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• 1 2021-04-22T08:18:51-07:00 American Orientalism: Objectification Through Chinoiserie 87 plain 1074437 2023-03-28T19:12:50-07:00 Before the Chinese migrated 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. Many in society during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, held notions of China without ever being in the country or forming relationships 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 considered exotic from Asian countries. Europeans often did not try to distinguish between motifs and styles from different non-Western cultures. “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 Asia or what Europeans think Asian cultures should be. The Chinoiserie style disseminated widely and became embedded in European culture.²
  
  In early eighteenth century America, many leaders of the American Enlightenment including Benjamin Franklin admired and respected the isolated Chinese civilization and valued 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

  
  
  Prosperous Americans aspired to continue aristocratic fashionable trends from Britain and Europe, which included importing Chinese products such as 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 and indicates his fondness 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 imports and philosophy “patrician orientalism.”⁶
  
  
  Starting early nineteenth century, a craze developed for things from China in America: shoes, jewelry, silks, porcelain, china, textiles, umbrellas, tea and 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 became more widespread. 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