Title
From France to the Qing Court: Tapestries as Cross-Cultural Textiles
Abstract
Mei Mei Rado presented on her book, The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-cultural Textiles at the Qing Court (Yale University Press, 2025). Large-scale pictorial tapestries ranked among the most precious art forms in the early modern period. While their circulations and functions among European courts have been well studied, less known are their journeys to China and subsequent roles in stimulating new developments in Qing imperial arts.
In the first part of this talk, Rado uncovered the history of French tapestries that entered the Qing court during the eighteenth century as diplomatic gifts and trade goods, including the first and second Tentures chinoises woven by the Beauvais Manufactory and the Tenture des Indes made by the Gobelins Manufactory. In the second part of this presentation Rado examined how European tapestries gave rise to a new type of textile art form in the Qing imperial workshops and an innovative mode for furnishing the palace interiors.
This event was co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Department of Art History.
Biography
Mei Mei Rado is Assistant Professor of Textiles, Dress, and Decorative Arts at Bard Graduate Center, where she also received her Ph.D in 2018. From 2020 to 2022 she was Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and previously held various curatorial and research positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Palace Museum (Beijing), and Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris). Her research focuses on Chinese and French textiles and dress from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, with a special focus on cross-cultural exchanges.