CLOSELY OBSERVED CHINA: FROM WILLIAM ALEXANDER'S SKETCHES TO HIS PUBLISHED WORK

FRANCES WOOD

WHEN Lord Macartney led the first British Embassy to China from 1792 to 1794, he and his entourage travelled largely by boat, even after their arrival in China. They proceeded up the coast in their flotilla and disembarked at the mouth of the Bei river, to transfer to smaller, flat-bottomed Chinese barges for the trip upriver to Tongzhou and only travelled by road for the last twenty miles to Peking. When the Embassy was dismissed by the Emperor just over a month later in early October 1793, Lord Macartney and his party proceeded south by barge along the length of the Grand Canal to Hangzhou. There, the party split, with one group travelling south to Canton (mainly by water) and the others following the river to Ningbo on the coast and the Zhoushan archipelago where their brigs and East Indiamen waited.^ The slow passage along canals and rivers allowed members of the Embassy time to write their diaries, botanize and watch China slip slowly by. William Alexander (1767-1816), the junior draughtsman to the Embassy, made endless sketches and drawings, of which some 870 survive.'^ These, which provided the raw material for the two books of engravings that he published subsequently,^ contributed greatly to the one achievement of Lord Macartney's Embassy, which was the gathering of as much information as possible about China. The fundamental reason for the fact-finding aspect of the Embassy was the urgent need for the East India Company to discover more about the Chinese economy and way of life in order to ascertain her potential as a market for Lancashire cottons and Indian manufactures to redress the imbalance of trade in tea. Lord Macartney attempted to centralize the gathering of information and had 'conditioned with the different persons who went with him to China, not to keep separate journals of what passed, but that each should contribute what he could to a general book which should be revised and published.'"^ Macartney's condition was ignored on a grand scale. Apart from Sir George Leonard Staunton's official account of the voyage, published in 1797, no less than four members of the party published their own memoirs and the Embassy's Comptroller, Sir John Barrow, managed to squeeze two books out of it, though he did wait until after Staunton's account had appeared,^ William Alexander also wrote a diary, with regular entries from Sunday, 23 September 1792: 'Set sail', to 28 August 1793. It was on the latter date that he discovered he would not be one of the party to go to see the Emperor of China in his summer retreat at Chengde but was to be left behind in Peking. 'To have been within 50 miles of the famous Great Wall, to have seen that which might have been the boast of a man's grandson I have to regret forever that the artist should be doomed to remain immured at Peking. '^ From that day, Alexander's diary entries became shorter and less frequent, suggesting that he was compelled to abandon any idea of publishing a written account of the Embassy as he had been denied access to the crucial moment.^ His excitement at the thought of returning to Canton overland from Hangzhou, 'by this decision we shall have a wide field of observation laid open to us' (6 November 1793) was also short-lived, for he was informed that he and Dr Dinwiddie, the 'machinist' in charge of the latest scientific instruments, a diving bell and a hot-air balloon for demonstration to the Chinese court, were to proceed directly to the Zhoushan archipelago and thence along the coast thus 'preventing the exercise of my pencil in passing through such an extent of the country as from hence to Canton myself (7 November).^ When he worked on watercolours of the major events of the Embassy such as the meeting between Lord Macartney and the Qianlong emperor or made drawings of significant scenes or machines, Alexander worked at second-hand, relying mainly on the technical drawings made by Lieutenant Henry William Parish, an artillery officer accompanying the Embassy who drew plans and elevations of the imperial buildings at Chengde and the Great Wall, and possibly to a lesser extent on the amateur watercolours of John Barrow.^ Though his second-hand work on the Great Wall, for instance, is very impressive, Alexander's contribution lay above all in the direct communication of the China he saw from the boats on which he travelled,^*' His views of waterside life, of crowds of villagers and curly-tailed dogs gathered to watch the passage of barges full of foreigners, of rice fields and graves, of buildings and canal constructions like bridges, locks and 'inclined planes' with winches and capstans, offer a unique view of ordinary life in China at the time. His interest in the variety of the clothing, accoutrements and hair-styles of ordinary people, whether young or old, male or female, rich or poor, provides a wealth of detail that was not included in Chinese sources (see fig. i). Such Chinese evidence as there is for the physical appearance of eighteenth-century China occurs in paintings and illustrated printed albums. An example is the Gengzhi tu ('Pictures of Tilling and Weaving'), where the processes of rice production from ploughing to stacking the hay, and the creation of silk cloth from the egg to the loom, are depicted in fine woodblock illustrations. The agricultural scenes are small and intimate and both the rearing of silkworms and the weaving of cloth took place within the courtyard house whose depiction afforded much everyday detail of interest. The baskets, from the flat trays where the silkworms were reared and the small baskets with handles used for collecting mulberry leaves to the large storage baskets for husked rice, are clearly differentiated. The processes of silk production, with the exception of dyeing and tailoring, are depicted as women's work. The (male) tailors cut cloth with large- handled Chinese scissors and squint to thread needles in an open room with a kettle on 99 cn n

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100 a small brazier and teapot and four little cups on a stool beside them. Yet there is much that is missing in such Chinese sources. Clothing and hairstyles are sketchily depicted and uniform; details of shoes are absent, much of the house is hidden and the life of the street not seen at all.^^ Much of the missing material can be found in Alexander's drawings. The small, closely-observed sketches made on scraps of paper as the Embassy's barges drifted on the current or were pulled along canals were his notes of the physical appearance of China and its people. The survival of sketches is of particular importance in the light of Alexander's method of work, for after his return from China he supported himself for almost eight years through the production of illustrations, watercolours and vignettes of 'Chinese' scenes created from combinations of figures, buildings and landscapes seen on the voyage. ^^ He was still producing engravings for publication more than a decade after he left China, by which time the accuracy of some of the combinations was rather doubtful. Alexander's long captions to the published engravings of his work, particularly those in his Costume of China (1805), are as informative as the original paintings. The captions were written from a combination of memory, diary entries and brief descriptions often added to the sketches. Hired to draw for the Embassy yet excluded from many of its most important moments, Alexander's involvement was as tortuous as the history of the Embassy itself. The Directors and merchants of the East India Company had been exercised for decades over the difficulties of trading with China. The restrictions placed by the Chinese government upon foreign traders at the end of the eighteenth century are well known. ^^ Some of them were rehearsed in the East India Company's instructions to Lieutenant- Colonel Charles Cathcart, M.P., in November 1787 as he prepared to lead an Embassy to China. Great Britain...has long been obliged to pursue this Trade under Circumstances the most discouraging, hazardous to its Agents employed in conducting it, and precarious to the various interests involved in it. At Canton, the only Place where His Majesty's Subjects have the Privilege of a Factory... the fair competition of the Market is destroyed by associations of the Chinese, our Supercargoes are denied open access to the tribunals of the Country and the fair Execution of its Laws, and are kept altogether in a most arbitrary and cruel State of depression incompatible with the very important concerns which are intrusted to them as such as one hardly supposes could be exercised in any country that pretends to Civilisation...

Cathcart was instructed to try and obtain ' a place of Security as a Depot for our Goods' and to assure the Emperor of the ' mutual benefits to be derived from a Trade between the Two nations '.^^ Cathcart set off on the frigate Vestal on 21 December 1787 but died of consumption off Java on 10 June 1788. His grave was marked by an elegant wooden headboard made by Julius Caesar Ibbetson, an artist in his suite,^^ and the Embassy returned home. For Ibbetson, named for his caesarean birth in 1759 (which killed his mother), the failure of the Embassy was one of a series of set-backs in his career. Seeing that his son was set

IOI on becoming an artist, his father apprenticed him to a ship's painter by mistake. After painting many hulls and making stage designs and scenery for theatres in Hull and York in his spare time, Ibbetson ran away to London. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1785 and began to attract notice. 'When, in 1788, Colonel Cathcart offered the painter a post as draughtsman in an embassy about to proceed to China, Ibbetson snatched at the chance.'^^ All he had to show for his voyage apart from Cathcart's memorial was a watercolour of False Bay at the Cape of Good Hope, characterized by 'a picturesque roughness of foliage and rustic stuffage adapted from his English landscape style'.^^ Having 'lost a year's work and a year's salary', it is hardly surprising that when his well- connected friends obtained for him 'a similar post on another embassy that was about to proceed to China', Ibbetson was unwilling to take the risk. The place was taken by William Alexander, one of Ibbetson's pupils, a chance selection that was to prove a great success. Despite the fact that he went sketching with Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman and Turner, painters who were transforming English landscape painting,^^ Alexander himself was an observer rather than an innovator. Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote tactfully of Alexander's conservatism at a moment of transformation. His chiaroscuro was correct; his colouring was clear, harmonious and natural, and his figures were grouped with tasteful simplicity; his pencil was dictated by the judgement of a highly cultivated understanding and extensive acquaintance with Art and Nature; seldom indeed striking out any brilliant or novel idea, but uniformly attaining the more useful purpose of representing each individual character to the eye and thus identifying it in the mind of the spectator.^^ The choice of a useful artist who aimed to represent and identify was fortunate. Our view of eighteenth-century China might be very different had Turner or Cotman joined the Embassy.^" Alexander applied his pencil with persistence on Lord Macartney's behalf, despite being the junior of two artists and paid less than half the annual salary of his senior, Thomas Hickey (circa 1740-1824). There is some dispute over the amount of work that Hickey achieved on the Embassy but even the most generous estimate of four pictures hardly suggests activity to match that of his junior draughtsman.^^ According to the diarist Joseph Farington, a close friend of William Alexander and of Hickey's sculptor brother John, Thomas Hickey, unproductive himself, was jealous of the prodigious production of his junior. The Daniell brothers dined with Farington on 28 December 1794, three months after the return of Lord Macartney's Embassy. Possibly guilty of some professional jealousy themselves, they reported that they had met 'the artists who went to China in Lord Macartney's suite' in Canton. 'It appeared that little had been done by them excepting some figures sketched by Alexander.,.It seems that Hickey devoted more of his time to writing than to drawing or painting and Alexander complained that Hickey refused to supply him with paper and pencils when he required them, though a large stock was laid in of which Hickey had the care.'^'^ The choice of Hickey as official painter and paper-keeper probably arose less from an

102 estimation of his potential artistic contribution than from Lord Macartney's preference for congenial friends and acquaintances to accompany him on his long and difficult journey. Though his primary duties were an extended list of those entrusted to Cathcart,"^=* the East India Company also enlarged his suite, so that ^ the Embassy should include men of scientific and artistic attainments, such as to impress the Chinese Court with the high degree of civilization attained in England'.^^ Lord Macartney did indeed take men of attainment with him but they were almost all closely linked. His deputy and Secretary, Sir George Leonard Staunton (1737-1801), was his oldest friend on the Embassy. They had met in 1776 when Lord Macartney arrived in Grenada as Captain- General and Governor of Grenada and the Grenadines and Tobago, where Staunton was a medical doctor and plantation owner and also served as a government official. They endured together the invasion of Grenada by the French in 1779^^ and when Macartney served the East India Company as Governor and President of Fort St George from 1780 to 1786, he took Staunton with him. Staunton took his young son, George Thomas (1781-1859), to China as Macartney's page. John Barrow (1764-1848), Comptroller of the Embassy, was an old friend of the Stauntons and former mathematics tutor to George Thomas whose current tutor, Johann Christian Huttner, was taken on the Embassy in that capacity.^^ Barrow obviously got on well with Lord Macartney for when Staunton suffered an incapacitating paralytic seizure soon after returning from China, Barrow took over as Macartney's secretary on his subsequent posting to the Cape of Good Hope from 1797 to 1798.^^ There was apparent disagreement between Barrow and James Dinwiddie, the 'machinest' or 'astronomer' brought along to demonstrate the latest scientific apparatus, but Dinwiddie was also an acquaintance of Macartney for they had met in Dublin."^ Henry Baring, son of Francis Baring, chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, another old friend of Macartney, acted as assistant secretary to the Embassy""*^ and Thomas Hickey, who spent most of his working life as a portrait painter in India (much occupied with restoring or re-painting portraits that decayed in the heat and humidity), was probably known to Macartney who may have met him in Calcutta in 1785.^*" Barrow later hinted that Hickey was hired out of compassion, being short of work, though he allowed that he was a 'shrewd clever man in conversation', an aspect of the Embassy that appears to have been important to its leader.^^ Whilst Hickey conversed, Alexander drew and painted. The majority of his sketches can be divided into various groups, by theme and also by time. Two sheets of paper, in particular, are firmly fixed in the period of the Embassy yet illustrate some of Alexander's future plans for the exploitation of his Chinese experience. WD 959, f. 65/180 comprises four parts. There are two handwritten lists to the left, one a 'list of my packages', the other a rather oddly romanized list of the names of colours in Chinese.^" There is a central sketch of a Chinese man seen from behind, a very characteristic study of the detail of his robe, sash and crumpled boots. A sketch of an ordinary-looking cat is annotated. 'Miou' is Alexander's transcription ofmao, which means cat, and a Chinese has written a character using a brush, rather than Alexander's pen and ink. The character, also 103 Fig. 2. Alexander's sketch of a cat, accompanied by the wrong character mao^ which means 'animal hair' and is also used as a surname (as in Mao Zedong). WD. 959, f. 65/180 (detail) pronounced mao^ does not mean cat but 'animal hair'. Whichever of the Chinese around the Embassy added the character must have been semi-literate for though it is the wrong character, it is well drawn (fig. 2),^^ A similar sheet is pasted in the same album, f. 28/148. A Chinese official posed for a pencil and wash sketch, seated cross-legged on a stool, smoking a long- stemmed pipe. He wears his official coat with the embroidered badge of rank on his chest and a string of beads. He also wears the black satin hat of an official decorated with a button and peacock feathers. Here, again, is evidence of collaboration with a Chinese colleague for around the figure are pencilled Chinese characters for the court beads (chaozhu), the badge of office (puzi), the red hat button ('The Ball, Red'), the peacock feather (lingzi) and a four-character phrase to the top right which means 'portrait, seated cross-legged'. Below are a couple of characters and small drawings of the animals that appeared on the embroidered insignia of military and civil officials. The pencilled characters have clearly been written by a Chinese in a confident hand that contrasts with Alexander's pen and ink attempt at the peacock feather characters on the left, which is clearly the work of a foreigner. There is the same case of contact and confusion as with the cat. Alexander has drawn a feline outline beneath the character wu which means 'military' and a bird beneath the character for culture rpen, here meaning civil as opposed to military. It would appear, however, that he may have understood whu (in his inaccurate transcription) to mean tiger (hu) rather than 'military' and win (actually wen) to mean 'bird' in a confusion between symbol and meaning (fig. 3).^^ The latter page with its mixture of portrait, characters, transliteration and translations, evidently formed the basis for part of a plate in Alexander's book, The Costume ofChma,

104 Fig. J. Sketch of a Chinese official, who appears in a number of Alexander's later published works. The characters are written by a Chinese with the exception of that in ink to the left of the official's knee. WD. 959, f. 28/148 105 entitled, 'A Mandarin, attended by a domestic'. The domestic, a simple, broad-faced character in a long blue robe with rather sloppy cloth shoes, owes something to a sketch of a rather small, sad-looking gentleman in the same sort of gown with a detachable flap, made around 19 November 1793, and to a watercolour of a man's shoe 'of satin, with thick soles of paper' and a series of small studies of the pouches, purses and sporran-like bags that hung from men's belts.^^ The mandarin is very similar to the figure in the sketch, and the caption to the engraving reveals Alexander's use of the notes that he made at the time.

Though chairs are commonly in use in China, yet the Chinese sometimes choose to sit in the manner of the Turks. The Mandarin, habited in his court attire, is one of the literati, and a civil magistrate, which is known by a bird embroidered on the badge on his breast: his high rank and honour are likewise denoted by the red ball and peacock's feather with three eyes attached to his cap, as likewise by the beads of pearl and coral appending from his neck...On the walls of the apartment Chinese characters are painted signifying moral precepts... It would appear that Alexander traced these characters from his diary, which also contained a long description of mandarin dress seen in the Yuanmingyuan in Peking which helped to inform his caption.^^ At the end of the diary, he included a copy of a four-character phrase described as being 'written on boats and temples', tianfengjing iafig%B.^Bi, where a word for 'peaceful' or 'tranquil' (ttanjing) is combined with wind (feng) and waves [latig). The 'moral precepts' appear to consist of the character for wind, reversed, and part of the character tian.^^ Possibly the most important of Alexander's sketches are those which depict contemporary technology. By far the greatest quantity of material illustrates nautical technology but there are a couple of agricultural references, A beautiful ink and watercolour portrait of an iron-tipped plough drawn at Zhoushan, probably in the autumn of 1793, was included in the album Staunton presented to King George III,^^ and a small pen and ink sketch of the rice harvest in Zhejiang province, probably made slightly earlier, includes a detail of an iron sickle.^^ Alexander observed the personnel involved in moving the Embassy's barges, the trackers hauling ropes, pushing against a form of harness and squatting around a small stove preparing what Aeneas Anderson described as ' messes'.^'^ Though Alexander never wrote about the characteristic resting stance of the Chinese peasant or manual labourer, either squatting comfortably back on his haunches or, if outside his house, perhaps sitting on a tiny stool which achieved the same effect, many of his sketches and finished watercolours include squatting figures,'*^ though in some cases he has them sitting on the ground. One of the best observed figures is a 'tracker regaling' in his late publication Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese (1814), where the position of the figure seen from the back wielding his chopsticks and the angle of upper arm and elbow with the bowl held close to his face are accurate in every way.'*^ Alexander made dozens of drawings and sketches of the vessels worked by trackers and 106 boatmen, from the large, ornate barges of the Embassy or local mandarins and the decorated pleasure boats seen on the lakes of the imperial palaces and Hangzhou. Small, fiat-bottomed boats, some with two oars, others propelled by a single oar at the stern, were used on rivers and canals to ferry passengers and light goods"^^ and longer trips were made by boats with barrel-shaped awnings of straw matting, either rowed or moved under sail with a variety of riggings.'^•^ Alexander included many details of life on board house-boats, from cooking to washing and drying clothes in the characteristic Chinese way of threading poles through both sleeves of jackets and upper garments. Some of the more unusual depictions of life on the river include details that must have been observed on the last stretch of Alexander's journey in China between Hangzhou and Ningbo, The sketch entitled 'Economy of Time and Labour Exemplified in a Chinese Waterman'"*^ could have been made in Shaoxing (which lies between Hangzhou and Ningbo) in the 1980s when watermen still rowed the single oar with one foot in a casual manner, leaving the hands free for pipe and tobacco. Shaoxing's canals were the main thoroughfares, domestic rubbish was still collected by boat and twentieth-century boatmen wore hats of the type sketched by Alexander (WD 961, f. 67/191). The basic form of the black felt hat is a cone: fashions appear to have changed over the centuries for Alexander's eighteenth-century boatman has rolled up a considerable brim on his hat whilst twentieth-century boatmen prefer more of a pudding-basin, Chico Marx style. Alexander was able to draw details of more women's fashions than might have been thought possible. Members of the Embassy, including Alexander himself, were surprised at the number of women who came to see the Embassy pass by for their reading had led them to believe that women were confined to the home. Between Tianjin and Tongzhou, 'the inhabitants... poured from their dweUings... It does not appear that the women are so closely confined, as was expected from the statements hitherto published of this country. For the lower class of females stamped along with their small bandaged feet...'. Upper class ladies were more inaccessible but no less curious, peeping over garden walls, 'so that their heads only are seen, which are generally ornamented with artificial flowers, bodkins etc...'.*' Women's hair and life-styles have changed dramatically in the intervening centuries. In some of his architectural drawings, too, Alexander depicted vanished forms. One was the Leifeng ta or 'Tower of the Thundering Winds' on the banks of the West Lake at Hangzhou. Originally constructed in 975, the pagoda collapsed in 1924. There are a few fuzzy photographs of its last years but paintings by Parish, Barrow and Alexander depict it in more detail and in somewhat better shape although sprouting greenery from its crumbling brickwork. Two rather bad watercolours of the pagoda by Barrow were included in Staunton's presentation album; a version by Parish is known and Alexander made three sketches of the Leifeng ta as well as at least one finished watercolour complete with a huge cemetery below.*^ Another vanished monument commemorated in several finished watercolours is the Pingzhi gate of Peking. Alexander certainly saw the walls and gates of Peking but his 107 depictions of the superstructure of the barbican gate are amongst the most unsatisfying of his paintings from the point of accuracy. Osvald Siren's photographs of the walls and gates of Peking made in the 1920s demonstrate the horizontality of the structures: Alexander introduced a verticality, elongating and pagoda-izing the constructions beyond recognition. The tendency to turn the low flat buildings of northern China into fantastic vertical pagodas with elaborately up-curling eaves was to become almost a standard practice amongst artists and writers depicting or describing Chinese buildings in the subsequent centuries.*^ Though the Pingzhi gate survived to be recorded on photographic plates and most of the eighteenth-century buildings of Chengde still stand, some of the constructions Alexander recorded were never intended to survive. Temporary mat-shed constructions were put up on river and canal banks where officials greeted the Embassy. WD 959, f. 38/22, dated 18 November (1793) depicts 'The place where we received the presents at Ningpo', a mat-shed on the river bank hung with red lanterns, a common form of temporary structure not depicted in any Chinese sources.^"^ Details of daily life that Alexander sketched and which arc still to be seen in China included sellers of tang hiihi on the riverbank (see fig. i).^^ The North Chinese version of toffee-apples, tang hulu, are crab-apples, threaded in groups of five or six on thin sticks and covered in toffee. They were (and are) hawked through the streets in the autumn, stuck into a cloth-wrapped straw bundle on a pole which looks like a bobbly hedgehog. He noted the fine spectacles worn by old men with big butterfly-shaped brass hinges and sketched a pair on 21 November 1793.^^ Such glasses were still in use by the elderly in late twentieth-century China and, with smoked glass against snow glare, sold in the street markets in Lhasa in the 1980s. Like bound feet, an enduring preoccupation of Europeans in China is manure. Alexander depicted two children collecting horse manure on the street in Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese. His caption to plate VIII is^ detailed: The collecting and preparing of manure of various descriptions, and making it up into cakes for sale, occupy a very considerable population of the lowest classes of society, and for the most part is the employment of the aged and children. No agriculturalists, perhaps, understand the value of manure better than the Chinese, and certainly none are so well skilled in the economical distribution of it. It is quite ridiculous to see the avidity with which young children follow a traveller on horseback for the chance of catching what the animal may emit, which is immediately caught up, and thrown into the basket; and if the traveller himself should contribute his portion, it is considered as more valuable than that from the animal. Only fifty years later, as British merchants began to establish themselves in China's treaty ports, manure remained a subject of fascination. At one of the early meetings of the Asiatic Society in Hong Kong (in 1847), one of the settlement's most noted merchants, who had apparently paid great attention to the subject, delivered a lecture on 'Manures used by the Chinese'. For roadside manure collectors in China, despite the

108 rosy cheeks and neat clothes of Alexander's children, life was not always easy: by the 1970s, most draught animals were fitted with nappies, strips of cloth loosely slung beneath their tails so that their owner retained the full benefit of their emissions. Such intimate views of eighteenth-century China, so closely tuned to peasant life two hundred years later, are bound together in the Oriental and India Office volumes with working drawings that reveal Alexander's future plans. It is very unfortunate that the drawings were reorganized, numbered and apparently grouped roughly by subject when they arrived in the India Office in the early nineteenth century for there is, as a result, no coherent chronology and, indeed, no definite indication of when the majority of the drawings and paintings were made. There are exceptions: a very small number of the sketches are dated; some have inscriptions clearly made at the time. Many must have been made on the spot but Alexander's methods of working, the balance between record and evocation, leads to internal inconsistencies. Most of the finished watercolours in Staunton's volume presented to George III have dates on the verso, dates which refer to the day on which the Embassy travelled on the Grand Canal where it runs parallel with the Yangtse or the Poyang Lake (October 1793), rather than the date of production. Amongst the instant sketches, made on the spot in China, are tentative groupings of figures and themes; working drawings that anticipate some of the final engravings seen in Alexander's two published volumes. These may have been made whilst he was in China, or on the long voyage home from 8 March 1794, when they left Macao, to 10 September, when Alexander recorded that he was back in Billingsgate.^^ Though his first tentative groupings of figures and scenes may have been made when the memory was fresh, some may have been made much later, though still based, to a great extent, on the sketches made in China. In some of his later engravings, Alexander's desire to convey the full range of the sights that he saw in China overwhelms strict accuracy. 'A view of a Burying Place' in The Costume of China is a puzzling prospect of the very different tombs found in north and south China. In the left centre ground is a horseshoe-shaped grave, characteristic of the south, whilst there is a clump of unadorned grassy northern grave mounds in the background.^* The association of these forms, together with a clump of English boskage, is a geographical impossibility. Alexander's sketches reveal very separate sources. There are two watercolour sketches of the round grassy grave-mounds of the type commonly seen between Peking and Tianjin, along the route taken by the Embassy in August 1793-^^ Separate sketches depict horseshoe graves, typical of the south. These are often built against hillsides with a central stone and low, curving walls on either side (fig. 4). The southern graves that Alexander sketched are labelled 'Dane's island', which is downriver from Canton.^^ Bound together with these separate sketches, which show exactly what the various types of grave found in eighteenth-century China looked like, are a number of preliminary paintings of funerary landscapes, combining northern and southern burial styles, perhaps produced on the voyage home, perhaps later. One is a wonderfully light-infused wash landscape of tombs, mixing all types and including a dagoba." Alexander's accompanying text to the 'Burying place' engraving side-steps the 109 '. 7.' .V >••

Fig. 4. Southern horseshoe graves near Canton. WD. 961, f. 16A/44-6 no problem of the muddle of northern and southern styles by saying, 'The tombs...of China exhibit a variety of architecture.' A group of figures depicted in The Costume of China also reveals another north-south amalgamation. One wears a fur coat characteristic of the north, one a straw raincoat of the sort worn by peasants in South China well into the late twentieth century; another, in military uniform, shelters with a child under an umbrella. This engraving was the final result of several sketches.'^^ One of the most amusing groupings of figures resulted in two finished engravings, one more lurid than the other. A group of figure studies (WD 961, f. 67A/193 verso, f. 68B/215 and f. 70A/216; figs. 5, 6) show a variety of men in official dress. A man in a black satin hat with a dark waistcoat over his gown bends over a table, watched by one or more others in varying positions. Associated with these sketches are two depicting punishment, one of a man in the cangue, a kind of portable stocks that prevented the wearer from feeding himself, another of a policeman with a prisoner wearing a cangue (WD 961, f. 69B/213, 214). These associated sketches culminated in an engraving showing the writer,^^ bent over his table and a tall figure in a long blue gown with a circular embroidered badge of office standing beside the table pointing his finger at a young lady who kneels before him, her hands bound behind her back. A policeman dressed in red stands behind her. The scene is set in open country with a town dominated by a pagoda in the far distance. The engraving, entitled 'The Examination of a Culprit Before a Magistrate' and with an explanatory caption, 'The subject represents a female, charged with prostitution ... The Secretary... is taking minutes of the proceedings ...', is an entirely imaginary and somewhat sensational vignette formed from original (and unconnected) sketches (fig. 7). The figure bent over his writing table who is shown in a number of the preliminary sketches for the final scene, also appeared in another engraving in the same work, 'A Sacrifice at the Temple'. This depicts a Buddhist monk standing behind an incense burner whilst a man in everyday dress shakes tallies in a vase. Alexander witnessed such a scene in a temple in Macao. 'One Chinese was holding a vessel containing some tallies marked with Chinese characters. This was shaken until one dropped out, this being examined was carefully registered by the officiating priest.'^^ Another participant in this scene of fortune-telling is the figure previously seen bent over his writing table. Here he has been toppled through 90 degrees so that he appears almost prostrate before the incense-burner. In this uncomfortable position, the embroidered purse hanging from his belt has been carefully repositioned (fig. 8). The reuse of this well-dressed figure is reassuring for it shows Alexander, several years after he left China, still making economical use of his original sketches. Other examples of published engravings present complexities of reappraisal. In The Costume of China, one plate showed a Chinese wheelbarrow, a finely observed vehicle loaded with fresh green vegetables, a jar of wine, a basket and with 'implements for keeping the machine in order' neatly stowed (fig. 9). The driver's queue is wrapped around his head to keep it out of the way, a hairstyle that Alexander sketched on several occasions. As is usual in

III Fig. j. A mandarin bent over a writing desk, first sketched on WD 961, f. 67A/193V, is joined here by another figure in official dress. WD 961, f. 68B/215

Fig. 6. In this sketch, which may have been made on the voyage home, a third figure is added to those in fig. 5. The ink caption indicates Alexander was already working towards a dramatic vignette, a 'culprit' before a magistrate. WD 961, f. 70A/216

112 Fig. 7. In the final version, published in The Costume of China (pi. 43), the 'culprit' is now a prostitute. 455.e.9

5. In pi. 25 of The Costume of China the mandarin is incorporated as a prostrate worshipper in 'A Sacrifice at the Temple'. 455.e.9 Fig. g. The well-observed wheelbarrow in The Costume of China (pi. 43), though the Chinese characters at the left of the barrow appear to have been reversed. 455.e.9

Fig. 10. A later version of the wheelbarrow in Picturesque Representations (pi. 14) has been Europeanized. The shoulder strap of the barrowman is, however, an accurate touch missing from the earlier print. 7742.d.8 114 Chinese wheelbarrows, the wheel is under the load but this vehicle has an added sail *to lessen the exertion of the driver... This contrivance is thus described by Milton, in his Paradise Lost^ Book III, line 437 &c, "But on his way lights, on the barren plains. Of Sericana, where Chineses drive, With sails and wind, their cany waggons light".' After this masterful and literary depiction of a Chinese wheelbarrow, it is a surprise to find another wheelbarrow in Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese (fig, 10) where the wheel is in the unergonomic European position (at the front, rather than under the load as in China) and the caption exhibits a failure of nerve, distancing itself from the well-observed predecessor and wiping the Chinese wheelbarrow off the face of the earth: It has long been known that the ingenious Chinese, taking advantage of the constancy with which the wind blows in the same direction, applied a sail to assist the progress of their land carnages; but the late British Embassy has furnished us with the precise manner in which these sails are applied, and it appears that they are meant only to aid a sort of wheelbairow, different however in its structure; that in the present drawing, resembling very much the same machine which is used in the Western world and differing from that which has already been given in a former volume exhibiting the Costume of China.^^ This confusing volte-face suggests that the passage of time left Alexander less sure of his recollections. The second volume of engravings is, on the whole, less satisfying than The Costume of China. A number of the engravings (pis. 11, 12), where figures are depicted without any background landscape, look more like export paintings than Alexander watercolours. Given the lapse in time, perhaps William Alexander or his engravers looked to export albums for inspiration. In the earlier Costume of China, one plate is entitled 'A Chinese lady and her son', where the two figures, elegantly drawn, stand against a low wooded background, characteristic of Alexander's watercolour style. The plate of the same title in Picturesque Representations (plate 10) has lost the dehcate colouring, suggestive of a watercolour original, and the figures are darkly and heavily outlined. They are also depicted inside a building with very unconvincing panelled walls and some completely meaningless attempts at Chinese characters. Similar depictions of a single figure against a lightly sketched Chinese background dominate the style of The Costume of China and include the portrait of a monk with the Potala at Chengde behind him and a very lightly sketched Great Wall vanishing into the mountainous distance. The outer wall of the Little Potala enclosure appears to have been confused with the Great Wall (neither of which Alexander saw himself). However, the delicate painting and engraving and the elegance of the composition leave the whole convincing as a picture of ' China' even if some of the landscape elements have run together. Other examples of recognizably Chinese background elements include the small military post with the grey-tiled roof characteristic of Northern China behind the soldier in a tiger suit; the watery landscape with junks beside the Embassy's Chinese purveyor who wears an unusual fur jacket with half-moon patterns; in the 'Portrait of a Soldier', a pin-sized pagoda is glimpsed in the distance and Chow-ta-zhin, the civil official accompanying the Embassy, stands in front of a fascinating landscape of distant mountains, a lake dotted with junks and a pagoda on a grassy lawn.^^ Several other plates in Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese relate to earlier versions in The Costume of China but have been reworked, and are, like the wheelbarrow, less satisfactory. In plate 6, 'Offering in a Temple', temple deities are represented by curiously human figures, standing on boxes decorated with suns and moons, like circus-performers; there is an inappropriately low kang table, and none of the sense of observation or connection with a diary record seen in the earlier version. In many cases, including that of the children collecting manure, no preliminary sketch in the Oriental and India Office volumes exactly corresponds with the scene and the well- dressed figures, though based on sketches of children observed, seem inappropriate to their task, although the written text is convincing. It is also interesting that no sketch of a wheelbarrow appears in the volumes of sketches either, so in the compilation of this later work Alexander may not have had physical references to hand. Where there is no obvious sketched source, some of this later work must be used with care. Alexander was, perhaps, less well served by his engravers in this later volume. The first plates in The Costume of China were engraved by G. Nicol, who also produced the plates for Staunton's and Barrow's volumes; their engravings are brilliantly coloured and skilfully reflect the original watercolour effect. At plate 37, more than half-way through the volume, the engraver W. Miller of Old Bond Street took over (in 1803) and the plates acquired a softer line and a brownish tinge never seen in Alexander's original Chinese watercolours. The engraver of Picturesque Representations is not acknowledged and a variety of hands appear to have been involved. It could well be that Alexander himself, by then employed at the British Museum as its first Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings, and apparently preoccupied with thoughts of death,^^ may have been less involved in the production of the latter volume.

1 See Aubrey Singer, The Lion and the Dragon: the Drawings in the India Office Library^ vol. ii. Story of the First British Embassy to the Court of Official and Professional Artists (London, 1969), the Emperor Qjanlong in Peking., ijg2~4 (London, P- 372. 1992). 3 The Costume of China illustrated in 48 Coloured 2 The 870 drawings, now bound in three albums, Engravings (London: William Miller, 1805) and are held in the Oriental and India Office Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Collections: WD 959, 960 and 961. According to Manners of the Chinese illustrated in 50 Coloured Mildred Archer, they were 'deposited with the Engravings with Descriptions (London: John East India Company in the early 19th century' Murray, 1814). One of the best collections of and subsequently 'numbered by the Library' watercolours of Chinese scenes can be found and listed in 1832. See Mildred Archer, British in the two dozen paintings included in the ri6 album that Sir George Staunton presented to the children of a man who had gone to visit the George III when the Embassy returned to wall of China. I am serious. Sir.' See James England (formerly K. Top. 116.19-3, now Maps Boswell, The Life of Dr Johnson (London, 1933), 8. Tab. c. 8.). The vivid colours have been vol. ii, p. 193- perfectly preserved. Susan Legouix, Image oj 7 It is possible that Alexander himself, or someone China: William Alexander (London, 1980) and else, did consider publication at some point for Patrick Connor and Susan Legouix Sloman, his diary shows additional material inserted, William Alexander: an English Artist in Imperial taken from Staunton's account among other China (Brighton, 1981) illustrate many water- sources, and critical emendations suggesting colours from different collections. rearrangement, and the handwriting varies con- 4 The brother of the senior artist on tbe Embassy, siderably. See Legouix, p. 8. Thomas Hickey, passed this information to 8 Dr Dinwiddie was another disappointed member Joseph Farington; see Kenneth Garlick and of the Embassy. He did not get the chance to Angus Mackintyre (eds.), The Diary of Joseph give a full demonstration of the range of scientific Farington (Yale, 1978), p. 220, entry for 26 July instruments that he had brought along and 1796. devices like a burning glass and vacuum pump 5 Macartney's valet, Aeneas Anderson, published were dismissed as toys by the Qjanlong emperor a lively and readable book which was, however, himself; see Alain Peyrefitte, VEmpire immobile, disparaged by Barrow, A Narrative of the British ou, Le choc des deux mondes (Paris, 1989), pp. Embassy to China (London: J. Debrett, 1795). 234-6. This was translated into French, ran to a second 9 Alexander's reliance upon Parish, in particular, London edition and two editions in Dublin. has been noted in Legouix, p. 12. One of the Johann Christian Huttner, tutor to Sir George most interesting portraits in the volumes of Staunton's son. Macartney's page, whose Latin sketches is a pencil drawing of the Qjanlong was useful in the complex business of in- emperor by Lord Macartney himself, WD 959, terpretation, published his memoirs in German f. 43/38. Some of the most impressive reworking and they were translated into French: Nachricht can be seen in WD 961, fF. 59/158 and 60/160 von der Brittischen Gesandtschaftreise durch China where Parish's plans, section and elevation (Berlin: Vossische Bucbhandlung, 1797). There 'taken on the spot' are followed by a delicate was also Samuel WoXva^s's Journal of Mr Samuel wash of the Wall by Alexander. He may have Holmes., Sergeant-Major of the Xlth Light used Barrow's watercolours of the Leifeng ta at Dragoons during his Attendance as one of the Hangzhou since it is difficult to determine Guards on Lord Macartney^s Embassy to China whether he saw the ruined pagoda himself. and Tartary (London: W. Bulmer, 1798) and Sir Barrow complicates the picture since he, too, John Barrow, Travels in China (London: Cadell produced a watercolour of the lake at Chengde and Davis, 1804) and Travels in Cochinchina (which he did not visit, eitber); whether Barrow (London: Cadell and Davis, 1806). Staunton's was working from Parish's sketches or from Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Alexander's reworkings is not clear. Great Britain to the Emperor of China, with 10 He frequently included a portrait of himself plates after Alexander, was published by J. Nicol sketching on board a boat; see Connor and in London in 1797. Legouix Sloman, pp. 38, 44-45. 6 William Alexander's diary is in the British 11 Clearly, tbere are many more Chinese illustrated Library's Department of Manuscripts, Add. sources than tbe Gengzhi lu. I would argue, MS. 35174. He refers to one of Samuel Johnson's however, that though animals, vegetables and many rebukes to James Boswell who had technology, as well as individual items of remarked he would willingly go to see the Great equipment, including articles of imperial cloth- Wall of China if he did not have children to ing, for example, are usefully represented, support. Johnson said '.. .by doing so, you would details of clothing as worn, of hairstyles and do what would be of importance in raising your shoes, are lacking. Alexander's interest and his children to eminence. There would be a lustre training were entirely different and offer a reflected upon them from your spirit and useful supplement to existing Chinese illustra- curiosity. They would at all times be regarded as tions. For some further Chinese examples see

117 Frances Wood, Chinese Illustration (London, Hickey. The reassignment is unlikely for al- 1986). though Hickey was a portrait painter by trade, 12 The several dozen of Alexander's finished the tbree other Chinese works attributed to him watercolours in the Staunton album (Maps 8. are all sketches of views vv^hilst Alexander made Tab. c. 8.) include ten depicting riverside scenes at least eight portraits of Wang. One in with boats and curious onlookers. particular, in the British Museum's Department 13 See Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the of Prints and Drawings, is remarkably similar to East India Company Trading to China (Oxford, the engraved frontispiece; see Legouix, p. 46, 1926-9) and John King Fairbank, Trade and and a similar version illustrated on p. 47. The Diplomacy on the China Coast: the Opening of tiger on Wang's embroidered badge of office the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854 (Cambridge, Mass., looks like a spotted dog, a tendency seen in one of Alexander's sketches, WD 959, f. 28/148. 14 See Morse, vol. ii, pp. 160-4. 22 Garlick and Macintyre (eds.). The Diary of 15 On the subsequent Embassy, Alexander sketched Joseph Farington, p. 282. This passage was not Ibbetson's memorial, WD 959, f. 64/178. included in the earlier edition of the Farington 16 B. L. K. Henderson, Morland and Ibbetson diaries edited by Grieg (London, 1922-5). (London, 1923), p. 124. 23 Macartney was to press for free trade at Canton, 17 The picture is in the Victoria and Albert removal of the duties imposed on imports and Museum; see Susan Morris on Ibbetson in The exports '...For the purpose of liquidating there- Dictionary of Art (London, 1996), vol. xv, pp. out the debts due by Chinese to foreign 57-8.^ merchants...', an 'island, a convenient depot... 18 Legouix, p. 17. With the same privileges as were granted to the 19 From the Gentleman''s Magazine, quoted by Portuguese at Macao', access to the interior, Henderson, pp. 140-1. Alexander's sensitivity both to gain access to the tea and silk-producing and skill are perhaps best seen in his English areas (in the hope of reducing the prices of these landscape studies, made under easier circum- commodities), and he was to investigate the stances, often in Maidstone. There are some potential sales of 'British Manufactures'. He examples in Legouix, pis. 71-85. was also to suggest that important trade between 20 Turner painted Italian scenes before he visited the two nations would be made easier by the the country and Girtin painted pictures of presence of a resident Ambassador, preferably Venice without ever travelling to Italy; see located in Peking, like the Russian mission. Richard Dorment, 'Those Splendid Liars: a British merchants were also keen to avoid the new show reveals that Turner and his contempo- imposition of Chinese laws. These were not raries didn't let reality hamper their imagin- necessarily more severe than those of eighteenth- ations'. Daily Telegraph, 18 Mar. 1998, a review century England but enshrined the principle of of the Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition Ttaly common responsibility 'that an innocent man in the Age of Turner'. Despite praise of should be delivered up as a substitute to suffer Alexander for his fidelity to nature, some of his the punishment due to a criminal who may have later efforts, produced over a decade after the found means to escape...', which the merchants voyage, such as the vignette 'Examination of a at Canton did not relish. See Morse, vol. ii, p. Culprit by a Magistrate' (in his Costume of 215- China), involved considerable invention and 24 Morse, vol. ii, p. 215. helped to create a penny-dreadful image of 25 By the ' mean and ungenerous Count D'Estaing' China, see below. who nevertheless invited Macartney to dine th-e 21 The most generous estimate of four pictures same evening. Helen Robbins, Our First Am- includes a reattribution of the portrait of Wang bassador to China (London, 1908), p. iii. Wenxiong, the military official assigned to the 26 Huttner's Latin was eventually helpful in the Embassy, which was used as the frontispiece to chain of interpretation. Though Sir George Sir John Barrow's Travels in China. In the first Staunton had impressed upon Lord Macartney edition of 1804, the original of tbe engraving is the importance of hiring linguists and had credited to William Alexander, but in the second travelled to Naples to enlist four young Chinese edition, the attribution was altered to Thomas Jesuit students, Chinese laws forbidding

118 foreigners to learn Chinese or hire Chinese as 33 The character appears to me to be too fluently they pleased frightened most of them, who left written for it to have been the work of an the Embassy at Macao. Thus, by the time the EngUshman as Legouix suggests, p. 27. Embassy arrived in China proper, most interpret- 34 Quite whose badges these were is difficult to ing had to be done by somewhat hostile ascertain. The presumption would be that they Portuguese or Italian Jesuits, into Latin. As the were those of Wang Wenxiong (military) and Enghsh party were not happy conversing in Qjao Renjie (civil), the two officials who ac- Latin, Huttner was often called upon to translate. companied the Embassy throughout China. One of the young Chinese Jesuits, Jacobus Li or Wang, an officer of the second grade (Peyrefitte, 'Mr Plumb' (for Ii means plum in Chinese) did p. 62) was entitled to the red button and his stay with the Embassy, unscathed. See Peyre- badge insignia was a lion, not a tiger (4th rank) fitte, pp. 114-17,487. or a leopard (3rd rank) which the spotted animal 27 Robbins, pp. 442-7, 452. in many of Alexander's portraits of Wang 28 Peyrefitte, p. 480. Though Dr Dinwiddie's suggests. Qjao, a 3rd grade civil official, was splenetic diary was not published until after his entitled to a blue button and a badge with a death in William Proudf00t-Jardine, A Bio- peacock. See Linda Wrigglesworth, The Badge of graphical Memoir of James Dinwiddie (Liverpool: Rank [exhibition catalogue] (London, 1990), p. Howell, 1868), his quarrels with Sir John Barrow [5], and a very well-observed portrait in The persisted beyond the grave. Dinwiddie's nephew Costume of China., plate [21] where his blue Proudfoot-Jardine also published an attack on button is evident. In this case, however, the Barrow in 1S61 for disparaging the usefulness of vagueness of Alexander's drawings makes firm the scientific demonstrations. An Investigation identification difficult, allied to the fact that, into the Origin and Authority of the 'Facts and though there were regulations in place from 1625 Observations'' in a Work Entitled 'Travels in to determme the animal or bird appropriate to a China'' by John Barrow...preceded by a pre- specified rank, the Chinese were notorious for liminary enquiry into the nature of the 'powerful ignoring regulations; see Verity Wilson, Chinese motive'' of the same and its influence on his duties Dress (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, at the Chinese capital as Comptroller to the British 1986), pp. 24-6. It is not likely that Wang and Embassy, in ijg^ (London: George Philip and Qjao would have been careless about their dress Son, 1861). With the exception of Dinwiddie, whilst on this important mission so it is difficult Barrow seems to have been genial and much- to make a firm identification of the subject. The liked; see Christopher Lloyd, Mr Barrow of the picture is complicated by its eventual use in a Admiralty (London, 1970). published engraving which Alexander described as being of a civil official entitled to wear a red 29 See Mildred Archer, p. 377. button on his hat, which Qjao Renjie was not. 30 Sir Harry Evan Auguste Cotton, 'Thomas Hickey: Portrait Painter' in Bengal Past and 35 The sad man is WD 959, f. 58/145; the shoe is Present (Calcutta, r924), p. 147. WD 959, f. 15/129 and the belt paraphernalia 31 Sir John Barrow, An Autobiographical Memoir are WD 959 f. 48/64. The description of (London: John Murray, 1847), p. 49. footwear is from The Costume of China, plate i. 32 There was at the time no official romanization 36 See Singer, p. 71. system. The only member of the Embassy to 37 Add. MS. 35174. The characters, together with make any systematic study of Chinese was young some pages of flag signals and Lord Macartney's Staunton who learned the language from the note requesting their best behaviour from all 'as Chinese Jesuits during tbe voyage out. Other it was from us few that the Chinese were to form members of the Embassy made their own their opinions of the English character' were transcriptions; Macartney's valet Aeneas bound in the back. The temples on which such Anderson seems to have had the best ear. Their phrases as 'tranquil wind and waves' were transcriptions of the names of people, places and inscribed were probably the group at Macao objects made their way into their published dedicated to A-Ma, a maritime version of the accounts: in tbe case of Alexander, he used some Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara or Guanyin. The of them in the captions to his published rocks on which they are built are covered with engravings. similar inscriptions (and some are described in

119 the Blue Guide to China (London, 1991), pp. Maps 8. Tab. c. 8., f. 86, and for Parish, see 543-5)- Connor and Legouix Sloman, p. 6i. 38 Maps 8. Tab. c. 8., f. 37. 49 See Connor and Legouix, p. 27, and Osvald 59 WD 959, f. 56/135 verso. Beth McKillop and I Siren, The Walls and Gates of Peking (London, used exactly the same sort of small sickle when 1924). It is possible that Alexander only had drafted with other Peking University students to glimpses of the walls and gates since he was help with the wheat harvest in the suburbs of effectively confined in the Yuanmingyuan, be- Peking, 1976. yond the city walls, for the duration of his stay in 40 Aeneas Anderson, A Narrative... (Dublin: the capital. The vertical elongation is strange and P, Wogan et al., 1795), pp. 81-2. somehow orientalizing. The impossible exag- 41 See Legouix, pp. 67, 69, 75 and WD 959, f. geration of the up-curving eaves also makes the 12/63. constructions look more like southern garden 42 Picturesque Representations..., pi. 46. It may be forms than the solid horizontal blocks that they wrong to extrapolate in retrospect; the comfort- were. This verticalizing tendency, unusual in the able squatting position was universal among careful observer, was to continue in the work of peasants in the 1970s. The observation of the Allom; see Connor and Legouix Sloman, pp. angle of the chopstick arm is Proust's madeleine 14-15. Parish had a tendency to emphasize the to me and Alexander at his best. vertical: perbaps Alexander caught it from him. 43 It is well known that Alexander produced many Parish's painting of the Potala at Chengde is watercolours of places that he did not see himself. mucii slimmer and taller than the real thing His view of the great lake at the centre of the which affected Alexander's version (for imperial park at Chengde was based on the Alexander had not seen the building himself); sketches and watercolours made by Lieutenant see Connor and Legouix Sloman, p. 33. Henry William Parish, an artillery officer at- 50 Though matting is still used for temporary tached to the Embassy. Parish made wonderful walling on building sites, its widespread use has plans of events such as a bird's eye view of the ceased. In 19th and 20th century Peking, it was imperial tent and crowds gathered for the common to erect a temporary mat covering over meeting between Macartney and the Qjanlong courtyards in summer to provide shade and there emperor (Maps 8. Tab. c. 8.). In his view of the was a specific guild of mat-shed makers to lake at Chengde, the pleasure boats in the fore provide the service. In Ann Bridge's novel, and middle ground are probably based upon Peking Picnic (Harmondsworth, 1938) there is an those Alexander did see in Peking and at evocative description of the peng or matting Hangzhou; see Legouix, p. 64. cover, pp. 26-7. 44 Legouix, p. 50. 51 Sketched in North China; see WD 961, f. 45 Legouix, pp. V, VII-IX, and 64, 67, 71, 82; and 65A/179 and included in finished watercolours Connor and Legouix Sloman, pp. 37, 40. like f. 2 in Maps 8. Tab. c. 8. and two versions 46 WD 961, f 34/92 and Connor and Legouix of the same scene illustrated in Connor and Sloman, p. 54. Sloman, pp. 58—9. 47 Alexander's Diary, 9 Aug. 1793. Details of 52 WD 959, f. 57/140. women and their clothing and bound feet can be 53 Alexander's diary. One of Alexander's most found in WD 959, f. 10/59, f- 4^/55' f- 57/i4O, striking efforts on the long voyage is the 'Self- f. 66/189, etc. The eternal fascination of bound portrait at Sea' in the British Museum, De- feet led to the inclusion of an engraving after partment of Prints and Drawings; see Legouix, Alexander in Staunton's official account of the plate I. The transparent green silk eye-patch has Embassy; see Legouix, p. 58. been seized upon and attributed to the eye 48 Alexander's drawings are WD 961, f. 18/51, 53 irritation Alexander noted in his diary as he and 54, associated with several studies of travelled to Peking in a convoy of carts along Buddhist monks and a note by Barrow (on the very dusty roads. Conditions would not have verso of 51) describing the pagoda rather been so dusty at sea when he had the time to inaccurately: 'it is built of stone...it is said to work on his self-portrait. Though he recorded have been built before the time of Confucius' the use of a green silk scarf to protect his eyes en (i.e. 5th century B.C.). Barrow's versions are h route to Peking, Patrick Connor's explanation

120 for its use to conceal his bad positioning of the Fang shan. Alexander depicts the white Tibetan- right eye is surely correct; see Connor and style dagoba, characteristic of the fashion for Legouix Sloman, p. 19. lamaist or Tibetan styles in i8th century China. 54 William Alexander, The Costume of China 58 WD 959, f. 12/63, is very similar to the finished (London: William Miller, 1805). A British engraving but there is a version in the British Library copy, 455.e.9, was once owned by Sir Museum which lacks the man and child under Joseph Banks, whose manuscript instructions on the umbrella; see Legouix, p. 49, and several how to collect and care for plant specimens, similar figures in Maps 8. Tab. c. 8. prepared for Lord Macartney, are still in the 59 Costume of China, pi. [43]. Linnean Society collections. 60 Alexander's diary, 12 Jan. 1794. Such fortune- 55 WD 961, f. 51/41 and f. 16A/47. They are telling activities, whether by tally or by dropping known as mantou or 'steamed bun' graves from small fragments of broken ceramics on the their form. temple floor, can still be seen in many southern 56 WD961, f. 16A/44-46. temples in China, particularly in Fujian prov- 57 The eerie landscape is WD 961, f. 13/38, the ince. dagoba and grave mounds WD 961, f. 16A/27. A 6r Picturesque Representations, pi. 14. dagoba is a Tibetan-style stupa, often white- 62 The strange half-moon fur coat is familiar from washed and built as the central construction in a several sketches; see Conner and Legouix Buddhist temple. Examples include the 13th Sloman, p. 73, where the watery background is century Baita si in Peking. Smaller stupas, in identified as Macao. There are many views of miniature pagoda form, had been used for small military posts with their oddly-rigged flag monastic interment since the Tang if not before. pole, such as WD 959, f. 45/45-49. Early examples can be found in the Yunju si at 63 Legouix, pp. 19-20.

121