The empire of paper : pictures of Chinese papermaking made in late imperial China and their social lives in early modern world

Abstract

This dissertation investigates a series of Chinese papermaking albums produced throughout the 18th and 19th century in Qing China. These albums entail a consecutive program of step-by-step scenes, each of which dedicates to a specific procedure of producing bamboo paper. One of the albums was commissioned by a local official Zhou Kaitai (a.1722-1737). The Zhou Kaitai album takes on the traditional Chinese painting practice that incorporates painting and calligraphy. The album creates a literati account of papermaking production, indicating that the visual representations of paper production as a cultural and economic enterprise became a proposition of interest to the educated elites in the eighteenth century. The other export-style albums, patronized by French bookseller, printing entrepreneur, politicians, and envoys to China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveal the unprecedented scale of French research into the art and technology of Chinese papermaking during the early modern period. The three Chinese papermaking albums, currently housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France practically reflect the entire corpus of late imperial Chinese papermaking images in French collections in terms of the composition template. Despite their shared thematic focus on bamboo papermaking, many identical technical procedures demonstrated in the scenes; these albums take on vastly distinct artistic languages. The variety of these albums nicely exemplify the visual diversity of pictures of papermaking produced in later imperial China while each of the albums captures its dynamic relationship with respective historical context. This dissertation reconstructs the social network in which the papermaking images were fabricated and consumed in relation to the specific formal qualities. The intersection of art, culture, and technology embodied in these papermaking picture albums offer a fascinating lens through which to examine the history of technology, labour production in both Qing China and France, and Sino-European interaction in the early modern world.