Awards

The thesis investigates the production and use of court portraits within the context of outer court politics during the Qianlong emperor’s reign (1735-1795), seeking to explore how the imperial Qing court utilized this genre of court art as a technology of domination and articulated emerging visions of universal rulership in response to the growth of a multicultural and multiethnic empire and the increasingly interconnected world of the early modern period. Synthesizing surviving portraits, multilingual court archives, and other historical texts, the thesis uncovers the emperor’s awareness of and avid participation in deploying portraits to speak to multicultural audiences from within and without, thereby reconstructing a dynamic view of the politics of portraiture in the contexts of honorification, diplomacy, and ritual.

The first part of the thesis examines the production of portraits in the Qianlong court society, recovering the political meaning of the so-called Sino-European style the portraits represent. The second part reconstructs the politically strategic deployment of court portraits through three cases: the institution of honorific portraiture, the gift-giving of portraits in Inner Asian diplomacy, and the welcoming ceremonies for imperial portraits. In each case the thesis not only reveals a different way in which the Qianlong emperor strategically deployed court portraits to speak to and interact with culturally diverse peoples, but also retrieves how these multiethnic audiences perceived and responded to the imperial deployment.