ABSTRACT
For Henri Bertin, many widely varying aspects of China and Chinese civilization were the objects of his extraordinary curiosity, and he apparently made repeated requests for information about a number of them. Although few of Bertin’s original letters to the French Jesuit missionaries in Beijing have survived, from their replies and the documents they sent to Paris, it is clear that Bertin returned a number of times to the question of Chinese architecture. Images of Chinese pavilions, bridges, and pagodas, indeed, were not unknown in late eighteenth-century France, and these architectural elements formed part of the image of China that was transmitted by some of the first published descriptions of travel in the seventeenth century. The reception and appropriation of European trompe-l’oeil painting techniques in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century China is a fascinating subject that continues to attract significant scholarly interest.
