From the late 1750s British writers, merchants and diplomats responded to trade tensions with China by imagining how cross-cultural forms of civility might bridge the political divides between the two empires, allowing the trade demands of the East India Company to be granted as tokens of Chinese friendship. This article explores the development of this cosmopolitan and idealising perspective on Anglo-Chinese relations in two related literary genres: philosophical contes imagining Chinese travellers in England (by
This chapter explores the eighteenth-century tendency to imagine ‘China’ as an aestheticised space into which domestic debates about hierarchy, taste, and social class could be transferred, reconfigured, and developed. I explore the shifting articulations of China across the career of the Anglo-Swedish architect William Chambers (1723–96). Chambers was, in both social origins and career, located on the fault lines between middle and upper class interpretations of China. The son of a Scottish expatriate merchant, he strategically deployed his limited experiences – gained from time spent in Canton as an employee of the Swedish East India Company – to win elite acceptance as a China expert. As Royal Architect and chief designer of Kew Gardens from 1757 to 1762, he insinuated into this most rarefied of landscape gardens a more ordinary mercantile perspective.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.