Video Transcript:

The Ch'ing Dynasty was China's last great traditional Dynasty. It lasted from 1644 until 1912. And it was a period, like that of the Yuan before it in the 14th century, of foreign rule. In this case the Manchus came down from the north and conquered the country. But like the Yuan, their cousins before them, they also incorporated China's system of governance into their own. The bureaucracy was kept pretty much intact, Beijing was maintained as the capital city, the dragon throne continued with much of its standard iconography just as before.

They were enamored of Chinese culture and the best of the Ch'ing, the early Ch'ing emperors especially took great care to study Chinese history, Chinese literature, they learned how to speak Chinese and write Chinese and they were major patrons and collectors of the arts. The court sponsored a great deal of lacquer and cloisonné, temple building, silk production, porcelain especially was popular.

There was a trickle down effect in court taste of fine decorative arts, to an aristocratic level of consuming fine arts as well, like jade and lacquer and porcelain which were used throughout wealthy Chinese households during this time. And if we could define a kind of court taste which was large and somewhat pompous and made for public display because it represented the strength of the dragon court, we could talk about an aristocratic taste in which the items were finely crafted, the materials often very precious, like jade or lacquer or cloisonné.

There's also a third case that grows out of China's aristocracy or upper class which we might term scholars' taste. Now scholars were aristocrats but they had a different taste in terms of what they collected, they were also major artists, they were poets, they were the writers, they wrote books, they collected old books. They were students, they were Confucian trained and Taoist trained adepts. They loved nature and the idea of their taste somehow evoking nature or making a reverence, or a reverential tilt of the hat toward nature, can be found throughout what it was they used and collected in their daily life.