ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

In the middle of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the west of London, still stands a pagoda in Chinese style. Completed in 1762, the ten-storey octagonal structure is nearly 50 meters high and was at that time the tallest reconstruction of a Chinese building in Europe. The bottom storey is 7.9 meters in diameter and 5.5 meters high; each successive storey diminishes by 0.3 meters in both dameter and height. Influenced by the Porcelain Tower in Nanking, the original building was very colourful; the roofs being covered with varnished iron plates, with a dragon on each corner. There were 80 dragons in all, each carved from wood and gilded with real gold. Designed by William Chambers for Princess Augusta, the Dowager Princess of Wales and mother of George III, it commanded and still commands an impressive view over the entire Kew area. Using the pagoda as an interlocutor, this essay is an attempt to address Chinoiserie in eighteenth-century England in a new way. Needless to say, the lure of China fascinated European imaginations ever since the Middle Ages, but China’s cultural practices attracted the intensive attention of philosophers, theologians, architects, artists, entrepreneurs particularly from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. The direct influence of China on European culture were manifold and far reaching, ranging from Chinese teahouses in gardens to adaptations of Chinese plays for the popular stage. More significant than such readily tangible modes of imitation and appropriation, however, were the interpretative paradigms that accompanied them: the processes whereby the Europeans translated the unfamiliar and often enigmatic artifacts of Chinese culture into familiar forms of meaning, thus engaging them in the emergent discourses of European modernity. This study traces one such moment in the English imaginative reconstruction of China via a detailed analysis of Chambers’s treatise on the Chinese architecture and his building of the pagoda. By locating them in concrete historical circumstances and contexts, this essay seeks to demonstrate how cultural practices condition and constrain responses to the alien as well as to suggest that we need to construe prejudices as present in all understanding.

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