Lukas Nickel

Prevailing conceptions of China’s self-reliant growth to a major power in East Asia are mainly rooted in the fact that the written transmission both of China and of western Eurasia contains hardly any information on interaction with other Eurasian polities before the late 2nd century BC (Nickel 2020). In recent years this belief has increasingly been challenged by the results of archaeological research, which point towards rather intense contacts between China and Hellenistic Bactria, the Maurya state in India, and other states further west especially during the late 3rd century BC (Barnard 2004, Nickel 2013, Shao Anding 2019). The hotspots where most material outcomes of such communication can be observed are not situated in the border regions of the Chinese empire, but in the centres of the Qin and Han, the capitals Xianyang and Xi’an. The first clearly traceable interaction between China and its Asian and European competitors likely took place under direct imperial patronage and supervision. This case study is to investigate the archaeological indicators of inter-imperial links during the emergence of the Chinese empire in the 3rd and 2nd century BC. It aims to examine the usage of specific means of imperial propaganda such as monumental public inscriptions in stone, the employment of public and politically charged sculpture, and the adoption of novel crafts and technologies such as stone masonry and advanced lost-wax casting. By utilising expertise embedded in the COE on Central Asia, India, the near East, Europe and Egypt, it will compare such evidence of interaction across Eurasia, in order to re-shape established perceptions of Ancient China and its place in the wider world.

Since the discovery of the sea route from Europe to India and China, Chinese and East Asian commodities increasingly became available in Western Asia and Europe. Lacquers, soap stone objects, paintings and textiles first entered collections were treated as exotic valuables and since the late 17th c. began to be joined with local products in Chinese taste to decorate complete rooms, thus shaping a new and distinct environment as a backdrop of elite activities. The practice was extremely widespread. Within the borders of today’s Austria alone more than 30 such rooms are still extant (Berger 1995, Krist and Iby 2015 and 2018). For the French, Dutch, British and to some extent the German context the widespread employment of ‘Chinoiserie’ has variously been explained as a superficial fashion, as reference to notions of colonialist aspirations and cultural superiority, or even as a criticism of the contemporary European religious divisions (Sloboda 2014, Porter 2014, Holländer 2018, Menne 2018). For the Habsburg realm that had little direct trade links and no means to establish itself as a colonial power in East Asia the reasoning behind its preference for Chinoise design for crucial imperial spaces is more difficult to fathom; none of the patrons and designers involved ever vocalised what the reference to China meant for them. The project will investigate Chinoise spaces in the Habsburg territories and pursue the significance it entailed in the imperial representation.