ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some changes in the presentation of material from China in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, two institutions directly patronised and supported by the British state. Chinese objects came to the British Museum in the founding bequest of Sir Hans Sloane in 1753, and appear at first to have been included under the rubric of ‘Ethnography’. London’s other major institutional collection, the South Kensington Museum, has also included Chinese material since its inception in the Museum attached to the central design school of the Department of Practical Art in the decades immediately prior to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Percival David while also building up a major private collection of Chinese ceramics provided in 1930 the funds for an experimental lectureship in Chinese Art and Archaeology, to be tenable at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University.
