Back Ground Summary

Qianlong is a renowned Emperor in Chinese history, reigned from 1735 to 1796, who is famous for his legendary life. He sustained the previous high-speed development of society in his early and mid periods but lost the control to the internal corruption in later years. However, no matter how controversial he is in political, he absolutely influenced Chinese culture and arts a lot. He was not a very literate person but he really liked to collect literature, arts, crafts, machines, etc; he also travelled around the country many times. In folk stories, he at least six times travelled with a large group of accompanying people to the Jiangnan area. Someone even considers this large amount of expenditure as a reason for the treasury deficit.

Mechanical Clock

Because of the industrial revolution and the increasing communication between eastern and western in that period, more and more people began to tribute something highly scientific instead of traditional treasures to the Chinese emperor. One of the most representative is the mechanical clock which many Chinese emperors liked the most from western. Qianlong was also in love with this novel artificial stuff, especially when this clock is not only mechanical in the movement of the dial. Usually, the whole clocks are made up of complicated device combinations that run the decorations on the appearance, normally including animals, stars, and figures, etc. Qianlong liked the mechanical clock so much and that he even on-site command the production in the palace but not only bought from the western. Since the emperor’s love towards this machine, the craftsmen constantly transformed and reformed it fresh for Qianlong seeing each clock was new. Finally, the clock making technique developed so much that they could even make flowers blooming, pictures changing, text appearing and figures actions on the clock.

Obviously, the style of this clock is deeply influenced by western culture, especially Baroque. In the Qing Dynasty, the Chinese royal family liked this kind of complex appearance very much, and they developed it to more and more complicated patterns.

Revolving Vase

Chinese pottery was highly developed in the Qianlong era, traditional pottery differentiated to diverse forms. One of them is the revolving vase which cleverly combined with the machine. It usually made of the outer vase, inner vase, and a revolving device. For the outside appearance, the outer vase has the hollow patterns which allows people to see the inner vase. Then, the inner vase has pictures on its surface for viewing. During the rotation, the viewed inner vase’s appearance changes. In addition, the type of device determined the outer vase or the inner vase can move.

However, since the technical difficulty and resource wasting, the revolving vases is hard to see except the Qianlong era in Chinese history.

Wenwan(Artworks in the Study Room)

Chinese people named the brush, ink, paper, Inkstone as Four Treasures of the Study in the past. Furthermore, accompany with the prosperity of the Qing Dynasty, more and more people began to truly make these everyday items into works of art. Wenwan is the general name for all of those, and in addition to the above, it also includes pen holder, pen washer, ink bed, paperweight, printing box, seal, etc, and even walnut.

• 

• 

• 

Above is one of Qianlong’s ink collections which decorated by golden patterns. The text means the essence of the sun and the moon.

References

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/%E6%B8%85_%E9%83%8E%E4%B8%96%E5%AE%81%E7%BB%98%E3%80%8A%E6%B8%85%E9%AB%98%E5%AE%97%E4%B9%BE%E9%9A%86%E5%B8%9D%E6%9C%9D%E6%9C%8D%E5%83%8F%E3%80%8B.jpg http://fashion.163.com/13/0805/14/95H72VIO00264MK3_mobile.html http://bbs.1shoucang.com/data/attachment/forum/201305/08/101719ohhgw6wwwhax4lql.jpg http://antiquities.npm.gov.tw/Utensils_Page.aspx?ItemId=6 https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/44012334 http://imgsrc.baidu.com/baike/pic/item/6a63f6246b600c33b196edeb174c510fd9f9a121.jpg