China's Hidden Century

The China Forum seminar on Thursday 23 November 2023 was given by Jessica Harrison Hall (Head of China Section, Curator of Sir Percival David Collection of Chinese Ceramics, and Curator of Chinese Decorative Arts and Ceramics, British Museum).

Jessica Harrison-Hall’s seminar was based on the recent British Museum exhibition China’s Hidden Century and the associated books China’s Hidden Century and Creators of Modern China. The exhibition focused on China’s history between 1796 and 1912. In this period there was a profound ‘psychosocial crisis’ in China. The exhibition was designed to present a different version of the 19th century by focusing on ‘creativity and resilience’. Ms Harrison-Hall explained the way in which the themes of the exhibition were selected and described the complex preparation process and unexpectedly wide impact of the exhibition. Museum curators, academic researchers, artists and designers all contributed their ideas to illustrate the themes in the exhibition. Ms Harrison-Hall highlighted important items, figures, and activities in each of the six sections of the exhibition: court, military, educated elite, local life, global Qing, and reform to revolution. The exhibition conveyed China’s diverse multicultural nature, making use of bilingual documents and polyglot dictionaries, in which multiple languages including Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan and Chinese were displayed or heard (from recordings by specialists). The exhibition produced some unexpected results, including the intense interest in the Nanjing Treaty. Many Chinese visitors identified closely with the exhibition, often dressing in the style of the era and making on-line video recordings of their own participation in the exhibition. The exhibition had more than 100 million on-line comments.

The following issues were raised in the Q&A session: the challenges of displaying objects connected with agriculture, trade and industry, including farm implements, textile machinery, blast furnaces, ships, and porcelain kilns; how to make the objects on display look interesting and beautiful so as to attract visitors; how to reconcile  the contrasting perspectives on 19th century China, with humiliation on the one hand, creativity and dynamism on the other; the extent to which the exhibition underestimated the suffering of Chinese people in the nineteenth century and the negative impact of the Nanjing Treaty; and interesting objects that were not included in the exhibition, such as the sword of Taiping rebel Li Xiucheng.

Jessica Harrison-Hall is Head of the China Section, Curator of the Sir Percival David Collection, Chinese Ceramics and Decorative Arts at the British Museum. She was lead curator for two permanent galleries at the British Museum: one, a beautiful space with 1,700 Chinese ceramics from the Sir Percival David Collection; the other devoted to a history of China from the Neolithic to the present, which is shown in the Sir Joseph Hotung Gallery for China and South Asia. As Principal Investigator, she has led two major Arts and Humanities Research Council projects: one with Professor Craig Clunas and Dr Yu-ping Luk (2012-2016), investigating early Ming courts and their contacts, resulting in the Ming: 50 Years that changed China exhibition and its books; and the other with Professor Julia Lovell and Wenyuan Xin (2018-2024), researching cultural creativity and resilience in China’s long 19th century. She has authored or co-authored 10 books, including China: A History in Objects, which has been translated into six languages. Most recently, she has been lead curator of the blockbuster exhibition, China’s Hidden Century.