Possessing the King of Flowers, and other things at the Qing court

Abstract

Rendered in paintings and sung in lyric poetry, birds and flowers asserted the mandate of the emperor and defined an imperial aesthetic in eighteenth-century China. Whether it was a peacock from the west or a peony flower from the south, each represented an object–subject relationship that attracted the covetous gaze of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) court. This study focuses on images of the peony, historically regarded as the “King of Flowers,” to probe the tremendous marshaling of labor and resources that put them to work as possessions. Through words and images, imperial artists used peonies to map critical nodes of the Qing Empire and form a visuality of conquered subjects: from the cultural heartland of Han Chinese scholars to European missionaries in the capital of Beijing, and finally to Buddhist devotees in Tibet. Meanwhile, the peonies that began their journey as ephemeral objects of southern Chinese gardens ultimately faded from memory along with their messages of loyal and dissent. Thus, although court artists used peonies to construct a totalizing image of the Qing as a global power, the biographies of these objects instead challenge the relationship between the Qing court and the things it possessed.