19th British Visual Image Of The China Factor

This essay on the Willow Pattern combines histories of the nineteenth centuryvisuality together with histories of Sino-British political, economic, and social relationsin order to understand the vision’s place during the period. China offered a broadrange of visual differences to the British thinkers and formed the visual alternative to theEuropean mind.Of all the items connected with China, the most familiar to the West was theWillow Pattern. The Willow Pattern is an image produced by British engravers in thelate eighteenth century and derived from Chinese models. It is at best an imitation, atworst a distortion of Chinese culture. That it was perceived as quintessentially Chinesereveals much about Western perceptions and misconceptions of the East. Through theWillow Pattern and the stories associated with it, we can see the effects of this fantasyimage of China upon the West.As the example of the Willow Pattern shows, even if the object had been producedin Britain, its seemingly ‘Chinese’ characteristics offered an opposition to Britishconvention. Focusing on the example of the Willow Pattern, this essay has followedboth British celebration and repudiation of China’s aesthetics in literary and popularculture as a part of the history of British visuality. The essay illustrates how objectsappropriated from one culture to another and the domestic reproduction of such objectsbecame symptoms of the appropriating culture’s own historical anxieties and aestheticvalues.The essay is also concerned with the impact of colonialism on the production,consumption and interpretation of material object, as seen through the example of theWillow Pattern ceramics. To the nineteenth century Europeans, China’s foreignnesswas an evidence of its society’s secular difference. Such foreignness is exploited bythe British to justify their colonial policies.