Inventing the ‘Foreignized’ Chinese Carpet in Treaty-port Tianjin, China

Abstract

When the northern Chinese city Tianjin was 'opened up' as a treaty-port after the Second Opium War in 1860, it had never produced a single carpet; by 1929, the city was exporting 180,000 pieces annually, more than any other Chinese city. Carpets were never indigenous to the Tianjin/Beijing region, but were imagined, invented and produced for export at the turn of the twentieth century. The history of the Chinese export carpet from idea to object reveals how tastes and styles aligned with global power and politics. At the height of nineteenth-century British imperialism, a broadly imagined Eastern aesthetic mixed Chinese porcelains with Japanese kimonos and Turkish carpets. With the rise of the nation-state in the twentieth century, distinctions among national styles became more clearly delineated, and the newly invented Chinese carpet became the centrepiece of Chinese-style interior design. From imagined Asian artefact to authentic Chinese commodity, the carpet is an example of how Chinese, European and American people used commodities to navigate uneven systems of global power to produce ideas of Chineseness, foreignness, tradition and modernity.