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Agency through Otherness: Portraits of Performers in Circus Route Books, 1875-1925

China insulation

China retained an insular country, restricted interactions with the outside world, and only allowed Guangzhou to be the Chinese trade port open to outsiders in the mid-18th to early 19th century. China deliberately isolated themselves away from Western countries and did not allow much knowledge to interchange between countries. Much information on China came through to America via Catholic missionaries. These accounts portrayed China as a compassionate autocracy with an elite educated ruling class. - John Haddad, “The Chinese Lady and China for the Ladies.” Chinese America: History & Perspectives, January 2011, 5–19.

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American Orientalism: Objectification Through Chinoiserie Before the Chinese started to migrate to the United States in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans had already formed ideas about the Chinese culture and what they called the Orient. They shaped their beliefs often on imagery from objects imported from the country, travelogues, and other written observations from Westerners. In the 17th – 19th century, many in society held notions of China without ever being in the country or interactions with the Chinese.¹

The market for Chinese goods had grown so much by the seventeenth century in Europe that they began producing their own versions of Chinese designs to meet demand and cost. These versions of Chinese goods are termed Chinoiserie. It is a broad term, encompassing primarily Chinese-inspired designs but also including Japanese, Turkish, or any other motif or combination of cultural designs deemed from the exotic Orient. Europeans often did not try to distinguish between motifs and styles from different Eastern cultures. To many Westerners “the spread of Chinese art…throughout Asia produced a similarity of art styles which, to many Westerners, reflected one cultural pattern and one classification of peoples.” Chinoiserie focuses on how the European objects reflect the Western perception of the Orient or what they think it should be. The Chinoiserie style disseminated throughout the western world and became embedded in its culture.²

In early 18th century America, many leaders of the American Enlightenment including Benjamin Franklin held the insulated Chinese civilization in high regard and admired the Confucian harmony and social order principles.³

Although he never visited China during his lifetime, much evidence exists that he took a great interest in the country and admired its culture and government long before his fictional account from 1786. For example, he published an essay entitled ‘The Morals of Confucius’ in several installments in his 1738 edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin also looked to the philosophies of Confucius when forming his own habits. Franklin’s conception of China and Confucian virtue that inspired his own habits also had an effect upon his peers. Some colonial Americans, such as Franklin and Jefferson, fit their understanding of China within their own Enlightenment worldview. For these persons, Chinese goods and chinoiserie in American homes not only reflected the owners’ desires to keep up with European fashions, but also carried associations with Enlightenment thought.⁴

Americans strived to continue aristocratic fashionable trends from Britain and Europe, which included bringing the taste for the Orient to America with them. Prosperous Americans imported the exotic luxuries such as Chinese tea, porcelain tea services, furnishings, and silk bed curtains both before and after the Revolution. George Washington's residence in Mount Vernon held a wide array of ceramics and Chinese porcelains which is telling of his personal taste for following the popular fashion trend among the American elite. In correspondence with a British trading company, Washington complained about the difficulty of obtaining Chinese items through Britain, "I have been impatiently waiting for my Goods...having heard nothing from you in respect to them since the 12th of September . . . ," Due to the crisis with the British in the 1770s, America adamantly sought its own trade route with China to fulfill their desire to possess Chinese goods.⁵ John Kuo Wei Tchen calls this aristocratic affinity to Chinese goods and philosophy “patrician orientalism.”⁶

Starting early 19th century, a craze developed for things from China in America: shoes, jewelry, silks, porcelain, china, textiles, umbrellas, tea ware, dinner wares. The appeal no longer originated from the aristocratic class, but from the lesser gentry, middle class and the modest consumer. This proved to be a significant change as beliefs about China based on consumption become more widespread in America. The racialized commodities along with writings in newspapers and literature dictated perceptions of Chinese persons. Tchen calls the shift to a populist consumption of Chinese goods “commercial orientalism.” Commercial orientalism does not simply include the commodity of objects and things, but also persons and bodies.⁷