Extraordinary tale of Chinese-British collaboration revealed in new exhibition

Winnie Wong, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was on holiday in the summer of 2019 when she received the kind of call historians dream of. “I started screaming,” Wong says, laughing. “My family was like, ‘What?’” On the line was fellow historian Jordan Goodman, who had just visited the Canterbury Cathedral Archives & Library in England. There, he had discovered a trove of documents belonging to John Bradby Blake, an English botanist who worked for the East India Company in Canton (Guangzhou in southern China) between 1769 and his death in 1773, when he was just 28. Both Wong and Goodman had spent years researching Blake, examining how this often overlooked figure shaped the art and science of his day. His life offers particularly interesting insights into the dynamic between Canton and London, as well as the movement of people and plants between the two in the late 18th century. Even Blake’s death was consequential, likely sparking a chain of events that led to a young Chinese man, Whang At Tong, travelling to London around 1774, making him one of the first Chinese people recorded to have visited England. Whang – also known as Wang-y-tong, Huang Yadong and Whang Atong, among other variations – became a minor celebrity and is the only Chinese person known to have been painted by the society portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds. These stories and more are told in “Seeds of Exchange: Canton and London in the 1700s”, an exhibition curated by Emma House at the Garden Museum in the British capital and produced in collaboration with the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) in the US, which holds most of Blake’s archive. Among the items on display are Reynolds’ portrait of Whang, documents Goodman identified in Canterbury, and 30 botanical paintings Blake commissioned from an artist who worked under the name Mak Sau. This is the first time in more than 200 years that the notes from Canterbury have been reunited with some of the botanical paintings to which they refer. Seen in conversation, they reveal an extraordinary tale of cross-cultural and transcontinental collaboration between Blake, his father, Whang and Mak Sau, who was also known as Mauk-Sow-U. Blake was the son of John Blake, a captain for the East India Company. He followed in his father’s footsteps by joining the business and arrived in Canton, the only place in China where Westerners were allowed to conduct trade, in the late 1760s. There, Blake devoted his free time to studying the native flora. He was driven by both a passion for botany and a desire to identify plants of commercial value that could be grown in the UK or British colonies, so the country would be less reliant on foreign partners. The fact that China had a monopoly on tea was later a factor in the outbreak of the opium wars. Blake’s greatest goal was to compile what he called a Compleat Chinensis, a book illustrating every plant in China and detailing their uses and how to grow them. Key to this project was the artist Mak Sau, whom Blake hired to paint native plants in the style of Western botanical texts. Very little is known about Mak Sau, but his paintings tell a story of cultural exchange. “They are a meeting of Chinese art and European science,” Wong says. Blake sent several of these paintings to London as the book was progressing. There, they were seen by some of the city’s leading scientists, including the explorer Joseph Banks and naturalist Daniel Solander, who were impressed enough to begin the process of electing Blake as a fellow of the Royal Society. Shortly before that could happen, tragedy struck. Blake died in Canton of complications brought on by gallstones. He left behind at least 150 botanical paintings, but his Compleat Chinensis was unfinished. Exactly what happened next is a mystery. All we know is that by March 1775, the paintings Blake had commissioned were in London with Blake’s father, along with Whang, a man from Canton believed to have been in his early twenties at the time. Little is known of Whang’s life before arriving in London. It is possible that Whang was a translator for Blake and sourced plants for his project. Since Whang appears in the UK around the same time as Blake’s belongings, he likely delivered them to Blake’s family. In London, Whang worked with Blake’s father to help him make sense of Blake’s archive. “Throughout the documents, especially the Canterbury ones, you see this four-way conversation,” Wong says. There are notes detailing how Blake and Mak Sau spent their days together creating botanical paintings. Alongside those, there are annotations from Whang and Blake’s father in which Whang translates details from Chinese to English for Blake senior. Whang At Tong in high society While Whang was helping Blake senior decode his son’s project, Blake senior was introducing Whang to high society. Shortly after Whang’s arrival, Blake senior brought him to a dinner with the fellows of the Royal Society. In the following years, Whang socialised with Banks; discussed porcelain manufacturing in China with Josiah Wedgwood, the founder of the renowned British pottery company; and explained acupuncture to the doctor Andrew Duncan. The defining image of this time is Reynolds’ portrait of Whang, which is peak chinoiserie, featuring Whang posing cross-legged on a carved chair, wearing silk robes and a conical hat. Despite Whang’s fame in London, it has so far been impossible to track his movements after he returned to China. Whang was back in Canton by the early 1780s. Then, his trail goes cold. In the following decades, trade and relations between China and the UK grew more fraught. The First Opium War took place between 1839 and 1842. A few years later, the East India Company paid another British botanist, Robert Fortune, to smuggle tea plants out of China, an act of industrial espionage. Although Blake was also partly motivated by commercial opportunities, Wong thinks his collaboration with Mak Sau, and the subsequent cooperation between Blake’s father and Whang, show a different approach. “Part of my fascination with these 18th century stories is that I see in them the fact that the 19th century endings were not inevitable. It didn’t need to end in the opium wars and colonialism and violence,” Wong says. “It might be trite to say, but people were genuinely trying to understand each other. Even if their motives were commercial or complicated or multilayered, I think you’ll see in the exhibition a genuine – if contingent – meeting of people.” “Seeds of Exchange: Canton and London in the 1700s”, Garden Museum, 5 Lambeth Palace Road, London. Until May 10.

Extraordinary tale of Chinese-British collaboration revealed in new exhibition

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The London show spotlighting an English botanist sheds light on 18th century science and exchanges between China and England

The London show spotlighting an English botanist sheds light on 18th century science and exchanges between China and England