Study on Technology and Reproduction of Qing Dynasty Red Sandalwood Inlaid Glass with Double-Happiness Pattern Lantern Enamel Painted Tassel in the Palace Museum

Identification of yellow dyes in two wall coverings from the Palace Museum: Evidence for reconstitution of artifacts

Tie luo (affixed hanging) was an expressive form of traditional Chinese calligraphy or paintings, and popular in the imperial palaces for interior decorations in Qing Dynasty (1644–1911 C.E.). A piece of calligraphic tie luo, written by an eminent calligrapher Gu Gao (1763–1832 C.E.), was restored recently in the Palace Museum, Beijing, China. The paper with pigment coating specially made for this calligraphic piece was named as fenjian. This article presented results from materials identification prior to the restoration. Multianalysis with scientific approaches revealed how tie luo was manufactured. It could be concluded that the investigated tie luo used a paper made from bast fibers of mulberry trees. And the decorative ground layer for the piece was also studied, which indicated that a type of organic red pigments were used for the masterpiece. White lead was considered as the main pigment, mixed with a red dye extracted from sappanwood. Meanwhile, animal glue, drying oils and beeswax were confirmed as the organic binding media. In dye analysis, protosappanin B and brazilin as well as brazilein were identified, which implied that sappanwood was used for the organic manufacture of pigments. In addition, both Nowik type A and C were found in the research, which were characteristic of sappanwood for identification.

Palace lanterns were important and highly visible decorations in the imperial palace in Beijing, China, during the Qing dynasty (1636–1912). Most lanterns had colourful tassels made of fibres. The study performed a comprehensive investigation of the materials and dyes used for palace lantern tassels preserved in The Palace Museum, Beijing. Eight samples with different colours, including yellow, green and red, from five palace lanterns were analysed. By using ultra‐performance liquid chromatography combined with time‐of‐flight mass spectrometry, the compositions of the dyes were identified quickly, and thus the dyes' origins were explored. A X‐ray fluorescence spectrometer assisted in the detection of whether a mordant was used during the dyeing process. As a result, the tassels were all made of silk, discovered through the use of microscopic observation and micro‐Fourier transform infrared spectrometry analysis. Different dyeing techniques were found in these tassels: yellow tassels were dyed by cork tree or turmeric by a direct dyeing method; greens were dyed by pagoda bud with an iron mordant, or by the combination of cork tree and indigo using multi‐dyeing method; and red tassels were coloured with different acid red industrial dyes. These results provide valuable data for the conservation of ancient textile tassels and contribute to the investigation of other hanging tags.

Established in 1925, the Palace Museum is located in the imperial palace of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. The center of imperial governance, it includes numerous structures. ...

Based on the theory of three levels of culture, this study analyzed the cultural elements of enamel-colored porcelain in Qing Dynasty by using experimental methods. In the process of research, first of all, 10 experts in the field of porcelain design were invited to use Delphi expert consultation method to sort out and summarize42representative enamel-colored porcelains in Qing Dynasty from 100 enamel-colored porcelains in Qing Dynasty stored in Beijing Palace Museum and Taipei Palace Museum. Secondly, this study invited 16 designers from porcelain fields to conduct individual analysis of the cultural elements of these 42 enamel-colored porcelains in Qing Dynasty. In addition, this study divided 16 designers into two groups for focus group discussion. Finally, this study used thematic analysis to analyze the results of focus group discussions. The result of this research shows that the three levels of enamel-colored porcelain culture in Qing Dynasty contain 9elements. That is, the pattern, color, shape, and material in the outer tangible level, the craftsmanship, function, usage experience in the middle behavioral level, and the allusion, cultural peculiarity in the inner intangible level. This research can provide a theoretical framework for further clarifying the cultural characteristics of enamel-colored in Qing Dynasty and the design methods of inheriting and innovating enamel-colored.

Reviewed by: The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures Shana J. Brown (bio) Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott with David Shambaugh. The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures. A Samuel and Althea Stroum Book. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2005. xiii, 178 pp. Hardcover $24.95, ISBN 029-598522-4. Vast treasures, whether real or fictional, cast a spell over many of us. The lure of riches and of artifacts of indescribable beauty motivates many escapades, and the treasures of the Chinese imperial houses were even more fabulous than one can imagine. Countless jewels, paintings, jades, bronze vessels, rare books, porcelains of the most varied and opulent kind-imagine the storehouses cluttered to the rafters. Where is all that loot now? This is the central question that Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott sought to answer in The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures.1 After discussing the history of imperial art collecting in earlier dynasties, Elliott narrates the movement of these treasures over the past century, including the establishment of two rival museums to house the artifacts: the Palace Museum in Beijing-the jewel in the crown of museums in the People's Republic of China-and the similarly exalted National Palace Museum in Taipei, under the control of the Republic of China. As the two regimes have at times claimed political legitimacy over Greater China, they have used their possession and stewardship of the imperial treasures to signify their right to rule-mimicking the earliest Chinese royal houses, who collected bronze vessels because of their "magico-religious power" (p. 10). Although this slim volume references few of the Chinese archival materials that document the formation of the Qing collection, it is a useful and entertaining overview of the modern fate of the dynasty's art objects. Furthermore, this work raises several significant questions, in particular the meaning of "ownership" of these materials-private versus state-and the ongoing political significance of the treasures to the regimes that now possess them. For millennia, Chinese emperors collected objets d'art to establish their education, taste, and political legitimacy. Up to the Qing dynasty (est. 1644), most of the existing collections were destroyed, sold, or stolen upon the turn of each new dynastic cycle. Indeed, the detritus of the imperial collections replenished the national art markets, as looted imperial treasures were sold to private and state collectors, or bartered away by fleeing royalty. As with pharaonic tomb gold in ancient Egypt, treasures of various kinds circulated slowly but consistently within political and cultural circles. Before the Yongle emperor of the Ming dynasty established his capital in present-day Beijing in the early fifteenth century, he first commanded the building of the enormous walled courtyards of the Imperial City, now the Palace Museum. [End Page 114] Although two centuries later much of the extensive Ming collection was lost even before the conquering Qing established control, still the Manchus inherited the palace and much of its storerooms, which became the basis of their own fabulous collection. Indeed, the Qing emperors were avid (if not particularly sophisti-cated) collectors. Under the Qianlong emperor, the imperial collection came to number some fifteen thousand paintings and works of calligraphy, including over two thousand produced by the emperor's own brush. Not all of these works are esteemed today, however; Elliott quotes Michael Sullivan as calling Qianlong "a niggardly and opinionated connoisseur" (p. 53). When the young Puyi, the last Qing emperor, abdicated the throne in 1912, the collection's ownership became highly contested. The issue, at heart, was whether Puyi actually owned any of the artworks personally. As Elliott explains, the abdication agreement stipulated that "the emperor's private property would be protected by the government of the Republic of China. But it did not specify who actually owned the personal property of the Qing household" (p. 57). This ambiguity enabled both Puyi and various Peking governments to claim legitimate ownership over the artworks. For a decade, Puyi's family and attendants made up shortfalls in his budget by selling choice items from the collection. When the warlord Feng Yuxiang ousted Puyi from his palaces in 1924, he unilaterally declared the "treasures and historical relics" to...

This paper analyzes a group of rose engine lathe-turned ivory works from the original Qing court collection, which were previously unknown to museum curators and scholars. The transcultural messages carried by the lathe-turned ivory works and the role that lathe turning machinery in the Qing court played in artistic exchanges and in disseminating technical knowledge between eighteenth-century Europe and China are significant. The recent publication of the Imperial Household archives has made this research possible, and it has been the author’s privilege to work with the National Palace Museum’s digital archive of the collection and with colleagues in the Palace Museum, Beijing, to identify similar works in storage. The turned ivory works by European rose engine lathe in the eighteenth-century Qing court is an interesting and solid case study for the discussion of communication between the East and the West. This paper evaluates imperial archive documents, ivory art works made by European rose engine lathes in the imperial workshops, and the relevant practical techniques brought to the Qing court, to discuss the exchange of art and craftsmanship techniques between the East and the West during the period.

Jade products that imitate ancient Chinese art samples are a special kind of objects that, in their form and decor, are close to or likened to more ancient works of arts and crafts. The article explores the artistic form and characteristic features of imitations of ancient jade products of the Qing era, presented in the collections of Russian museums and the Palace Museum of China. The object of the study are objects of Chinese art of jade carving, which are in the collection of the Palace Museum (Beijing), the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. Peter the Great (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg) and the State Museum of Oriental Art (Moscow), where the use of imitations of ancient objects was discovered. Artistic analysis of jade imitations allows us to conclude that the works of the Qing era were more complex and diverse in form, decor and carving techniques compared to Han products, while the craftsmen, although they managed to preserve the classical sophistication of objects, lost the severity and solemnity of Han jade. As well as the art history analysis of the works, one can see that the forms and decors of jade objects are the product of aesthetic consciousness. The novelty of this study lies in the fact that the varieties and features of imitations of ancient jade during the Qing Dynasty are summarized, and the huohuan technique in jade processing is confirmed. This may be of interest to researchers in related scientific fields.

There is a kind of historical relics called "Angdi moniu" in the Palace Museum, which looks like metal and appears frequently in the archives of the Qing Dynasty as a foreign medicine.It is stated that it can treat sores and pus in the HanXiu CaoTang Biji and it was also found in the archives of the Palace Office. However, no researcher in the academic community has yet conducted an in-depth research of what exactly is it. Through the investigation of cultural relics, in-depth research of Chinese and foreign literature, and the use of linguistic methods, this paper examines "Angdi Moniu" and its related items, and clarifies that "Angdi Moniu" is antimony, related items are antimonials and antimony cup.

Research on Very Early Warning Aspirating Smoke Detector Deployed in Massive Guan Style Buildings from Ming and Qing Dynasties in the Palace Museum

Root size is a key trait in plant cultivation and can be influenced by the cultivation environment. However, physical evidence of root size change in a secular context is scarce due to the difficulty in preserving ancient root samples, and how they were modified during the domestication and cultivation stays unclear. About 100 ancient root samples of Panax notoginseng, preserved as tribute in the Palace Museum (A.D. 1636 to 1912, Qing dynasty), provided an opportunity to investigate the root size changes during the last 100 years of cultivation. The dry weight of ancient root samples (~120 tou samples, tou represents number of roots per 500 g dry weight) is 0.22-fold of the modern samples with the biggest size (20 tou samples). Transcriptome analysis revealed that PnGAP and PnEXPA4 were highly expressed in 20 tou samples, compared with the 120 tou samples, which might contribute to the thicker cell wall and a higher content of lignin, cellulose, and callose in 20 tou samples. A relatively lower content of dencichine and higher content of ginsenoside Rb1 in 20 tou samples are also consistent with higher expression of ginsenoside biosynthesis-related genes. PnPHL8 was filtrated through transcriptome analysis, which could specifically bind the promoters of PnGAP, PnCYP716A47, and PnGGPPS3, respectively. The results in this study represent the first physical evidence of root size changes in P. notoginseng in the last 100 years of cultivation and contribute to a comprehensive understanding of how the cultivation environment affected root size, chemical composition, and clinical application.

Finding Distinctive Chinese Characteristics in Qing Era Popular Protests David D. Buck (bio) Ho-fung Hung. Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 288 pp. Hardcover $50.00. ISBN 978-0-231-15202-0. This title already has won the Social Science History Association’s President’s Award for 2010. The award is given to a first published work, and this book displays careful social science research and broad interpretative scope. Ho-fung Hung has extracted from the Qing dynasty’s Veritable Records (Qing shilu) more than 950 cases of popular protests against the Qing government in the hundred years from 1740 to 1839. He has supplemented this material with work in the First Historical Archives in Beijing and the Palace Museum in Taiwan as well as careful reading of secondary materials. The century under investigation covers most of the Qianlong emperor’s reign (1736–1796) and the reigns of his successors: his son, the Jiaqing emperor (1796– 1820), and grandson, the Daoguang emperor (1821–1851). Then Ho-fung Hung breaks down his data into three shorter time periods of twenty years each and draws conclusions about the different patterns of protest he finds. He uses established categories from other social science scholars of protest, particularly Charles Tilly, to classify this data. To supplement his statistical analysis, Hung adds detailed descriptions of several incidents from each subperiod. Hung finds shifting patterns of protest in three twenty-year subperiods and devotes more than half of this work to discussing these differences. The first subperiod, from 1740 to 1759, comes during the early years of the Qianlong emperor’s long reign. It was marked by general prosperity and aggressive state expansion, including the pacification of the far western regions of Mongolia and the establishment of Xinjiang (new territory). Hung is not concerned with this expansion, but rather deals with protests within the Chinese heartland of the Qing empire. He characterizes the protests from this period as “filial-loyal demonstrations” (p. 68), [End Page 128] in which Chinese protesters accepted the Qing mandate to rule and sought to bring about changes by impressing the emperor with their loyalty and filial devotion. Many protests from this era took a peaceful form and showed respect toward officials as parental figures. Demonstrations included kneeling in worshipful postures before magistrates. The second subperiod runs from 1776 to 1795, during the last decades of the Qianlong emperor’s reign, when his Manchu protégé, Heshen, dominated the government. In these years, the elderly emperor exercised lax control and tolerated corruption at all levels of government, led by Heshen’s own avaricious behavior. Hung finds that under these conditions, protestors became defiant toward both the emperor and his officials. No longer respectful, the protesters took forceful action, including open rebellion. The White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1805) was the culmination of this period. He labels this as a time when “riots [turned] into rebellion” (p. 102). The final subperiod, from 1820 to 1839, comes in a time known as the Daoguang Depression, marked by financial and monetary instability of the Qing empire, resulting from declining tax revenues, silver outflow to purchase opium imports, and the breakdown of the Grand Canal grain shipments. These made up the most obvious examples of failing state policies. Hung sees this period as an era of “resistance and petitions” (p. 135) during which the Qing empire’s Chinese subjects resumed a filial and loyal manner toward the emperor, but vented their antagonism on local officials. Tax riots and open rebellion declined because of general awareness of the declining capacities of the Qing administration. Protestors resumed their appeals to the emperor’s mercy and sought his Confucian responsibility to his subjects. Nevertheless, popular resistance to state policies grew as economic and social conditions worsened. Hung’s statistical data reveal continuing forms of protests across the century, and he draws his general characterizations for each twenty-year subperiod from increased percentages of certain kinds of protest within each. When Hung’s conclusion about the century from 1740 to 1839 is compared with those of his John Hopkins colleague William T. Rowe’s in China’s...

The Qing court produced an extensive history of the Ming empire in the Manchu language, which has survived in manuscript form in the Palace Museum under the title Ming gurun i suduri (History of the Ming State). Based on a close reading of this manuscript and scrutiny of related archival documents, this article elaborates on three observations. First, the Ming gurun i suduri resulted from the earliest stage (1645–1669) of the Qing compilation of the Ming history. With a primary focus on producing a chronicle in Manchu, it exemplifies the mid-seventeenth-century development of Inner Asian historiography. Second, it recounts Ming history by juxtaposing and connecting translated extracts from the Ming shilu 明實錄 (Ming Veritable Records) whenever it exists. This approach that combines compiling and translating, in effect, offers a reassessment of key political events and figures. Third, in light of the Ming gurun i suduri thus contextualized, the 1739 Ming shi 明史 (Ming History) is best seen as a product of a century-long history of negotiation (1645–1739) during which the ideological agenda and intellectual achievements of the early Qing court gradually sank into oblivion.

Characterization of Ancient Chinese Textiles by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography/quadrupole-time of flight mass spectrometry

Although fur artifacts are not numerous, they are relatively common in northern China’s museums. This article focuses on the conservation of a man’s court robe from the Palace Museum, lined with golden yellow silk kesi and decorated with golden dragons in colorful clouds and fur trim. It illustrates the treatment process for fur garments, including fur type identification, original sewing methodology documentation, replacement fur piece preparation and degraded fur repair. The fur class cultural relics appraisal method makes we completed a research project1. It based on fur fiber micro detection in the field of zoology2 and fiber detection of textile field3. Fur repair methods described in the article isfusion of the traditional fur production and restoration. This article would provide a detailed reference for future similar fur artifact repair work.