Images of the Canton Factories 1760–1822

Reading History in Art

Paul A. Van Dyke, Maria Kar-wing Mok

• Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9789888313778
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Hundreds of Chinese export paintings of Canton trading houses and shopping streets are in museums and private collections throughout the world, and scholars of art and history have often questioned the reliability of these historical paintings. In this illustrated volume, Paul Van Dyke and Maria Mok examine these Chinese export paintings by matching the changes in the images with new historical data collected from various archives. Many factory paintings are reliable historical records in their own right and can be dated to a single year. Dating images with such precision was not possible in the past owing to insufficient information on the scenes. The new findings in this volume provide unprecedented opportunities to re-date many art works and prove that images of the Canton factories painted on canvas by Chinese artists are far more trustworthy than what scholars have believed in the past.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Tables
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Years of the Co-hong, 1760-1770
• 2. The Opening of Trade and the Debt Crisis, 1771-1781
• 3. Problems with Porcelain
• 4. Ups and Downs of Trade
• 5. Vantage Points, Perspectives and Artistic Presentation
• 6. Rise of the Private Traders
• 7. American Entrepreneurs and the Brief Return of the French, 1800-1814
• 8. New British Factories, Return of the Danes, and the Great Fire, 1815-1822
• 9. The Shopping Streets in the Foreign Quarter
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Foreign Movements between Canton and Macao, 1760-1769
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates