{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.033541341653666144, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0327613104524181, 'mean_word_length': 5.121718377088306, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
China on Paper: European and Chinese Works from the Late Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century

The appearance in paperback form of a book several years after the conclusion of the exhibition that generated it suggests a continuing public interest that not every exhibition inspires. This is the honour now afforded China on Paper, structured around a catalogue of 37 items exhibited at the Getty Research Institute between November 2007 and February 2008, and which collectively illustrate aspects of China’s early modern global history. The catalogue entries are accompanied by a series of introductory essays by Reed and Demattè themselves, with a contribution from Gang Song and an excellent final chapter by Richard E. Strassberg. The exhibition catalogue stretches chronologically from the 1586 edition of Juan González de Mendoza’s (1545–1618) Dell’historia della China (cat. 1) to the 20 prints depicting the European Pavilions at the Garden of Perfect Clarity (Yuanmingyuan) in Beijing, produced by the Manchu court artist Yi Lantai (fl. 1750–90) in 1783–86 (cat. 30). As the editors thoughtfully suggest in their Introduction, the European Pavilions (1747–83) and their ruins, perhaps more than any other structure, ‘‘epitomize centuries of interactions between European visitors and Chinese hosts, documenting a history of mutual curiosity and mixed communications that have sought but never achieved perfect clarity’’ (p. 2). While many of the works and themes discussed in China on Paper will be familiar, one of the undoubted strengths of this book is its sustained and detailed discussion of its high-quality images, many of which are in colour, along with its meticulous treatment of publication histories. The ample catalogue entries themselves, and the discussion of supplementary figures included in the essays, allow us to explore in detail how these images were reused, reimagined and republished for different ends. We are able to see, for example, how the remarkable Song nianzhu guicheng (Method for the Recitation of the Rosary) of 1619–23 transforms a late sixteenth-century engraving of the Annunciation into the inner quarters of a late-Ming household (figs. 12–13), complete with latticed windows and a painted screen in the style of the great landscape painter Ni Zan (1301–74) (p. 36). At the other end of the cultural spectrum, a work that must truly have startled Chinese and Manchu observers is an engraving (fig. 45) from the Pingding Zhunga’er Huibu desheng tu (1765–75), Asian Studies Review June 2012, Vol. 36, pp. 271–305