Technology and knowledge in the Qianlong Emperor's pictures of tilling and weaving

Abstract

In 1739 and again in 1769 the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-1796) commissioned the reproduction of the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving. This genre of painting and poetry was inaugurated in the 12th-century and consisted of two handscrolls, one of which depicted the procedures involved in the cultivation of rice and the other represented the scenes of silk fabric manufacture. Each step had a poem included with it. The subject had been extremely popular from its inception to the end of the Yuan dynasty. In patronizing the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving, the Qianlong Emperor was following his grandfather’s and father’s example. First the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1661-1722 ) and then Prince Yinzhen (the future Yongzheng Emperor [r.1722-1735]) had commissioned a new suite of imagery and a new series of poems for this genre. Such sustained imperial patronage revitalized the genre even while it experienced significant iconographic transformation. The Kangxi Emperor made adjustments to the steps he included in his Imperially Commissioned Pictures of Tilling and Weaving, but the most startling change was the introduction of a hybridized form of linear, or geometric, perspective. I briefly explore the suitability of this style which was greatly inspired by Western knowledge Jesuits brought to Kangxi’s court. This emperor’s Pictures of Tilling and Weaving was the first imperial commission in China that incorporated perspective. As the study of linear perspective was aligned with the fields of mathematics and astronomy in the Jesuit curriculum, I argue that the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving, intimately related to the cyclical seasonal changes of the year, were a particularly appropriate subject matter to happily combine Chinese agrarian technological imagery with this Western mode of representation. Qianlong and Yongzheng had continued to deploy Kangxi’s novel style of painting for their versions of the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving. However in 1769, the Qianlong Emperor radically altered this course by returning to a Chinese form of representation. Through a discussion of the appeal of the different modes of creating imagery with an exploration of Qianlong’s accompanying prefaces to his Pictures of Tilling and Weaving, I analyze the motives for Qianlong’s promotion of historical forms of technology with the development of different types of knowledge.