Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves

by Jacqueline Yallop

  Few of these objects were meant for serious collectors. They acted more as evidence of distances covered and lands visited than as objects of aesthetic pleasure or financial investment. Those with a more incisive eye were nonetheless aware that among all the false knick-knacks and tacky keepsakes there were important and handsome objects that encapsulated the mystery and glamour of the places they were made. But you had to know where to look. Just as in Europe, serious collectors had to be both wary and astute. They needed to be energetic enough with their research to keep one step ahead of the mass-market travellers and the traders who profited from them. And, just as in Europe, it was often a great advantage to be first on the scene. As Stephen Smith discovered in A Pair of Blue Eyes, by the middle of the nineteenth century, countries at the heart of the Empire, such as India, were enmeshed in a complicated and profitable souvenir trade: those who wanted to find the best objects had to be prepared to go to more remote, inaccessible, and often more risky, destinations.

  On 29 February 1868, Stephen Wootton Bushell sailed from Southampton on a boat bound for Shanghai. He was twenty-three years old and had graduated as a doctor from Guy’s Hospital in London less than two years previously. He was clever, likeable and mildly adventurous, but his experience of life so far had been sheltered and comfortable. He had grown up on his father’s substantial farm in Kent, spent happy years at a minor public school and won easy success as a scholar. His natural talent for learning, an excellent memory, a personable manner and money in his pocket had allowed him to glide through childhood and adolescence and to emerge as a thriving and upright young man well equipped to begin a medical career. Now, however, his life was changing. For the first time, he was facing a challenge and striking out from the solid middle-class ways of his upbringing. As he joined the bustle in the Southampton docks, showed his papers and began the steep walk up the wooden gangplank, Bushell was setting foot firmly in the unknown.

  It was a long journey. Back at his father’s farm, the spring lambing was over and the summer crops ripening before Bushell reached his destination. At sea, there were wide, alien views and strange stories. There were long days of bright calm, and nervous stormy nights. There were dinners and concerts and games. And there was plenty of time to think. Bushell was not on a pleasure trip. He had his formal letter of appointment as Medical Attendant to the British Legation in Peking (now Beijing), a promise of £600 a year, and official approval ‘to engage in private practice at Pekin’ if he so wanted.4 He was determined to use the months at sea to prepare himself properly for his new job. He began the task of learning Chinese and he brushed up on the medical conditions he might expect to encounter. He read and reread the scant official documentation he had been given. Yet he did not know what to expect. Very few European travellers had spent time in China, or travelled extensively there, and there was limited reference material for him to consult. He had little idea what his life was going to be like and he could not help but suspect that his preparations might all turn out to be useless. Huddled in his berth as he sailed across the world, Bushell had nothing in his experience to compare with where he was going. He would just have to wait and see.

  Shanghai was noisy, crowded and prosperous. It was a city growing quickly and erratically, a newly affluent port on the mouth of the Yangtze river, ideally placed to trade with the West. It was a hub of commerce, a centre for travellers and a maze of narrow streets leading into still narrower alleys. From the moment he landed, Bushell was captivated by the colours, smells and sheer noise of such foreignness. He found himself welcomed into a thriving cosmopolitan community. But his journey was not over; he was hardly acclimatized to the light and the dust – or to the unfamiliar cadences of the Chinese language – before he was travelling onwards to Peking, around 1,300 kilometres to the north, away from the mercantile centre of China to a much more traditional heartland. As he left the modernity of Shanghai, Bushell became more and more a foreigner, a strange man with curious ways.

  If Bushell had been hoping to find himself part of a community comparable to the one in Shanghai, then he was to be disappointed. When he finally arrived in Peking, tired and exhilarated by his journey, he discovered that there were fewer than fifty non-Chinese residents enclosed in a compound within the city, walled in with their families and servants, a fives court and bowling alley, a library, a billiard room and a stage for regular performances of amateur dramatics; an entrenched and unremarkable group of administrators and bureaucrats carefully recreating European society deep in the heart of China. There were luncheons and parties and evenings around the piano. There were lengthy discussions of British politics and imperial ambitions. The national anthem was sung, and the Queen toasted. But the restrictions of life within the legation did not dishearten Bushell. He enjoyed the security and comfort, and he became determined to use the legation as a springboard for exploration instead of a barrier to it, a safe retreat that would allow him to make forays into the bewildering city that lay all around him.

  Bushell’s fascination with China, inspired by his brief stopover in Shanghai, had become only more potent as he had moved north. His ten-day journey by boat up the Beihe river, and then overland on a mule cart, had given him the opportunity to begin a study of the country. Now he was eager to discover more. Not content to shut himself off in an expatriate enclosure, he wanted to learn more of the language, meet more of the people and explore more of the landscapes and the intriguing histories that China seemed to offer. Above all, he wanted to acquire some of the tempting things he had seen. China, he had already observed, was a country of extraordinary objects. On landing at Shanghai, Bushell wrote, ‘one sees on the wharf a number of pedlars offering for sale teapots and cups of quaint form’ fashioned like a dragon rising from the waves or a mythical phoenix, a gnarled tree trunk or an elaborate flower. In Peking, ‘a garden of any pretension must have a large bowl and cistern for goldfish, and street hawkers may be seen with sweetmeats piled up on dishes a yard in diameter, or ladling syrup out of large bowls; and there is hardly a butcher’s shop without a cracked Waul-li jar standing on the counter to hold scraps of meat’.5 Although Bushell had not been a collector before, the extravagance and abundance of Chinese objects quickly seduced him.

  Despite his enthusiasm, the contrast with the neatly kept fields of Kent was a culture shock, and settling in took time. Bushell knew he could not simply go out and start bartering for wares. First, he had to become familiar with the arcane workings of the British government abroad and the idiosyncrasies of his patients. He had to learn how to fit in with his colleagues and their families – and he had to improve his Chinese and begin to understand the habits of the Peking inhabitants, who were frequently hostile. Throughout the East, the British presence was often resented: in Japan, the legation’s native interpreter was murdered at the compound gate in 1860, and the following year the building was stormed by angry locals. In China, the Second Opium War of 1855–60 pitted French and British troops against the Chinese in a series of bitter battles punctuated by incidents of kidnap, torture and looting. Unsurprisingly, when Bushell arrived in Peking in 1868, relations between the British and their hosts could be awkward, and the city could seem unwelcoming. Mary Crawford Fraser, the wife of the secretary to the legation, noted in her journal that the British ‘were detested in the city and never passed outside the Compound without being made to feel it’, and many preferred to spend as much time as possible in the Western Hills where they felt more welcome and secure.6

  But Bushell was not intimidated. With the determination and optimism of youth, he knuckled down to establishing himself, and soon found that, with such a small British contingent to serve, his medical duties were reasonably light and relaxed. He had a great deal of spare time. So he set his mind to the community beyond the compound, studiously reading about Chinese history, improving his language skills and researching the country’s ancient culture. He worked enthusiastically and conscientiously, and he made rapid progress. What might h
ave begun as the naïve experiment of a young man soon developed into something more. His excursions from the compound became increasingly lengthy and ambitious; his conversations with the locals increasingly fluent. He grew in knowledge and confidence and within a couple of years he was moving boldly across the city, a familiar figure among its residents and an object of wonder to Mrs Fraser: ‘our good Doctor Bushell,’ she noted in amazement, ‘could talk to the people of their ailments in excellent vernacular and gave them medicines free of charge. This fact alone set him quite apart from other human beings in their estimation.’7

  The more Bushell saw and read of Chinese art, the more it fascinated him. He used his local contacts to find the best shops and market stalls in the Outer City, way beyond the compound, and he became familiar with the monthly markets in the temple courtyards and the lanes clustered around them, where all kinds of food, clothes and trinkets were on display. The market at Wu Men, the main gate into the walled Forbidden City, was, he discovered, a particularly rewarding source of objects from private houses, and he browsed the stalls there regularly. Sometimes, too, the objects came directly to him without his having to leave the compound: small-time dealers in curios would call daily at the legation and on its Western residents. ‘The morning was spent in studying and cheapening the wares brought by native merchants and spread all over the floors,’ explained an American visitor, apparently dazzled by the display, an alluring array of ‘bronzes, porcelain, jasper, jade, amethysts and emeralds’ as well as furs from ‘sea otter, sable, Tibetan goat, Astrakhan, wolf, white fox, red fox, bear, panther and tiger skins’.8

  Bushell was especially fortunate, however, in not having to rely only on curiosity dealers. ‘I have obtained access, in the exercise of the duties of my profession,’ he admitted gratefully, ‘to several palaces and private houses, and have in this way had many opportunities of seeing the treasures of native collectors, which usually are so rigidly closed to foreigners.’9 He began to acquire a variety of things: textiles and silks; enamels, ivories and jewellery; carved stone sculptures, bronzes, pictures and architectural specimens. He was increasingly impressed with the skills of both ancient and modern Chinese craftsmen. By 1873, just five years after his arrival in Peking, he felt confident enough to begin corresponding with Augustus Franks at the British Museum, alerting him to the treasures he was unearthing and sending one or two pieces to Franks for his personal collection. He also published his first scholarly article, a study of the ‘mountain boulders roughly chiselled into the shape of drums’ which stood in the city’s Temple of Confucius.10

  Bushell had settled quickly. The sheltered young man had grown into the role of pioneer and explorer. With archaeology yet to uncover the sites around Peking, he was becoming an expert in the ancient literary sources that made sense of Chinese history and its objects, and he was already on his way to becoming the first Westerner to undertake the serious study of Chinese art. In 1872, he set off for nearly 200 miles to the north with Thomas Grosvenor, a secretary at the legation, on a journey beyond the Great Wall, to Inner Mongolia, where he visited the ruins of Shangdu, the summer capital of Kublai Khan’s Yuan dynasty. It was a fabled city, a byword for opulence, made famous in Britain as Xanadu in Coleridge’s popular poem ‘Kubla Khan’ (1816). There was little left to see, but there were enough relics to captivate Bushell. The two men were the first Europeans to visit the site since Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, and the feeling of discovery was intense. Bushell used the journey to collect all kinds of pieces, and to begin to understand more fully the culture of ancient China. On his return, he took a period of leave in 1874 to return to Kent to marry, and persuaded his new wife Florence – herself the daughter of a doctor – to return with him to China the following year. The long voyage back was very different from the first. It was a journey home. The talk in the Bushells’ cabin was about everything Florence could look forward to, the people she would meet, the places her new husband would show to her – and the abundance of things still waiting to be discovered.

  The objects accumulating in Britain’s museums provided tangible evidence of the Victorian fascination with their expanding world. The extension of the Empire, the growth of trade routes and the increasingly far-flung voyages of intrepid travellers such as Bushell were brought to life for museum visitors in the pieces beginning to appear in the display cases. At the South Kensington Museum, for example, alongside the Italian Renaissance sculptures and medieval French treasures that Robinson had tracked down, or the English manufactured wares championed by Henry Cole, there were now increasing numbers of objects from less familiar destinations: carpets, textiles and tiles from Persia and the Islamic world; models, busts, Buddhist reliefs and imperial treasures from India; Japanese porcelain and pottery; arms, ammunition and jewellery from Afghanistan; lace, costumes and embroidery from Mexico and South America. New forms, colours and ideas were beginning to appear in the museum, presenting visitors with alternative ways of looking at the world and its peoples. Collecting was making itself truly international.

  These new kinds of objects required new methods of description. There was a long tradition of European anthropology that had often sat alongside abstract philosophical thought: the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, gave a series of lectures on anthropology for over twenty years from 1772. But such anthropology was not necessarily specifically concerned with foreign races and cultures (Kant mostly used examples from close around him to make his points) and there was no term at all for the tangible artefacts that collectors were now acquiring. In 1834, the term ‘ethnography’ was coined, and this was quickly adopted to cover anything that did not fit into the established hierarchies of works of art or that came from some distant, apparently primitive, possibly exotic, land.

  Having a word for these things made it easier to define and categorize them, but it did nothing to make them more familiar. The arrival of objects from all over the Empire and beyond was creating a challenge for museum staff. Asian art, Japanese ceramics and Indian sculpture were not traditional subjects of study; they had not been considered important. A young gentleman’s education in the Classics rooted him firmly in European culture; the Grand Tour and its Victorian hybrids prepared him for an appreciation of Western art. At small private endowed schools or grammar schools for the middle classes and respectable working classes, boys and girls had little chance of seeing any art, let alone works from distant cultures. These schools tended to be insular in their philosophies, with an emphasis on discipline and vocational skills, and even at progressive schools run by education reformers the aims were modest: ‘to write a letter grammatically, to calculate rapidly without a slate and to keep accounts by single and double entry’.11 Most ordinary people knew very little, if anything, about countries other than their own, while, even among dealers and connoisseurs, scholarship about non-Western objects was distinctly patchy. The world was simply growing too quickly.

  There were exceptions. J. C. Robinson developed a love for Chinese ceramic art, which he regarded as ‘the perfect consonance of material and decoration’.12 And at the British Museum, Augustus Franks was making himself something of an expert in non-European works. Franks himself did not travel outside Europe. His contemporary and friend in Germany, Adolph Bastian, was a field collector, personally acquiring 2,000 artefacts from his travels to South Asia alone, and creating the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin in the 1880s with ethnographic collections six or seven times larger even than those at the British Museum. But Franks did not let his relative lack of field experience defeat him; he kept in close contact with numerous travellers, negotiated with a steady stream of collectors who brought objects to the museum on a more or less daily basis, and used his visits to Europe to acquire pieces by exchange, both with private collectors and museums.

  When Franks joined the British Museum in 1851, there were around 3,700 ethnographic objects on show in a single gallery; by the end of his work there in 1896, the muse
um boasted an outstanding display of almost 40,000 pieces in a suite of rooms. As well as individual objects, Franks was instrumental in securing a number of substantial complete collections, such as the Christy Collection, which brought more than 1,000 items to the museum. A banker and textile manufacturer, Henry Christy had been a friend of Franks’ and had spent much of the early 1860s undertaking excavations of cave sites in southwest France. Alongside this archaeological material, however, he had collected almost 1,000 items from travels in Mexico, North America and Canada. After Christy’s death in 1865, Franks worked on cataloguing the objects. He also purchased a further 20,000 pieces with £5,000 bequeathed to the museum by Christy, which Franks had invested into a fund specifically for making acquisitions. The museum’s ethnographic collection grew quickly, and Franks’ knowledge grew with it. He soon became an acknowledged expert on non-European objects, and was often called on to assist other institutions with their collecting; when the South Kensington Museum acquired a large consignment of Japanese ceramics from the International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, Philip Cunliffe-Owen turned to Franks to research and catalogue it.

  Nevertheless, there were few other scholars working in Britain on the new material from around the world, so the public collections were forced to look much further afield for help. Staff began to recruit collectors to work alongside their Western European specialists and provide a much-needed link with distant lands. They looked to the colonial service and the army, in particular, to start creating a collecting network that spanned the globe. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British Museum acquired important objects from officers in the Royal Navy and the East India Company, and from public servants working in Africa, the Arctic and Australia. Captain Marryat, also known as a writer for children, gave a large lacquered Buddha and a colossal stone carving of Buddha’s footprint in 1826, and the museum became the home for the stunning collection of Sir Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant-Governor of Java, who founded modern Singapore in 1819. By the mid-century, as the number of British territories grew and increasing numbers of people were involved in administering them, the quantity of objects arriving on ships from around the world rose steadily, and from the 1880s, collections made by professionals abroad were frequently arriving at the museum. Very few of these distant collectors were experts: most of them collected as a diversion from their day jobs and chose objects that caught their eyes as opposed to pursuing a disciplined programme of study. But they were enthusiastic and often acquired a sound knowledge of their local area and customs. And help was at hand to guide them, especially from Franks. He regularly briefed travellers in person about what to collect, and even handed out questionnaires for them to complete on his behalf, demanding details such as the kinds of clay employed in making pottery or the type of objects used for marriage and funeral customs.