Artistic Exchanges between China and the West during the Late Qing Dynasty
The mid 1790s witnessed the abdication of the Qianlong Emperor, who had ruled China for more than sixty years (1735 to 1796), as well as the last Western Embassy that traveled to China, organized by the Dutch East-India Company in 1794-95. Moreover, the decade saw the rapid rise of the opium trade, leading to an edict forbidding its use by the Jiaqing Emperor in 1799. The year 1911 marked the end of the Qing dynasty. By addressing the “long” nineteenth century, the workshop is intended to explore a subject that has received comparatively less attention than East-West artistic relations during the eighteenth century, when most exchanges took place between the Beijing and European courts.
The workshop is aimed at investigating what happened when political relations between China and the West soured and when artistic contacts were no longer situated at the courts but largely took place in the context of international commerce and middle-class culture. By choosing a format that is less formal than a conference or symposium, we hope to attract to the Seton Hall workshop more speakers on a topic that has in the last few years emerged as one that is crucial for our understanding of East-West relations, and of international relations generally.
Held under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies, with funding from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, the workshop is co-sponsored by the University of Sydney and Seton Hall University. Its steering committee is comprised of Petra Chu (Seton Hall University), Yachen Ma (National Tsing Hua University) and Jennifer Milam (University of Sydney).