Encounters: the meeting of Asia and Europe . 1500 – 1800

Edited byAnna Jackson and Amin Jaffer

Victoria and Albert Museum: £45

The lavish publication that accompanies the ground-breaking Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition, which continues until 5 th December 2004, explores, as does the exhibition itself, three hundred years of cultural, commercial and technological interaction between Europe and maritime Asia following the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a sea route to India in 1498. The text of this extraordinarily informative volume is complemented by a complete and opulent display of objects in the exhibition, which include The Fonthill Vase – the earliest piece of Chinese porcelain in Europe; The Van Diemen Box – one of the most important pieces of Japanese lacquer in the world; jewelled clocks from The Forbidden City in Beijing; panoramic wall papers depicting Canton in the late 18 th century (from Strathallan castle); and Tippu’s Tiger – created as a gruesome Indian political statement by Tippu Sultan in 1795. Indeed illustrations of some of these rare and sometimes magnificent pieces are being published for the first time. Uniquely complementary portraits by Reynolds, Vigée le Brun, Kneller, Baynes and Zoffany round out the presentation. The book is a tour de force.

One of the strengths of the book is its broad approach, which brings together scholars working in a variety of fields. Although some of the material has been discussed in other publications this is the first time that such a rich array of objects and ideas have been brought together.

The Introduction provides a fascinating but concise background to the period and raises the underlying theme of the text: that both East and West were fascinated by one another and that the notion of exoticism, a concept generally associated with the western construct of the East, does in fact work both ways.

The period is a fascinating one indeed, taking at its starting point the arrival of the Portuguese in Asia in 1498 and closing with the establishment of British military and economic hegemony of much of South and East Asia at the end of the eighteenth century. As the book shows, although in the period under discussion relations between Europeans and Asians were often marred by misunderstanding and greed, it was also an age of cultural dialogue, hybridity and fluidity, rather than one of dichotomy of East versus West. The essays in the book show that globalisation is nothing new. However, in the period, it was not a case of one culture dominating others, but of the mutual appropriation and absorption of elements of many cultures. The exchange between East and West was not just one of goods and currencies but of ideas and lifestyle, the profound effects of which are still apparent in the world today.

The book follows the innovative thematic approach of the exhibition which addresses the subject in an entirely new way. Discoveries, the first section, explores the state of play at the brink of the encounter. The renowned late scholar David Woodward provides a cartographic view of the world in the early modern period, from both European and Asian perspectives. It was luxury goods and wonders of nature from Asia that provided renaissance collectors with a vision of the East. Chapters by Annemarie Jordan Gwshend and Rose Kerr explore the appeal of Asian novelties at the time of the Discoveries. Typically in the past the Discoveries and the subsequent encounters have been seen from a western perspective. This is not the case here, and many of the authors are quite obviously specialists in Asian art and culture. Indeed the book and exhibition have been generated by the Asian Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum and many of the curators have contributed to this volume. John Guy’s chapter of Asian Trade and Exchange, for example, brings to light a hitherto neglected subject: the trade routes that existed at the time Europeans arrived in Asia.

The real appeal and strength of the book lies in the middle section, Encounters. To my knowledge the ideas discussed here have never been explored in a scholarly book or in an exhibition. Chapters on diplomatic encounters by Amin Jaffer for South Asia and James Heria for East Asia, provide an understanding of the diplomatic conventions Europeans experienced in Asia, illustrated with images of gifts exchanged and representations of the meetings themselves. Gauvin Bailey explores the religious encounter, in particular the way in which Christian Missionaries employed works of art to communicate across profound linguistic barriers. Liturgical objects from Europe were copied in the East, demonstrating that missionary orders were engaged in an active dialogue with local craftsmen and iconography leading to the development of a fascinating hybrid visual culture. The architectural environment in which Europeans in Asia lived is addressed by Paulo Varela Gomes for the Portuguese settlements, Leonard Blusse for the Dutch and J.P. Losty for the British. The personal – often intimate - relationships form the backbone of the encounter. Once again this is a subject never properly addressed in an exhibition context. The three chapters by William Dalrymple, Leonard Blusse and Rupert Faulkner are perhaps the most engaging and amusing of the book, drawing readers into the intimate -world of East-West relationships. The chapters on the Asian visual response to the arrival of curious looking westerners are remarkable for the freshness of information and compelling images. Rosemary Crill and Anna Jackson explore how Asians perceived and represented Europeans and how the exotic European was absorbed into the artistic landscape.

The final section of this exemplary book, Exchanges, explores the material dimension of the relationship. The story of Asian luxury goods made specifically for export to Europe is a well known one. A team of curators – Rose Kerr, Julia Hutt, Amin Jaffer, Rosemary Crill and William Sargent – contextualise this production in different media – porcelain, lacquer, furniture, textiles and paintings. The reverse story – What Asia consumed from Europe – is seldom discussed or even addressed in East-West exhibitions. These chapters alone render this book indispensable. Suan Strong, Catherine Pagani and Timon Screech examine how India, China and Japan responded to western goods and technologies. The book culminates in chapters which explore how in both Europe and Asia elites created fantastic spaces representing the other devoted to leisure and escapism. The role of the East in the formation of Western fantasy, explored here by Steven Parissien, is already well known. What is rarely acknowledged is that the reverse is also true. European images and objects were re-contextualised in the East, inspiring in Asian peoples a corresponding vision of the exotic West, revealed in this book by Sally North and Ming Wilson.

These main chapters are augmented with fascinating double-page features on discrete subjects ranging from the trade in exotic animals and shipwreck cargoes to the impact of western war technology in Asia. The book also features a prodigious chronology, and has been expertly edited. The chapters read well as a coherent whole and the particular voice of the individual authors has not been lost.

Encounter is definitely an independent book rather than an exhibition catalogue. This is its strength. Although a handlist of exhibits is included in the book in rather small type at the end, it does not really provide much object-based information. I feel also that the placement of images and the over-use of cut-outs detracts from the elegance of this otherwise exceptional book which surely is a landmark publication in the field of East-West relations.