Toying with China: Cosmopolitanism and Chinoiserie in Russian Garden Design and Building Projects under Catherine the Great

Abstract

An emerging cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century bolstered the search for the foundations of a shared humanity across the boundaries of different cultures, which was one of the central aspects of Enlightenment thought. Similar ideas and principles transformed the traditions of European garden design in the second half of the eighteenth century with William Chambers’s writings on Chinese gardens suggesting aesthetic values that both paralleled and rivalled those found in the English gardens of his contemporaries. In 1771, Catherine the Great translated Chambers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings (1757) into Russian, which led to the creation of the largest complex of chinoiserie in any eighteenth-century European garden. Taking as my focus the gardens of Tsarskoye Selo, I explore the tensions between cosmopolitanism, exoticism, and imperialism in Russian garden design under Catherine the Great.