Chinese and European monarchs at work: Images of rulers personally pushing ploughs in the 18th century

Abstract

Sometime during 1723-1735, the Yongzheng雍正Emperor commissioned an image that can be translated into English as the Picture of [the emperor] personally ploughing or the Qinggeng Tu 親耕圖.This representation depicts the monarch of China taking his own hands to a plough and pushing it for some paces. Beginning in the Zhou dynasty (c. 1100-479 BCE), Chinese rulers have enacted this ceremony in accordance with the Book of Rites or Li Ji 禮記. The emperor chose a propitious day to inaugurate the ploughing season. This activity, which not every Chinese monarch has performed, nonetheless has served as an ideal petition in which the emperor appeals to the benevolence of nature to ask for a prosperous harvest. For the Yongzheng Emperor pictorially recording this act appeared to have great importance for him. Prior to his representation, the earliest-known picture of an emperor ploughing appears in the form of a humble woodblock print in the Book of Agriculture or Nong Shu 農書by Wang Zhen王禎 (act. 1300s). Written by 1303, the earliest extant version dates to 1530 and features a nameless figure identified as the emperor as pushing the plough. Yongzheng is portrayed as personally pushing the plough in a very long and ambitious handscroll painted by the famous Jesuit painter Giuseppe Castiglione (1688 - 1766). Within fifty years after Yongzheng’s production, at least two European rulers (or in one case king-to-be) are represented in printed versions of the Picture of [the emperor] personally ploughing. Louis Auguste, the 25th Dauphan, the future King of France Louis XVI (r. 1774-1791) was represented as performing the ploughing ceremony in 1768. In 1769, Joseph II (r.1765-1790), the Holy Roman emperor and brother of Louis Auguste’s future wife, Marie Antoinette (1755 - 1793), would likewise be represented in the same agrarian ceremony. As text and possibly imagery about the activities of the Chinese emperors entered Europe through Jesuits’ and travelers’ accounts, intellectuals of the period (at times successfully) sought to encourage European monarchs to emulate their ceremonies. This paper starts by considering the Yongzheng Emperor’s motivation to commission such a lavish representation of this ceremony and then moves on to explore the appeal of the same type of imagery for 18th-century European rulers and audiences.