A History of the World in 100 Objects (77 page)

When the Qianlong emperor examined this
bi
, he also thought it was very beautiful and was moved to write a poem recording his thoughts on studying it. In his collected poems his
bi
poem is entitled: ‘Verses Composed on Matching a Ding-ware Ceramic with an Ancient Jade Bowl Stand’:

It is said there were no bowls in antiquity / but if so, then where did this stand come from? It is said that this stand dates to later times / but the jade is antique. It is also said that a bowl called
wan
is the same as a basin called
yu
, but only differing from it in size.

While modern scholars know jade
bi
discs are found in tombs but are unsure of their exact use or meaning, the Qianlong emperor didn’t struggle with any doubt. He thinks the
bi
looks like a bowl stand, a type of object used since antiquity in China. He shows off his knowledge of history by discussing arcane facts about ancient bowls and then decides he cannot leave it without a bowl, even if no antique bowl is to be found:

This stand is made of ancient jade / but the jade bowl that once went with it is long gone. As one cannot show a stand without a bowl / we have selected a ceramic from the Ding kiln for it.

By combining the
bi
with a much later object, the emperor has ensured that, in his eyes at least, the
bi
now fulfils its aesthetic destiny. This is a very typical Qianlong, eighteenth-century Chinese way of addressing the past. You admire the beauty, research the historical context and present your conclusions to the world as a poem, so creating a new work of art.

The bowl in the Palace Museum, Beijing, that the Qianlong emperor matched with the
bi

In this case the
bi
itself became the new work of art. The emperor’s musings were incised in beautiful calligraphy on the wide ring of the disc, so fusing object and interpretation, as he saw it, in an aesthetically pleasing form. Chinese words, or characters, are spaced so they radiate out from the central hole like the spokes of a wheel, the very words I have been quoting. Most of us would see that as a defacing – a desecration – but that’s not how the Qianlong emperor saw it. He thought the writing augmented the beauty of the
bi
. But he also had a more worldly, political purpose in making his inscription. The historian of China Jonathan Spence explains:

There was very much a sense that China’s past had a kind of coherency to it, so this new Qing Dynasty wanted to be enrolled, as it were, in the records of the past as having inherited the glories of the past and being able to build on them, to make China even more glorious. Qianlong was, there’s no doubt about it, a great collector; and in the eighteenth century, when Qianlong was collecting, China was expanding. There is a bit of nationalism about his collecting, I think; he wanted to show that Beijing was the centre of this Asian cultural world … And the Chinese, according to Voltaire and other thinkers in the French Enlightenment, did indeed have things to tell Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, important things about life, morality, behaviours, learning, genteel culture, the delicate arts, the domestic arts …

And politics. The Qing Dynasty had one major internal political handicap. They were not Chinese – they came from modern Manchuria, on the north-eastern border. They remained a tiny ethnic minority, outnumbered by the native Han Chinese by about 250 to 1, and were famous for a number of un-Chinese things – among them, an appetite for large quantities of milk and cream. Was Chinese culture safe with them? In this context, the Qianlong emperor’s appropriation of ancient Chinese history is a deft act of political integration, but only one act among many. His greatest cultural achievement was the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, the largest anthology of writing in human history, encompassing the whole canon of Chinese writing from its origins to the eighteenth century. Digitized, today it fills 167 CD-ROMs.

The modern Chinese poet Yang Lian recognizes the propaganda element in the Qianlong emperor’s lyrical inscription on the
bi
, and takes a rather dim view of his poetry:

When I look at this
bi
I have some very complex feelings. On one side I am very much appreciative: I love this feeling of a link with the ancient Chinese cultural tradition, because it was a very unique phenomenon which started a long time ago and never broke, continually developed until today through many difficult times … In that case the jade always represented the great past. But on the darker side, the beautiful things were often used by rulers and powers who had bad taste, so they don’t mind destroying ancient things with bad writing. So they can carve the emperor’s poem on the beautiful piece and also do a little propaganda, which for me is very familiar!

Like his contemporary Frederick the Great, the Qianlong emperor was no master of poetry – he seems to have mixed Classical Chinese with vernacular forms to poor effect. But that didn’t hold him back – he published more than 40,000 compositions in his lifetime, part of his elaborate campaign to secure his place in history.

He was largely successful. Although the Qianlong emperor’s reputation dipped dramatically in the Communist period, it is once again strong in China. And a very satisfying discovery has just been made. As we saw a moment ago, the emperor wrote: ‘As one cannot show a stand without a bowl / we have selected a ceramic from the Ding kiln for it.’ Very recently a scholar in the Palace Museum collections in Beijing found a bowl that carries exactly the same inscription as the one on this disc. It is undoubtedly the very bowl chosen by the emperor to sit in the
bi
.

As he handled and thought about the
bi
, the Qianlong emperor was doing something central to any history based on objects. Exploring a distant world through things is not only about knowledge but about imagination, and necessarily involves an element of poetic reconstruction; with the
bi
, for example, the emperor knows it is an ancient and a cherished object, and he wants it to look its best. He believes it is a stand, and he finds a bowl that seems to be a perfect match – a choice made with his sense of supreme self-assurance that he is doing the right thing. It is unlikely his assumption about the
bi
being a stand was correct, but I find myself admiring and applauding his method.

Why does the whole world measure its time and define its position in relation to the Greenwich Meridian, a line passing through a spot on the banks of the Thames in south-east London? The story begins with the invention in London of a sea-going clock that allowed sailors to find their longitude. The object pictured here is one of those clocks – a marine chronometer made around 1800 – which could keep perfect time even in rolling seas.

During what is sometimes called the ‘long’ nineteenth century, from the French Revolution to the First World War, the countries of western Europe and America were transformed from agricultural societies into industrial powerhouses. This Industrial Revolution generated many others. New technologies led for the first time to mass production of luxury goods: societies reorganized themselves politically at home, while overseas, empires expanded to secure raw materials and new markets. Technological advances also led to revolutions in thought: it is hardly an exaggeration, for example, to say that the whole idea of time changed in the nineteenth century, and in consequence so did our idea of ourselves and our understanding of humanity’s proper place in history.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries clockmaking was a vital European technology, and London was at its cutting edge. As a maritime nation, the British were concerned with one problem in particular: they could make clocks that kept very good time as long as they stayed perfectly still but not when they were shaken about, and particularly not on board a rolling ship. If you wanted to sail, it was impossible to keep a precise record of time. And at sea, if you can’t tell the time, you don’t how far east or west you are. It is relatively easy to calculate latitude – your distance north or south of the equator – by measuring the height of the Sun above the horizon at noon; but this won’t let you calculate longitude – your position east or west.

The problem of accurate timekeeping at sea was finally cracked in the middle of the eighteenth century by John Harrison, who invented a clock – a marine chronometer – which could go on accurately telling the time in spite of fluctuations in temperature and humidity and the constant movement of a ship, thus making it possible for the first time for ships anywhere to establish their longitude. Before a ship set sail, its chronometer would be set to the local time in harbour – for the British this was usually Greenwich. Once at sea, you could then compare the time at Greenwich with the time of noon on board ship, which you fixed by the Sun; the difference between the two times gave you your longitude. There are twenty-four hours in the day so, as the Earth rotates, every hour the Sun apparently ‘moves’ across the sky one twenty-fourth of a complete circle of the globe – that is, 15 degrees. If you are three hours behind the time in Greenwich, you are 45 degrees west – in the middle of the Atlantic. If you are three hours ahead you are 45 degrees east – on the same latitude as Greenwich, you would be somewhere south-west of Moscow.

Harrison’s chronometers were pioneering, high-precision instruments made in tiny numbers and affordable only to the Admiralty. It was not until around 1800 that two London clockmakers managed to simplify the chronometer mechanisms so that virtually any ship – and certainly the larger ships of the Royal Navy – could carry them as routine equipment. Our object is one of those lower-cost chronometers, made in 1800 by Thomas Earnshaw. It is made of brass and is around the size of a large pocket watch, with a normal clock dial showing roman numerals and a smaller dial at the bottom for the second hand. The clock is suspended inside a swivelling brass ring fitted to the inside of a wooden box – this is the key to keeping the chronometer level even in an unsteady ship. The geographer Professor Nigel Thrift assesses the background:

The chronometer is the pinnacle of a long history of clockmaking, and it is very important to realize that clocks have been around since 1283 in England. Everyone talks about Harrison and the fact that he was a genius. He was, but you have to understand the innovative efforts made by hundreds and thousands of clockmakers and general mechanics that, in the end, produced that object. Gradually, all of those things are incorporated into this extraordinarily efficient machine. These kinds of chronometers were phenomenally accurate; for example, one of the first was used by Captain Cook on his second voyage of exploration to the Pacific, and when Cook made final landfall in Plymouth in 1775 after circumnavigating the globe it gave an error of less than eight miles in calculated longitude.