FAH262H1 Chap.7 Jesuits in Beijing and Korean Chaekgeori
Jesuits in Beijing and Korean Chaekgeori
Where Week 7 sits in the term
The seventh week turns from Japan to Ming-Qing China and Joseon Korea, and it begins with the in-class Midterm Review and Reflection, worth 15 percent, before the new material starts.
The syllabus gives the period two different spans: the weekly outline says roughly the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, while the term calendar says about 1644 to 1910. Quote whichever span you use with its source.
The readings are Jennifer Purtle on devices for seeing China around 1640 and Sunglim Kim on the chaekgeori screens of late Joseon, with Lambros Malafouris's 2008 essay on material agency, “At the Potter's Wheel”, set as the conceptual reading to annotate.
Korea returns in Week 8 with the colonial-era painter Ko Hui-dong, so the Joseon background built here pays off quickly.
Seeing with two eyes in late-Ming print
Purtle studies the twenty illustrations that the publisher Min Qiji made in 1640 for a popular romance. Instead of a plain picture for each act, Min drew the scene inside an object: a handscroll, a fan, a bowl, a polished bronze, a lantern.
Purtle calls these objects scopic frames and argues that they record a binocular, multipoint habit of looking at the very moment Jesuit books and imported lenses were bringing single-point, monocular seeing to the Ming court. Johannes Adam Schall von Bell wrote the first Chinese treatise on the telescope in 1626, and Giulio Aleni's 1637 life of Christ already attempted a perspective floor.
The bronze vessel in Act 6, she suggests, holds a reflection rather than an engraved scene.
An exchange that ran both ways
The essay ends by reversing the expected direction of influence.
Chinese lanterns that turned paper figures by candle heat had been described since the Song dynasty, and Purtle links them to the lantern slides and other lantern devices that appeared in Europe from the 1640s through Jesuits such as Athanasius Kircher and Andre Tacquet.
Her conclusion is that late-Ming China took in single-point perspective without having its own visual culture displaced, which unsettles any claim that modern vision was simply a Western invention. Purtle also cites Joseph McDermott: between 1654 and 1663 lenses reached Japan from China mounted in pairs, so even imported glass served two eyes.
Kircher's smicroscope, a canister holding a turning wheel of painted glass, made pictures seem to move.
Painters the key terms ask you to place
The key-term list names a sequence of painting positions: Dong Qichang and his division of painters into Southern and Northern schools, the Ming loyalist painters Zhu Da and Shitao, the Four Wangs of Qing court orthodoxy, the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, and the Jesuit court painter Giuseppe Castiglione, known in China as Lang Shining.
Andrews and Shen, listed for Week 8, explain the ranking behind Dong's schools, so it pays to read ahead. Treat the printed romanisations of the two schools with care, because the list sets them against the opposite English names.
Andrews and Shen also record that Wang Yuanqi served the Kangxi emperor as court painting connoisseur and that Wang Hui documented the emperor's southern inspection tours, which is why the Four Wangs stand for the court.
Screens of books and things in Joseon Korea
Kim traces chaekgeori to Qing curio cabinets and to a trompe l'oeil shelf painting attributed to Castiglione, then follows the genre from King Jeongjo's court, where it became a painting examination subject in 1784, to wealthy households of every rank in the nineteenth century.
Patrons used the selected objects to announce learning, wealth and hopes, while painters tried out Western perspective and shading without ever fully adopting them. Kim gives particular weight to the jungin, the interpreter and technical class whose trade in Beijing goods made them conspicuous collectors and targets of yangban satire. Jeongjo, she adds, had approved classics written as the book titles on his court screens.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Min Qiji's 1640 illustrations as scopic frames
- 02
Binocular and monocular vision in late-Ming China
- 03
Jesuit prints, telescopes and lanterns between China and Europe
- 04
Dong Qichang's Southern and Northern schools
- 05
Ming loyalists, the Four Wangs and the Yangzhou eccentrics
- 06
Castiglione and trompe l'oeil at the Qing court
- 07
Chaekgeori, King Jeongjo and the jungin collectors
Worked example · free
Contrast the owners implied by two chaekgeori screens
- 2Describe the orderly screen: objects kept apart on shelves, sixteen of twenty-six shelves holding books, imported Qing ceramics arranged with restraint.
- 2Describe the Leopard Skin Screen: eight raised skins revealing a cluttered room with eyeglasses on an open book, tea wares, golpae tiles and smoking pipes.
- 2Conclude that patrons customised screens to project a self, scholarly control in one case and sociable abundance in the other.
Key terms
- Scopic Frame
- Purtle's name for the cultural and technological frame that shapes seeing, such as a fan, bronze mirror or lantern holding Min Qiji's 1640 scenes.
- Pacing Horse Lantern
- A Chinese zoetropic lantern, zouma deng, in which candle heat turns vanes so that paper-cut figures circle and cast moving shadows.
- Duobaoge
- A Qing curio cabinet of irregular shelves for precious objects, installed in Forbidden City rooms and proposed as a source for chaekgeori.
- Jungin
- The late Joseon technical class of interpreters and officials whose Beijing trade made them wealthy collectors despite exclusion from yangban privilege.
- Scholar's Rocks
- Stones kept for appreciation, listed in the course key terms as gongshi, qishi or “strange stones”, and shangshi, stones for admiration.
Jesuits in Beijing and Korean Chaekgeori FAQ
Why did Min Qiji draw a romance inside fans, bowls and lanterns?
Purtle argues the frames show how late-Ming viewers saw moving and projected images. Eighteen of the twenty prints use such objects, from a handscroll to a zoetropic lantern, at a time when telescopes had already reached the court.
Did any chaekgeori painter use correct one-point perspective?
Kim knows of no surviving screen whose lines meet at one vanishing point level with the viewer's eye. Yi Eung-nok's San Francisco screen comes close; most use several vanishing points or diagonals that never converge.
How did Korean envoys see European painting in Beijing?
Kim cites Bak Ji-won, who in 1780 described ceiling paintings of children among clouds at the South Church, where viewers instinctively opened their arms as if to catch a falling child.
Exam move
Redraw Purtle's three families of scopic frame with one 1640 example each, then take any chaekgeori screen and write one line each on its prototype, objects, patron and space.
