by R.R. Knoop
The times in which Europeans, often full of colonial cultural clichés, went into an exotic cramp in dealing with China, are now on their way out. The rapid rise of China itself will certainly play a role in this. Cultural advisor Riemer Knoop saw in China, and in Thailand, that people there look at the Western imperialist past with completely different eyes and do surprising things with it.
My hosts took me to one of the campus museums. I wrote about this Art and Archaeology Museum before, but there is more to it than that it is huge. Such as the choice to dedicate one of the permanent exhibitions to a – slowly rotating – total overview of two thousand years of Chinese painting. These are replicas – indistinguishable from the real thing, except that the passe-partout frames have also been copied. The enormous amount is quite a challenge for someone who is not initiated in Chinese painting: spot the differences! If you want to check things again at home, there is an extremely prestigious 67-part series of facsimiles, in 248 volumes with a total of 12,000 works. Weight: 1800 kilos. ( in this pdf you can read more about this ‘Comprehensive Collection of Ancient Chinese Paintings’)
The multi-reflective cube feels like a metaphor for the infinity of this heritage, and perhaps of the entire Land of the Middle. The fact that President Xi Jinping was governor and party secretary in Zhejiang province at the start of this project, 20 years ago, will certainly have contributed to its happy completion.
Ball bounces from west to east and back again
Then I was taken to a special place in the museum library. What did I think of their new historical book collection that had recently been acquired at public auctions? It had been given a place in the new Fong Wen Library, named after art historian Wen C. Fong from Princeton, founder of Sinology in the US and after his retirement in 2018 endowed professor in Hangzhou for a while. I read that he was the initiator of this university museum, but whether that was as a patron or as a donor to his own library was not mentioned. Walking through the immensely large and crowded study rooms, in unapproachable fluorescent light, there is suddenly a cool, dark vault with special collections:
Cabinets full of impressive folios in Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French – about 4000 pieces.
Since the 16thcentury, it was mainly French Jesuits who documented the discovery of China and played no small role in it themselves. Some even (almost) managed to successfully complete the hellish imperial civil service training. To my own pleasure and to the surprise of my supervisors, I read aloud and impromptuly translating the title pages of the works that have been laid open to me. But in the collection I also found an exhibition catalogue on Chinese art in the Stedelijk Museum, 1925, from our own Association of Friends of Asian Art.
How interesting is that: Asia was ‘discovered’ by the West during the European expansion; the recording of that colonial process is now in turn documented in that Asia itself. The discoverer discovers, the viewer looks at it – a taste of his own medicine.
And there are more bouncing balls from west to east and vice versa: in 2019, French President Macron donated a first edition (1688) of the Latin-French version of Confucius’ Analecta to President Xi Jinping.
At the professor’s home in Qingdao
Last October, in the coastal city of Qingdao, I was pleasantly surprised in the field of my own specialization, museology. This is a relatively new field in China.
I was visiting Professor Kai Yin, an anthropologist at Shandong University. He had invited me to his home – something that had never happened to me in the 13 years that I have been visiting China – so very special. He lived near the campus in a brand new tower block especially for university employees. In the spacious apartment that he shared with his wife and a daughter, there was a full study, which he showed with a smile.
I was about to walk away when I noticed something. Many books had the same format. That could be right, he said, because he had purchased most of it as an e-book and printed it himself on A4.
It turned out that he was working on a major project: mapping the recent museum studies from the West. He had called on colleagues and students via academic social media to review some 60 important texts from Western museological literature, according to strict protocol. With two hefty volumes, he had already created a beautiful Chinese opening up of the Western canon of museology. In the same way, he is now also compiling an overview of recent heritage studies.
A special approach for me, but my host Kai Yin told me that compiling handbooks with weighted summaries in all kinds of disciplines is very common in China. I asked him whether AI might be able to take over this kind of collecting work in the future. “Certainly not” was his answer. “AI has undeniable advantages of standardization and clarity, but lacks depth and layering. And these are especially crucial in the human sciences.” The handbooks are therefore not only summaries, but also considerations, based on the judgments of the reviewers.
Thai Discovery Tours
That reminded me of an experience in Thailand ten years ago. In Bangkok I visited the Vimanmek palace where there was a wall map showing the travels of the Siamese king Rama V. This colleague and contemporary of the British Queen Victoria modernized Thailand and made many trips, through India and the then Dutch East Indies, but also through Europe. In 1897 he also visited the Netherlands, had lunch with Queen Regent Emma and the young Crown Princess Wilhelmina.
What struck me on that wall map in the palace? His travels, which stretched from Lisbon to the North Cape in Scandinavia, were presented in that palace museum in Bangkok as voyages of discovery. On triumphalist maps, complete with routes, arrows, symbols, dates, notes and interesting facts. [1] Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama, but in reverse. And also with the opposite objective: not subjugation or trade advantages were the goal, but the playing off of Western powers against each other in order to guarantee the independence of Siam (then still the name of Thailand). What actually worked: it is one of the rare Asian countries that has been able to do without colonial bosses.
An example of how not ‘they’ but ‘we’ can end up in a display case. Now I saw a piece of the puzzle in Bangkok, and two others in Hangzhou and Qingdao.
[1] I would have liked to illustrate this, but it is strictly forbidden to photograph in Thai royal museums, and the museum in question has also been under renovation since my visit in 2015, reportedly forever.
Dr. Riemer R. Knoop is a researcher, consultant and essayist with his own agency Gordion Cultural Advice. Between 2011 and 2019, he served as a lector in Cultural Heritage at the Reinwardt Academy (AHK).
