The modern Chinese poet Yang Lian recognizes the propaganda element in the Qianlong emperor’s lyrical inscription on the bi, and takes a rather dim view of his poetry:
When I look at this bi I have some very complex feelings. On one side I am very much appreciative: I love this feeling of a link with the ancient Chinese cultural tradition, because it was a very unique phenomenon which started a long time ago and never broke, continually developed until today through many difficult times … In that case the jade always represented the great past. But on the darker side, the beautiful things were often used by rulers and powers who had bad taste, so they don’t mind destroying ancient things with bad writing. So they can carve the emperor’s poem on the beautiful piece and also do a little propaganda, which for me is very familiar!
Like his contemporary Frederick the Great, the Qianlong emperor was no master of poetry – he seems to have mixed Classical Chinese with vernacular forms to poor effect. But that didn’t hold him back – he published more than 40,000 compositions in his lifetime, part of his elaborate campaign to secure his place in history.
He was largely successful. Although the Qianlong emperor’s reputation dipped dramatically in the Communist period, it is once again strong in China. And a very satisfying discovery has just been made. As we saw a moment ago, the emperor wrote: ‘As one cannot show a stand without a bowl / we have selected a ceramic from the Ding kiln for it.’ Very recently a scholar in the Palace Museum collections in Beijing found a bowl that carries exactly the same inscription as the one on this disc. It is undoubtedly the very bowl chosen by the emperor to sit in the bi.
As he handled and thought about the bi, the Qianlong emperor was doing something central to any history based on objects. Exploring a distant world through things is not only about knowledge but about imagination, and necessarily involves an element of poetic reconstruction; with the bi, for example, the emperor knows it is an ancient and a cherished object, and he wants it to look its best. He believes it is a stand, and he finds a bowl that seems to be a perfect match – a choice made with his sense of supreme self-assurance that he is doing the right thing. It is unlikely his assumption about the bi being a stand was correct, but I find myself admiring and applauding his method.
PART NINETEEN
Mass Production, Mass Persuasion
AD 1780–1914
Between the French Revolution and the First World War the countries of Europe and the USA were transformed from agricultural to industrial economies. At the same time, their empires around the world grew, providing many of the raw materials and the markets these booming industries required. Eventually all of Asia and Africa were compelled to become part of the new economic and political order. Technological innovation led to mass production of goods and growing international trade: consumer goods that had previously been luxuries, such as tea, became widely affordable to the masses. In many countries, mass movements campaigned for political and social reforms, including the right for all men and women to be able to vote. Only one non-western country, Japan, successfully, if involuntarily, embraced modernization and emerged as an imperial power in its own right.
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Ship’s Chronometer from HMS Beagle
Brass chronometer, from England
AD 1800–1850
Why does the whole world measure its time and define its position in relation to the Greenwich Meridian, a line passing through a spot on the banks of the Thames in south-east London? The story begins with the invention in London of a sea-going clock that allowed sailors to find their longitude. The object pictured here is one of those clocks – a marine chronometer made around 1800 – which could keep perfect time even in rolling seas.
During what is sometimes called the ‘long’ nineteenth century, from the French Revolution to the First World War, the countries of western Europe and America were transformed from agricultural societies into industrial powerhouses. This Industrial Revolution generated many others. New technologies led for the first time to mass production of luxury goods: societies reorganized themselves politically at home, while overseas, empires expanded to secure raw materials and new markets. Technological advances also led to revolutions in thought: it is hardly an exaggeration, for example, to say that the whole idea of time changed in the nineteenth century, and in consequence so did our idea of ourselves and our understanding of humanity’s proper place in history.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries clockmaking was a vital European technology, and London was at its cutting edge. As a maritime nation, the British were concerned with one problem in particular: they could make clocks that kept very good time as long as they stayed perfectly still but not when they were shaken about, and particularly not on board a rolling ship. If you wanted to sail, it was impossible to keep a precise record of time. And at sea, if you can’t tell the time, you don’t how far east or west you are. It is relatively easy to calculate latitude – your distance north or south of the equator – by measuring the height of the Sun above the horizon at noon; but this won’t let you calculate longitude – your position east or west.
The problem of accurate timekeeping at sea was finally cracked in the middle of the eighteenth century by John Harrison, who invented a clock – a marine chronometer – which could go on accurately telling the time in spite of fluctuations in temperature and humidity and the constant movement of a ship, thus making it possible for the first time for ships anywhere to establish their longitude. Before a ship set sail, its chronometer would be set to the local time in harbour – for the British this was usually Greenwich. Once at sea, you could then compare the time at Greenwich with the time of noon on board ship, which you fixed by the Sun; the difference between the two times gave you your longitude. There are twenty-four hours in the day so, as the Earth rotates, every hour the Sun apparently ‘moves’ across the sky one twenty-fourth of a complete circle of the globe – that is, 15 degrees. If you are three hours behind the time in Greenwich, you are 45 degrees west – in the middle of the Atlantic. If you are three hours ahead you are 45 degrees east – on the same latitude as Greenwich, you would be somewhere south-west of Moscow.
Harrison’s chronometers were pioneering, high-precision instruments made in tiny numbers and affordable only to the Admiralty. It was not until around 1800 that two London clockmakers managed to simplify the chronometer mechanisms so that virtually any ship – and certainly the larger ships of the Royal Navy – could carry them as routine equipment. Our object is one of those lower-cost chronometers, made in 1800 by Thomas Earnshaw. It is made of brass and is around the size of a large pocket watch, with a normal clock dial showing roman numerals and a smaller dial at the bottom for the second hand. The clock is suspended inside a swivelling brass ring fitted to the inside of a wooden box – this is the key to keeping the chronometer level even in an unsteady ship. The geographer Professor Nigel Thrift assesses the background:
The chronometer is the pinnacle of a long history of clockmaking, and it is very important to realize that clocks have been around since 1283 in England. Everyone talks about Harrison and the fact that he was a genius. He was, but you have to understand the innovative efforts made by hundreds and thousands of clockmakers and general mechanics that, in the end, produced that object. Gradually, all of those things are incorporated into this extraordinarily efficient machine. These kinds of chronometers were phenomenally accurate; for example, one of the first was used by Captain Cook on his second voyage of exploration to the Pacific, and when Cook made final landfall in Plymouth in 1775 after circumnavigating the globe it gave an error of less than eight miles in calculated longitude.
This particular chronometer sailed on many ships – always issued and set, as others were, at Greenwich; but it is famous because in 1831 it was issued to HMS Beagle, the ship that carried Charles Darwin on his great voyage to South America, the Galapagos Islands and on around the world, which ultimately led to his theory of evolution and his great work On the Origin
of Species.
The Beagle was on a mission to map the coastline of South America, work which relied on very accurate measurements of longitude and latitude. The chronometer for the first time allowed absolutely accurate charting of the oceans, with all that implied for establishing safe and rapid shipping routes. It was another great step in the Enlightenment project of mapping – and therefore controlling – the world. To allow for any discrepancies or failures, the Beagle carried twenty-two chronometers: eighteen, including ours, were provided by the Admiralty, and four by the captain, Robert FitzRoy, who felt that eighteen was not enough for such a lengthy and important job. After five years at sea, the eleven chronometers still working at the end of the voyage showed a discrepancy of just thirty-three seconds from Greenwich time. For the first time, a detailed chronometric girdle had been put around the Earth.
By the middle of the nineteenth century it was established that all British shipping would take Greenwich as its point of reference for time and therefore for longitude, and all the oceans of the world had been mapped by British ships on that basis. As a result, the Greenwich Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time were increasingly widely used by the international community until, in 1884, the Washington Convention formally ratified the practice. There was one notable exception: the French defiantly stuck to their Paris Meridian for some decades more, but eventually they too fell into line, and every country now fixes its time zone by reference to Greenwich Mean Time. For the first moment in history the world was working to one timetable. Global time, a concept almost unimaginable 100 years earlier, had arrived.
But on the Beagle our chronometer was also witness to another, quite separate shift in the nineteenth century’s understanding of time. Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and his subsequent work on evolution pushed human origins – and indeed the origins of life itself – into an unthinkably distant past. Geologists had already demonstrated that the Earth was far older than previously believed, undermining the calculation made by Archbishop Ussher (see Chapter 2). This new concept of deep time – going back tens of millions of years – destroyed the established historical and biblical frameworks of thought. The shifting parameters of time and change forced the nineteenth century to rethink from scratch the very nature and meaning of human existence. Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist and expert on Darwin and evolution, considers the significance of the discovery of deep time:
I think what deep time did was to make people realize that the Earth was not unchanging. The biggest transformation since the Enlightenment has been a shift in our attitude to time, the feeling that time is effectively infinite, both the time that’s gone and the time that’s to come. It’s worth remembering that the summit of Everest, not long ago in the context of deep time, was at the bottom of the ocean; and some of the best fossils of whales are actually found high in the Himalayas.
These were enormous and belief-shattering ideas for many people in the nineteenth century, but time was also changing in a much more day-to-day, or rather hour-to-hour, way. Thanks to clockmakers like Earnshaw, precise and reliable clocks and watches became ever more affordable. Before long the whole of Britain was running by the clock, and the measurement of time had been severed from the natural cycle of days and seasons. The clock ruled every aspect of life – shops and schools, pleasure and work. As Charles Dickens wrote, ‘There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in.’ Nigel Thrift explains:
The chronometer, an exceptionally accurate clock, meant that gradually an ever more accurate measure of time became possible, and that of course worked through other things in the nineteenth century to produce ever more standardized time. A good example of that is the railway, where standard time based on the meridian was first applied by the Great Western Railway in 1840 and gradually that standard time became general. By 1855, 95 per cent of towns had switched to GMT, and by 1880 GMT became the reference point across the UK by Act of Parliament. But it is worth remembering that until that point, certainly until the beginning of railway time, places had all run to local time, and if you were travelling, Leeds, for example, was six minutes behind London; Bristol was ten minutes. It didn’t matter then. But it mattered when you started getting fast travel. Everyone went on to one time, gradually but very certainly.
Just as people adopted a common standard time, so numerous aspects of working and daily life were becoming rigidly fixed by the clock, from clocking on at work to school hours and tea-time – which is the subject of our next chapter.
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Early Victorian Tea Set
Stoneware and silver tea set, from Staffordshire, England
AD 1840–1845
What could be more domestic, more unremarkable, more British, than a nice cup of tea? You could of course put the question the other way round and ask what could be less British than a cup of tea, given that tea is made from plants grown in India or China and often sweetened by sugar from the Caribbean. It is one of the ironies of British national identity – or perhaps it says everything about our national identity – that the drink which has become the worldwide caricature of Britishness has nothing indigenous about it, but is the result of centuries of global trade and a complex imperial history. Behind the modern British cup of tea lie the high politics of Victorian Britain, the stories of nineteenth-century empire, of mass production and of mass consumption, the taming of an industrial working class, the reshaping of the agriculture of continents, the movement of millions of people, and a worldwide shipping industry.
By the middle of the nineteenth century in Britain some luxuries came to be seen as not only desirable but essential. The most ubiquitous of all was tea, a vital ingredient of life for every part of the British population. The object that highlights this change is a tea set made up of three pieces of red-brown stoneware: a smallish teapot about 14 centimetres (6 inches) high with a short straight spout, a sugar bowl and a milk jug. They were made – as we can read on their bases – at Wedgwood’s Etruria factory in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, in the heart of the Potteries. In the eighteenth century Josiah Wedgwood had made some of the most expensive stoneware ceramics – in jasper and basalt – in Britain, but this tea set shows that by the 1840s, when Wedgwood produced it, the company was aiming at a much wider market. This is quite clearly mid-range pottery, simple earthenware of a sort that many quite modest British households were then able to afford. But the owners of this particular set must have had serious social aspirations, because all three pieces have been decorated with a drape of lacy hallmarked silver. The historian Celina Fox explains that tea-time had become a very smart event:
In the 1840s the Duchess of Bedford introduces the ritual of afternoon tea, because by this time dinner had become so late, seven-thirty to eight o’clock, that it was a bit of a gap for the British tummy between lunchtime and evening. For a while there was a revival of tea-drinking, as a sort of meal for sandwiches and so forth, around four o’clock.
Among the upper classes, tea had been popular since before 1700. It received celebrity endorsement from Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, and from Queen Anne. It came from China, it was expensive, refreshingly bitter and drunk in tiny cups without milk or sugar. People kept their tea in locked tea caddies, as if it were a drug; for those who could afford it, it often was. In the 1750s Samuel Johnson confessed himself a happy addict:
A hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle scarcely has time to cool, who with Tea amuses the evening, with Tea solaces the midnights, and with Tea welcomes the morning.
Desire for the drink increased in the eighteenth century, but government taxes kept the price high, so a vigorous smuggling trade developed to avoid the excise duty. By the 1770s most of the tea entering Britain was smuggled – it was estimated that 7 million lbs (3 million kilograms) of tea were illicitly trafficked into Britain, against only 5 million lbs (2 million kilograms) imported legally
. In 1785, under pressure from the law-abiding tea traders, the government slashed the duty on tea, which wiped out the illegal smuggling trade virtually overnight. The price of tea dropped sharply. It could now become a truly popular drink. But cheapness was only one factor in the nation’s growing taste for tea. At some point early in the eighteenth century, people had started adding milk and sugar, which transformed bitter refinement into sustaining sweetness. Consumption rocketed. Unlike coffee, tea was positively marketed as a respectable drink for both sexes – with women particularly targeted. Tea houses and tea gardens flourished in London and china tea sets became an essential part of the fashionable household, while less costly versions in pottery – like the object in this chapter – spread through society.
As it got cheaper, tea also spread rapidly to the working classes. By 1800, as foreigners remarked, it was the new national drink. By 1900 the average tea consumption per person in Britain was a staggering 6 lbs (3 kilograms) a year. In 1809 the Swede Erik Gustav Geijer commented:
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 51