An emperor hits the road

Art that captures the travels of the Chinese emperor Qianlong is on show at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Wang Naizhuang’s Hermit’s Retreat in the Mountain (1988), left, and Bamboo is Essential (2014). National Museum of China

A few years ago, the National Gallery of Victoria devoted a substantial exhibition to the Qianlong Emperor, who ruled China for most of the 18th century, almost as long as his grandfather Kangxi, who had ruled in the previous century, at around the same time as Louis XIV. These were the two greatest monarchs of the Qing dynasty, which was to persist with diminishing ­vitality throughout the 19th century until its final overthrow in the revolution of 1911.

Qianlong felt a great sense of responsibility to carry out the sacred role of emperor in accordance with traditional Confucian ideals, following the example set for him by his grandfather. He was also dedicated to upholding the highest ideals of Chinese culture in literature and the arts. He was himself an amateur painter and a prolific poet and calligrapher.

And yet Qianlong was not actually a Han Chinese. The Qing were a Manchu people, originally barbarian invaders from the north who had, in a familiar pattern, been civilised by the people they had invaded, and by now had grown into the fervent upholders of the culture they had conquered.

Emperor Qianlong’s Southern Inspection Tour (detail). National Museum of China

China had been through this before, with the Yuan, who were Mongols. Persia too had been ruled by the Turkish Seljuqs, the Mongols — in the same period as the Chinese — then again by the Turkic Tamerlane. India had been ruled by Turkic invaders during the Delhi Sultanate, and then the Moguls, though they had already been Persianised, and thus if anything brought with them more sophisticated standards.

In the early 20th century, Sun Yat-sen felt that in driving out the last of the Qing and setting up the Republic of China, he had freed his people from foreign domination.

But in earlier times, before the new nationalism of the 19th century, with its ultimate origins in German romanticism, foreign rule was not a matter of particular concern, because culture and civilisation were more important than ethnicity, and even barbarian invaders would submit to and adopt a superior culture. Perhaps one could even venture the counterintuitive hypothesis that less developed cultures are quicker to assimilate the ways of the more developed when they conquer than when they are conquered.

Oddly enough, though, despite the enthusiastic adoption of Han Chinese civilisation by the Manchu Qing, they did cling to certain traditions of their own, which went back to the origins of their people as tribal nomads. When the emperor travelled through his domain, for example, his innermost military guard were Manchu, as was the manner of encampment, with the ruler’s own private quarters in a very un-Chinese yurt.

Just such an official tour is part of the subject of this oddly mixed exhibition from the National Museum in Beijing, while the other part, almost wholly unrelated, consists of the work of three contemporary painters and calligraphers.

Emperor Qianlong’s Southern Inspection Tour (detail). National Museum of China

In 1751, Qianlong undertook the first of what would end up being six ambitious tours to the southern regions of his empire, matching the six similar tours made by his grandfather. These were huge expeditions, involving thousands of staff, military escorts and other attendants, and taking between three and four months each time. Of course the season for such travel is a vital consideration, and the tours seem to have been arranged, as one would expect, in spring and early summer.

We are fortunate to have a minute visual record of this first expedition in a series of 12 ambitious scrolls (about 154m in total) painted by Xu Yang (c. 1712-77), court artist and the 18th-century equivalent of a documentary maker. Starting more than a decade after the original journey, he spent six years on the original painting on silk, and then started again and spent a further six years producing a copy on paper.

The original set on silk was dispersed more than a century ago (the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has two of them), but fortunately the paper version survives in its entirety at the Palace Museum in Beijing. A facsimile of the first scroll in the paper series, 20m in length, is included in the exhibition, with thousands of figures as well as countless city buildings, shops and inns, streets, bridges, rivers and landscape passages, all defined in an exactingly realistic illustrational style that owes much to Western influence, as is even more evident in the perspectival rendering of the buildings.

No style, in fact, could be more unlike the fluent, free and spare style of classical Chinese ink painting, which is traditionally practised by the amateur poet-scholar. This narrative type of painting, known as gongbi, is on the contrary the preserve of technical specialists. Because much of this scroll is concerned with urban subjects, it is accompanied by another technique known as jiehua, which is the precise rendering of architectural subjects with a ruler.

In classic ink painting, the artist not only takes pleasure in the summary suggestion of forms but tends to leave large parts of the picture area blank, perhaps generally alluding to water or air, but just as much reminding us the act of ink painting is akin to that of writing, and that the picture economically evoked across the page is analogous to the calligraphic poetry that is written, with the same brush and ink, on the same surface.

Gongbi painting tolerates no empty spaces and leaves, as it were, nothing to the imagination. Every part of the picture area is occupied with narrative or anecdotal content, which means that there are secondary and behind-the-scenes things going on throughout the composition.

And every figure, every detail of the setting, must be precisely worked out without leaving the slightest room for ambiguity.

A battle in the wild (1995) by Xiao Lang. National Museum of China

This means that, once again quite unlike ink painting, everything must be underdrawn first, before it can be painted or coloured: every figure standing and talking in the street, the groups sitting and eating in an inn, customers and merchants in a shop, must all be meticulously worked out in advance. Somehow, miraculously, it all fits together and there are no loose ends, no empty spaces or neglected passages.

Here the narration starts from the right and unfolds towards the left. Most of the extent of the scroll is occupied by the procession of the departing expedition, with the emperor himself, riding a horse and shaded by a bearer with a golden parasol about halfway along, riding by crowds who prostrate themselves as he passes.

Further back are guards and attendants of all kinds, and horse-drawn litters with court ladies. In the middle is a particularly huge and sumptuous litter, like a sort of golden cube, carried on the shoulders of 16 bearers and enclosing, safe from public view, Qianlong’s mother, the dowager empress. He was very attached to her and considered it an act of filial piety in the Confucian tradition to include her on his official visits.

Wherever the official procession is passing, the citizens of Beijing are out in the streets, watching respectfully or bowing down where appropriate. The shops and inns are empty at these points. But behind the scenes and further from the main street, thanks to our aerial view of the city, we find that life goes on: people talk, or bargain in shops, or eat, servants gather wood or go about their business.

Ahead of the procession, life continues in shops and inns too, but already coloured with anticipation of its arrival. There are men sweeping the street, and some who look as though they are sieving fresh sand on to the roadway. In between all these ­vignettes, the artist has periodically included the relief of landscape motifs, like trees and rocks.

It would be remarkable to see the full set of scrolls, and interesting to see how the later stages of the grand official tour were handled, for among other things the emperor visited all the ­famous beauty spots of the south that had been celebrated by the classical painters and poets, and usually composed some poem of his own for the occasion. For this was the heartland of classical Han Chinese culture, and the Manchu emperor wanted both to pay homage to these sacred sites and to show himself a worthy heir to the great tradition as monarch, artistic patron, humanist and scholar.

There is a partial digital animation of the enormous scroll on the far wall of the exhibition, but this is really a novelty for those without the patience to look at still images. The rest of the exhibition, if one can call something so disparate a single exhibition, is devoted to three contemporary Chinese painters and calligraphers, each represented by a mini-survey of their work.

The first, Xie Yun, practises calligraphy, an art form to which Chinese is uniquely suited — as are languages whose writing derives from Chinese, such as Japanese and Korean, or Vietnamese before it adopted the Latin alphabet in the 19th century. Other languages can enjoy the elegance of writing — for example Roman inscriptions, or Arabic and Persian penmanship — but it is only when your word is made of pictograms that calligraphy becomes deeply expressive.

On the other hand, for that very reason calligraphy is an art that we in the West can never fully understand unless we know the Chinese language. In the postwar years, some abstract painters rather embarrassingly thought that they could make calligraphic gestures in paint, but of course their marks ­remained vacuous and arbitrary.

But here, even without fully understanding the connotations of Xie Yun’s calligraphy, it is fascinating to see that he takes the characters through an archeological process: to their most primitive and overtly pictorial form as oracle bone writing, then to the first mature but still archaic form that survives as seal script, and finally through the various stages of scribal and literary cursives.

Of the other two painters, Xiao Lang is particularly noted for his spontaneous and organic depictions of flowers, and his sometimes whimsical or humorous birds and insects — especially chickens — which he imbues with a range of quasi-human feelings.

Finally, Wang Naizhuang paints in a style that is a kind of fusion of Eastern and Western modes, using for example a great deal of modelling and shadow that are foreign to classical Chinese painting, and generally in a rather heavy and congested manner, especially compared with the lightness of classical ink painting.

He is nonetheless the most impressive of the three artists in his range and depth, including pictures inspired by ancient Buddhist sculptures, portraits of clumps of bamboo, and above all a range of evocative landscapes, from a path across the mountains into Tibet, based on a visit to the location, to purely poetic views of mountains and streams in which we are invited to imagine ourselves as guests in the hut of a hermit scholar.

The Historical Expression of Chinese Art

National Museum of Australia, until July 28