Between "Crockery-dom" and Barnum: Boston's Chinese Museum, 1845-47

Abstract

This essay considers the relativistic ethnographic possibilities offered by Boston's Chinese Museum (1845-1857) within its local cultural milieu and international political context. Impelled by the diplomatic milestone of the Treaty of Wanghsia (1844), the museum in its inception and layout argued for improved relations, based upon mutual understanding, between Americans and the Chinese, in the name of trade. The argument unfolded in a larger discursive environment in which civilization and savagery were dichotomized, but this was complicated by a centuries-old, self-conscious Chinese civilization ambiguously positioned between these opposite poles. The museum's setting at Marlboro' Hall, so intimately associated with reform movements and especially Garrisonian abolitionism, contributed another strain of meaning, inviting visitors to radicalize their visualization of the Chinese racial Other beyond the fragmentary knowledge available through, on the one hand, the fantasy-laden "crockery-dom" represented in pictorial porcelain and other imports, and, on the other, the not always flattering Celestial Empire delineated in the period's several popular books by Westerners. Furthermore, this new construction of ethnographic knowledge about the Chinese Other had to counter omnipresent simplications of the exotic, sensationalized, and ultimately Barnum-ized Oriental. The visual discipline of the museum's devolutionary interior organization from Imperial court life to common people's everyday culture, along with the richly contextualizing catalogue and, above all, the two dignified Cantonese "ethnographic informants," encouraged a museum experience that blended the recognition of cultural difference with the celebration of human commonality. The fragility of that blend would be underscored when the museum ultimately fell into P.T. Barnum's hands where, absent the informants, crass commercialization of the exotic reigned in an ethnocentric manner that would characterize Sino-American intercultural relations for the rest of the century and beyond.