Collecting Qing dynasty textiles

Magazine Antiques, March, 2001 by Carol Dean Krute

The Forbidden City stands eerily empty, its massive courtyards colorless under gray Beijing skies despite hordes of dusty tourists who pass through its south-north axis from the Gate of Heavenly Peace to the Gate of Spiritual Valour. They peer past barriers into partially restored architectural splendor trying to conjure up traces of the imperial family, mandarins, concubines, and eunuchs attired in brilliantly colored, elaborately patterned silks, that bespoke the power and magnificence of the Qing dynasty (1644--1911). Lost to internal looting, international plunder, and sold to save the defeated Manchu officials of the Qing dynasty from impoverishment, the textiles seemed to have vanished like the civilization that created them. [1]

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, has a number of these textiles, collected in China before the collapse of the Qing dynasty. When they were shipped out of China, they were marked in ink with their new owners' names: Cheney, Irwin, and Knapp who were, respectively, a merchant, a missionary, and a naval officer.

In 1842 the Treaty of Nanking (now Nanjing) forced China to open five treaty ports to foreign commerce. The same year, Daniel Wadsworth (1771--1848) founded the Wadsworth Atheneum. These two seemingly unrelated acts, the former to end the first Opium War between England and China (1839--1842), the latter to enhance the cultural life of the commercially thriving port of Hartford, came together serendipitously a century later. In 1949 Marjory(1880--1967) and Dorothy Cheney (1880--1971) gave two uncut Chinese embroidered robes to the Wadsworth Atheneum's costume and textile collection. Twin daughters of Frank Woodbridge Cheney (1832--1909) and Mary Bushnell Cheney (d. 1917), the sisters were the third generation in a family that built one of the largest silk empires in the United States.

After years of unsuccessful attempts to grow mulberry trees in Connecticut and raise the silk worms that feed on them, Charles Cheney (1803--1874) sent his twenty-eight-year-old son Frank to the newly opened treaty ports in China to buy silkworm cocoons. Frank Cheney left Hartford in a blizzard on January 3, 1859, and arrived in Shanghai in the spring. [2] The silk business kept him there for almost three years. He wrote to his mother on April 24, 1859:

I have been to three dinner parties in the last week Dinner is a great social institution in China and a very pleasant one. You sit down to table at half past seven or eight and including the time spent over cigars and wine; it is eleven before you finish. Then comes an hour or two in the parlors or the billiard room. [3]

In return, local news and gossip came from Connecticut accompanied by many requests to send home exotic Oriental objects such as embroideries, mandarin costumes, lacquerware, tea, and bronzes. The casual tone of these letters belies the chaos bedeviling China in the mid-nineteenth century.

The provenance for the Cheney gift to the Wadsworth Atheneum is given as the "Emperor's Palace Peking," although it is doubtful that Frank Cheney ever got there. His letters, written from Hong Kong and Shanghai, make it clear that China's internal and international conflicts made it too dangerous to travel to Peking (as Beijing was then known). Writing from Hong Kong on June 6, 1860, Cheney explained:

From the Shanghai letters and papers you will learn of the unfortunate state of affairs in the north. Soochow [now Suzhou] is now in the hands of the Rebels. Horrible excesses were committed and the loss of life and property, it is impossible to estimate. [4]

A peasant revolt, the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), led by the Christian convert Hung Hsiuchuan (Hong Xiuquan; 1814-1864), devastated the major region for silk production in China as bands of rabble fought to overthrow the Qing rulers. [5] Optimistically Cheney tried to carry out business as usual, although in letters to his father and uncles he suggested that Japan might be a better source of raw silk in view of the rebellion. On June 22, 1860, he wrote to his uncle Ward Cheney (1813-1876),

the rebels are now more rampant than ever and seem to have gained possession of the whole province in which Shanghai is situated. They are also gaining ground in other parts of the Empire and as the immense amount of plunder that has fallen into their hands of late, enables them to pay their soldiers which the Emperor does not, his soldiers are fast deserting either to join the Rebels or else plunder on their own account. [6]

China's international problems were no less troubling. French and English demands for more treaty ports and fewer restrictions on trade precipitated a second Opium War (1856-1860). The Qing rulers, fending off predators on two fronts, were humiliated. Cheney informed his father that as of October 21, 1860, the allies had possession of Peking. In December Cheney received a letter from a friend in Hong Kong who wrote that

lots of transport skips are coming in daily with quantities of loot to sell. The officers have put their loot up at auction and get very good prices, jade stone ornaments, enameled snuff boxes, watches, broaches, etc. [7]