From France to the Qing Court: Tapestries as Cross-cultural Textiles

The first part of this talk uncovers the history of French tapestries that entered the Qing court during the eighteenth century as diplomatic gifts and trade goods, including the first and second Tentures chinoises woven by the Beauvais Manufactory and the Tenture des Indes made by the Gobelins Manufactory. Their trajectories reconstructed from both the French and Qing sides offer a window into the complexity of global networks and contingency of cultural encounters. These tapestries’ themes, marked by idealized exoticism compressing distance and time, functioned as a kind of diplomatic lingua franca adaptable to express divergent cultural and political visions. The second part of this presentation examines how European tapestries gave rise to a new type of textile art form in the Qing imperial workshops and an innovative mode for furnishing the palace interiors. The medium’s architectonic tension and interactive visual potential enabled the Qianlong emperor to envision his own physical presence in relation to the tapestry in space and offered him new ways to reenact narratives charged with imperial significance.

Mei Mei Rado is assistant professor at Bard Graduate Center. Her research and teaching focus on the history of textiles, dress, and decorative arts in China and France from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, especially on Sino-French exchanges. Previously she held curatorial and research positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Palace Museum, Beijing. She is the author of The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-Cultural Textiles at the Qing Court (Yale University Press, 2025). Next spring she will be invited researcher at Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris, where she will work on a new project on the adaptations of baroque and rococo ornament in Qing arts.

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Scientific Organization: Ariella Minden e Anna Dumont

_{Image: (left) The Indian Hunter, from the second set of the Tenture des Indes, 1689–90. The Manufacture royale des Gobelins. Tapestry, wool and silk, detail. Mobilier national, Paris.
(right) Yu Sheng and Zhang Weibang, “Cassowary,” in Manual of Birds (Niaopu), 1774. Album leaf, ink and colors on silk, detail. Palace Museum, Beijing}.