ABSTRACT
Since a primary source of modernity in China in the past few centuries lies in Europe, processes of ‘Westernization’ and ‘modernization’ have been intertwined in complex ways. Have the Chinese ever attempted to separate the two processes, to select what was needed for China, to reorganize foreign influence and to synthesize it with local traditions? How did these interventions play out in architecture, art and visual culture in early modern China? To answer these questions, we need to investigate the earliest moment in history when European modern science and culture entered China. In the early seventeenth century, through an encounter of European Jesuits with Chinese Confucian scholars at the imperial court of Beijing, ‘Western Learning’ in science was embraced, although Christianity did not receive a comparable reception. Western mathematics, astronomy and cartography were introduced early in the century, which generated organized applications of the knowledge and great compilations of Western and Chinese studies in these fields in the late seventeenth century. One major consequence of this was a visual ‘revolution’ taking place around the 1730s, a breakthrough marked by an introduction of Renaissance linear perspective into China. A Chinese court official, Nian Xiyao, published a study on the subject in 1729 and then a revised edition in 1735 titled Shi Xue (Principles of visual perspective). Giuseppe Castiglione, an Italian Jesuit painter serving at the Chinese court since 1715, developed in the following decades a new style in which Renaissance realism with the use of perspective and chiaroscuro was integrated into the Chinese painting tradition. With the help of Castiglione and other Jesuits, ‘Western-Style Pavilions’ or ‘Xiyanglou’, a group of pleasure villas, fountains and gardens in a quasi-Baroque style with Chinese elements, was constructed in the 1740s to the 1780s, which had an impact on ‘modern’ buildings emerging afterwards.
