Strategies of Collecting and Displaying China in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Gotha’s Chinese Cabinet

• Applicant: Dr. Emily Teo
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Art History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442207053

The project brings renewed attention to a significant Chinese collection in early-nineteenth-century Germany, the Chinese Cabinet in Gotha, established by Duke Emil August (1772–1822) of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg from 1804 to 1810. Consisting of over 2.000 objects, the Cabinet was a great sensation during the first decades of the nineteenth-century, and was described as the most important Chinese collection in continental Europe. However, following the establishment of national museums across European metropoles in the late-nineteenth century, smaller, regional collections such as the Chinese Cabinet gradually faded from memory. Despite its former fame, this collection is scarcely heard of today. The project argues that the Chinese Cabinet deserves further scholarly attention and takes a micro-historical approach to investigate the historical, cultural and social processes behind its creation. In doing so, this project offers new conclusions about the history of collections in nineteenth-century Germany, German perceptions and representations of China, and the provenance of Chinese objects during the early-nineteenth century. With the material turn and the recent debate about colonial objects, there has been an uptick in the study of foreign objects in European museums. At present, studies on Chinese collections in Europe have taken approaches inspired by postcolonial theory that has mostly focused on the British and French colonial contexts. These studies interpret the nineteenth-century display of foreign objects as a means of creating ethnographic knowledge to promote the colonial message. Meanwhile Chinese collections in Germany, which had their own unique histories, remain largely neglected. Hence, the suggested research project provides an important corrective to current academic narratives on Chinese collections in Europe through considering the German case by a close reading of Gotha’s Chinese Cabinet. Instead of projecting postcolonial narratives onto the collection, the study closely refers to the rich historical sources, ranging from archival documents, to Chinese objects from the Cabinet, and engages with questions of space and display. Through this research, new answers surrounding the nineteenth-century practices of collecting and displaying will emerge, such as aesthetic preferences, aristocratic self-representation, and the networks involved in acquiring Chinese objects. The working hypothesis is that Chinese collections in early-nineteenth-century Germany were indicative of a strong curiosity about China by affluent aristocrats and other passionate collectors who had their own strategies of collecting and displaying objects for the means of self-representation and the creation of new knowledge, which differed considerably from the strategies employed by ethnographic museums in the age of imperialism, later on.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants