Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (42 page)

The more Bushell saw and read of Chinese art, the more it fascinated him. He used his local contacts to find the best shops and market stalls in the Outer City, way beyond the compound, and he became familiar with the monthly markets in the temple courtyards and the lanes clustered around them, where all kinds of food, clothes and trinkets were on display. The market at Wu Men, the main gate into the walled Forbidden City, was, he
discovered, a particularly rewarding source of objects from private houses, and he browsed the stalls there regularly. Sometimes, too, the objects came directly to him without his having to leave the compound: small-time dealers in curios would call daily at the legation and on its Western residents. ‘The morning was spent in studying and cheapening the wares brought by native merchants and spread all over the floors,' explained an American visitor, apparently dazzled by the display, an alluring array of ‘bronzes, porcelain, jasper, jade, amethysts and emeralds' as well as furs from ‘sea otter, sable, Tibetan goat, Astrakhan, wolf, white fox, red fox, bear, panther and tiger skins'.
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Bushell was especially fortunate, however, in not having to rely only on curiosity dealers. ‘I have obtained access, in the exercise of the duties of my profession,' he admitted gratefully, ‘to several palaces and private houses, and have in this way had many opportunities of seeing the treasures of native collectors, which usually are so rigidly closed to foreigners.'
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He began to acquire a variety of things: textiles and silks; enamels, ivories and jewellery; carved stone sculptures, bronzes, pictures and architectural specimens. He was increasingly impressed with the skills of both ancient and modern Chinese craftsmen. By 1873, just five years after his arrival in Peking, he felt confident enough to begin corresponding with Augustus Franks at the British Museum, alerting him to the treasures he was unearthing and sending one or two pieces to Franks for his personal collection. He also published his first scholarly article, a study of the ‘mountain boulders roughly chiselled into the shape of drums' which stood in the city's Temple of Confucius.
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Bushell had settled quickly. The sheltered young man had grown into the role of pioneer and explorer. With archaeology yet to uncover the sites around Peking, he was becoming an expert in the ancient literary sources that made sense of Chinese history and its objects, and he was already on his way to becoming the
first Westerner to undertake the serious study of Chinese art. In 1872, he set off for nearly 200 miles to the north with Thomas Grosvenor, a secretary at the legation, on a journey beyond the Great Wall, to Inner Mongolia, where he visited the ruins of Shangdu, the summer capital of Kublai Khan's Yuan dynasty. It was a fabled city, a byword for opulence, made famous in Britain as Xanadu in Coleridge's popular poem ‘Kubla Khan' (1816). There was little left to see, but there were enough relics to captivate Bushell. The two men were the first Europeans to visit the site since Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, and the feeling of discovery was intense. Bushell used the journey to collect all kinds of pieces, and to begin to understand more fully the culture of ancient China. On his return, he took a period of leave in 1874 to return to Kent to marry, and persuaded his new wife Florence – herself the daughter of a doctor – to return with him to China the following year. The long voyage back was very different from the first. It was a journey home. The talk in the Bushells' cabin was about everything Florence could look forward to, the people she would meet, the places her new husband would show to her – and the abundance of things still waiting to be discovered.

The objects accumulating in Britain's museums provided tangible evidence of the Victorian fascination with their expanding world. The extension of the Empire, the growth of trade routes and the increasingly far-flung voyages of intrepid travellers such as Bushell were brought to life for museum visitors in the pieces beginning to appear in the display cases. At the South Kensington Museum, for example, alongside the Italian Renaissance sculptures and medieval French treasures that Robinson had tracked down, or the English manufactured wares championed by Henry Cole, there were now increasing numbers of objects from less familiar destinations: carpets, textiles and tiles from Persia and the Islamic world; models, busts, Buddhist reliefs and
imperial treasures from India; Japanese porcelain and pottery; arms, ammunition and jewellery from Afghanistan; lace, costumes and embroidery from Mexico and South America. New forms, colours and ideas were beginning to appear in the museum, presenting visitors with alternative ways of looking at the world and its peoples. Collecting was making itself truly international.

These new kinds of objects required new methods of description. There was a long tradition of European anthropology that had often sat alongside abstract philosophical thought: the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, gave a series of lectures on anthropology for over twenty years from 1772. But such anthropology was not necessarily specifically concerned with foreign races and cultures (Kant mostly used examples from close around him to make his points) and there was no term at all for the tangible artefacts that collectors were now acquiring. In 1834, the term ‘ethnography' was coined, and this was quickly adopted to cover anything that did not fit into the established hierarchies of works of art or that came from some distant, apparently primitive, possibly exotic, land.

Having a word for these things made it easier to define and categorize them, but it did nothing to make them more familiar. The arrival of objects from all over the Empire and beyond was creating a challenge for museum staff. Asian art, Japanese ceramics and Indian sculpture were not traditional subjects of study; they had not been considered important. A young gentleman's education in the Classics rooted him firmly in European culture; the Grand Tour and its Victorian hybrids prepared him for an appreciation of Western art. At small private endowed schools or grammar schools for the middle classes and respectable working classes, boys and girls had little chance of seeing any art, let alone works from distant cultures. These schools tended to be insular in their philosophies, with an emphasis on discipline and vocational skills, and even at progressive schools run by
education reformers the aims were modest: ‘to write a letter grammatically, to calculate rapidly without a slate and to keep accounts by single and double entry'.
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Most ordinary people knew very little, if anything, about countries other than their own, while, even among dealers and connoisseurs, scholarship about non-Western objects was distinctly patchy. The world was simply growing too quickly.

There were exceptions. J. C. Robinson developed a love for Chinese ceramic art, which he regarded as ‘the perfect consonance of material and decoration'.
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And at the British Museum, Augustus Franks was making himself something of an expert in non-European works. Franks himself did not travel outside Europe. His contemporary and friend in Germany, Adolph Bastian, was a field collector, personally acquiring 2,000 artefacts from his travels to South Asia alone, and creating the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin in the 1880s with ethnographic collections six or seven times larger even than those at the British Museum. But Franks did not let his relative lack of field experience defeat him; he kept in close contact with numerous travellers, negotiated with a steady stream of collectors who brought objects to the museum on a more or less daily basis, and used his visits to Europe to acquire pieces by exchange, both with private collectors and museums.

When Franks joined the British Museum in 1851, there were around 3,700 ethnographic objects on show in a single gallery; by the end of his work there in 1896, the museum boasted an outstanding display of almost 40,000 pieces in a suite of rooms. As well as individual objects, Franks was instrumental in securing a number of substantial complete collections, such as the Christy Collection, which brought more than 1,000 items to the museum. A banker and textile manufacturer, Henry Christy had been a friend of Franks' and had spent much of the early 1860s undertaking excavations of cave sites in southwest France.
Alongside this archaeological material, however, he had collected almost 1,000 items from travels in Mexico, North America and Canada. After Christy's death in 1865, Franks worked on cataloguing the objects. He also purchased a further 20,000 pieces with £5,000 bequeathed to the museum by Christy, which Franks had invested into a fund specifically for making acquisitions. The museum's ethnographic collection grew quickly, and Franks' knowledge grew with it. He soon became an acknowledged expert on non-European objects, and was often called on to assist other institutions with their collecting; when the South Kensington Museum acquired a large consignment of Japanese ceramics from the International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, Philip Cunliffe-Owen turned to Franks to research and catalogue it.

Nevertheless, there were few other scholars working in Britain on the new material from around the world, so the public collections were forced to look much further afield for help. Staff began to recruit collectors to work alongside their Western European specialists and provide a much-needed link with distant lands. They looked to the colonial service and the army, in particular, to start creating a collecting network that spanned the globe. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British Museum acquired important objects from officers in the Royal Navy and the East India Company, and from public servants working in Africa, the Arctic and Australia. Captain Marryat, also known as a writer for children, gave a large lacquered Buddha and a colossal stone carving of Buddha's footprint in 1826, and the museum became the home for the stunning collection of Sir Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant-Governor of Java, who founded modern Singapore in 1819. By the mid-century, as the number of British territories grew and increasing numbers of people were involved in administering them, the quantity of objects arriving on ships from around the world rose steadily, and from the 1880s, collections made by professionals abroad were frequently arriving
at the museum. Very few of these distant collectors were experts: most of them collected as a diversion from their day jobs and chose objects that caught their eyes as opposed to pursuing a disciplined programme of study. But they were enthusiastic and often acquired a sound knowledge of their local area and customs. And help was at hand to guide them, especially from Franks. He regularly briefed travellers in person about what to collect, and even handed out questionnaires for them to complete on his behalf, demanding details such as the kinds of clay employed in making pottery or the type of objects used for marriage and funeral customs.

Many of these overseas collections, rather like Franks' own, had an odd semi-official status. They were made during the course of official duties but they were usually privately owned. Once they were finished with – usually on the death of the collector, or on his return to Britain – they were commonly given, rather than sold, to public museums, as though it were understood that they had been borrowed by the individual for the duration of his time overseas. Collecting on this basis was clearly a popular distraction for those posted far from home, a way of understanding a new culture while marking public service with something tangible. The collecting network was expanding alongside the ambitions of Empire. In the early 1870s, the South Kensington Museum made contact with Major Robert Murdoch Smith, director of the British Telegraph Service in Persia, who agreed to source examples of historic and contemporary Persian art on the museum's behalf, and whose expertise enabled the museum to publish a guidebook to its Persian material. Then, in 1874, two cases of bronze vases, mirrors and bowls and twenty-three small spearheads, daggers and other weapons arrived in South Kensington. All the pieces were Chinese, and they were all on offer for exhibition. The consignment had come direct from China, via the Temple Club
on the Strand, and the unfamiliar and occasionally bizarre objects were the property of Stephen Wootton Bushell.

Bushell's association with South Kensington was to be a long one, but it started humbly enough. When they were unpacked, the pieces turned out to be small and largely unspectacular. But they were a taste of things to come. And for Bushell, it was a means of establishing professional contact with the museum staff. When his marriage to Florence had been celebrated in 1874, he used his time back home to discuss his initial discoveries with the curators at South Kensington. He tried to describe the variety and wealth of objects waiting to be discovered in China, emphasizing how much more there was than the limited range of Chinese porcelain already familiar in fashionable circles. His enthusiasm was infectious, and the staff were delighted. Here was a learned man at the heart of one of the most mysterious countries on earth, with a collector's eye for the unique and historic, and with a willingness to ship his objects back to England and lend them for display.

Bushell turned out to be as good as his word. When he returned to China with his new wife, he found that his conversations at the museum had given him new impetus and direction, and immediately he began assembling a consignment to send back to South Kensington. Over the next few years, he began collecting with the museum in mind, acquiring an assortment of carefully chosen objects that would make a coherent display in the galleries. ‘I have selected during my residence at Peking a few more typical specimens. . . to add to my small collection now being exhibited in the Loan Department,' he wrote modestly to Cunliffe-Owen in the summer of 1880.
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The arrangement seemed to work perfectly. The museum had found a reliable source of expertise and a cost-free way of acquiring the best pieces, and Stephen Bushell could collect to his heart's content, knowing that his efforts
were being appreciated back in England and that the South Kensington display cases would ease the pressure on the modest doctor's accommodation he was allocated in the Peking enclosure.