Americans such as George Washington and Phineas T. Barnum had embraced Chinese things and ideas to “suit their own agendas" ⁸

The first known Chinese woman Afong Moy arrived in the United States aboard the Washington as valuable cargo in 1834.⁹

Merchants Francis and Nathaniel G. Carnes with Captain Benjamin Obear acquired Afong Moy from Guangzhou, China to exhibit her with Chinese decorative merchandise goods for eager American middle-class consumers. The story is not clear due to China’s insulation and the confinement of Chinese women at the time - newspaper accounts and promotional materials explain that Obear reached an agreement with Afong Moy's “distinguished citizen" father "residing in the suburbs of Canton (Guangzhou)." Obear received "large sums of money," from Moy's father to take her out of the country with the promise to bring her home on the captain's next voyage to Guangzhou.¹⁰ However, there is no historical record that Afong Moy ever returned to China. 

The Chinese woman hidden from society equated to fantasy and mysterious ideas from Chinoiserie objects in Americans' collective consciousness. In patrician orientalism, the Orient was a place of exoticism, dignity, and revered history.¹¹ The Carnes took advantage of this perception and promoted Afong Moy as a beautiful eminent lady with a focus on her visual difference - her bound feet and clothing. ¹²

The Carnes opened the public exhibition displaying ancient Chinese artifacts alongside Afong Moy with everyday Chinese imports to advertise them to the middle class. Additionally, an accompanying exhibition catalogue featured the exotic personification of Afong Moy. Promotional materials highlighted images of Afong Moy seated on a raised platform to indicate royalty in order to entice the public to view a person of prestige. Her fame quickly spread with the US tour not only through her presentations but also in newspaper articles, children’s magazines and inspired poems. ¹³

Exhibit of Persons

Human exhibit appearances were common as amusements and curiosities during the 19th century. Moy's appearances are not especially different in the context of other human exhibits of the time. In 1810 Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman, one of the "Hottentot Venus," was put on display in Europe. In the US, similiar presenters included Chang and Eng Bunker known as the Siamese Twins, Black Hawk, a warrior and leader of the Sauk Tribe, and Joice Heth, an African-American slave woman who was billed as George Washington's 161-year-old enslaved nurse and the oldest living woman.¹⁵
During the 19th century, polygenesis was a very popular and widespread belief among naturalists, doctors, and ethnographers. The visual ordering and hierarchy of racial identity contributed a profitable piece in commercializing the spectacle.¹⁸ This is noticeable in the descriptions of persons on display such as Afong Moy in the identification of her as "a specimen of oriental magnificence." The description on the juxtaposition of Chinese women's bound feet and African women's calves reduced them to body parts. Science and spectacle were interdependent activities.¹⁹

Her ladyship has been imported expressly as a 'lioness,' for exhibition. The feet of the Chinese are fair, are the points of beauty, as the calf of the leg is with the belles of Africa
-New Hampshire Patriot, November 24, 1834²⁰

Merchant Philip Hone in his description of Afong Moy’s 1834 appearance described her as a figure on a Chinese decorative object with no intellect: 

Her appearance is exactly the same as the figures on tea chests a large Head, small features and a countenance devoid of expression . . . from want of Education . . . she is deficient in ideas.²¹

The association of Afong Moy with an inert image on a tea chest displays the typical opinion of the period. Most Americans envisioned the Chinese from illustrations on their tea chests, china ware, fans, lacquer, or wallpaper.²²Men in the audience tended to obsess on her small feet, as “anatomical fascination, moral disgust, or erotic pleasure.” Women were intrigued with her feet, but equally drawn by the Chinese home furnishings and decorative objects. Men and women both intently consumed her performance but for very different reasons.²³
One writer was positively enamored by Afong Moy: 

At length her ladyship . . . presented herself in the rich costume of a Chinese lady—an outward mantle of blue silk, sumptuously embroidered, and yellow silk pantalets from beneath the ample folds of which peeped her tiny little feet, not over four inches in length. . . . Her head has a profusion of jet black hair, combed upward from her fine forehead and brunette temples, and filled on the top with bouquets of artificial flowers and large gold pins, which dress we suppose will be henceforward quite the ton. . . . Her features are pleasing, her forehead high and protuberant, and her face round and full with languishing black eyes placed with the peculiar obliquity of the outer angle, which characterizes the Mongolian variety of the human race. . . . She then walked without seeming difficulty to her cushioned chair . . . and there sat in . . . quiet repose for us to gaze at.²⁴

It was odd "to find a mainstream newspaper in the 1830s offering this much graphic description of a young female form. Of course, he could justify his suspiciously thorough physical description by pointing out that the extreme rarity of a Chinese person in America - and a lady, no less - demanded that extreme attention be paid to detail. Despite his scientific-seeming insight that the ‘peculiar obliquity’ of her eyes ‘characterizes the Mongolian variety of the human race,’ his interest in the Chinese Lady was almost certainly erotic in nature. Yet by camouflaging his mildly pornographic description in the garb of ethnographic observation, he could elude moral censorship.”²⁵

Afong Moy functioned simultaneously as entertainment and enlightenment. The audience visually consumed her presence for their own thoughts and desires, no different than material possessions.

The Chinese Museum

Following the lucrative marketing campaign of Afong Moy's exhibition, trader Nathaniel Dunn published Ten Thousand Chinese Things in 1838 to accompany the opening of his Chinese Museum in Philadelphia. Shortly after the Treaty of Wangshia signing in 1844, the treaty members opened the Boston Chinese Museum, facilitating the political agenda to promote trade with China. The museum contributed imaginary narrative fantasies and aggrandizement of China to publicize Chinese commodification under the guise of cultural education.²⁶The treaty offered new access to Chinese goods specifically for a growing American middle-class population.²⁷

The museum promoted the idea that “the Chinese had achieved a high level of cultural, if not artistic, production that clearly raised them above the primitive.” The collection contained paintings, porcelain, musical instruments, everyday material goods, and life-size wax sculptures of Chinese figures robed in imperial dress. The owners also hired two Cantonese men, Le-Kaw-hing and T'sow-Chaoong. They dressed in "native costume" and served as interpreters, played instruments, sang and demonstrated calligraphy.²⁸
The museum was well received and attracted many visitors. It relocated to New York City and P.T. Barnum took over the museum in April 1850. He installed a Chinese lady, Pwan-Ye-Koo with bound two-and-a-half- inch feet in the "Chinese Family.” The act drew crowds and went on tour, while the museum later closed.²⁹ Characteristic of Barnum's promotions, controversy surrounded the origins of the family's performers. He had reported the family arrived on the vessel Ianthe from Guangzhou in April 1850, however none of the members were on the Ianthe’s passenger list. It was reported that Pwan-Ye-Koo was born in New York City and the child of a Chinese father and Caucasian mother and reported in the newspapers. An observer also overheard Pwan-Ye-Koo speaking in a “low Yankee slang.”³⁰ Furthermore, Soo-Chune, who was a musician with the family, had actually arrived in Boston six years before 1850 and worked as a musical performer alongside T’sow Chaoong at the Boston Chinese Museum under the name of Le-Kaw-hing. This may all be very plausible. Chinese and Chinese Americans in the 1850s had limited options for employment, but the theatrical arts were open to them. Both Chinese and American-born men and women presented their racial differences and lived and worked under terrible conditions.³¹

Changing Perceptions

Barnum knew the "Chinese Family" attraction would work, as he had already profited from the commercial market for Orientalist exhibitions a few years earlier. In 1847 the Chinese junk Keying from Hong Kong welcomed visitors for the price of twenty-five cents to view Chinese objects in glass cases with “almost everything produced or used in the Chinese empire.” The Keying advanced commercial orientalism³² and Barnum jumped on the opportunity to bring Afong Moy back to the public. However, for Afong Moy’s return, Barnum promoted her identity much differently than in the 1830s.The Keying’s public promotional pamphlet described the Chinese people as “false and faithless, trifling and shameless.”³³

From this period until the early 1850s, Afong Moy performed under contract with Barnum. She shared the exhibition space with another Barnum performer, Charles Stratton, known as Tom Thumb, the famed American dwarf for several years. The promotional pamphlet deviated from the earlier portrayal of Afong Moy and the Chinese with connections of enlightenment, royalty and prestige. Instead the description claimed “’her appetite for fancy goods, finery, and gold had induced her to escape China with her ‘advisors’ for the riches of America.’" Barnum invented a completely new origin story for Afong Moy in which her American presence was of her own free will. The pamphlet continued to describe her disparagingly as “vain, conceited, prideful, and shallow" and “reads little or nothing, as a very limited degree of education is bestowed on women in China, a few accomplishments making up the sum total of their intellectual training.”³⁵

This unfavorable depiction of Afong Moy differed from the admiration of Tom Thumb with his large personas of Frederick the Great and Napoleon. The text noted Tom Thumb with worthy qualities of humor and wit. This intentional comparison with Tom Thumb mocked Afong Moy and affirmed the West’s superiority over the inferiority of China.”³⁶

Barnum's representation of Afong Moy added to the larger anti-Chinese sentiment in America due to the aftereffects of the Opium War and the increasing competitive labor environment. Prior the war, Americans recognized China as a powerful nation with a long-standing civilization. The press shifted popular opinions when it reported quite the opposite in its coverage on the war with Britain's subsequent successes. Americans now viewed the West as the stronger, dominant power over China, and thus the Orient - the East.³⁷ Around the same time, the number of Chinese immigrants along the West Coast increased in the late 1840s due to economic opportunites in the possible discovery of California gold and the rise of the American contract labor system. The Chinese labor populations were steadily increasing and American resentment started to form over job competition.³⁸ Disdainful rhetoric with negative characterizations of the Chinese spread rampant. This popular derogatory poem typified the new sentiment of mockery towards the Chinese in 1845:

Mandarins with yellow buttons, handing you conserves of snails; Smart young men about Canton in Nankeen tights and peacocks' tails. With many rare and dreadful dainties, kitten cutlets, puppy pies; Birds nest soup which (so convenient!) every bush around supplies.³⁹

Barnum’s exhibits combined the fetishism of racial difference and physical abnormality.⁴¹

As demonstrated with Afong Moy, Barnum commonly illustrated his subjects’ racial inferiority through the juxtaposition of performers. He easily promoted racist and othering ideas onto the masses with this ploy, as already constructed in printed discourse on racialized bodies of the period. Barnum did not view them as persons, but specimens without any intellectual ability fitting his fabricated racial categorizations for profit.⁴²This view changed with the presentation of two Chinese performers, Chang (Chang Yu Sing, Chang Woo Gow) the Giant and Che Mah, the Chinese Dwarf, in the early 1880s. Typical performances of Chang illustrated what Robert Bogdan has identified as the aggrandized mode. This aggrandizement emphasized the performer’s cultural or intellectual achievements rather than the physical abnormality.”⁴³

A Barnum advertisement described Chang as "the Chinese Giant, not the ogre of Fairy Tales, but [a]Gentleman, Scholar and Linguist-the tallest man in the world." 

To tarnish Chang’s Chinese image of kindness and intelligence, Barnum promoted him juxtaposed to another Chinese performer, Che Mah, the Chinese Dwarf.”⁴⁴ Che Mah

is cunning, crafty and a diplomat, whose tact and ingenuity have been a source of great annoyance and bloodshed to his government. In Western China, on account of his diminutive physique and superior erudition, he became an oracle and was WORSHIPED AND SET UP AS A GOD! whose commands became law among his fellow men. Recognizing the threat represented by Che Mah's power, the emperor declared him a rebel and sent an army against him.⁴⁵

Barnum labeled Che Mah as a sneaky, untrusting and dangerous Chinese man. The message of Che Mah with the Chinese reinforced the current anti-Chinese sentiment: the Chinese could not be trusted and with any agency, they will become dangerous. While the circus still promoted Chang’s intellectual traits, it stressed more dominantly his racial and physical differences. At an 1884 Ethnological Congress he was exhibited as "The Goliath of His Race and the Tallest Giant Alive" and led the circus opening with the Ethnological Congress into the big top.”⁴⁶

Chang also led the inaugural procession for the Barnum Circus in 1886, as seen in the Barnum Budget or Tent Topics of The Season of 1886 route book:

Barnum sensationalized and reduced his performers to their race and body, deliberately strengthening notions of white supremacy to the audience. Chang commanded top dollar of the time from Barnum for his performances, at $500 a month.”⁴⁷ Chang recognized his valuable attraction in circuses and exhibitions and it is most likely he was aware of Barnum’s tactics. However, it did not deter him from the industry. Even at retirement, he returned to the circus as a guest in London, as reported in the Gleanings at Olympia During the Winter Season of 1889-90, in London, England, with P. T. Barnum's Greatest Show on Earth route book:

The negative perception of the Chinese increasingly grew more widespread within America’s popular culture in the concluding half of 19th century well into the 20th century, not only projected through the circus, but in all forms of entertainment and media.