Orientalising the British Class System: Exploring the ‘Chinese’ Landscapes of Sir William Chambers, 1740–1775

Abstract

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.