The 19th century Chinese craze for all things European

By the 1800s, the mechanical clock had become a status symbol for wealthy Chinese. The first arrived with Jesuit missionaries and Portuguese merchants years earlier, but it wasn’t until the early 19th century that those outside of the imperial court could afford them. Rich merchant families displayed their clocks proudly, like their European counterparts had showed off pineapples. Women’s jackets started to be decorated with ‘clock buttons’ made of enamel and one family embroidered a clock face on to their baby’s silk bib.

European aesthetics made their way into other parts of Chinese society too. Traditional ink portraits became colourful and hyper-realistic, inspired by photography. Courtesans learned to play billiards and ate in restaurants decorated like European salons. The artist Wu Youru illustrated these early modern scenes along with vignettes from western life: village cricket played in the English countryside or New York firemen at work. The pictures were lithographically printed in the Dianshizhai Huabao, a Shanghai-based magazine founded by a British businessman in 1884.

Colonial European powers were expanding their reach ever eastwards

You can see all these works in the British Museum’s new show China’s hidden century. The dark exhibition space is cloistered with glowing paper screens, among which sit more than 300 exhibits that tell the story of Qing China’s final century, through elite politics down to everyday life. Curious fusions in fashion, art and household items were created through China’s interactions with Europeans. The country was transforming from a feudal empire to a modern republic.

This wasn’t always a happy (or voluntary) process. As much as artists and merchants were intrigued by the ideas and aesthetics brought by the foreigners, the foreigners were also (more often than not) brutal in their methods. Colonial European powers were expanding their reach ever eastwards. Cultural histories of Chinese art have often skated over this era, writes co-curator Julia Lovell in the exhibition’s companion catalogue, hence ‘hidden’.