The 19th century Chinese craze for all things European

By the 1800s, the mechanical clock had become a status symbol for wealthy Chinese. The first arrived with Jesuit missionaries and Portuguese merchants years earlier, but it wasn’t until the early 19th century that those outside of the imperial court could afford them. Rich merchant families displayed their clocks proudly, like their European counterparts had showed off pineapples. Women’s jackets started to be decorated with ‘clock buttons’ made of enamel and one family embroidered a clock face on to their baby’s silk bib.

European aesthetics made their way into other parts of Chinese society too. Traditional ink portraits became colourful and hyper-realistic, inspired by photography. Courtesans learned to play billiards and ate in restaurants decorated like European salons. The artist Wu Youru illustrated these early modern scenes along with vignettes from western life: village cricket played in the English countryside or New York firemen at work. The pictures were lithographically printed in the Dianshizhai Huabao, a Shanghai-based magazine founded by a British businessman in 1884.