1735-1796) commissioned the painting New Year’s Beginning ( Sui zhao tu 歲朝圖) ( Fig. Image in the public domain.Īt the end of 1736, the newly-enthroned Emperor Qianlong (r. Hanging scroll, color on silk, 277.7 x 160.2 cm. Giuseppe Castiglione, Tang Dai, and Chen Mei, New Year’s Beginning, 1736. This idea was demonstrated in the time-honored themes, syncretic compositions, and spectacular abundance of artifacts commissioned and collected at the Qing court and intended to resound with the panoptic ordering of imperial power.įig. As mechanical clocks became the most salient objects and technologies of Sino-European exchange, flourishing especially during the High Qing era (1661-1796), such effects generated a sense of spatiotemporal profusion. They acted out a spectacle of power that was manifested in an illusory unity of variations governed by the workings of an automatic system. When activated alongside other movable accessories on mechanical clocks, firework ornaments highlighted a sense of synchronic time and fueled the vigor of temporal imminence.
I argue that fireworks not only engaged in redefinitions of art and power, but also that the lifelike simulation of pyrotechnic effects in objects such as automaton clocks transformed conceptions and strategies of ornamentation. It opens up a broader discussion regarding the conceits and sensations of pyrotechnics and pyropolitics, while also responding to recent accounts of early modern European pyrotechnic arts and sciences. Exploring the custom of fireworks in China alongside their pictorial representations and decorative applications in a transcultural context during the long eighteenth century, this article draws connections among various artifacts that enacted pyrotechnic spectacles and elicited synesthetic immersions of light, sound, motion, hue, and temperature. Fireworks in the early modern world paradoxically wedded a local experience of ephemeral sensations with an impulse to create patterns of perpetual motion.