China’s Hidden Century Looks at the Turbulent 1800s in a Vast Land

Despite sumptuous art, the British Museum tackles too much.

C hina’s Hidden Century is the new exhibition at the British Museum considering history and culture in China from, roughly, 1796, when the Qing dynasty ruled over one-third of all humanity to 1912, when imperial rule collapsed. It’s a good, introductory exhibition drastically condensed from the show’s catalogue, which involved, I’m told, more than a hundred scholars. I learned a lot about a time and place of which, aside from the existence of the Opium Wars and, later, the formidable Empress Dowager Cixi, I knew nothing.

I enjoy pushing myself in new directions. I didn’t take any Asian-art classes in graduate school and, aside from very junior jobs, have never worked at a museum with an Asian collection. China’s Hidden Century is worth a visit, though I’d have done it differently.

An early, and very beautiful, work of art is a map of China painted in eight scrolls in blue ink. It’s from around 1800. Yes, it’s a big country and a huge, unwieldy topic. The exhibition first roots us in a century that had eight emperors and nearly constant, bloody wars. That’s good — not the wars but the method of organization. The emperors claimed universal power over all things spiritual and temporal but over the years saw their power contracted and corrupted. European business and military incursion created alternative sources of authority and enrichment. The ultimate diva was Cixi (1835–1908), who was the consort of one emperor and regent for her son and, later, her nephew, whom she, as an old woman, effectively deposed.

Cixi was younger than Queen Victoria but was her contemporary in durability and presence, and far exceeded her in power. Her embroidered red kimono-style robe with designs of peacock-tail feathers and a swooping phoenix is a showstopper, but, alas, the imperial section is about fashion. I enjoyed hearing a minute-long recording of Cixi speaking in Manchu, Chinese, and English and seeing the giant, grand cloisonné-enamel vases the last emperor gave to George V as a coronation present in 1911, but the intellectual hot pot is a bland one.

There’s a nice section on court dress and opulence bordering on decadence — hairpins with tassels and moving parts such as kingfisher feathers and gold-filigree fingernail guards to protect long, little fingernails.

An instructive section on the military is more about the aesthetics of warfare as a general proposition than uniting art and history. I’d never heard of the White Lotus Insurrection, the Taiping Civil War, or the Sino-French or Sino-Japanese Wars, but these and the two Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion were brutal. The wars over opium showed the British at their worst, even Gladstone, prime minister during the latter portion of Victoria’s reign. The Chinese tried to bar opium-smuggling by the British from India into China, but the British, finding it lucrative, sent warships to protect its drug business.

These wars opened China to the West, not only to Western business but also to Western art and design and to Christianity. The Taiping Civil War between 1851 and 1864 was, up to that time, the deadliest in human history in sheer numbers, with more than 20 million fatalities, and it directly challenged the Qing dynasty by its Christian bent. A painting of the Battle at the Wei River, commissioned by Cixi in the late 1880s, long after the civil war’s end, is impressive in conveying a bloodbath.

I didn’t think I’d be writing about Looty, Queen Victoria’s Pekingese dog, presented to the Queen after British troops sacked the imperial palace in the Forbidden City, but here he is, in China’s Hidden Century as well as in the Wallace Collection’s show of dog portraits.

China’s Hidden Century does a good job staying focused on art, given the sweep of the exhibition. I learned about an art form called bapo painting, which mimics collage, and also about the study of ancient inscriptions, rubbings of ancient bronzes, Chinese artists’ new interest in the natural world, and, of all things, a revolution in commercial publishing. Just these topics alone — innovation in art — would have carried an exhibition.

A section on everyday life was a bit of a laugh, since the curators focused almost entirely on bourgeois fashion — though 90 percent of the Chinese people lived in subsistence-level poverty. A bamboo, palm, and rice-fiber waterproof raincoat and hat was the best they could do. There were a few other things — a dentist’s sign and a cook’s jacket — but the overall subject was how the well-to-do dressed. How young girls’ feet were bound was of interest for its brutality, with broken toes tucked under the soles, making tiny stumps only three or four inches long. A case of detachable collars was a riot of color. Again, a show focused entirely on bourgeois domestic life — done in depth — would have been fascinating.

It ends with a fizzle, alas, so much so that I asked whether there were other galleries, but, no, I’d landed in the satellite shop, which meant the exhibition was over. A chunk of China’s Hidden Century concerns the changing role of women, which would be fine, but there doesn’t seem to have been much material. Women from wealthy families sometimes went abroad to school. The show ends with a woven silk dress belonging to the feminist poet and revolutionary Qiu Jin. From a rich family, she studied in Japan, learned about radical politics, returned to China, and fussed enough to be beheaded in 1907.

I’m not sure she was a consequential figure, and it seemed as though the exhibition ended on America’s 19th century, with the story of the life of Elizabeth Candy Stanton. A very fine person she was but not one driving the Gilded Age’s central plot. Strangely, the collapse of imperial rule in 1912 got only a few lines in the exhibition.

I felt the same way after visiting a British Museum exhibition in 2022 on the art and culture of ancient Peru. It covered half a dozen distinct cultures and hundreds of years. I’d contrast this with an exhilarating BM exhibition a few years ago on Rodin and the Parthenon sculptures. It was the first time some of the Parthenon sculptures were moved from the Tate’s Duveen Galleries for a temporary show. Now, mostly, the BM seems to be focused on survey exhibitions that drive paying visitorship.

China’s Hidden Century is a sumptuous show, taking into account the royal robes and accessories, warrior portraits, and mid-century art. The catalogue considers these and many more topics in greater detail. I think Cixi could have carried an exhibition on her own, delicious and diabolical as she was.

On another front, a couple of weeks ago, British newspapers broke the story of the biggest theft in the history of the British Museum in London and, in sheer numbers, the history of the entire country’s museums. Two years ago, an antiquities dealer with a stellar reputation told Jonathan Williams, the BM’s deputy director, that a gigantic theft of little things was under way. They were from the ancient jewelry collection, mostly, and the dealer had spotted them on eBay. Through plumbing the depths of PayPal, he thought the vendor was Peter Higgs, who, until he was fired over the summer, was a senior antiquities curator at the museum.

He also alerted Hartwig Fischer, the director. Fischer first outright spurned the charge and then told the dealer that after “a thorough investigation,” as Fischer described it, “there is no evidence to substantiate the allegation.”

Now, Fischer’s out the door. He was last seen with the Little Old Bird Woman, murmuring something about “tuppence a bag.” Williams announced he was “stepping back” as deputy director. Stepping back where? His credibility has already fallen off a cliff.

A bad inventory system and sloppy security made the theft possible, but why the obfuscation? I’ll tell you. In 2021, Greek demands for the return of the sculptures of the Parthenon — the Elgin Marbles — escalated and sharpened. The last thing the bigwigs at the BM wanted was bad news, news about careless management, news about antiquity thefts, and news pointing to the curator in charge of, drumroll, the Elgin Marbles, of all things.

Williams was once the curator of Roman and Celtic coins at the museum. He knows about tiny objects and how easy it is for them to go missing. Hartwig was a curator before he became director of the museum system in Dresden and, in 2016, the first director of the British Museum who’s not British. Both might be high-end scholars, but they’re also bureaucrats, and at a level where bureaucrats, especially in capital cities, are very political. They tried to squelch news of the theft and keep it a dirty little secret. The curator said to have raided the vaults, now fired, was a colleague of Williams. When it came to a mate, he might very well have looked the other way.

Bureaucrats at their level care most about how they look, in London and in Washington. Do we think Comey or McCabe at the FBI or Dr. Tony the Phony care about making our lives better or safer? They care only about their personal turf.

I hope culture potentates everywhere take note. The British Museum has just launched a £1 billion capital campaign, the biggest fund drive in the history of British museums and now subverted by its biggest theft.

On a happier note, the British Museum announced this week that it’s sending 500 objects from its ancient Egyptian collection for Pharaoh, an exhibition next year in Melbourne. It will cover 3,000 years of Egyptian culture. That’s very, very thin ice, if either Egypt or Melbourne have ice. And I thought 100 years of Chinese culture was overreach. How much can the public possibly learn, or even absorb, from so sprawling an exhibition? I count good intentions, though, and the BM is supporting the Commonwealth.