Collecting Qing dynasty textiles.(China, 1644-1911)

The Forbidden City stands eerily empty, its massive courtyards colorless under gray Beijing skies despite hordes of dusty tourists who pass through its south-north axis from the Gate of Heavenly Peace to the Gate of Spiritual Valour. They peer past barriers into partially restored architectural splendor trying to conjure up traces of the imperial family, mandarins, concubines, and eunuchs attired in brilliantly colored, elaborately patterned silks, that bespoke the power and magnificence of the Qing dynasty (1644--1911). Lost to internal looting, international plunder, and sold to save the defeated Manchu officials of the Qing dynasty from impoverishment, the textiles seemed to have vanished like the civilization that created them. [1]

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, has a number of these textiles, collected in China before the collapse of the Qing dynasty. When they were shipped out of China, they were marked in ink with their new owners' names: Cheney, Irwin, and Knapp who were, respectively, a merchant, a missionary, and a naval officer.

In 1842 the Treaty of Nanking (now Nanjing) forced China to open five treaty ports to foreign commerce. The same year, Daniel Wadsworth (1771--1848) founded the Wadsworth Atheneum. These two seemingly unrelated acts, the former to end the first Opium War between England and China (1839--1842), the latter to enhance the cultural life of the commercially thriving port of Hartford, came together serendipitously a century later. In 1949 Marjory(1880--1967) and Dorothy Cheney (1880--1971) gave two uncut Chinese embroidered robes to the Wadsworth Atheneum's costume and textile collection. Twin daughters of Frank Woodbridge Cheney (1832--1909) and Mary Bushnell Cheney (d. 1917), the sisters were the third generation in a family that built one of the largest silk empires in the United States.

After years of unsuccessful attempts to grow mulberry trees in Connecticut and raise the silk worms that feed on them, Charles Cheney (1803--1874) sent his twenty-eight-year-old son Frank to the newly opened treaty ports in China to buy silkworm cocoons. Frank Cheney left Hartford in a blizzard on January 3, 1859, and arrived in Shanghai in the spring. [2] The silk business kept him there for almost three years. He wrote to his mother on April 24, 1859:

I have been to three dinner parties in the last week Dinner is a great social institution in China and a very pleasant one. You sit down to table at half past seven or eight and including the time spent over cigars and wine; it is eleven before you finish. Then comes an hour or two in the parlors or the billiard room. [3]

In return, local news and gossip came from Connecticut accompanied by many requests to send home exotic Oriental objects such as embroideries, mandarin costumes, lacquerware, tea, and bronzes. The casual tone of these letters belies the chaos bedeviling China in the mid-nineteenth century.

The provenance for the Cheney gift to the Wadsworth Atheneum is given as the "Emperor's Palace Peking," although it is doubtful that Frank Cheney ever got there. His letters, written from Hong Kong and Shanghai, make it clear that China's internal and international conflicts made it too dangerous to travel to Peking (as Beijing was then known). Writing from Hong Kong on June 6, 1860, Cheney explained: