 40, 50 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (1857), 106, 111, 112–18, 121, 137, 147, 194, 223, 226, 229

272

catalogue, 6, 114–16, 146 Guanyin at, 4, 12 Manchester Museum, 143 Mandarin (language), 16, 96, 115, 146 Mandarin (official), 68, 89, 97, 145 Manjusri, 26, 48, 194 Mayer, Joseph, 106, 139, 140, 166, 169, 179, 186, 194, 200, 208, 223 collecting, 123–27, 226 collection, 4–5 collection register, 157 donation to Liverpool Museum, 5, 135–36, 232 Egyptian Museum, 107, 127–31, 229 and Hertz collection, 110–12, 118–23, 132, 232 and Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, 112–18 Mayer collection (at Liverpool Museum), 140–1, 142, 144 Mayer exhibition (1986–7), 181 Mayer Museum catalogue by Gatty (1882), 145–49 Mayer Museum in nineteenth century, 152, 158, 159 Mayer Museum/galleries in 1920s–40s, 164, 189 Mayer Museum inventory, 155–56, 160, 227 Mayer papers (Liverpool Record Office), 241 Melanian race, galleries at Liverpool Museum, 13, 15, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 164 Keane’s classifications, 150, 151 metallurgical analysis, 186, 190, 191, 224, 226 metallurgy, 98, 116, 186, 225 metalwork, 14, 15, 25, 97, 116, 124, 132, 143, 161, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 213, 220, 223 Miao Shan, 24, 25, 44 modernism (in art), 13, 165–70, 188, 225 modernist avant-garde, 162 Mongolian race, 5, 12, 14, 149–56, 165, 166, 218, 219, 224, 227 galleries at Liverpool Museum, 13, 15, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 164

Index

Keane’s classifications, 150, 151 monks (Buddhist), 4, 13, 14, 18, 26, 29, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 43–48, 49, 50, 62, 63, 127, 175, 229, 234, 236 mudra, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 31, 43, 48 Muensterberger, Werner, 70 Museum of London Antiquities, 122 N Nanjing, 4, 15, 18, 55, 57, 59, 64, 67, 96 Treaty of, 37, 54, 58, 63, 79 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (NMGM), 180, 181, 192, 193, 196, 197, 198, 205, 211, 218 National Museums Liverpool (NML), 80, 133, 203, 219, 220, 225, 232, 233, 234, 235, 239, 241, 242 Ninety Eighth Regiment, 3, 4, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 63, 64, 65, 67, 74, 79, 80, 82 Ningbo, 82, 226, 241 and commissioning and casting of Putuo Five, 17, 18, 19, 20, 31, 35, 36 and First Opium War, 49, 54, 57, 59, 62, 63, 74, 78, 80 museum, 236 Qita temple, 41, 42 Tiantong temple, 50, 79 Nirvana, 21, 22, 29, 43, 44 O object biographies, 8, 11, 209, 225 ‘Oriental’ art, 5, 183, 218, 224 Oriental Ceramic Society (OCS), 163, 164, 176, 190 Oriental Court (Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition), 114, 116, 118 ownership, theories of, 71, 73, 76, 77, 107, 111, 119, 147, 179, 224, 229, 232, 239 Buddhist images, 18–19 legal, 232–33, 236 P palimpsests, 169, 228 Pearce, Susan, 10, 72, 231 pilgrims, Chinese and Japanese, 13 in India, 39

Index

to Putuo, 4, 5, 14, 18, 25, 38, 43–46, 101, 223, 237 pilgrimage site, 3, 170, 172, 227, 240 Crystal Palace, 100–2 Putuo, 4, 17, 35, 36, 38, 43–44, 47, 50, 84 piracy, 36 Pitt Rivers, Augustus, 74, 142, 148, 151, 157, 158 Pitt Rivers Museum, 65, 74, 81, 150 Poly Museum, 238 Polygroup, 238 post-colonialism, 232, 234, 239 Potakala, 35 prayer, 24, 25, 35, 40, 45, 46, 101, 105, 120, 145, 213 preservation, 65, 68, 97, 195, 232, 233, 234–35, 237 Puji temple, 3, 33, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 47, 50, 61, 62, 63, 81 Pusa, 22 Putuo island, 3, 19, 20, 28, 31, 35–43, 51, 77, 82, 84, 98, 100, 101, 119, 127, 145, 186, 194, 198, 206, 223, 226, 227, 234, 239, 240, 241 during Cultural Revolution, 4, 175 during First Opium War, 54, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 68, 71, 74, 75, 242 and Guanyin, 24, 25 history of, 35–38, 225 temples, 14, 17, 18, 26, 34, 35–43, 50, 81, 96, 137, 138, 139, 147, 155, 170, 224, 236, 237 Puxian, 1, 2, 3, 8, 16, 19, 22, 26, 31, 34, 41, 42, 49, 76, 183, 185, 194, 197, 209, 220, 225 accession number, 193 conservation of, 204–5 Gatty exhibition, 145–47 at Great Exhibition, 94–99 mythology and iconography, 27–29 at Sotheby’s, 118–23 in storage, 180 in World Cultures gallery, 214–18 Q Qianlong Emperor, 36, 52, 79, 87, 184, 224, 238

273

Qing dynasty, 4, 18, 52, 79, 120, 163, 184, 195, 223 Qita temple, 41, 42 R race (theories of ), 135, 142, 143, 148, 149–56, 158, 159, 161, 189, 225, 226, 227 Mongolian, 5, 12, 13, 14, 149–55, 218, 224 See also Mongolian Read, Hercules, 163, 187 reflexive anthropology, 192, 208 replication, 202–4, 225 restitution, 15, 231–41 Ridyard, Arnold, 149, 207 ritual of consecration, 140–41 at Great Exhibition, 100–2 Royal Academy, 164, 182 Royle, John Forbes, 114–16, 132, 226 Ruskin, John, 112, 223 S sacred architecture, 35–43, 101, 136–39 Samantabhadra, 27, 48, 194 samsara, 22 San Da Shi, 22, 35, 42 Sangharama, 31 Seckel, Dietrich, 4, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 29, 33, 34, 39, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 155, 168, 188, 206, 213, 220 Second Opium War, 61, 64, 73, 84, 118, 132 Shakyamuni, 28, 48, 145 Shanghai, 3, 35, 54, 55, 57, 78, 79, 88, 89, 104, 198 History Museum, 64 seafarers, 209 shrines, 130 Great Exhibition as a shrine, 100–2 Guanyin temple, Nanjing, 58 portable shrines (in Buddhism gallery), 212, 215 on Putuo, 17, 31, 35–43, 44–47, 169, 236 in World Cultures gallery, 212–214 Si tianwang tian, 40

274

Skanda, 49 Smith, Charles Roach, 106, 107, 121, 122, 124, 126, 133, 139, 147, 194, 200, 208, 232 Sotheby’s, 183, 238 1854 sale, 4, 6, 74, 107, 110, 118–19, 127, 184, 194, 227 1859 sale, 4, 6, 102, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112, 115, 118–23, 127, 140, 146, 147, 184, 194, 224, 227, 232 souvenir (theories of ), 71–73, 76, 82, 87, 92, 93 Staffordshire Regiment Museum, 3, 58, 61, 64, 67, 75, 79, 81 Steiner, Christopher, 7, 8, 106 Stewart, Susan, 72, 76, 82 Summer Palace (Yuanming Yuan), 64, 73, 80, 119, 133, 162, 238 sutras, 20, 21, 24, 25, 33, 45, 47, 50 T Taiping Rebellion, 120 Tallis, 93 Tankard, Elaine, 12, 13, 172, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 181, 183, 189, 190, 191, 194, 200, 201, 203, 208, 223, 225, 227 temple, 1, 2, 11, 15, 19, 24, 26, 29, 30, 31, 33, 44, 47, 51, 68, 74, 76, 77, 110, 119, 121, 139, 145, 168, 169, 200, 204, 206, 213, 214, 215, 224, 226, 236 Crystal Palace as, 85, 100–2, 170 during Cultural Revolution, 175, 234–35 See also Cultural Revolution during First Opium War, 57–63, 79, 80 See also First Opium War Hindu, 39 keeper, 1, 229, 241 museums and, 136–139, 170, 227 on Putuo, 3, 4, 14, 17, 18, 26, 34, 35–43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 75, 81, 96, 97, 127, 137, 138, 139, 145, 155, 170, 233, 237 See also Putuo during Taiping Rebellion, 120 worship, 44–46

Index

Theravada Buddhism, 212, 213, 216, 217 Thomas, Trevor, 13, 15, 165–70, 172, 176, 189, 194, 200 Tiantong temple, 50, 79 Treaty of Nanjing. See Nanjing Treaty ports, 37, 64 trophies, 12, 62, 69, 73–74, 76, 98, 224 U universalism, 233 urna, 22, 25 usnisha, 22 V Vajrasana, 25 Vajrayana Buddhism, 212, 216 Victoria and Albert Museum, 67, 81, 163, 164, 185, 194, 195, 210, 220, 226 Victoria, Queen, 84, 90, 94, 101, 104, 107, 223 W Walker Art Gallery, 138, 142, 144, 145–149, 176, 177, 180, 189, 220, 222 Wanli Emperor, 36 Waring, J B, 116, 132 Weituo, 3, 8, 16, 19, 21, 40, 46, 60, 70, 76, 110, 183, 194, 195, 234 accession number, 193 Gatty exhibition, 145–47 at Great Exhibition, 94–99 mythology and iconography, 29–31 photograph at Great Exhibition, 99 at Sotheby’s, 118–23 in storage, 181, 205, 219 temples devoted to, 41–42 Wenshu, 1, 2, 3, 8, 16, 19, 21, 22, 28, 29, 31, 34, 41, 42, 45, 46, 48, 49, 70, 76, 177, 183, 185, 194, 195, 197, 219, 220, 225 accession number, 193 conservation of, 204–5 Gatty exhibition, 145–47 at Great Exhibition, 94–99 mythology and iconography, 26–27 at Sotheby’s, 118–23

Index

in storage, 180 in World Cultures gallery, 214–18 World Cultures gallery, 2, 25, 147, 148, 193, 196, 204, 221, 222, 223, 226, 229 Asia displays, 210–11 Buddhism displays, 5, 15, 187, 211–19, 235 general concepts, 181, 206–10 Worrall, Eldon, 25, 124, 181, 182–86, 190, 191, 200, 202, 221, 223, 225, 227, 242 Wutaishan, 26

275

Y Yin county, 18, 19 Yongle Emperor, 52 Yongzheng Emperor, 36, 184, 224 Z Zhenjiang (battle of ), 4, 54, 55–57, 59, 62, 67, 79 Zhoushan (‘Chusan’) archipelago, 4, 35 and First Opium War, 51, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 67, 74 museum, 80