Museum collection shines light on Chinese culture and language

For the 2023 Mid-Autumn Festival, Dr Alistair Kwan undertook an object reading of some Chinese artefacts in the Nelson Provincial Museum Pupuri Taonga o Te Tai Ao.

In much of east and southeast Asia, the Mid-Autumn Festival sees people sharing mooncakes and hanging lanterns, many adorned with calligraphy.

Ancient myth tells how, inspired by the patterns on a turtle shell, the imperial historian Cāngjié invented writing about 5,000 years ago. There came to be several scripts, differing between adjacent states. The states and their scripts were unified around the second century BCE as a decisive move in the creation of Chinese ethnicity.

Object 1: Porcelain bowl with calligraphy and painted scene that includes a boy riding an ox. FE.381.67.1.

Chinese writing – whether handwritten, carved, embroidered or printed – is more than just communication. Wherever it appears, writing is simultaneously practical and decorative, and a living connection to history. How does it show up in New Zealand’s museums?

Object 2: A seal blank. Individuals usually buy seals with the top already carved, and hire a calligrapher to engrave the printing surface. FE.359.67.

Let’s start with a porcelain bowl decorated with both images and text (object 1). In Chinese use, painting and writing can be hard to separate. Together, they carry art and literature throughout everyday life: this little bowl brings painting, calligraphy and poetry to the table, to eating and drinking, to conversation. The bowl features two kinds of writing. The seal inside the bowl’s foot has been stamped in red ink. It reads: “Made by Wāng Yìshèng.” It was likely stamped with a seal cut from soapstone; the more precious seals are of harder stones like agate or jade (object 2).

In contrast, the black script on the side of the bowl – a short poem – has been written by hand, using a brush like the one in object 3. This brush, still dirty, rests on a brush stand.

Many brush stands are shaped like the character 山 (saan¹/shān, mountain); the brush rests in the valleys between the peaks. This one features the Japanese maxim of the three monkeys who speak no evil, see no evil, and hear no evil. It was made in Japan, whose calligraphic culture grew from China’s, and in truth we don’t know whether it was made to be a brush stand or just happens to be the right shape and size.

Object 3: A writing brush, stained with ink. The three monkeys are from Japan. FE.372.67/ NPM372.67.

Brush handles are usually wood or bamboo, occasionally porcelain, metal, ivory or stone or, these days, plastic. The hairs range from tiny, stiff tufts of weasel hair for small, strict text like on the bowl to huge, floppy shanks of wool and horsetail for scripts that swirl like smoke on signs and banners. Painting is done with the same types of brush.

Object 4: Glazed ceramic figurine of a man holding an inkstick and an inkstone. NPM2008.17.101.

Wāng, the ceramicist, worked around 1900, a time of social, political and economic strife. The script of his time is nearly identical to the script of today.

The ink that he used is still made now, much as it has been for thousands of years: soot from wood or oil smoke, is bound into a stiff paste with glue and sometimes ground charcoal, and dried in blocks. For writing, the end of a block is dipped into water and ground on an inkstone, as depicted in one of the museum’s figurines (see object 4). The resulting product – but powdered for convenience in a dip-pen culture – made its way across the British Empire, even into New Zealand classrooms.

As it passed through Britain’s south Asian trade hub, it came to be called India Ink. Francophones, in contrast, call it encre de Chine – China ink.

An inkstone in the collection speaks more overtly to how Chinese literary culture crossed boundaries. It was dug up on the West Coast and has long been said to have come from a Chinese shipwreck, though details are scant. One end has been drilled with holes. This makes no sense from a Chinese point of view but their positioning suggests that the inkstone found a new use: with holes, it could be hung as an ornament or worn as a pendant (object 5).

Object 5: An inkstone found buried on the West Coast. Said to be from a wrecked Chinese ship, it has been drilled with holes. E.2851.79.

Object 6: A British passport dated February 1894. NN2013.519.

Geopolitical borders are crossed by the passport in object 6, a printed form with gaps for filling in particulars by hand. In the large, red seal impression, we see one of the formal seal scripts, and also a coat of arms – the language is Chinese, but the passport is British. It was issued to a missionary from Christchurch and points to a less familiar story: we usually hear about Imperial China as an origin of financial refugees but, for a few British people here in New Zealand, China was a destination.

Decorative script is still everywhere in Chinese homes, workplaces, restaurants, and public spaces. Some characters, like 寿 (sau⁶/shōu, which means longevity), still appear in ancient forms. Other common characters include 祿 (luk⁶/lù, happiness) and 福 (fuk¹/fù, blessings). For example, a woodblock print of a household deity (see object 7; the banner at the top says that this is Zàojūn, the “kitchen god” and Sīmìng, the “master of fates”) features an ancient 寿 on his sleeves and a modern 福 on a pendant around his neck. Prints like these are hung above the stove, especially during preparations for the New Year.

Object 8: Ancient stylised forms of 壽(shōu, longevity) and 禄 (lù, happiness) on a brass tobacco water-pipe. FE.391.67.

A brass water-pipe (object 8) features ancient forms of 壽 and 祿. The words might seem ironic, given that tobacco brings neither long life nor, in the long run, all that much happiness. At the time, though, smoking appealed to the upper class, tobacco was widely understood to be a health supplement, and the words carried ideals even if the nicotine itself did not.

Interestingly, museums the world over still list Chinese water-pipes as opium pipes, having catalogued them under the influence of the Chinese-addict stereotype. That deep interest in Chinese opium addiction moved collectors and cataloguers alike offers us another interesting geopolitical connection to western understandings of China and again also to India, where Britain grew the opium.

Why does the Nelson Provincial Museum hold this mix of objects? The answer, in nearly every museum, is that collecting is complicated.

People who collect delicate porcelain bowls are often more interested in visual art and sculptural form than the cuisine eaten from them; collectors of opium pipes might have been fascinated by exotic seediness of the addicts or by the drug lords – literal lords, in this case – who ran the business; whoever collected the travel documents might have been focused on missionary history.

Museums house objects that all sorts of people collected for all sorts of reasons. Collecting objects in a museum takes them away from their original contexts, but also presents new opportunities. When curators bring objects together in new combinations, lost memories return and new insights emerge.

The light, bright bowl, representing the porcelain so prized in the West, sits now with opium pipes that remind us how Britain paid for fine china, tea, spices and silk, and a passport for a missionary who sought to save afflicted souls. Like the Museum, the Mid-Autumn Festival – 中秋節, zung¹cau¹zit³/zhōngqiū jié in Chinese - joins scattered dots. Families and friends reunite.

Writing and mooncakes link the present with the past, just as the letterforms in this newspaper link New Zealand English with the engraved letters of ancient Rome and the other cultures that use them. In the same way, the writing on these collected objects connects Cantonese (廣東話, Gwong²dung¹waa⁶/Guǎngdōnghuà), the main heritage language of the New Zealand Chinese, with the classical literary language (文言, man⁴jin⁴/wényán) of the poem, the ancient sigils of the poster and pipe, the imperial government’s Mandarin koiné (官話, gun¹waa⁶guānhuà) of the passport and, ultimately, the standard Chinese (普通話, pou²tung¹waa⁶/pǔtōnghuà) of today.

The centuries may feel distant at times but, like objects in the museum, they made us who we are today and offer lessons on how we should craft the morrow.

Object 7: This woodblock print of a household deity, showing 禄 (lù, happiness) on the sleeves and福 (fù, blessings) on a neck pendant, would have been hung above the kitchen stove, especially in the weeks leading up to the New Year. FE.381.67.1.

Article by historian Alistair Kwan, PhD with the support of Nelson Provincial Museum Pupuri Taonga o Te Tai Ao. Additional editing by Kerry Sunderland. Romanisations are given in Jyutping for Cantonese, followed by Hànyǔ pīnyīn for Pǔtōnghuà (standard modern Chinese).

This article was originally published in The Nelson Mail on Saturday 30th September 2023. To view the story - click here