Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay: Constructing China with Ceramics, 1780–1920Author(s): John R. HaddadSource: Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring 2007), pp. 53-80Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum,Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/511937 .Accessed: 17/08/2011 19:33

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Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay

Constructing China with Ceramics, 1780–1920

John R. Haddad

Between 1780 and 1860, mothers and housewives set their tables using Chinese ceramics and British imitations, includingthe willow pattern. Since these ceramics carried idealized Chinese scenes, women could construct an exotic China, called‘‘Cathay,’’ that they could visit in their imaginations at a time when the real China was cloaked in mystery. Curiously, thedearth of information on China conferred credibility onto Cathay; when Americans traveled to Canton, they compared theactual country with the ceramic patterns etched in memory. Around 1900, large importers of Asian goods dictated throughadvertising exactly how women should construct China for pleasure.

IN THE 1830s, a young girl named CarolineHoward King made numerous visits to theEast India Marine Society in Salem, Massa-

chusetts. Since Salem was a thriving center of mari-time commerce, ships departed daily from its portsfor destinations all over the world. When sea cap-tains and merchants returned home bearing ar-tifacts, they deposited these in the society’s privatemuseum, East India Marine Hall. Sitting behindglass in display cases, these objects were presented asethnological trophies, symbolizing the success ofthe bold seafaring individuals who had securedthem in the manly pursuits of global trade, whaling,and exploration. Since the holdings in artifactsfrom China, India, the East Indies, and the PacificIslands were particularly strong, the hall providedits visitors with a new and intriguing way to ex-perience Asia without venturing far from home.

Caroline relished these encounters with Asia.In memoirs that she composed later in life, she rem-inisced about the hall’s magical allure:

the Museum had a mysterious attraction for me andindeed it was an experience for an imaginative child tostep from the prosaic streets . . . into that atmosphereredolent with the perfumes from the east, warm and

fragrant and silent, with a touch of the dear old ArabianNights. . . . I . . . was greeted by the solemn group ofOrientals [referring to several life-size statues] who,draped in eastern stuffs and camel’s hair shawls, stoodopposite the entrance . . . the hours were full of enchant-ment, and I think I came as near fairyland as one can inthis workaday world. And that circle of sitting and stand-ing figures . . . became real friends of mine. . . . I came toknow their dark faces well, and Mr. Blue Gown, and Mr.Camel’s Hair scarf and Mr. Queer Cap, each had his ownpleasant individuality and must be greeted whenever Iwent into the Museum.1

As her language illustrates, Caroline used the ex-hibits to escape from the general dullness of thequotidian world (‘‘prosaic streets’’) and from therelentless pursuit of wealth that actuated Salem’smercantile society (‘‘workaday world’’). In a sense,one could argue that the exhibit offered King wel-come relief from the very hard-driving Yankee ethosthat had brought the objects to Salem in the firstplace. Indeed, the courageous spirit of the Yankeetrader was on display as much as Asian cultureswere. That said, the arrangers of the exhibits alsointended to offer visitors an object lesson in thecustoms, costumes, and religious practices of realAsian cultures. Yet Caroline happily defied theirwishes. For she knew that once the sights and scents

1 Caroline Howard King, When I Lived in Salem, 1822–1866(Brattleboro, VT: Daye, 1937), 28–30; Walter Muir Whitehill, TheEast India Marine Society and the Peabody Museum of Salem, a Sesqui-centennial History (Salem, MA: Peabody Museum, 1949), 37–38,45–46.

John R. Haddad is assistant professor of American studiesand literature at Penn State Harrisburg.

n 2007 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum,Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/2007/4101-0004 $10.00

of distant lands entered her thoughts, she was freeto do with them as she pleased. With this license, shechose to fashion her own personal Orient, one thatwas quite different from the geographic and ethno-graphic realities of Asia. This Orient was exactly thesort of place that one might expect ‘‘an imaginativechild’’ to invent: it was ‘‘fairyland,’’ and it was allher own.

Though one could dismiss King’s behavior inthe hall as simple child’s play, to do so would be tooverlook a rather profound act of self-empowerment.Refusing to accept the hall on its own heroic terms,she appropriated the space and converted it intothe sort of venue that could meet the needs of herimagination—fairyland. In this way, the fancifulyoung girl was able to steal the boastful thunder ofthe hearty Yankee mariners. For in her reconfigu-ration of the exhibition space, she got to becomethe traveling ethnographer; she got to meet andbefriend the indigenous peoples of exotic lands(‘‘Mr. Blue Gown,’’ ‘‘Mr. Camel’s Hair scarf,’’ and‘‘Mr. Queer Cap’’); upon returning home, she gotto spin amazing yarns about her adventures. In short,through the use of her imagination, King was ableto accomplish something that women were barredfrom doing in real life—participate in the manlysphere of international commerce and exploration.

In the early nineteenth century, very few Amer-icans lived in close proximity to a collection ofAsian artifacts. Yet interestingly, most did possessthe means to enjoy an encounter with the largest ofall Asian countries, China, without leaving the safeconfines of their own homes. A young housewife,simply by using her imagination, could transform aceramic plate into a magical portal, capable of trans-porting her to China. Of course, as with King’sOrient, the China they visited was a land of theirown invention. They imagined it as a timeless realmof enchantment, replete with bucolic landscapes,misty mountains, picturesque pagodas, bountifulfruit trees, graceful willow trees, exotic birds andfish, meandering streams, and charming woodenfishing junks. Since this idealized portrait had lit-tle in common with the real China, we can best un-derstand it as an incarnation of Cathay—Westerncivilization’s construction of a mythic China forthe purpose of pleasure. At the smallest whim, anAmerican woman could either whisk away her chil-dren for, or embark alone on, a pleasurable excur-sion to Cathay, simply by using tableware to invokethe strange land in her mind.

These journeys of fanciful discovery coincidedwith, but existed in striking contrast to, the more

manly expeditions of scientific exploration takingplace in the nineteenth century. Whereas the lat-ter required men to commit to prolonged periodsof risky travel, the former might involve nothingmore than a concentrated gaze onto a plate. Andwhereas the cognitive work inherent in the nauti-cal, geographic, and ethnographic tasks of the latterdemanded that a man employ his rational faculties,trips to Cathay required only that one possess alively imagination. And finally, whereas professionalexplorers transmitted their findings to the learnedcommunity through scientific tracts and ethno-logical exhibits, a young mother employed entirelydifferent media—colorful rhymes and folk stories—to paint with words a portrait of Cathay before acaptive juvenile audience. Like King, women in thedomestic sphere mimicked in playful fashion the ex-peditions of scientific exploration then taking placein the men’s sphere.

Though American women could, theoretically,have reinvented any country they pleased, histori-cal conditions made China the perfect choice. Priorto the Opium War (1839–41), China was largely amystery to the West. In 1760, the Chinese EmperorQianlong, desiring to control the empire’s intellec-tual and commercial intercourse with the outsideworld, confined all Westerners to the southern portof Canton (Guagnzhou). Merchants, missionaries,and travelers with inquisitive minds chafed underthese restrictions. Though these men possessed astrong desire to study the people, the culture, thelandscapes, and the flora and fauna of China, thestrictly enforced Qing ordinance stymied any effortto do so.2 Thus, at a time when much of the worldwas opening up to Western eyes, China remaineda sealed book. However, since commerce was notonly permitted at Canton but was conducted at ahigh volume, trade articles from the mysterious em-pire flowed into American households. And sincesome of these objects, such as ceramic plates, car-ried pictures of China, American women had thevisual images necessary to nourish their activeimaginations.

How should we interpret the idealized visionof China emanating out of the American domes-tic sphere? Most obviously, it offers an example ofwhat Edward Said called ‘‘Orientalism’’ in his path-breaking work by that name. However, the American

2 Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York:Norton, 1990), 121. John King Fairbank gives the slightly earlierdate of 1759 (China: A New History [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1992], 195).

54 Winterthur Portfolio 41:1

woman’s Cathay represents a significant departurefrom the sort of Orientalism described by Said, ‘‘aWestern style for dominating, restructuring, andhaving authority over the Orient.’’ As Linda Nochlinhas pointed out in her essay ‘‘The Imaginary Orient,’’Orientalism could serve numerous agendas, notjust an imperialistic one.3 In our case of domesticOrientalism, what we observe is not an act of ex-ploitation engineered by American men but rathera playful usurpation of male power orchestrated byAmerican women.

In the period before the Civil War, many Amer-ican women certainly possessed a strong incen-tive to create their own China. In 1966, BarbaraWelter famously used the name ‘‘the Cult of TrueWomanhood’’ to describe the widely held belief inantebellum America that womanly virtue was syn-onymous with religious piety, purity, submissive-ness, and self-sacrifice within the domestic sphere.Subsequent scholarship by Mary Ryan, Lori Ginzberg,and Mary Kelley, among others, has shown thatmiddle-class women were not as mentally and phys-ically restricted as was previously thought; they par-ticipated passionately in reform movements andsucceeded in the literary marketplace.4 Similarly,by interacting creatively with ceramics, mothers andhousewives were able to break free (albeit briefly)from the constraints of domesticity. Here, one mustbe careful not to overstate the importance of thisact. It did not constitute an act of rebellion againsta patriarchal authority nor did it imply a rejectionof conventional gender roles. Yet it does show thattwo distinct methods for delineating the world ex-isted side by side during the nineteenth century:the one rational and ‘‘masculine’’ and the otherimaginative and ‘‘feminine.’’ And we should notmake the mistake of assuming that only the re-sults of the masculine method enjoyed real-worldconsequences.

Interestingly, these twin lines of discovery didnot always progress along parallel tracks, out ofcontact with one another. Sometimes the tracksbecame crossed, as they did in the case of China,with confusion being the inevitable result. As moth-ers regaled their daughters and sons with storiesthat corresponded to an image on a ceramic plate,this vision of Cathay became indelibly imprintedon their childhood memories. When these child-ren grew up, they exhibited a surprising tendencyto confuse the Oriental paradise with the realAsian nation. This conflation becomes abundantlyclear when one reads the reactions of sailors, mer-chants, travel writers, and naval officers arriving inCanton and confronting China for the first time.Though they may have been anchored in China,their minds were seeking the strange land that hadbeen lodged in their memories since their youths.In this way, the domestic construction of China asCathay acquired an astonishing amount of credi-bility in an age that professed to value empiricaldata.

Yet our story is not always one of female creativ-ity and influence. Though American women con-tinued to enjoy ceramics after the Civil War, thenature of their interaction underwent a fundamen-tal change. As large companies with advertising de-partments increasingly took over the sale of ceramics,an activity that had once been characterized by spon-taneity, creativity, and exploration became increas-ingly scripted, even programmed, as women weretold exactly how one was supposed to enjoy ceramicsby imagining the ‘‘Orient.’’ Unfortunately for thesecompanies, China was no longer mysterious, as ithad been visited, described, photographed, map-ped, and studied. Worse still, the American view ofChina had darkened considerably since the ante-bellum era. A nation that Americans had onceregarded as mysterious and exotic now seemedbackward, overcrowded, poorly governed, and hos-tile to foreign ideas and people. Stymied by thepresent, companies selling ceramics delved backinto the past, opting to recycle the old myths, leg-ends, and dreams invented and adapted by womenfrom an earlier era. Yet these nineteenth-centurymyths, when transplanted to the modern twentiethcentury, were not merely harmless anachronisms—they were problematic. For now they taught womento disengage intellectually with the real China—to turn a blind eye to a nation struggling to copewith famine, internal rebellions, an opium epidemic,and Western imperialism—to instead act as if theedict of Emperor Qianlong was still in effect. Thatwas the only way in which the antiquated romance

3 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 3;Linda Nochlin, ‘‘The Imaginary Orient,’’ in The Politics of Vision:Essays on Nineteenth -Century Art and Society (New York: Harper &Row, 1989), 33–59. Similarly, Ruth Yeazell, in her study of Westerndepictions of Middle Eastern harems, argues that these ‘‘imaginativeprojections’’ display surprising ‘‘heterogeneity’’; she disputes the‘‘current cliches about Europe’s relation to the Orient’’ that spokeonly of ‘‘mastery,’’ ‘‘power,’’ and a ‘‘will to dominate the Orient im-perially’’ (Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature[New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000], 8).

4 Barbara Welter, ‘‘The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,’’ American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151–74; Mary Ryan,Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York,1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); MaryC. Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); LoriGinzberg, Women in Antebellum Reform (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson,2000).

Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay 55

of Cathay could be used to sell Chinese goods inthe modern world.

Chinese Export Ceramics in Early America

In the 1780s, the English traveler Claude C. Robinobserved during his tour of America, ‘‘There is nota single person to be found, who does not drink it[tea] out of China cups and saucers.’’5 What Robinwas witnessing was a sudden proliferation of blueand white ceramics that moved both horizontallyacross geographic regions and vertically throughsocial classes. Concerning the former, archaeologi-cal excavations, advertisements for auctions in news-

papers, and manifests from vessels arriving in Amer-ican ports all offer testimony to a tremendous influxof blue and white ceramics across the eastern UnitedStates.6 Two key developments contributed to theavailability of inexpensive ceramics that Americansat almost any economic level could afford. First, al-though American traders carried the high grades of

Fig. 1. Famille rose dish, eighteenth century. Chinese porcelain, Hodroff Collection.(Winterthur, gift of Leo A. and Doris C. Hodroff, 2000.61.19.)

5 Nancy Ellen Davis, ‘‘The American China Trade, 1784–1844:Products for the Middle Class’’ (PhD diss., George WashingtonUniversity, 1987), 114.

6 Ibid., 67, 122; Ping Chia Kuo, ‘‘Canton and Salem: TheImpact of Chinese Culture Upon New England Life during thePost-Revolutionary Era,’’ New England Quarterly 3 (1930): 431. Inthe early nineteenth century, a Boston or Salem dwelling mighthave as much as one-tenth of its ‘‘effects’’ originating in China, andPhiladelphia would not have fallen too far short of that figure( Jonathan Goldstein, Philadelphians and the China Trade, 1682–1846[University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978], 6).In Charleston, South Carolina, Chinese ceramics accounted for24 percent of all ceramics uncovered at archeological sites. Themajority of these are shards of inexpensive blue and white dinnerand tea wares (Robert A. Leath, ‘‘After the Chinese Taste: ChineseExport Porcelain and Chinoiserie Design in Eighteenth CenturyCharleston,’’ Historical Archaeology 33 [1999]: 50).

56 Winterthur Portfolio 41:1

porcelain (fig. 1) for their well-to-do clientele, theyalso loaded the compartments of their vessels withthe commoner grades for very practical reasons.7

Cheap ceramics provided traders with an idealcargo to place in the bottoms of ships because it didnot suffer from prolonged exposure to moisture;by serving as a bulwark against encroaching sea-water, this cargo protected the more valuable andperishable teas and silks placed on top of it. In ad-dition, these ceramics were heavy and so providedgood ballast for the long journey through turbu-lent seas.8

Second, toward the end of the eighteenth cen-tury, English potters began to produce ceramics

bearing pleasing landscape scenes that closely re-sembled those found on Chinese ceramics. TheseEnglish ceramics were a part of a larger decorativestyle, then gaining popularity in Europe, called‘‘chinoiserie.’’ Any object classified as chinoiseriewas European in its origin but possessed designelements adhering to what was termed ‘‘the Chi-nese taste.’’ These Chinese-styled plates, bowls, andcups initially sold at lower prices in America thandid their Chinese counterparts. No longer possess-ing a monopoly, Chinese manufacturers respondedwith new measures designed to enhance the ap-peal of their products and cut the overall cost. AtJingdezhen, a city devoted entirely to ceramic pro-duction, the Chinese had for centuries employed asystem involving a division of labor for painting im-ages on ceramics. This system possessed similaritieswith the modern assembly-line system (figs. 2–3).‘‘One man traces the outline of a flower,’’ wrotea foreign observer, ‘‘another of a pagoda, whilea third is at work upon a river or a mountain.’’However, in the face of British competition, the Chi-nese simplified production by reducing the over-all number of patterns that embellished thepieces. By 1815, between 80 and 95 percent of allpieces bearing landscape views carried a patternchosen from a select group of just three or four

Fig. 2. Chinese porcelain manufacture, 1800–1820. Watercolor, Hodroff Collection.(Winterthur, gift of Leo A. and Doris C. Hodroff, 2003.47.14.8.)

7 Diana diZerega, ‘‘Family Dinners and Social Teas: Ceramicsand Domestic Rituals,’’ in Everyday Life in the Early Republic, ed.Catherine E. Hutchins (Winterthur, DE: Henry Francis du PontWinterthur Museum, 1994), 265.

8 In 1815, Charles Tyng, a sailor with the Cordelia, explainedthe order used by the crew to load a cargo in Canton: ‘‘The first partof the cargo was boxes of china tea sets, dinner sets &c. These wereplaced in the bottom of the ship, being much heavier than the restof the cargo. They answered for ballast. Then came the tea ofvarious kinds’’ (in Susan Fels, ed., Before the Wind: The Memoir of anAmerican Sea Captain, 1808–1833 [New York: Viking Penguin, 1999],36–37); Robert Copeland, Spode’s Willow Pattern and Other Designsafter the Chinese (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), 4; David Quintner,Willow! Solving the Mystery of Our 200-Year Love Affair with the WillowPattern (Burnstown, ON: General Store, 1997), 166.

Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay 57

patterns.9 Chinese potters also studied the mostsuccessful British patterns so as to transfer certainattributes of these patterns into their own designs.In this way, British and Chinese ceramics evolvedthrough a process of cross-pollination as designspassed back and forth between the two cultures.10

As a result of these factors, inexpensive Chi-nese ceramics found their way into the cupboardsof middle- and lower-income level families. On adaily basis, ordinary Americans viewed appealingChinese scenes on their plates, bowls, saucers, andcups, completely oblivious to the process of cross-fertilization with England that had brought abouttheir formation. And what they saw delighted them.Typically, a Chinese-manufactured plate would carrya landscape design that the Chinese called shan shui(hills and streams). Most such designs included ahandful of basic elements: birds, fruit trees, a wil-low tree, a junk with a fisherman, a bridge, an island,Chinese figures, pagodas, and Chinese houses(fig. 4). Though mothers and housewives may havepurchased these ceramics because they were cheapand functional, they cherished them for their de-signs. For the individual with an active imagination,these images possessed more than just ornamentalvalue; they offered a portal to a beautifully pastoralOriental world called Cathay. While sipping tea,

one could escape household chores, misbehavingchildren, or the tedium of daily life and embark ona brief flight of fancy to a strange but wonderfulversion of China.11

The kinds of Chinese landscapes that womenfound on their ceramics could sometimes influ-ence household projects. In 1831, Godey’s Lady’sBook, a popular magazine that both reflected ex-isting fads and initiated new ones, taught womenhow to decorate plain objects ‘‘in the Chinese style’’:‘‘A variety of articles, such as work-boxes and bas-kets, screens, and small ornamental tables, may beprocured at the fancy shops, made of a beautifulwhite wood, quite plain, for the purpose of beingornamented, by ladies, in the Chinese style. Thesubjects generally represented are Chinese figuresand landscapes.’’ The article went on to explainhow one could use tracing paper to transfer a de-sired pattern onto an object.12

Following this sort of advice, some womenelected to create their own Chinese landscapes inother areas of domestic labor—such as in needle-work. The Downs Collection at Winterthur Libraryowns a design book from the 1830s that had oncebelonged to H. Wrightson. Wrightson, who wasprobably a young woman, drew Chinese scenes inher own hand and transferred these onto fabrics,wallets, screens, pouches, or boxes. Her designbook is a valuable artifact because her sketches re-veal the image of China lodged in the imaginationof a young woman (fig. 5). Though her drawingsare understandably amateur, one can see that the

Fig. 3. Detail of fig. 2.

9 C. Toogood Downing, The Fan-qui in China, 1836–1837, 2

vols. (London: Colburn, 1838), 2:98; Crosby Forbes, Hills andStreams: Landscape Decoration on Chinese Export Blue and WhitePorcelain (Washington, DC: International Exhibition Foundation,1982), preface.

10 Quintner, Willow! 168; Ivor Noel Hume, Pottery and Porcelainin Colonial Williamsburg’s Archaeological Collections (Williamsburg,VA: Colonial Williamsburg , 1969), 40.

11 Forbes, Hills and Streams, preface.12 ‘‘Chinese Painting,’’ Godey’s Lady’s Book, April 1831, 177.

58 Winterthur Portfolio 41:1

pastoral vision of Cathay found on plates, dishes,and cups inspired the Chinese scenes produced byher own hand; she drew landscapes that were filledwith flowers, butterflies, streams, fishermen, chil-dren, and Chinese architecture. It was as if she wereattempting to magnify small sections of a shan shuipattern in order to explore in detail the figures,dwellings, and vegetation it depicted only from afar.As Wrightson’s example shows, the romance ofCathay did not need to remain restricted to Chineseceramics; if one possessed even a small amount ofartistic ability, one could spread the pleasing Orien-tal vision throughout the home.13

American merchants, especially those in the teatrade, understood quite well the magical allure pos-sessed by Chinese things, and they did not hesitateto exploit China’s attractive exoticism for commer-cial profit. If we take a brief look at advertisementsfor tea in antebellum America, we see that tea sellersemployed idealized images of China in marketingefforts that targeted female customers.14 They in-

cluded Chinese landscape scenes and architectureboth in their print ornaments, which adorned news-paper advertisements (fig. 6), and in their adver-tising posters (fig. 7). They also populated theirretail outlets with Chinese statues so as to providecustomers with the pleasurable illusion that shop-ping for tea offered an encounter with the exotic(fig. 8). In the 1840s, the Boston tea seller Redding& Company even arranged for ‘‘a Native Chinaman’’named ‘‘Achowe’’ to work at its store in a highlyvisible fashion. In its advertisement, the companyannounced that Achowe ‘‘will be happy to have hisfriends call on him.’’ Since the appearance of a Chi-nese person was extremely rare on the East Coastat this time (Chinese immigration did not beginout West until later in the same decade), Redding& Company hoped to lure potential customers bypromising an encounter with the Chinese exotic.15

Other merchants went even further to conferan aura of Chinese exoticism onto imported goods.In October of 1834, the ship Washington arrivedin New York, carrying the cargo of Nathaniel andFrederick Carne, two brothers engaged in the China

Fig. 4. Blue painted soup dish. Chinese porcelain. (Courtesy, PeabodyEssex Museum, E79315.1.)

13 H. Wrightson, Design Book, Document 528, DownsCollection, Winterthur Library.

14 According to Diana diZerega, tea had become a distinctly‘‘feminine ritual’’ by the 1840s, enjoyed by both middle-class andelite women (‘‘Family Dinners and Social Teas,’’ 264).

15 Boston Post, November 17, 1847; see also Coolidge & Wiley’sBoston Almanac for the Year 1850 (Boston: Mussey, 1850), 184.

Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay 59

Fig. 5. H. Wrightson, design book, ca. 1817–ca. 1822.(Winterthur Library, Joseph Downs Collection of Manu-scripts and Printed Ephemera, Doc. 528.)

60 Winterthur Portfolio 41:1

trade. Along with tea, fans, silk boxes, Chinese wa-tercolor paintings, and other items, the ship alsocarried a rather unexpected passenger: a youngChinese woman named Afong Moy who was soonto become famous throughout the city as the cel-ebrated ‘‘Chinese Lady.’’ Three weeks after herarrival, the young woman was being exhibited inthe city before large ticket-holding audiences. Sinceshe apparently did not perform in any sense ofthe word (her bound feet made mere walkingdifficult), curious New Yorkers paid mainly to see aChinese woman—and this was enough to cause asensation. However, Moy appeared not in a ster-ile exhibition space but rather was ensconced inan opulent environment decorated and furnishedwith Chinese things. In other words, women in theaudience were exposed not only to an elegant Chi-nese lady but also to an attractive Chinese de-corating style composed of the sorts of objects that,

Fig. 6. Chinoiserie print ornament. From L. Johnson,Specimen of Printing Types (Philadelphia, 1844), fig. 1077.(Winterthur Library, Printed Book and Periodical Col-lection, RBR Z250 J67.)

Fig. 7. Great American Tea Company at 51 Vesey Street, New York. Advertising poster. (New York HistoricalSociety, Bella C. Landauer Collection, neg. 60581.)

Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay 61

conveniently, the Carnes were concurrently put-ting up for sale in the city.16

The exhibition of Afong Moy allows us to un-derscore two points. First, American women wereenchanted by China, or at least their constructionof China, and they relished opportunities to bringChinese styles and objects into their own homes.Second, excepting those who lived in the largercities, very few Americans had access to an exhi-bition like the Chinese Lady. The nonperformingAfong Moy was only able to stir up excitement be-cause, before the Civil War, Chinese people (es-pecially women) were rarities on the East Coast.Thus, for the vast majority of Americans, the act ofstudying a landscape scene on a Chinese plate wasthe extent of their interaction with China.

Not surprisingly, they tended to take these sim-ple blue and white images quite seriously, sometimesviewing them as legitimate conveyors of information.Brantz Mayer, a travel writer from Baltimore whovisited Canton in 1827, held Chinese ceramics partly

accountable for shaping perceptions of China. ‘‘Ourgeneral notions of the arts and civilization of the Em-pire,’’ he observed, ‘‘were derived from . . . ‘that worldbefore perspective,’—a China plate.’’17 In 1845, awriter for the Boston Atlas stated that ‘‘our first ideas ofChina-dom were formed at meal times, and illustratedwith plates.’’18 Samuel Goodrich, the popular authorof children’s books, was so certain that children wereusing plates, dishes, and cups to imagine the countryand its people that, in his Manners and Customs of Na-tions (1844), he introduced China by alluding to thiscommodity: ‘‘Everyone is familiar with their dress,personal appearance, and aspect of their houses,from the drawings in their porcelain.’’19 Another chil-dren’s book, Peter Piper’s Tales About China, instructedyoung readers to examine Chinese-made ceramics foraccurate information on China. ‘‘You may form agood idea of the manner in which the Chinese dressupon ordinary occasions,’’ the author advised, ‘‘bynoticing the figures which they delineate upon theirtea-cups, and their other articles of porcelain.’’20

In other words, Americans demonstrated a surpris-ing tendency to take seriously the designs found ontheir Chinese-made plates because other meanswere not available.

English Chinoiserie

Americans who enjoyed eating from plates deco-rated with Chinese scenes did not need to pur-chase Chinese ceramics. As has been stated, towardthe end of the eighteenth century, English pottersbegan to produce ceramics bearing landscape scenesresembling China’s shan shui patterns.21 However,whereas all Chinese ceramics were hand painted, theEnglish potteries placed their Chinese-styled land-scape scenes on ceramics employing a mechanical

Fig. 8. Detail of invoice from A. Williams, successor toRedding & Company, Boston, to Messrs. P. Whiting &Sons, March 5, 1856. (Warshaw Collection of BusinessAmericana—Tea, Archives Center, National Museumof American History, Behring Center, SmithsonianInstitution.)

16 John Haddad, ‘‘Pursuing the China Effect,’’ chap 3 in TheRomance of China: Excursions to China in U.S. Culture, 1776–1876(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

17 Brantz Mayer, ‘‘China and the Chinese,’’ Southern QuarterlyReview, July 1847, 6.

18 Boston Atlas, September 15, 1845, quoted in Ronald J.Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, ‘‘Between ‘Crockery-Dom’ andBarnum: Boston’s Chinese Museum, 1845–1847,’’ AmericanQuarterly 56 ( June 2004): 272.

19 S. G. Goodrich, Manners and Customs of Nations (Boston:Rand, Reynolds, 1844), 343.

20 Peter Piper’s Tales About China (Albany, NY: Pease, n.d.), 4,Rare Books Division, Free Library of Philadelphia. Neither theauthor nor the date of publication are stated in the book. That it isa part of a series entitled ‘‘Peter Piper’s New Lithographic ToyBooks,’’ however, probably places it in the 1840s or 1850s, whenlithographic images began to appear in children’s books.

21 America’s own ceramics industry did not seriously affect theU.S. market until the 1870s (Neil Ewins, ‘‘‘Supplying the PresentWants of Our Yankee Cousins . . . ’: Staffordshire Ceramics andthe American Market, 1775–1880,’’ Journal of Ceramics History 15

[1997]: 11).

62 Winterthur Portfolio 41:1

process called transfer printing, invented in the1750s.22 The English produced numerous designs,but one basic pattern involving a centrally posi-tioned representation of a willow tree steadily ac-quired popularity in Europe and the United Statesduring the first half of the nineteenth century.

The willow pattern can be traced back to de-signs created in the 1780s by Thomas Minton, anapprentice engraver at the Caughley pottery, andprinted on porcelain.23 Although his designs re-sembled the pattern that would eventually conquerthe Western world, they did not possess all of thefour elements that would later come to define thewillow pattern: a willow tree in the central position;three figures crossing a bridge, heading away fromthe main building; a zigzagging fence stretching

across the foreground; and two birds hovering inthe top center (fig. 9).24 Minton later went to workfor Josiah Spode’s pottery manufactory, which isusually credited as designing the earliest piecesthat included all four elements around 1790.25

Other manufacturers soon copied the willow pat-tern.26 By 1814, it had become a ‘‘generic’’ pattern.27

22 Underglaze transfer printing was a technique in which a de-sign engraved on copper was printed onto a piece of tissue paper,which was then transferred onto the ceramic object (Forbes, Hillsand Streams, preface; Davis, ‘‘The American China Trade,’’ 119).

23 Quintner, Willow! 40–41.

24 Geoffrey Godden, ‘‘The Willow Pattern,’’ Antiques Collector,June 1972, 148–50.

25 Quintner, Willow! 41–42; Copeland, Spode’s Willow Pattern,33. See also George L. Miller, Ann Smart Martin, and Nancy S.Dickinson, ‘‘Changing Consumption Patterns: English Ceramicsand the American Market from 1770 to 1840,’’ in Hutchins,Everyday Life in the Early Republic, 223.

26 In addition to the common practice among potters of lend-ing engravings to one another, successful factories also purchasedthe master patterns belonging to potters who were selling theirbusinesses (Copeland, Spode’s Willow Pattern, 9). ‘‘In addition toduplicating one another’s wares, potters copied one another’spatterns. The best example of this is the willow pattern, introducedaround 1790 by Josiah Spode and quickly copied by his com-petition’’ (Miller et al., ‘‘Changing Consumption Patterns,’’ 226).

27 Miller et al., ‘‘Changing Consumption Patterns,’’ 226.

Fig. 9. Blue transfer-printed willow pattern plate. (Author’s collection; photo, SamuelWinch.)

Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay 63

Thus, by the turn of the nineteenth century, nu-merous factories in England were churning outceramics bearing this pattern, much of it intendedfor the American market.28 Over the ensuing de-cades, British potteries proved to be enormouslysensitive and adaptable to American tastes. Giventhe growing size of the American market, they hadgood reason to be: in the 1830s, the United Statessurpassed continental Europe as the largest marketfor British ceramics.29 Thus, when American con-sumers signaled their affection for chinoiserie ingeneral, and this specific pattern in particular, Brit-ish potteries predictably responded by producingmore of the same thing.

Perhaps more than any other single image, thewillow pattern symbolized China in the popular im-aginations of Europeans and Americans (this is nosmall irony when one considers its English orig-ins!). In 1843, a British writer attested to the in-structive value of the willow pattern: ‘‘the earliestrecord that we have of Chinese customs, is to befound in the willow pattern plate. From this it wouldappear that the Celestials are in the habit of fishingfrom the tops of bridges.’’30 Though this attempt toglean ethnographic information from the patternwas done in jest, the fact that the author could as-sume his readers’ familiarity with the pattern dem-onstrates just how recognizable it had become. In1853, a reporter at New York’s Crystal Palace Ex-hibition described a visitor from China who lookedout of place in America: ‘‘He sighs, poor fellow . . .for those wonderful fruits which we see on thewillow pattern plates, over which the three birds . . .are continually flying.’’31 In 1887, Carter Harrison,the former mayor of Chicago, used ceramics bear-ing the willow pattern to prove his point that fre-quent and repeated small events, such as the dailyexposure to a ceramic image, can powerfully affectone’s outlook: ‘‘Men’s opinions [are] moulded, orat least colored, by the veriest trifles—colored intoprejudices which require time and care to eradi-cate. He whose mother’s treasured porcelain ser-

vice was of the old blue willow pattern, has, more orless, his impressions of the Celestial Empire fash-ioned upon the model he studied upon the platesfrom which he ate.’’32

Clearly, the pattern demonstrated a surprisingpropensity to linger in the memories of Americans.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow fell under the mag-ical spell of this pattern during his youth in theearly nineteenth century. The image proved to beindelible in his memory, prompting him to includeit in a poem composed later in life. The willowpattern that ‘‘we knew / In childhood,’’ he wrote in1877, enabled these ‘‘coarser household wares’’to transcend their purely utilitarian function. With‘‘its bridge of blue / Leading to unknown thor-oughfares,’’ the willow pattern offered a portal toan enchanted world where one could observe the‘‘solitary man,’’ the ‘‘white river,’’ the ‘‘arches,’’ andthe ‘‘fantastic trees.’’ So different, novel, and pow-erful, the willow pattern made an unmistakable im-pression on Longfellow and other imaginativeyouths; it either ‘‘filled us with wonder anddelight’’ or ‘‘haunted us in dreams at night.’’33

During the first half of the nineteenth century,this pattern pleased Americans for mostly the samereason as the Chinese shan shui patterns did: itoffered a pleasingly exotic landscape scene. How-ever, by the middle of the nineteenth century, ce-ramics bearing this specific pattern would possessone additional attribute—they could be used to il-lustrate a story. Though the exact date of the willowlegend’s inception is not known, it was probablyconcocted sometime in the 1840s (the first knownprinted version is dated 1849).34 Like the patternthat inspired it, the willow legend emerged as aplayful Western attempt to capture an attractiveChinese essence; in this way, it provided ownerswith a delightful piece of narrative chinoiserie.Whether the legend was the result of an ingeniousmarketing scheme by a British potter or whether itarose on its own out of the collective imaginationsof English women, the legend proved enormouslypopular in England and quickly migrated acrossthe Atlantic to the United States, where American

28 As a sign of the increasing success of the British industry, in1821, Tyng reported that his ship used stones rather than Chineseporcelain for ballast, as had been the practice in 1815: ‘‘China warewas no longer shipped, the English ware having taken its place’’(Fels, Before the Wind, 75).

29 Ewins, ‘‘Supplying the Present Wants of Our YankeeCousins,’’ 5–6, 38; see also Miller et al., ‘‘Changing ConsumptionPatterns,’’ 221.

30 Though this object becomes a whip in the willow legend,this writer sees it as a fishing pole. See Punch’s Guide to the ChineseCollection (London: Punch Office, 1844).

31 ‘‘People in the Streets,’’ New York Times, July 19, 1853, 4.

32 Carter Harrison, A Race with the Sun (New York: Putnam’s,1889), 130.

33 The Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, vol. 3, Poems(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), 231–32. Another Americanauthor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, viewed a porcelain ‘‘China tea-set’’as strange but intriguing. In The House of Seven Gables (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1991), he described it as ‘‘painted overwith grotesque figures of man, bird, and beast, in as grotesque alandscape . . . a world of vivid brilliancy’’ (76–77).

34 Quintner, Willow! 123.

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mothers, wives, and children seized upon it andmade it their own.

The most important feature of this legend, andwhat contributed to its contagious appeal, was thatany ceramic bearing the willow pattern providedthe necessary illustrations for the telling of the nar-rative. Since the legend mutated as it moved fromperson to person and from one culture to the next,several versions of the legend eventually came intoexistence. However, all tell a tale of two star-crossedChinese lovers—a mandarin’s daughter and hislowly bookkeeper. As the story goes, a powerfulmandarin serves the Chinese emperor as the cus-toms officer of a great seaport. His position allowshim to acquire great wealth because smugglers re-peatedly offer him bribes in order to avoid payingcustoms fees. When word of the mandarin’s cor-ruption begins to circulate, he removes himselffrom his post and retires to his mansion in thecountryside, taking with him only his accumulatedwealth, a bookkeeper named Chang, and his daugh-ter, Koong-se. Fearing an official investigation, themandarin orders Chang to square away his booksso that they can bear scrutiny. Chang loyally exe-cutes this task, only to find himself summarily dis-charged by the mandarin upon its completion.However, prior to his dismissal, Chang and Koong-sefall in love.

Knowing that the mandarin would never approveof the union of his daughter with a lowly book-keeper, the two young lovers meet surreptitiouslyevery night beneath the fruit trees, which are in-cluded in the pattern. When the mandarin learnsof these clandestine trysts, he confines Koong-se toa room overlooking the river and demands that astrong palisade (pictured) be built all around themansion grounds to keep Chang away from hisdaughter. Worst of all, he also makes arrangementsfor her to wed Ta-jin, a wealthy duke who is her equalin status but far more advanced in age. The weddingis set to take place when the peach tree blossoms(pictured). Upon hearing the news of Koong-se’sengagement, a despairing Chang realizes that heprefers death to a life without his beloved. He floatsa hollow coconut across the river to his lover con-taining a note in which he vows to commit suicidewhen the buds on the peach tree open. Thoughgreatly depressed, Chang also formulates a plan tosteal Koong-se away.

One evening, Ta-jin arrives at the mansion bear-ing a box of jewels that he intends as a gift for hisfiancee. That same night, Chang appears at themandarin’s doorstep disguised as a beggar seekingalms. Since Chinese custom requires the wealthy

to treat the poor charitably, Chang gains entranceinto the house and soon locates Koong-se in herroom. Down in the main hall, the mandarin andTa-jin enjoy an evening of performances, food,and wine. When the wine induces sleep, Changseizes the box of jewels and quietly leads Koong-seout of the mansion. Unfortunately, as the loversattempt to sneak past the mandarin, he awakens,raises the hue and cry, and proceeds to pursue themhimself. The two flee cross the bridge with themandarin, holding a whip, following closely behindthe absconding lovers (pictured). It must have beenone of the earliest manifestations of what later be-came known as a ‘‘chase scene.’’

The lovers find a fisherman with a junk (pic-tured) who is willing to convey them to a nearbyisland where they promptly hide in a gardener’shut. The enraged duke, hoping to have Chang putto death for stealing both his jewels and his fiancee,deploys his spies to search the area. When theduke’s soldiers arrive on the island, Chang andKoong-se escape onto a boat and sail to anotherisland. To support themselves, they begin to sell offthe jewels one by one. But as time passes, the tworealize they are safe and begin to build a new life.Chang constructs a house (pictured) and bringsthe land to a profitable state of cultivation. He alsowrites a book on gardening that brings him a degreeof fame. As for the duke, his desire for revenge con-tinues to smolder in his heart. So when the literaryreputation of Chang reveals his whereabouts, theduke dispatches his soldiers to the island. Chang val-iantly resists their advances but is mortally woundedin the process. Greatly distraught, Koong-se flees intothe house and lights it on fire with herself in-side. At this point, the Chinese gods, who arewatching the tragedy unfold from on high, decideto intervene; they place a curse on the vengefulduke and take pity on the unfortunate lovers. Asis pictured in the pattern, the gods turn Changand Koong-se into kissing doves just before theyperish.35

Though originating in England, the willow leg-end resonated in the United States for a couple ofreasons. First, the story appealed to people at themiddle and lower income levels because it carrieda populist message of antielitism: the lowly book-keeper wins the mandarin’s daughter. In almostany period in American history, readers have showna tendency to appreciate romantic tales about poor

35 Harry Barnard, The Story of the Wedgwood Willow Pattern Plate(Hanley, UK: Catalogue Printers, n.d.), 2–7. Josiah Wedgwood &Sons published this undated guidebook to Wedgwood porcelain.

Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay 65

boys and rich girls. However, this general plotlineenjoyed even greater cultural currency in Americanhomes during and after the Jacksonian Era, wherethe ethos of the day celebrated the ‘‘common man.’’In the 1830s and after, young boys were told by theirparents, ministers, schoolteachers, and much ofthe community that they could rise in the world,achieve wealth and status, and influence politics.Thus, just as the low price of these ceramics meantthat, at an economic level, ordinary Americanscould enjoy blue and white dinner and tea sets, atthe imaginative level the willow legend offered aparallel message about the ability of the commonperson to pursue the main chance.

Second, we can also understand the willow leg-end’s appeal when we place it in the context ofnineteenth-century domestic arrangements. AsLinda Kerber has written, after the RevolutionaryWar, the concept of Republican Motherhood im-bued the home and the mother’s role in it withgreat national significance; mothers needed to createan edifying domestic environment so that youngboys could grow up to be patriotic and civic-minded individuals. As the century progressed, thewoman’s presence in the home only increased. Bythe 1840s, ministers, magazines, and novels were in-stilling in women a belief that their proper ‘‘sphere’’was the home. Instead of participating in the ‘‘manly’’spheres of commerce and politics, middle-classmothers were expected to transform their homesinto wholesome sanctuaries, insulated from thesins and temptations of the outside world. Therethey could raise their children to be good Prot-estant Christians and perform their wifely duties withappropriate subservience and self-sacrifice. BarbaraWelter famously referred to this new gender role asthe ‘‘cult of true womanhood.’’36

Of course, the domestic ideal defined by Welterwas exactly that—an ideal. Though some women’sbehavior existed in strict accordance to its dictates,others achieved a degree of liberty from this way oflife, and still others rejected it entirely. Certainly,domesticity was an important social arrangementin antebellum America; however, the time periodalso produced women who engaged in factorywork, women who became agents of social changethrough their involvement in reform movements,and women who found economic and creativesuccess by pursuing literary endeavors. Most ob-viously, this was also the time period in which

women found a powerful political voice, expressedmost noticeably in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Con-vention.37 In sum, women possessed numerousroles in antebellum America, not just one.

Yet regardless of whether a woman accepted thehome as her proper sphere or struggled againstthis imposition, she was still coping, in some fash-ion, with a patriarchal system. For this reason, shewould relate to Koong-se’s story of captivity and lib-eration in a rigid, male-dominated culture. In thelegend, a young Chinese woman finds herself chaf-ing under the control of her overbearing father;he denies her the freedom to express herself bothemotionally, by crushing her attempt to choose herown husband, and physically, by confining her inthe home under a virtual house arrest. Yet Koong-sedefies society’s prescribed rules for proper femaleconduct by refusing to act as either the dutifuldaughter to an oppressive father or the obedientwife to an intolerable husband. Instead, she makesan enormously bold gamble: she breaks free of thehome/prison so as to enjoy a romantic adventurewith her lover. Thus, we can interpret the osten-sibly quaint and innocuous willow legend as a subtlysubversive text because it offered American womena compelling narrative of female empowerment.38

In sum, American women did not associateceramics bearing the willow pattern with house-hold drudgery. Instead, they used it as a means tocope with, challenge, and escape the same. By in-teracting creatively with their ceramics, womenand girls in Europe and the United States tookwhat might otherwise have functioned as a prop ofdomesticity and instead used the same to inventand develop an entirely novel cultural form—thestory plate. And out of this process, an idealizedvision of China emerged that would influencethose who encountered it for the rest of their lives.

The Ideal Meets the Real

One should not be surprised that these blue andwhite Chinese landscapes provided their owners

36 Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology inRevolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 1980); Welter, ‘‘The Cult of True Womanhood.’’

37 Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Kelley, Private Woman, PublicStage ; Ginzberg, Women in Antebellum Reform.

38 Similarly, Janice Radway, in studying popular romancenovels, found that the female readers did not typically view them-selves as the merely pathetic and passive receptors of mass culture’sproconsumption ideology. Instead, the women understood theiract of reading as liberating and rebellious—it constituted a ‘‘dec-laration of independence’’ from ‘‘women’s duties and respon-sibilities as wives and mothers’’ ( Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance:Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature [Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1984], 6, 14).

66 Winterthur Portfolio 41:1

with the occasional moment of escapist pleasure.However, it is truly startling that Americans wouldtake these images seriously as legitimate conveyorsof information on China. Yet that is precisely whatmany did: merchants, sailors, government officials,and tourists visiting China for the first time oftenmade comparisons between the actual scenes be-fore their eyes and the images of Cathay that hadbecome ingrained in their minds after frequent ex-posure to household ceramics. In short, they notonly carried dreamy Cathay in their memories butused it to set expectations for their first encounterwith the real China. This collision of the ideal andthe real sometimes took place when an Americanwould approach Canton for the first time (fig. 10).

No less of a figure than Commodore MatthewPerry appears to have invested household ceramicswith a degree of credibility. Perry arrived in Chinain 1853 to use the area of Canton, Macao, andHong Kong as a temporary Far Eastern station from

which he would launch his expedition to Japan.When he gazed upon Canton for the first time, theopinion he registered was one of supreme disap-pointment. According to Francis Hawks, who com-piled the official account of the expedition usingthe commodore’s notes and journals, Perry hadbrought to the experience an inflated idea of thebeauty of China, and the actual place failed tomatch his expectations.

He had imagined that it would be more striking to astranger than in his case it proved to be . . . he recalled tomemory . . . the snug cottages with the picturesque bridgesand the comfortable Chinaman under the shade of awillow, with nothing to do but fish, all of which . . . servedto amuse us in our childhood. . . . But the sketches ofimaginative boyhood were . . . dispelled by the soberrealities of maturer years. There was nothing of all thisbeautiful picture of . . . happy life. There were, indeed,boats and people, pagodas and cottages, bridges andtrees; but there were also filth and noise, poverty and

Fig. 10. Whampoa anchorage in the Pearl River below Canton, ca. 1820–40. Watercolor. (Winterthur Library,Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Doc. 1353.)

Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay 67

misery, lying and roguery, and, in short, anything but apicture of quiet content and Arcadian simplicity.39

During the years of his ‘‘imaginative boyhood’’in the early nineteenth century, Perry had usedceramic wares to construct China as a pastoral won-derland, and his trip to China in his adult yearsexposed these unrealistic preconceptions for whatthey were. In a moment of profound disillusion-ment, Cathay evaporated in his mind’s eye and wassummarily replaced by the squalor, noise, penury,and mendaciousness of what Perry now believedwas the real China.

Perry’s case is most perplexing because, if any-one should have known better than to have trustedpatterns on plates, it was the commodore. As thehead of a major government expedition, he wastoo intelligent, rational, and well educated to takeseriously such simplistic and idealized pictures. Moreimportant, Perry was unlike most Americans of histime in that he had waded through many of thelengthy books on China. Prior to his departure, heprepared himself for Asia by subjecting himself to arigorous study regimen in which he pored overevery source he could find on the Far East.40 Yetsomehow, the blue and white images not only heldtheir ground but were able to trump the informa-tion he had gathered from serious scholarly sources.

Perry was not alone in endowing ceramics withthe power to shape preconceptions; however, othersfound that the real China fared well when comparedwith images on plates and dishes. A sailor namedCharles Tyng was only fourteen years of age when,in 1815, he made his first approach to Canton onboard the Cordelia. Tyng found the scenery so strik-ing that, when composing his memoirs in 1878, hewas able to recall it in vivid detail:

The scenery along the river, which is thickly settled, isexceedingly interesting, and to one like me, who neversaw anything of the kind before, it was wonderful. Wepassed a pagoda of large size, seven stories high. It wasabout a mile from the banks of the river. It is exactly ofthe same form as pictures & models of pagodas which Ihad seen before. . . . The houses were curious, similar inappearance as those seen on china plates, and other ware.The country seemed crowded with inhabitants, youngand old, all moving about like ants round an ant hill.

For a young boy, the first sight of China must havebeen exhilarating. Tyng could only attempt to com-prehend the remarkable sight using earlier mem-ories with ‘‘china plates’’ as his frame of reference.41

Despite this glowing first impression, the neg-ative opinion expressed by Perry appears to havebeen the more typical response of Americans view-ing China for the first time. John Latimer of Delaware,a trader in the employ of Russell & Company whoresided in Canton for long intervals between theyears of 1815 and 1831, noted the potential of Chi-nese commodities like ceramics to mislead. ‘‘Cantonis seen to most advantage from a great distance,’’he wrote in 1821. ‘‘I mean you form a greater ideaof the beauty of it by viewing its products than if youwere to be here.’’ During his prolonged tenure inCanton, Latimer met with enough new arrivals tothe city to detect a repeated pattern of behavior:‘‘I never knew a person who was not greatly dis-appointed on landing and finding everything sodifferent from what he expected.’’ Evidently, thosewho had never before visited China used images ontrade articles such as ceramics to form an imagi-native construct that, they believed, surpassed theactual place in beauty and charm.42

With so many traders experiencing disappoint-ment, one would expect that word of their dis-enchantment with China would eventually reachAmericans back home. After all, at the major east-ern ports in the United States, ships bearing mer-chants returning from China arrived on a regularbasis. Yet their disappointment notwithstanding,these traders probably did not disseminate a neg-ative view of China for three reasons. First, it wasclearly not in their economic interests to puncturethe vision of Cathay. Since consumers associatedChinese ceramics and teas with their country oforigin, merchants knew that profits could conceiv-ably suffer if the American opinion of China wereto darken. For example, compare the above de-scription of Commodore Perry’s approach to Cantonin 1853 with one that appeared the very same yearin a serialized adventure story set in China andpublished in P. T. Barnum’s Illustrated News : ‘‘Theblue river . . . softly descended to the sea, betweentwo rows of pretty villages, which recalled those onporcelain plates. . . . Far in the distance the eye waslost amid mountains, blue and dreamy as the huesof the setting sun, or among endless collections of

39 Francis L. Hawks, Narrative of the Expedition of an AmericanSquadron to the China Seas and Japan, Performed in the Years 1852,1853, and 1854, Under the Command of Commodore M. C. Perry, UnitedStates Navy (Washington, DC: Beverly Tucker, Senate Printer,1856), 135.

40 Frederic Trautman, ed. and trans., With Perry to Japan: AMemoir by William Heine (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,1990), 6.

41 Fels, Before the Wind, 14, 28–29.42 Joan Kerr Facey Thill, ‘‘A Delawarean in the Celestial

Empire: John Richardson Latimer and the China Trade’’ (MAthesis, University of Delaware, June 1973), 51.

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rice-fields and gardens. As night came on, all sankin its dark flood. ‘China is a painted dream.’’’43

Writing for Barnum’s paper, the author intendedsolely for his story to please and entertain; the read-ers, he knew, wanted to believe that the ‘‘porcelainplates’’ they owned depicted the Chinese land-scape correctly. As a result, the description reflectednot realities in China but rather the collective de-sires of Americans who would never voyage there.44

Merchants in the China trade, like the author of thisstory, understood this desire quite well and knewthat it contributed heavily to their commercial suc-cess. They lacked the economic incentive to dis-abuse their customers.

Second, merchants also withheld their criti-cism of China because, in the decades prior to theOpium War, the aforementioned Qing edict pre-vented them from seeing much of the empire. TheQing government, in an effort to preserve stabil-ity by keeping the outside world at bay, confinedWesterners to the foreign factories, a small zonedesignated for international trade located on thewaterfront just outside the city walls of Canton. Cir-cumscribed by this law, foreign travelers could notaccess the interior and so failed to accumulate reli-able information about Chinese people, customs,and landscapes. Major Samuel Shaw, the first Amer-ican consul in Canton, recorded in his journal inthe 1780s that ‘‘Europeans, after a dozen years’residence, have not seen more than what the firstmonth presented to view.’’ The ‘‘few observationsto be made at Canton cannot furnish us with suf-ficient data from which to form an accurate judg-ment.’’45 In the 1840s, John Sword, a disgruntledAmerican trader, decried the small size of the areain which he was sequestered. He added with frus-tration that he could not give an account of acountry he was prohibited from seeing.46 JohnLatimer, who spent many years in Canton duringthe first half of the nineteenth century, echoedSword’s observations: ‘‘From this country it is im-

possible for me to write any thing descriptive thatcan be interesting, being debarred the privilegeof going in to the Country and even into the city[Canton].’’ To ensure that visitors enjoyed at leastone authentic Chinese experience during their stayin Canton, Latimer often treated them to expensivefeasts served and eaten ‘‘in the Chinese style.’’47

Latimer’s friend, the trader Nathan Dunn, alsofelt restricted. When Dunn’s curious niece wrote tohim asking for a description of China, Dunn couldnot oblige her request, stating that ‘‘the limits pre-scribed to foreigners . . . through the jealousies ofthe officers of the Government’’ had left him ‘‘verymuch confined.’’ Later, Dunn grew so curious aboutthe vast but unknown interior of China that he de-vised a way to circumnavigate the Qing edict. Hehired teams of Chinese agents to rove all over theChinese empire, gathering thousands of objectsthat would later be displayed in Philadelphia in hisChinese Museum.48 For American merchantsresiding in the foreign factories, stringent govern-mental restrictions eliminated almost any chancefor a reliable description of China.

Third, traders also did not rid their countrymenof their idealized China because many of them hadvisited a real place in China that actually resembleda shan shui or willow pattern. Though the foreignfactories dominated the life of the merchant, forthose eager to see another side of China, one op-tion did occasionally present itself: a trip to the plea-sure gardens of the Chinese merchants with whomthey traded.

Chinese Pleasure Gardens

In China, affluent citizens practiced a centuries-old tradition of walling off part of their estate fromthe dust and noise of society. Within the enclosedspace, they would construct an elaborate gardenthat could serve as a locus of escape, repose, andmeditation. According to Maggie Keswick, who haswritten extensively on the subject, these gardenspossessed an ‘‘extraordinary magic’’ that gave thevisitor the effect of being ‘‘transported to a fairy

43 ‘‘English and Chinese,’’ Illustrated News, May 21, 1853, 322.44 It was the positive view of the approach to Canton, not the

negative one, that tended to filter into children’s books, as isevident in the following passage from Peter Parley’s Tales about Asia(Philadelphia: Desilver Jr. and Thomas, 1833): ‘‘By and by webegan to approach Canton. The banks of the river were beautifullycultivated; the plains, the slopes, and the very hills which hung overthe water, were covered with many kinds of fruit, grain, andvegetable. The whole landscape . . . seemed like one extensivegarden. . . . At first it all appeared to me a dream’’ (21–22).

45 Josiah Quincy, The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw, the FirstAmerican Consul at Canton (Taipei: Ch’eng-Wen, 1968), 167–68,178–79.

46 Davis, ‘‘The American China Trade,’’ 243.

47 Thill, ‘‘A Delawarean in the Celestial Empire,’’ 34; NanHodges, ed., The Voyage of the Peacock: A Journal by Benjamin Ticknor,Naval Surgeon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991),178.

48 Letter from Nathan Dunn, April 13, 1824, the QuakerCollection, Haverford College, Haverford, PA; John Haddad,‘‘The Romantic Collector in China: Nathan Dunn’s Ten Thou-sand Chinese Things,’’ Journal of American Culture 21 (Spring1998): 7–26.

Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay 69

landscape quite unlike any other on earth.’’49 SomeChinese merchants built their luxurious pleasuregardens on Honam Island, located across the PearlRiver from the foreign factories. Houqua, the wealth-iest of all merchants, was said to have diverted$200,000 annually toward the upkeep of his pri-vate garden.50 Maintenance costs were high becausethese gardens were spectacular man-made environ-ments composed of artificial mountains and grot-toes; winding pathways; meandering streams;zigzagging bridges; handsome pavilions and kiosks;exotic birds and fish; peonies, orchids, chrysanthe-mums, and lotus flowers; and peach trees, plumtrees, and bamboo. And of course, once could notforget the obligatory willow tree!51 As these fea-tures suggest, Chinese pleasure gardens had muchin common with landscapes on ceramics. Thus, anAmerican who entered a Chinese garden felt as ifhe had entered a life-size version of the willow andshan shui patterns.

For many Western visitors, Chinese gardensafforded one additional pleasure. These magicallysurreal landscapes seemed to come straight outof the Arabian Nights. Before the Civil War, this fa-mous volume of Oriental tales was a fixture on mostAmerican bookshelves.52 For any literate child, thebook was almost standard reading. According to thepreface to an 1848 children’s edition, ‘‘the ArabianNights are to our childhood what . . . the writings ofShakespeare are in after life.’’53 Andrew Carnegie,the Gilded Age steel magnate, recalled the magicaleffect of the Arabian Nights on his childhood imagi-nation in the 1840s. ‘‘I was carried into a new world,’’he wrote. ‘‘I was in dreamland as I devoured thosestories.’’54 Though we in the present tend to think

of the stories as being set in the Middle East, someof the tales are actually set in China, a fact not over-looked by nineteenth-century readers. They knew,for example, that Aladdin, perhaps the best-knowncharacter from the entire work, was Chinese.55

Many also appeared to believe that the book, farfrom being pure fancy, imparted legitimate ethno-graphic information with regard to Eastern cultures.Indeed, they were told as much in the introductionsto some of the early editions: ‘‘the Arabian Nights,’’one translator proclaimed, ‘‘is more descriptiveof the people, customs, and conduct of Easterncountries . . . than any existing work,’’ and travelersto those countries have confirmed ‘‘the correctnessand authenticity of this work.’’56

That China and the Arabian Nights were meldedtogether in the American imagination is supportedby numerous references connecting the two. WhenKing visited the exhibits at the East India MarineHall (which possessed strong holdings in Chineseartifacts), she described them as having ‘‘a touchof the dear old Arabian Nights.’’57 In 1844, NewYorkers enjoyed a theatrical production calledAladdin the Wonderful Lamp that contained Chinesecharacters named Tongluck, Kein Long FongWhang, and Widow Ching Mustapha.58 In 1847,the Boston Museum presented The Grand ChineseSpectacle of Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp, a musicalcomposed by the popular songwriter ThomasComer.59 A visitor inside the famous Chinese Mu-seum of Nathan Dunn observed: ‘‘We seem torealize those imaginings of the gorgeous East,which have haunted us like dreams of childhood.We seem to be in the China of the Arabian Nights—a realized world of fancy.’’60 When ex-presidentUlysses S. Grant toured China in 1879, a member

49 Maggie Keswick, The Chinese Garden: History, Art andArchitecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1978), 14–15.

50 Elma Loines, ed., The China Trade Post-Bag of the Seth LowFamily of Salem and New York (Manchester, ME: Falmouth, 1953), 6.

51 Osvald Siren, Gardens of China (New York: Ronald, 1949), 4,10–14, 32–36, 42.

52 According to Orville Roorbach, who compiled a record ofevery book published in the United States between 1820 and 1861,twelve editions of the Arabian Nights appeared in this period(Bibliotheca Americana: Catalogue of American Publications, vols. 1–3

[New York: Smith, 1939]). Other editions were widely availablebefore 1820, the first year covered by Roorbach. The Rare BooksDivision at the Free Library of Philadelphia owns five separateAmerican editions of the book published before 1820, with theearliest dating back to 1794. The Free Library also owns severalBritish editions that were probably sold in the United States.

53 Tales from the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, as Related by aMother for the Amusement of her Children (New York: Walker, 1848),preface.

54 John C. Van Dyke, ed., The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 25. The originaledition was published in 1920.

55 The tale begins with the following lines: ‘‘In the capital ofone of the largest and richest provinces in the kingdom of China,there lived a tailor, whose name was Mustapha. . . . His son whomhe called Aladdin, had been brought up in a very careless andidle manner’’ (Aladdin; or, the Wonderful Lamp [London: Hardy,1789], 1).

56 Edward Forster, trans., The Arabian Nights, 5 vols. (London:Savage, 1810), 1:x. In the early nineteenth century, when theAmerican publishing industry was in its infancy, the booksellingmarket was dominated by English publishers and distributors.Though this edition was published in England, it was also sold inthe United States.

57 King, When I Lived in Salem, 28–30.58 George C. D. Odel, Annals of the New York Stage (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1931).59 Thomas Comer, Favorite Melodies from the Grand Chinese

Spectacle of Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp as Produced at the BostonMuseum (Boston: Prentiss & Clark, 1847), Performing Arts Read-ing Room, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

60 The Chinese Repository, vol. 12, November 1843, 570.

70 Winterthur Portfolio 41:1

of his party described his surroundings as ‘‘like ascene from the ‘Arabian Nights.’’’61

Chinese pleasure gardens actually appear prom-inently in one tale of the Arabian Nights. In ‘‘ThePrincess of China,’’ the daughter of the emperorlives in the palaces of her father, who ‘‘has furnishedthem in the most sumptuous style.’’ Each palace, asone of its most beautiful attributes, includes severalsplendid gardens: ‘‘Nor has he forgotten to em-bellish the gardens . . . with everything, that candelight the senses; smooth lawns, or pastures enam-elled with flowers; fountains, canals, cascades; grovesthickly planted with trees, through which the raysof the sun never penetrate, and all differently dis-posed in each garden.’’ As the story goes, thePrincess of China loves her palaces and gardens somuch that she refuses all of the suitors who wouldwed her and take her away.62

On occasion, a Chinese merchant would allow agroup of foreign traders or travelers to enter hisbotanical paradise on Honam Island. Almost with-out exception, the guests wrote glowing descriptionsof these gardens, sometimes using a vocabulary thatreflected their familiarity with both Chinese land-scapes on ceramics and the Arabian Nights. WhenBrantz Mayer received his invitation in 1827, heseized the chance to spend a day in the private gar-dens of Manhop: ‘‘Passing . . . through a large cir-cular gateway, we entered an extensive garden offlowers and shrubbery laid out in all the fancifuldevices of the East. . . . On every side in the mini-ature vallies [sic], lakelets spread out filled withlilies . . . and swarming with gold fish that chasedeach other among the blossoms. Coquettish summer-houses of bamboo and cane, were twisted intoevery grotesque shape. . . . Light bridges, whose airylines seemed spun of gossamer, were hung overthe narrow streams . . . in this exquisite pictureof Oriental fantasy and taste.’’63 Mayer, who alsocredited the ‘‘China plate’’ with informing Amer-icans’ ‘‘general notions of the arts and civilizationof the Empire,’’ mentioned some of the prominentfeatures of these plates in his description of the gar-den: ‘‘lakelets,’’ ‘‘summer-houses,’’ ‘‘bridges,’’ and‘‘streams.’’ Perhaps thinking of ‘‘The Princess ofChina,’’ Mayer also used his experience in a privateChinese garden to vouch for the veracity of theArabian Nights : ‘‘Fanciful and beautiful as this [de-scription of a garden] might seem to a reader who

has never been in the East, yet we assure him, thatin China he would be forced to believe the glowingdescriptions of the Arabian Nights are not drawnfrom the imagination.’’ Clearly, when Mayer con-fronted China for the first time, he carried pre-conceived images in his mind that had originatedin boyhood experiences with both ceramics andthe Arabian Nights. Later in life, he delighted hisreaders by finding real places in China that val-idated the accuracy of these sources.64

Another travel writer, Osmond Tiffany, also wrotethat his observations of the real China authenti-cated both the Arabian Nights and designs on ce-ramics. ‘‘In the Arabian Tales the central flowerykingdom [China] is considered the land of en-chantments,’’ he wrote. He then proceeded to alludeto the two popular tales set in China: ‘‘though I didnot fall in love with a princess of China, yet to myvision there were as many wonders displayed as wereunveiled by the genie of the lamp of Aladdin.’’65

Since Tiffany passed nearly all of his time in Chinaobserving life and commerce in the foreign facto-ries, his trip to the legendary garden of the Chinesemerchant Puntinqua almost certainly contributedheavily to his highly idealized view of China.

Interestingly, at some point in time prior to thisday trip to Honam Island, Tiffany stopped into thechinaware shop of Cumchong, a Cantonese mer-chant. While perusing the displays, he paused toexamine the variety of ceramic tableware that hadbeen ‘‘exported in the millions of sets’’ to the UnitedStates and Europe. In describing the pattern,he noted the trees with leaves ‘‘like cherries’’ andthe ‘‘three men passing over a triangular bridge,’’details that strongly suggest he was looking at thesort of Chinese design that either had inspired thewillow pattern or, conversely, borrowed from it.66

Later, when Tiffany beheld Puntinqua’s pleasuregarden, the pattern lingered in his memory: ‘‘Thehouse stood in the midst of the water, and wasapproached by bridges winding about in variousdirections, and guarded by balustrades as intri-cate and fantastic as the ivory carvings. Therewere bridges beginning every where, and endingin nothing at all. . . . Everything was queer, differ-ent from any thing we had ever before seen, andperfectly Chinese. We thus learned that the ex-traordinary representations on porcelain . . . were

61 John Keating, With General Grant in the East (Philadelphia:Lippincott, 1879), 188.

62 Forster, Arabian Nights, 3:21.63 Mayer, ‘‘China and the Chinese,’’ 18–19.

64 Brantz Mayer, A Nation in a Nutshell (1839), 24, Departmentof Rare Books, Library of Congress.

65 Osmond Tiffany Jr., The Canton Chinese; or, The American’sSojourn in the Celestial Empire (Boston: Monroe, 1849), 271.

66 Ibid., 70–71.

Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay 71

not fictitious creations, but faithful realities. Thebridge shaped like a truncated triangle on Chi-nese plates we actually saw.’’67 Unlike CommodorePerry, who did not visit Honam Island, Tiffany wit-nessed a Chinese garden and thus could report theexistence of a place that corroborated the imageson ceramics. Thanks largely to this experience, heleft China with none of the disenchantment thatwould characterize Perry’s reaction several yearslater. After all, he had visited the real China andseen magical Cathay with his own eyes.

Though diplomatic matters occupied the com-modore during his stay in China, one member ofhis expedition found the time to embark on a tourbefore the American steamships embarked forJapan. In 1853, Bayard Taylor, the most celebratedtravel writer in antebellum America, was able tovisit several of China’s largest coastal cities because,after the Opium War, the Treaty of Nanjing (1842)made such excursions possible by opening up addi-tional ports to foreign intercourse. In Shanghai,Taylor visited a famous ‘‘Tea Garden,’’ and, to helphis readers visualize the sight, he made referenceto a familiar image. The garden resembled the ‘‘old-fashioned plates of blue Liverpool ware,’’ Taylorwrote, alluding to the potters’ term for printed wares(named after the city where the process of printingon ceramics was invented), ‘‘with a representationof two Chinese houses, a willow tree, a bridge withthree Chinamen walking over it, and two crows inthe air.’’ Though Taylor loathed China in general,he nevertheless considered a Chinese garden to be‘‘a fair sample of what is most picturesque inChinese life.’’68

Like the three travel writers—Mayer, Tiffany,and Taylor—traders also described the gardens assplendid, strange, and enchanting. Only the pe-rennially glum Sword could express negativity afterhis visit to the gardens of Houqua, referring to hishost as a ‘‘miserable looking old wretch’’ and thegardens as ‘‘arranged in very bad taste.’’69 Exclud-ing Sword, the other traders who visited HonamIsland reached a consensus. Written accounts byWilliam Wood, Charles Manigault, Samuel Shaw,

William C. Hunter, and Bryant Parrott Tilden, justto name a few, indicate that they all fell under thespell of Chinese gardens. Tilden even referred tohis visit to the gardens of Paunkeiqua as ‘‘one ofthe most happy days of our lives.’’ And upon re-turning to the foreign factories at the end of theday, he was besieged by curious ‘‘yankees’’ who allwanted to know ‘‘where I had been, and what I hadseen.’’70

Not surprisingly, later in the nineteenth cen-tury, when a few well-off Americans were fortunateenough to visit China, they arrived with shan shuiand willow patterns deeply etched in their mem-ories. The tourist Walter Boles, who visited Cantonin the 1860s, immediately drew the connection be-tween Chinese gardens and images on ceramicswhen confronted with the former. Viewing thegardens at the Temple of Longevity, Boles wrote,‘‘They reminded me forcibly of the old-fashionedwedgewood [sic] ware, known as the ‘willow pat-tern.’’’71 As the century progressed, the relation-ship between Chinese gardens and the famouspattern changed; what had been viewed as a co-incidental resemblance became, in travelers’ ac-counts, direct causation. Francis Clark, who touredChina in the 1890s, claimed that a specific gardenin Canton had actually inspired the willow pattern:

Let us go into the Guild Hall of the tea merchants . . . weare especially interested in a little garden behind theGuild Hall, for, from this garden the famous willowpattern was copied, which is found upon the blue chinaware of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Theoriginal tree which gave it its name has died, but theother features are the same which have been perpe-tuated so many scores of millions of times, on the platesand cups and saucers and teapots and teacups, which, inthe olden time, were treasured by the mothers and handeddown to the daughters with such scrupulous care.72

Where did Clark get this notion? She got it fromthe Cantonese tour guide who organized and led

67 Ibid., 166–67.68 Bayard Taylor, India, China, and Japan (New York: Putnam,

1859), 330. Another traveler responded in similar fashion to thetea gardens of Shanghai: ‘‘The area is traversed in all directions bybroad canals of stagnant water . . . and crossed by zigzag woodenbridges, of the willow pattern plate-model’’ (Special Correspond-ent of the London Times, ‘‘Manners and Customs of the Chinese,’’New York Times, January 4, 1858, 2).

69 Davis, ‘‘The American China Trade,’’ 243.

70 William Wood, Sketches of China: With Illustrations fromOriginal Drawings (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1830), 92–94; JaneGaston Mahler, ‘‘Huguenots Adventuring in the Orient: TwoManigaults in China,’’ Transactions of the Huguenot Society of SouthCarolina 76 (1971): 12; Quincy, The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw,179; William C. Hunter, The Fan Kwei at Canton before Treaty Days,1824–1844 (London: Kegan Paul, 1882), 40; Walter Jenkins, BryantParrott Tilden of Salem, at a Chinese Dinner Party (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1944), 17, 23.

71 Walter Boles, ‘‘A Day in Canton,’’ Appleton’s Journal of PopularLiterature, Science, and Art, July 23, 1865, 108.

72 Francis E. Clark (president of the United Society of theChristian Endeavor), Our Journey around the World (Hartford, CT:Worthington, 1894), 172.

72 Winterthur Portfolio 41:1

her tour. ‘‘We were exceedingly fortunate on ourarrival at Canton, in finding the best guide it hasever been our good fortune to secure,’’ Clark wrote.‘‘Mr. Ah Cum, Jr., deserves to have his name em-balmed in history.’’73 Ah Cum Jr. belonged to anenterprising family that had dominated the sight-seeing business in Canton since 1858 and wouldcontinue to do so well into the twentieth century(the father and founder of the company, Ah Cum,had taken Boles around Canton three decadesearlier).74 Quite possibly, the tour guides from thisfamily had listened repeatedly over the years toforeign tourists exclaiming that Chinese gardensbore a striking resemblance to the willow pattern,which the tourists erroneously attributed to Chi-nese potters. After a while, the family perhaps de-cided to enhance their tours by making the falseclaim that a particular garden had served as themodel for the famous pottery design. If so, touristsmust have relished the opportunity to step inside athree-dimensional version of the famous patternthat their mothers had used to entertain them inchildhood.75

Even if the Ah Cum family did perpetrate thisrather benign hoax, the falsehood involved was mi-nor. By tracing back the line of influence, one cansee that Chinese gardens did in fact shape the wil-low pattern, albeit indirectly, through the intermedi-ary of landscape painting. Though most ceramicsexperts agree that the actual willow pattern sprangfrom the mind of an English pottery designer inthe late eighteenth century, this individual was at-tempting to imitate the popular shan shui land-scapes found on Chinese ceramics. The Chineseceramics painters responsible for these designshad borrowed extensively from the long tradi-tion of landscape painting in China; they em-ployed the same artistic conventions and possessedthe same view of humanity in relation to the nat-ural world. Continuing the chain of influence,landscape painters in China historically played alarge role in the development of Chinese gardens

since wealthy men often hired landscape paint-ers to design their private gardens. For these proj-ects, the artists would implement the same artaesthetic, conventions, and motifs that animatedtheir paintings.76

Even when the man-made paradise was com-plete, the interaction between the pleasure gardenand the landscape painter did not cease because thefinished garden might then attract another painter,who would use it as inspiration for his own land-scape painting. In this way, the three Chinese artforms—ceramics, paintings, and gardens—developedtogether and ultimately influenced the English pot-tery industry. Painters designed gardens that be-came the subject of later landscape paintings;ceramics painters transferred these paintings ontoa ceramic surface; and, finally, English potters stud-ied Chinese ceramics in order to develop designsfor their own plates and bowls. Ah Cum’s family, itseems, had not really lied after all.77

Though American traders were probably un-aware of the centuries-old cross-fertilization thatresulted in shan shui and willow patterns, their vis-its to the private gardens of the Hong merchantsstrongly affected their overall outlook on China.These luxurious gardens were the only part of Chinanot related to international commerce that traderssaw with their own eyes. Probably, most of themknew better than to believe either that these gar-dens were microcosms of China itself or that thevast interior of the country resembled on a largerscale these marvelous cultivated landscapes. Thatbeing said, a garden was no less true to Americantraders in the sense that they perceived it as beingpristine Chinese culture distilled to its purest es-sence, a bastion of Oriental splendor that broke upthe monotony of their purely mercantile existencein the foreign factories. In sum, American trad-ers might not have punctured the vision of Cathayheld by their countrymen because they saw onlya tiny portion of China that was unadulterated bycontact with the West—and what they saw wastruly spectacular. Or to put it differently, if a po-tential customer in Salem held up a ceramic platein the company of a merchant and inquired whetheror not one could find such an enchanting scene inChina, the merchant’s answer was an emphatic‘‘yes.’’

73 Ibid., 164–65.74 See advertisement placed in Cook’s Tours, a sightseeing guide

published by Thomas Cook & Son: ‘‘The oldest Guides to the Cityof Canton are the AH CUM FAMILY who, for three generationssince 1858, have conducted nearly all the Principal Visitors withperfect safety through the mazelike labyrinth of that most curiousbut fascinating City.’’ Though undated, the guidebook probablyappeared just after the turn of the century (Travel Pamphlets,B.E.I. n.c. 1–4, New York Public Library).

75 Even today, guides at a Chinese garden in Shanghai,reputed to have been in existence since the sixteenth century,make the same claim to tourists (Quintner, Willow! 126).

76 Julia B. Curtis, Chinese Porcelains of the Seventeenth Century:Landscapes, Scholars’ Motifs and Narratives (New York: ChinaInstitute Gallery, 1995), 20; Siren, Gardens of China , 3.

77 Keswick, The Chinese Garden , 91, 101.

Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay 73

Ceramics in the Colonial Revival

Toward the end of the century, profound changesin China and the United States altered how ceramicswere marketed to Americans and how the latter per-ceived them. In the decades following the Civil War,the United States entered a period that saw tech-nological progress, rapid industrial growth, large-scale immigration, and urban expansion. Takentogether, these developments transformed whathad been a largely agricultural nation into an eco-nomic and military power. China also felt the onsetof modernity, though often with tragic consequences.Two devastating midcentury wars with the British,the First Opium War (1839–42) and the resump-tion of hostilities (1856–60), concluded with termsunfavorable to China. Among its many concessions,the Qing government ceased to challenge the il-legal importation of opium, virtually guaranteeingthat opium addiction would plague the populationwell into the twentieth century. The treaties end-ing these wars also required China to demonstrategreater openness to the West, thus ending almost acentury of near seclusion.78 Increased openness,however, hardly meant that China would enjoyequitable relations with foreigners; rather, avariciousforeign powers assumed control over many ofChina’s ports, waterways, markets, and natural re-sources. In many parts of eastern China, one startedto see Christian missions, vast mining projects, tele-graphic systems, and complex rail networks. Theincreased visibility of foreigners on the Chinesecountryside precipitated a surge of xenophobia,which culminated in the 1890s with the rise of a vio-lent, antiforeign movement—the Boxers United inRighteousness. When the Boxers laid siege to theForeign Legations in Peking (Beijing), an inter-national relief force composed of units from theWestern powers and Japan was hastily assembled.This force marched to Peking, where it succeededin crushing the Boxers and saving the Legations. Inthe summer of 1900, the unfolding drama pro-vided by this conflict dominated newspaper head-lines in the United States.79

The second half of the nineteenth centuryalso brought large-scale Chinese immigration in theUnited States. In the 1830s, New Yorkers had viewedAfong Moy as a charming and exotic visitor from astrange land; in stark contrast, Californians were

far less welcoming to the thousands of Chinesewho arrived over the course of three decades follow-ing the discovery of gold in 1848. Though Americanopinions of Chinese immigrants varied consider-ably, a majority employed a set of cruel stereotypesin describing the despised newcomers. In the pub-lic imagination, the Chinese became an inassimil-able race of rat-eating opium smokers who took jobsfrom hardworking white laborers. In the 1870s,anti-Chinese sentiment gathered national strength,eventually producing the Exclusion Act of 1882,which barred Chinese laborers from entering thecountry.80

It hardly needs to be stated that, by the cen-tury’s end, the colorful exoticism and charmingromance that had once enveloped China in West-ern eyes had evaporated. To continue to placecredence in the land depicted on ceramics nowrequired a deliberate act of self-deception because,in the public discourse, China had become knownmainly for its excessively large population, horriblefamines, technological backwardness, unwanted im-migrants, and hostility to foreigners. Given this seachange in American perceptions, the last thing onewould expect to find at century’s end is a greatermarket for Chinese and willow-patterned ceramics.Yet that is precisely what we do see.

Starting in the 1890s, the Colonial RevivalMovement, with its focus on America’s past, helpedspark the renewed popularity of ceramics. Far frombeing an aesthetic or elitist movement isolated fromthe American mainstream, the Colonial Revival canbe best understood as a response to the aforemen-tioned economic and demographic forces reshap-ing American life: immigration, industrialization,urbanization, and their concomitant social prob-lems. Indeed, as Alan Axelrod has written, we can-not dismiss the Colonial Revival as ‘‘the provinceof the idle rich or the fantasy of the acquisitiveparvenue’’; rather, the ‘‘cultural myths and idylls’’of the Revival emerged as an ‘‘urgent response tothe social stress and crisis’’ of the period that manysaw as threatening. Though colonial architecturestood at the center of this national retrospectivemovement, the Revival’s objective to study, pre-serve, and celebrate the past affected other areas ofculture: museums, the restoration of historic homesand gardens, the decorative arts, sites of publichistory, and material culture.81

78 Spence, The Search for Modern China, 158–64, 179–82.79 Diana Preston, Besieged in Peking: The Story of the 1900 Boxer

Rising (London: Constable, 1999), 175–85; Spence, The Search forModern China, 231–35.

80 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston: Little,Brown, 1989), 14, 99–112.

81 Alan Axelrod, ed., The Colonial Revival in America (New York:Norton, 1985), ix–x.

74 Winterthur Portfolio 41:1

For many collectors of material culture, Chi-nese and English ceramics figured prominently intheir plans. But as they engaged in extensive scav-enger hunts for old ceramics, they sought not onlyto locate the objects themselves but also to recoverthe folklore that surrounded these pieces. In otherwords, they very much coveted the imaginativework undertaken by women of the past, who hadconjured a Cathay in their minds and told fancifulChinese tales of forbidden love to their children.

One collector, Alice Morse Earle, contributedto the Colonial Revival by writing several books onAmerica’s past. She also had a penchant for col-lecting old household ceramics, a hobby she de-scribed in her book China Collecting in America(1892).82 Earle was especially attracted to old im-ported Chinese ceramics because these seemed topossess a tantalizing aura of rich exoticism. Thatthe real China was engulfed in turmoil in the 1890sdid not bother or even interest Earle in the slight-est. Nor was she at all interested in learning aboutChina as it really had been in the early decades ofthe nineteenth century—when many of the cher-ished plates and bowls had arrived in Americanports. Rather, her interaction with ceramics in-volved recapturing, as accurately as possible, theperceptions and sensations of past Americanwomen as they bought, handled, and playfullycontemplated ceramics from China: What exoticsmells did those women enjoy? What romanticstories did the pieces inspire? In what sorts ofimaginative role-playing games were these piecesthe props?

To answer such questions, Earle attempted torecreate the scene on the wharf of an Americanport city as residents purchased ceramics directlyfrom the merchants who had recently weighedanchor. There one could watch ‘‘the strange pictur-esque foreign sailors, barefooted and earringed,’’removing ceramics from crates with their ‘‘bronzedtattoed hands.’’ Purchased in this fashion, thepieces seemed steeped in the mysterious and exoticcultures of the Orient. That ‘‘old blue Canton,’’Earle wrote, must have ‘‘savored to the fair buyers’’of the ‘‘far-away lands and foreign sights’’ and‘‘the magic and mystery of the sea.’’ Describingone of her own pieces, Earle used her imaginationto speculate that it had once held ‘‘heathenishedibles—sharks’ fins, birds’ nests, puppies’ tails,and other unchristian foods.’’ Though the strangefoods repulsed Earle, they simultaneously delighted

her because their exotic foreignness lifted her tem-porarily out of the quotidian world. Indeed, usingold ceramics to enjoy a brush with an imagined Chi-nese culture gave Earle tremendous pleasure. Towhile away the dull hours of the day, she inventednarratives that explained the various elements ina ceramic design: ‘‘I have woven about it . . . anArabian Nights romance of astonishing plot andfancy.’’ Along with inventing stories, Earle went sofar as to project herself into an Orient of her owninvention. After learning enough of the Chinesewritten language to read the characters on herceramics, she conferred upon herself mandarinstatus: ‘‘I too belonged to what is in China the rul-ing class, the literati.’’83 In this way, Earle en-gaged in creative role-playing, using ceramics toinsert herself in China’s male-dominated ‘‘rulingclass.’’84

Earle used old ceramics as a portal to America’smaritime past. Her writings on Chinese ceramicswere consistent with the goals of the Revival be-cause they did amount to an act of historical pre-servation: she sought to reproduce not the historyof the old China trade so much as the imaginativegames that Chinese ceramics were able to inspirein their female beholders. Of course, past Amer-ican women had engaged in such activities at a timewhen very little was known about the real China.One might say that this dearth of knowledge pro-vided them with poetic license to fashion their ownmythic China. In contrast, Earle’s intellectual proj-ect required intentional ignorance—the deliber-ate erection of a mental barrier that could blockout readily available knowledge. Her enjoyment ofpast myths entailed the erasure of present facts.

Though a lover of Chinese ceramics, Earle wasless fond of the willow pattern, admitting that shefailed to grasp its popular appeal.85 In holding thisopinion, she was not alone. In 1903, another col-lector, N. Hudson Moore, wrote that ‘‘of all dis-couragements which a china collector has to meet,’’the ‘‘inevitable willow pattern, which every Englishpotter made at one time or another, and which is asplentiful as blades of grass,’’ occupied a high posi-tion on his list. ‘‘It is worth next to nothing, butowners of it hold it at the very highest market

82 Alice Morse Earle, China Collecting in America (New York:Scribner’s, 1892), 193.

83 Ibid., 186–87, 191–93.84 Oleg Grabar, in his essay ‘‘Roots and Others,’’ wrote that

Americans used their concept of the Orient to ‘‘acquire, for how-ever short a time, another personality or another experience’’ (inNoble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930,ed. Holly Edwards [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,2000], 9).

85 Earle, China Collecting in America, 132.

Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay 75

price.’’ Moore added that his negative view of thewillow pattern reflected the consensus among col-lectors, most of whom ‘‘devoutly wish’’ the pattern‘‘had never been invented’’ at all.86 Writing later inthe century, Warren Cox expressed his con-tempt for the pattern, stating that it epitomized‘‘the utter dearth of aesthetic consciousness.’’ Coxalso despised the willow legend and its variousiterations, which he disparagingly referred to as‘‘the maudlin stories wrought about it to pleasethe sentimental old ladies.’’87 To collectors, thisartistically bankrupt yet annoyingly mass-producedpattern amounted to little more than a ceramiccliche.

Cox, Moore, and Earle were reacting (some-times emotionally) to the willow pattern’s resur-gent popularity around the turn of the century.New department stores such as John Wanamaker’sin Philadelphia and New York featured willow-patterned crockery in its advertising and promo-tional materials.88 So too did A. A. Vantine’s, aNew York–based mail-order firm that specialized inAsian imports such as tea, silks, fans, screens, andrugs.89 In 1905, the Buffalo China Company be-came the first American pottery to produce willow-patterned ceramics; its success prompted numerousother companies to follow its model.90 Evidenceof the pattern’s spreading fame even appeared onstage. In 1897, vaudeville audiences in New Yorkwere treated to a ‘‘Willow Pattern Plate,’’ a musicalshow in which costumed singers performed beforea backdrop of scenery inspired by the famous de-sign. The ‘‘Chinese musical fantasy,’’ as it was called,was still being staged as late as 1913. The very nextyear, one could see another theatrical productionentitled ‘‘Romance of Willow Pattern.’’91 As thecentury progressed, the willow pattern held its placein the popular imagination. In 1931, Walt DisneyStudios released a short animated film called ‘‘TheChina Plate,’’ which brought motion to the static

willow pattern. The film begins with a stationarywillow plate and then proceeds to take viewers in-side the imaginary Chinese world it depicts. Clearly,Americans living in the new century were exhibitingfresh fondness for the old pattern.

Though most collectors expressed disdainfor the famous pattern, Ada Walker Camehl, theauthor of The Blue-China Book (1916), was not amongthem. Very much a part of the Colonial Revival,Camehl placed her hunt for old ceramics withinher larger mission to access America’s past. ‘‘Theknowledge of a bygone period of our nation’s his-tory,’’ she claimed, ‘‘can be acquired from thepleasant study of old blue china.’’ She described,for example, the thrill she experienced when shefollowed a lead that was supposed to yield an oldwillow platter but which instead brought her faceto face with a blue platter bearing the inscription,‘‘Landing of General Lafayette.’’92 While lookingfor physical examples of willow ware, Camehl hopedalso to find and preserve the folklore attached tothese objects. Recognizing that the willow legendhad been transmitted orally from mother to daugh-ter over several generations, she endeavored to com-mit it to paper. In her book, the legend is recordedin two forms, as a narrative and as a nursery rhyme:

So she tells me a legend centuries oldOf a Mandarin rich in lands of gold,Of Koong-Shee fair and Chang the good,Who loved each other as lovers should.How they hid in the gardener’s hut a while,Then fled away to the beautiful isle.Though a cruel father pursued them there,And would have killed the hopeless pair,But kindly power, by pity stirred,Changed each into a beautiful bird.

Like any retelling of the legend, these verses wereclearly designed to be repeated in the presence ofwillow ware because they point out the various ele-ments in the pattern that correspond to specific mo-ments in the story: ‘‘Here is the orange tree wherethey talked, / Here they are running away, / Andover all at the top you see / The birds making lovealways.’’93

Camehl attempted to record the facts aboutthe willow pattern so as to dispel the ‘‘surprisingamount of ignorance or half-knowledge’’ encirclingit. Though a noble objective, she inadvertently con-tributed to the misinformation. Most important,she claimed that the willow legend was an old

86 N. Hudson Moore, The Old China Book (New York: Tudor,1903), 13, 59.

87 Warren Cox, The Book of Pottery and Porcelain (New York:Crown, 1944), 768–69.

88 John Wanamaker advertisement, New York Times, September19, 1898, 4. See also the undated trade catalog for the JohnWanamaker Firm, Catalogue of Crockery, China, Glassware, Lamps,Winterthur Library, Rare Books.

89 Vantine’s Catalogue (New York: Vantine, 1914), WinterthurLibrary, Rare Books.

90 Quintner, Willow! 187–88.91 ‘‘Theatrical Gossip,’’ New York Times, March 15, 1897, 7;

‘‘Vaudeville,’’ New York Times, December 21, 1913, 5; ‘‘TheatricalAssociation Presents ‘Romance of the Willow Pattern,’’’ New YorkTimes, January 24, 1914, 9.

92 Ada Walker Camehl, The Blue-China Book (1916; repr., NewYork: Dover, 1971), xvii–xviii.

93 Ibid., 287.

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Chinese story that, in the 1780s, reached the at-tention of Thomas Minton, who promptly createdthe pattern to illustrate it.94 Camehl was not theonly source of factual error, as far as the willowpattern was concerned. Amy Carol Rand, in anarticle for The Modern Priscilla instructing womenhow to design table linen using the willow pattern,wrote that the pattern was Chinese in origin.95

In addition, the aforementioned Buffalo ChinaCompany misinformed potential customers in itscatalog for 1905, the year its line of willow waremade its debut: ‘‘The legend illustrated by theBlue Willow ware decoration is centuries old. It orig-inated in China and forms a love story so alive withhuman interest that it never grows old.’’96 Finally,the owners of willow-decorated ceramics also mud-died the truth so as to enhance their pleasure. Inthe following poem, we can see how the erroneousattribution of Chinese origins to both the willowpattern and the willow legend could imbue anotherwise quotidian meal with romance:

My Willow ware plate has a story,Pictorial, painted in blue,From the land of the tea and the tea plantAnd the little brown man with a queue.

Whatever the food you serve, daughter,Romance enters into the feast,If you only pay heed to the legend,Of the old chinaware plate from the East.

The poem concludes with the following stanzas,in which the two Chinese lovers, appropriatelyenough, fly to the west:

They flew toward the western heavenThe pretty Koong Shee and her ChangOr so says the famous old legendFrom the land of the Yangtze Kiang.

I wouldn’t be one to deny it,For the little blue dove and her mateForever are flying togetherAcross my Willow ware plate.97

In sum, thanks to a confluence of interests amongcollectors, consumers, and sellers, some of themyths and factual errors associated with the willowpattern acquired credibility around the turn of thecentury. Collectors, eager to record the folkloreof past owners, mixed fantasy with fact in their

published works. Present owners, delighted by theChinese appearance of their ceramics, enjoyed be-lieving that these had come from a distant and ex-otic land (‘‘Romance enters into the feast’’). Andsellers, cognizant of the pleasure afforded by falseChinese origins, had an economic incentive to en-dorse old myths.

Ceramics in Home Decorating

Certainly, we can view the Colonial Revival as be-ing partially responsible for the revitalized interestin ceramics because the movement encouragedAmericans to explore the material culture of theirnation’s history. Also contributing to ceramics’ re-surgence was a concurrent fad in interior decorat-ing that emphasized the foreign and, in particular,‘‘the Oriental.’’ This international aesthetic did notemerge by accident; rather, we can link it directlyto the global ambitions of the United States nearcentury’s end, expressed through the nation’s com-merce, empire building, and missionary efforts.With the country expanding its role in world affairs,the flow of images, information, and objects enter-ing the United States from foreign places grew to atorrent, meaning that Americans now enjoyed manydiverse ways to experience foreign cultures: museumexhibits, paintings, photographs, missionary writ-ings, and world fairs. In keeping with this trend, itbecame fashionable to furnish one’s home employ-ing non-American motifs and objects, a decoratingstyle that Kristin Hoganson has called ‘‘Cosmopol-itan Domesticity.’’98 With its international orienta-tion, Cosmopolitan Domesticity could not have beenfarther removed from the inward-looking and na-tionalistic Colonial Revival. Yet the two understand-ably overlapped one another in the area of ceramicsimported from China.

As much as any other retailer, Vantine’s, whichcalled itself ‘‘The Oriental Store,’’ catered to womenattracted to this new vogue for internationally styledhome interiors. For instance, Vantine’s promotedits store in New York by claiming that it simulatedthe experience of traveling to Asia: ‘‘When you docome to New York, kindly remember that Vantine’sis the one place above all others that you shouldvisit. . . . It is America’s most intimate point of con-tact with the Far East.’’99 By equating the in-store

94 Ibid.95 Amy Carol Rand, The Modern Priscilla, July 1910, 4.96 Quintner, Willow! 128.97 The poem is undated (ibid., 152).

98 Kristin Hoganson, ‘‘Cosmopolitan Domesticity: Importingthe American Dream, 1865–1920,’’ American Historical Review 107

(February 2002): 59–60, 65.99 Vantine’s Catalogue (1914).

Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay 77

experience with travel to Asia, Vantine’s offered asophisticated version of the marketing strategy con-ceived by tea merchants and the Carne brothersback in the antebellum period. Yet Vantine’s oweda debt to the past in other ways as well, especially inits encouragement of imagined interaction withthe Asian exotic.

For those who could not visit the store in NewYork, Vantine’s offered extensive mail-order ser-vice. In its catalogs, the company encouragedfemale shoppers to use their imaginations to en-joy fanciful encounters with Asia. By doing so,Vantine’s revived the same sorts of storytelling androle-playing that had infused women’s past inter-actions with ceramics with so much amusement.However, one key difference separated women’simaginative activities of the past from those of thepresent: whereas past women had largely inventedtheir own fun, they now found themselves on thereceiving end of an Oriental fantasy dictated by adistant company. The first page of the 1917 catalogannounced, ‘‘This Book Brings the Offerings ofthe Orient to Your Door,’’ and presented a coloreddrawing of an imaginary scene that takes place on awharf. Indian, Chinese, and Japanese merchants,all decked out in their native costumes, present anAmerican woman with the finest productions oftheir countries for her inspection. As she regardsthe goods, the Asians eagerly await her approval(fig. 11). Of course, in reality, one’s mail-order ex-perience amounted to little more than sitting at atable and copying numbers into the appropriateboxes on the order form. And the only costumedman who would present imported goods to youworked for the United States Postal Service. TheOriental exoticism existed entirely in the mind,which is precisely the point. Through its catalog,Vantine’s attempted to produce a pleasurable im-aginary experience, much like Caroline HowardKing’s imagined acquaintance with ‘‘Orientals’’in East India Marine Hall or Alice Morse Earle’simagined mingling with swarthy Asians on thedocks.100

However, in Vantine’s world, not only do strangevisitors appear before female shoppers but alsoshoppers can embark on voyages to strange lands—as long as they follow the catalog’s instructions.One needs only ‘‘to rest comfortably at home inyour easy chair’’ and allow the catalog to carry

you across the Pacific: ‘‘Wander then, in a fancy,through the Orient,—that land of sunshine andflowers, of quaint people and strange customs,—whose products we illustrate on the pages follow-ing.’’101 Of course, one’s wandering was neitheraimless nor unstructured since the tour throughthe Orient was guided every step of the way by thecompany, leading to the inevitable purchasing op-portunity: ‘‘Out of the old, old Orient, with its pic-turesque pagodas . . . and . . . rainbow hues, comesthe inspiration for Milady’s styles for the Springand Summer of 1914 . . . in no country does themode of dress offer such opportunity for original-ity as that of the Mystical Lands beyond the Sea.’’102

Though Vantine’s called this enchanting Asianwonderland ‘‘the Orient,’’ the company’s descrip-tion borrowed from the old storehouse of imagesand myths associated with Cathay. Indeed, theOrient of Vantine’s appears to be little more thanCathay with its geographic boundaries expandedso as to encompass other countries of Asia. And likeCathay, Vantine’s Orient was beautiful, pastoral, andtimeless—an Asian fantasyland that would neverchange.

In the area of ceramics, catalog browserslearned that Chinese production methods had notundergone any change since the eighteenth cen-tury. ‘‘The Gold Medallion China imported by us,’’the catalog for 1914 claims, ‘‘is manufactured inexactly the same manner as that brought home bythe Far Eastern traders of early Colonial days, andits exquisite colorings and artistic designs are morepopular to-day than ever.’’103 While the consumerinspects the goods on the page, word of the recentoverthrow of the Qing Dynasty (1911) never flitsinto her consciousness because the text and the im-ages keep the mind oriented toward the past andtoward the fantasy—away from the present and thereal. Not surprisingly, the company revived the wil-low pattern and bestowed upon it a fictitious Chi-nese origin: ‘‘Everybody knows Canton China—thealways-popular ‘willow’ pattern—with its pagodas,bridges, streams, boats, little figures of men andwomen, and the love birds. A quaint legend has itthat the story depicted on the China tells how.’’The catalog then proceeded to tell a new genera-tion of female consumers a version of the old wil-low legend.104

101 Ibid.102 Vantine’s Catalogue (1914).103 Ibid.104 Ibid.

100 Vantine’s Catalogue (New York: Vantine, 1917), WinterthurLibrary, Rare Books.

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Fig. 11. A. A. Vantine & Co., Vantine’s, New York, 1917, 1. Trade catalog. (Winterthur Library, PrintedBook and Periodical Collection, NK1133.3 V28a TC.)

Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay 79

Conclusions

The new trends in home ornamentation toward theOriental and the foreign helped rejuvenate salesof Chinese and willow-patterned ceramics. Howshould we interpret American women’s renewedinterest in owning objects that either were fromChina or looked Chinese? Hoganson, as she im-plies with her term ‘‘Cosmopolitan Domesticity,’’offers a favorable assessment of the new Orientalisthousehold aesthetic, understanding it as a materialmanifestation inside the home of an internationalorientation within the mind. By purchasing non-American things for their homes, women were bothshowing their ‘‘appreciation of other peoples’ . . .artistic production and cultural attainments’’ andtacitly expressing their faith in the transnationalideal—that is, in a world without borders. She seesthis cosmopolitan outlook as providing a heart-ening counterweight to the tragic nativist impulsesshaping other areas of American life: the lynchingof African Americans and the passage of Jim Crowlaws in the South, rising anti-immigrant sentiment,the exclusion of Chinese laborers, and prevalentviews of white supremacy. In sum, at a time whenmany Americans were demonstrating their insular-ity, chauvinism, bigotry, and provincialism, middle-and upper-class women used shopping and interiordecorating to cultivate a cosmopolitan identity.‘‘American women who sought foreign objects fortheir households,’’ Hoganson writes, ‘‘demonstra-ted an eagerness to be at the receiving end ofcultural transmission. Their decorating efforts canbe read as an effort to transcend the nation, in aneffort to claim the cultural capital that theybelieved their nation lacked.’’105

Hoganson’s argument is compelling andmay hold true for some of the imports adorningAmerican homes. Furthermore, American womenprobably did demonstrate greater internationalawareness in the period she discusses. However, theevidence relating specifically to Chinese ceramicsand goods does not support such a hopeful in-terpretation. A company like Vantine’s understoodthat any awareness of modern China acquired byfemale shoppers was more likely to impair salesthan to bolster them. Though the perception thatChina was exotic and mysterious had enhanced theattractiveness of ceramics in the antebellum era,by century’s end, the public view of China hadbecome a liability as far as the Asian importer wasconcerned. Given the devaluing of China, Vantine’scould only sell Chinese goods by engineering aretrospective marketing strategy, one that em-braced the romantic past while it simultaneouslyeffaced the turbulent present. Though one couldcharitably argue that Vantine’s was benignly partic-ipating in the nostalgia industry, such a claim isproblematic for the following reason: one whopossesses nostalgia for the past is, by definition,keenly aware of a present that not only is dif-ferent from the past but also is in some way lackingin the past’s virtues. Such an awareness of China’stroubles was exactly what Vantine’s worked hard toconceal. Indeed, the company carefully crafted thetext and images in its mail-order catalog so as tohide the real China of the twentieth century be-hind a colorful facade composed of old myths,romantic legends, and pastoral landscape scenes.The sad irony is that the myths, legends, and scen-ery of Cathay—now incorporated into an adver-tising strategy—had formerly emerged out of therich imaginations and geographic curiosity ofAmerican women.105 Hoganson, ‘‘Cosmopolitan Domesticity,’’ 59–60, 75–77.

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