Transcultural Lenses: Wrapping the Foreignness for Sale in the History of Lenses

Abstract

This chapter investigates the advertising rhetoric used in the History of Lenses, a booklet describing eleven kinds of foreign optical devices. The descriptions reveal several characteristics of the way that Western artifacts were perceived and transformed in Chinese popular culture. I explain why the devices’ illustrations do not represent the tools but instead depict a series of stereotypical artifacts inscribed with marginally relevant commentary about the function of these lenses. First, I explain that illustrated artifacts such as perforated rocks, bronze mirrors, letter papers, and handscrolls are used as visual tropes to assimilate the optical devices into Chinese conventional discourses on artifacts and body. Second, I analyze the rhetoric of ethos, which refers to religious efficacy and moral authority for commercial promotion. Third, I show that the illustrations evoke particular sensory experiences by mobilizing the established cultural tropes linked to specific cultural practices. In summary, although the compiler Sun Yunqiu (1650–after 1681) praises some of the devices’ Western origins, I show that the display of indigenous tropes is used to reduce the foreignness of certain artifacts and to assimilate them into the cultural inventory. This booklet on transcultural lenses exemplifies the formation of a genre of illustrated pamphlets in the context of transcultural encounter, which was facilitated by trade and missionary activity in the early modern world.

This chapter results from a surprising encounter with a highly specific material, History of Lenses (Jingshi 鏡史), an illustrated woodblock booklet about eleven kinds of lenses.¹ Written by a Chinese lens maker, Sun Yunqiu 孫雲球 (c. 1629–1662), in the mid-seventeenth century, the booklet includes eleven categories of lenses purportedly introduced by Jesuits missionaries after the 1580s.² The title of each category is followed by a short essay, then accompanied by an illustration. The theoretically provocative surprise is twofold. To a lesser extent, it is due to the fast pace at which the optic devices were commercialized and the crafting technique transformed and assimilated into the local repertoire of technology. But more puzzling is the presentation of the material itself, which provides little depiction of and information about the natural historical use of such optic devices. Instead, the lens maker elaborates profusely on their other efficacy.

The booklet and the illustrated optic devices stage a transcultural event, which took place during the whole process of the introduction, mutation, and popularization of the crafting technique and visual experience. Over the past two decades, there has been a major update in the scholarship analyzing the artistic interaction among regions and among the constructed borders of cultures, especially between Asia and Europe.³ How can we push forward the insights with which the study of Eurasian cultural encounter has challenged the a priori cultural entities and fixed cultural borders? How do we narrate the process by which cultural entities articulate themselves or emerge rather than the other way around—that is, the process of interacting with clearly defined identities?

Following the recent efforts in the investigation of transcultural relationships, this chapter aims to unpack the commercial strategies used in the presentation of transcultural lenses.⁴ Central to this method, I will consider the wandering artworks as the incarnation of sensual experience, opening time and space for the transcultural construction of values and significance. By analyzing the illustrated booklet on lenses as a whole, I wish to beam-split the relation of a transcultural interaction—for instance, the Sino-Jesuits encounter—into a spectrum of continuous cultural differences, which were marked in a negotiation process among players with particular agendas in the marketplace.⁵

Landing this theorization on the very material in front of me, the parade of representations of Chinese bronze, screen, and garden in a book about lenses defies my expectation of telescope, microscope, or even kaleidoscope. Why do the illustrations not depict the actual devices at all? What are these representations doing here? To put it succinctly, I argue that the booklet mobilizes familiar cultural tropes to advertise the efficacy of the lenses for sale. In other words, the marketing strategy may explain a significant part of the composition and execution of the imageries vis-à-vis its relation to the accompanying text, which would never have been understood had we chased the scientific merit in such presentation. Instead of wondering at its stupefying irrelevance to science and the conspicuous absence of technological details, an analysis of the visual and textual rhetoric of early modern advertisement may serve to enrich our understanding of the transcultural making of lenses.⁶

The lenses did not simply move from Europe to be replicated and used in China. The materiality of lenses, contingent upon local primary source and craft traditions, was intrinsically entangled with the bodily efficacy they were purported to enhance. The transcultural lenses open a view of multiple agents, such as lens makers, business competitors, potential client, and missionaries, who each had their own sensual experience to negotiate; thus, each side leaves a mark of their own cultural expectation on the moving artifact. Without either defining or denying foreignness in a retrospective national framework, I seek to explicate how the cultural boundary has been demarcated with visual strategies such as spacing and composition as well as in textual reference. Most crucially, these strategies have been proportionated to the commercial purpose.

The Business of Lenses

Commercialization, especially advertisement, is a conceptual condition under which the transcultural encounter via optical devices took place in the Chinese context. There is actually a large amount of scholarship on the commerce and consumer society in early modern China,⁷ and scholars have investigated cultural entrepreneurs, especially in the business of commercial publication.⁸ Based on this socioeconomic mapping, we are still in need of analytical categories to tease out the impact of commerce on the form of artifacts. Advertisement or promoting strategy is still our blind spot.⁹ Some overarching surveys on “mass informing” (guang gao 廣告) cover both political propaganda and commercial advertisement. These general survey-textbooks are more interested in categorizing the kinds of media used in broadcasting rather than the intricate rhetoric and strategy that made advertisements effective.¹⁰

In the context of the court culture, the negotiation of the culturally marked visual experience catalyzed by the introduction and transformation of linear perspective and chiaroscuro at the Qing court has attracted strenuous investigation.¹¹ The dazzling court spectacle tends to foreground imperial decorum as the decisive magnetic field where the multicultural presence configures itself. However, there have been more recent discussions of intercultural encounters in art in the local society of the lower Yangtze delta.¹² Wang Cheng-hua, for instance, has traced the presence of European pictorial technique in Suzhou prints.¹³ Yet the dynamic of the commoners’ market, which has been a multivalent shaping force of transcultural differentiation, is largely left out of the picture of the highly centralized social structure of the court.

Therefore, in order to set the stage we need to first understand the status quo of making and selling lenses as a business in the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century.¹⁴ How were the makers trained after Jesuits missionaries came to China? Who might buy the lenses and for what purpose? What level of technology was employed? Fortunately, the booklet can illuminate us in this respect.¹⁵

With the information from four elaborate prefaces to the booklet, we are able to trace how the author, Sun Yunqiu, a skillful lens maker, started the business. The prefaces show Sun’s financial difficulty and talent in craftsmanship.¹⁶ His career pattern represents that of many educated men who were not able to serve in the government in early modern China. They made a living by developing specialized skills in tutoring, legal service, technology, and art.¹⁷ Some of these frustrated hommes de lettres eventually excelled in a field of knowledge other than traditional Confucian learning. Both the content and organization of their knowledge had to be appealing in the commercial market. Sun Yunqiu and his peers mastered these marketable skills. Like many of his contemporaries, Sun Yunqiu took the civil examinations twice but did not succeed. The failed official-want-to-be therefore had to learn to retool his skill in writing and his knowledge in the marketplace, a process that should be understood as the diversification of profession among the male educated elite.¹⁸ In order to support his mother, Sun traded medicine and lived in the Tiger Hill (Hu Qiu 虎丘) area in Suzhou, one of most dynamic commercial hubs on the southeast coast of China. His lens making master, Zhu Sheng, was also famous for painting orchids, and was commissioned to make a section in Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (Jieziyuan Huazhuan 芥子園畫傳), an influential panting manual, which itself was compiled by the relative of a literati entrepreneur, Li Yu 李漁 (1610–1680).¹⁹ In summary, unsuccessful candidates left out of governmental officialdom were particularly active in the market of cultural production. Thus, a person like the author could market his products by using his knowledge of the repertoire of cultural activities for decently educated literati.

The skill of making lenses is very different from the knowledge of literary tropes. How did a man of words learn to make lenses? The author’s experience shows us that both learning from books and as an apprentice are indispensable. Talented in mathematics and geometry, Sun was able to acquire the skill for making lenses and overtook most competitors in a short period of time. In 1672, he obtained a copy of Johann Adam Schall von Bell’s Explanation of the Telescope (yuanjing shuo 遠鏡說).²⁰ And in an itinerary tour to Wulin (now Hangzhou), he learned in person from a few lens makers, including Zhu Sheng 諸昇, Mr. Yu (俞生), Mr. Gao (高生), Mr. Chen (陳生). Most importantly, he calibrated the models supplied by Zhu Sheng with the optical principles in von Bell’s treatise and expanded the inventory of products into seventy-two types.²¹ He could also customize the glasses for clients with various visions.²² Later, I will explain how product differentiation was a salient strategy used in the booklet.

Sun’s products soon prevailed among all his competitors both because of their superior quality and, I think, because of his interpersonal skills. In fact, Zhu Sheng, one of his masters, betrays his insecurity in front of his disciple by remarking that Sun Yunqiu is “modest and reserved”²³ and “holding back and hiding flamboyance like a good merchant when he interacts with people.”²⁴ Sun is believed to have obtained the favored optical method from Li (Ricci) and Tang (von Bell) in the craft of lens making. After a few years, his products gained considerable publicity and were widely sought after: “People from everywhere heard about them and followed them. They did not hesitate to go cross hundreds of miles to purchase them with a fortune.”²⁵ Hundreds of miles in the radius from Suzhou covers the area of the lower Yangtze delta, the most prosperous region of late imperial China where his potential customers were located. It is clear that these urban lens makers did not dissimulate the merits of the technology introduced by the Jesuit, von Bell. On the contrary, they highlighted the insight of Western experts in order to promote their own products. For this purpose, Sun Yunqiu significantly refashioned von Bell’s Treatise in one of his entries in the booklet.

The Rhetoric of Efficacy

As a general promoting strategy that shapes the poiesis of the illustration and the textual description in the booklet, technical information is drastically eliminated so that the booklet focuses on the effect that users experience with the optic devices.²⁶ Rhetoric, the term that Joachim Kurtz uses to comment on such early modern handbooks captures their gist. Instead of transferring knowledge, they are “simplified versions of such treatises circulated in cheap reprints by commercial publishers and instrumental in raising popular interest in and understanding of useful techniques.”²⁷ My analysis will demonstrate the ways in which this knowledge was simplified. More specifically, the populist rhetoric in the booklet on lenses aims to augment the readers’ desire to purchase. The illustrations are not representations of the tools but rather a series of stereotypical artifacts and landscapes inscribed with marginally relevant textual commentary on the function of these lenses. I argue that the author mobilizes various cultural tropes from the established repertoire of motifs, which are often used in the woodblock decorations of the day, first to make sense of the effect of these lenses, second to convince the reader about the efficacy of the lenses, and third to persuade them to buy them. Eight out of the eleven illustrations feature inscribed artifacts and often include a poem in the upper left of the composition. Only two illustrations feature landscape paintings with minimum inscription and only one leaf of illustration contains a female figure. The transcultural relationship in the booklet is not merely in the interaction between two cultural entities, but in the strategic cultural configuration of the familiar and the foreign.²⁸ The author’s presentation of the telescope is a particularly revealing example of this, as he ostensibly retains its Western origin not for the sake of technical information but for its marketability. The textual entry introducing the telescope, “Lens for Distance” (yuan jing 遠鏡), is the most elaborate in the treatise, as if the author wanted to prepare the reader to view an extraordinary “Western Painting of a Distant View” (or Perspectival Picture of the West, xi yang yuan hua 西洋遠畫) by adding a textual frame (Fig. 1). Unlike other illustrations in the booklet, this leaf bears no inscription and no seal, which renders the Western landscape print paradoxically frameless. Although the image does not come from von Bell’s treatise, it very likely had a European model.²⁹ Here the author overtly acknowledges von Bell’s treatise on telescopes, from which he lifted fragments of exact expressions. Examining the selected textual expressions and the omissions, we find that this rewritten entry is primarily concerned with instructing the readers on how to properly use the telescope by adjusting its length according to the user’s vision and on how to clean it. The entry explains only a little of the structure of the device but by no means aims to discuss the optical principles involved. The textual explanation makes no reference to any trope from the familiar Chinese cultural repertoire. This is one of the three entries that explicitly acknowledges the Western origin of the lenses.³⁰ This entry on the telescope refers readers to von Bell’s On the Telescope and to the work of a contemporary lens maker, Bo Jue 薄珏, for the technical details.³¹

Fig. 1

Xi yang yuan hua 西洋遠畫 (Western Painting of a Distant View or Perspectival Picture of the West), from Sun Yunqiu 孫雲球, Jingshi 鏡史 (History of Lenses), 1681, main text, 5

Unlike the presentation of other lenses in the treatise, the entry and illustration on telescopes makes little effort to tout its efficacy, but instead directly shows what one might see through the device. The avoidance of Chinese cultural tropes should be understood in the context of the popularity of telescopes among the Chinese during this time. The visual experience of space compressing, which was brought by telescopes, was hardly a novelty by the early seventeenth century in China.³² There is even a short story written to marvel at the visual experience that a telescope provides and how the optic device is turned into an object of cult.³³ Both the length of the entry on telescopes and the cultural transparency suggest a keen and familiar expectance from the readers. Unlike other illustrations, which all bear legible signatures and sometimes seals, this “Western Painting of a Distant View” is completely anonymous. The author or designer of the illustration does not intend to describe this visual experience with indigenous metaphor, nor does he feel the need to justify the experience with moral rhetoric. In this sense, the relatively simple transcultural framing of the telescope may actually suggest a wider cultural acceptance. In comparison, the experience brought by camera obscura and microscope, as I will analyze below, required heavy-handed or even cryptic cultural translation, and the author did not have a chance to expound on their usage. Both anonymous foregrounding or heavy-handed cultural translation, contradictory as they may seem, serve the same purpose, which is to represent the experience that a customer could expect. It is significant that the entry on telescopes does not speak to any targeted customer, while the wording of many other entries clearly pitches to a particular market.

Information and Rhetoric

If information concerning the lenses is underplayed in the booklet, what new visual experience does the author want to convey, and how does he market it? The author was able to make actual lenses but the entries spare no words to explain the raw materials, the making process, tools, or mathematical and optical principles.³⁴ The author does not seem to believe that empirical and technical explanation alone would convince the readers about the effect of lenses. Instead the illustrations and the texts evoke religious discourse and ancient moral authority as a means of promotion. No matter how outlandish such experience looks to us, and probably also to contemporaneous European users, by organizing the convention of literary and pictorial tropes, Sun Yunqiu tried to forge an equivalence between the desirable bodily experience for potential customers and the experience that they could expect by using these foreign lenses.³⁵

The designer of the illustrations maximizes the variety of calligraphic scripts in order to enhance the visual impact of the text in the forms of inscriptions and poems. Thus, the text is not only a carrier of information, the highlighted calligraphic quality of it is intended to affectively impress the reader, and each kind of script evokes the conventionalized genres that are often associated with them in the reader’s mind (Fig. 2). For instance, a couplet describing fragrance is rendered as being written on lotus leaf in running script. We can also find a fanciful version of seal script on the surface of an intact piece of jade, which illustrates a reading class (Tong guang jing 童光鏡) for young examinees.³⁶ The “Encomium of Self-restraint in Privacy,” which illustrates microscopes, is inscribed with a clerical script that is often associated with monuments.³⁷ On the other hand, the depiction of artifacts, landscape, and the figure attempts to symbolize and to imbue the extraordinary effect of each lens with familiar cultural tropes.

Fig. 2

Feng xiang jing 焚香鏡 (Incense Burning Lens), from the History of Lenses, main text, 8

Pictorial Commentary

Instead of representation, the illustrations can be regarded as pictorial commentary for the entries on lenses. Commentary as a flexible genre entails various relations between the main text and the paratext. Commentaries might explain the main texts, but they are usually random associations between any detail in the main text and the commentator’s evaluation, moral critique, anecdotes, and so on. The kinds of associations that Sun Yunqiu chose to build between lenses and familiar cultural tropes reveals these rhetorical strategies.

By employing Buddhist and Daoist tropes, some illustrations convey to the reader, or the potential owner, the efficacy of the lenses on the body. The effectiveness of the lenses is therefore transformed into efficacy in the religious context. For the first entry on presbyopic glasses (hun yan jing 昏眼鏡), with which elderly people could see more clearly, the illustration features a chintamani or ruyi zhu (如意珠), a wish-fulfilling pearl, radiating in flames and fixed on a ruyi scepter. A four-syllabic verse printed in clerical script laments the inevitable deterioration of vision because of aging, which medicine cannot help. However, the presbyopic glasses offered an “efficacious method” (ling fa 靈法) to recover vision: “It is only by means of the efficacious method, my visual spirit is restored.”³⁸ The signature “zhi fei zi 知非子” means “elderly people”. Composed of verse, artifact, signature, and seal, this illustration looks like a leaf about chintamani in a catalogue of collectibles. It does not explicitly refer to the presbyopic glasses. In other words, the illustration functions almost like a riddle, describing familiar bodily experience in a language familiar to educated elites while gesturing to an unknown artifact.³⁹ It is only by juxtaposing the illustration and the explanatory entry that the reader understands the artifact and its effect on the body.

Referring to the primordial mythology about the rocks used to repair the heavens, the second illustration fashions a lake rock (hu shi 湖石) in flames. Accordingly, the second entry on myopia glasses mentions that the device could make up for deficiency in eyesight: “For those who have defected vision because of congenital lack of sap, the lens fits their nature very well.”⁴⁰ The metaphorical meaning of the rock obliquely points to the effect of the myopia glasses. Nonetheless, sometimes the symbolic meaning of an artifact in an illustration does not even tangibly relate to the actual use of a particular device.

For the camera obscura and the microscope, the illustrations depict two almost entirely unrelated artifacts while the interpretation reveals what particular cultural conventions may render the lenses desirable to the Chinese audience. The “Light-absorbing Lens” (she guang jing 攝光鏡) is camera obscura: “To set the lens in an extremely dark chamber is the so-called observation of the moon in the West. A blank screen faces the lens. All close and distant, up and down, moving and still, large and small kind of things come on the screen. Meticulous and colorful, they look like real.”⁴¹ The juxtaposed illustration depicts a screen that is decorated with elaborate and patterned panels. The decorative motif framing the lower part of the screen is a common variation of lotus petals, which often connotes Buddhism. As the Buddhist verse on the screen articulates, owners are welcomed to use the setting for contemplation, which has nothing to do with an effort to make life-like images: “Buddhist Hymn on Reflection: Through a hole in the room, the reflection shines close. The master is settled in the middle. Toward him come the myriad ethereal things. It is good for meditation and enlightenment.”⁴² The signature succinctly summarizes the purpose of “quiet entertainment” (jing yu 靜娛).

Moral Authority as Commercial Rhetoric

Appealing to ethos or moral integrity often functions as a powerful rhetoric. The illustration of the microscope evokes the Confucian moral discourse of self-restraint in privacy. On an unrolled calligraphic scroll, we find the following: “Encomium of Self-restraint in Privacy: Nothing is more visible when it is hidden. Nothing is more magnified when it is minute. A gentleman who restrains himself in privacy should engrave it and carry it.”⁴³ Although the illustration only plays with the idea of magnifying things and tries to link it with a Confucian virtue, the textual entry shows that the author not only knows what a microscope is and what it is used for, but also that he chose to make affective connection with the reader by referring to the long-standing moral authority of ancient rulers. Sun Yunqiu links “Burning Glass” (huo jing 火鏡) to sage minister Si xuan shi 司烜氏, who was in charge of any ritual related to fire in antiquity: “Minister of Zhou Dynasty, Si xuan shi obtained fire from the sun.”⁴⁴Although the author also quotes contemporary empirical reason in his textual interpretation, the illustration only highlights the sage minister.⁴⁵ It depicts ancient bamboo strips mounted on an unfolding letter. A few lines of tetrasyllablic verses are inscribed on the strips, which end with the signature “ancient minister of fire” (gu si zhou shi 古司烜氏) and the seal of “Minister of Zhou” (zhou guan 周官) in intaglio, suggesting that the evaluation of the lens is the sage minister’s own words.⁴⁶

In summary, several illustrations reveal their varied, sometimes even arbitrary, relation to the textual entries on lenses. This paratextual relation can be understood through the contemporaneous practice of literary commentary.⁴⁷ The illustration as pictorial commentary uses familiar tropes of established rhetoric from religion and moral discourses to convince the reader about the efficacy and merit of the foreign lenses. The pictorial rhetoric of these illustrations resorts less to empirical elucidation than to the force of cultural affect.⁴⁸

Cultural Affect

Besides the employment of religious and moralistic tropes, to mobilize cultural affects also means to recall familiar and pleasant multisensory memory or imagination to the reader’s mind by displaying pictorial tropes that are firmly associated with cultural practices and from which the sensory experience is conventionally generated.⁴⁹ Thus, the force of cultural affect lies not merely in readers’ direct visual or haptic engagement with the artwork. The juxtaposition of texts and illustration affects the reader by means of triggering established sensorial association. For instance, “Incense Burning Lens” (feng xiang jing 焚香鏡) very likely refers to a convex lens crafted to focus light on a piece of incense cake and therefore to yield an even and subtle fragrance (Fig. 2). In order to vividly recall the olfactory experience of the popular cultural practice of incense burning among literati elites,⁵⁰ the illustration displays an enlarged lotus petal, inscribed with running calligraphic script: “There is no need of charcoal in beast shaped vessel to smelt elixir. The fragrant flame lasts and the light transport it…”⁵¹ The depiction of the lotus petal and the whole composition of this leaf takes a minimalist approach. The woodblock designer highlights the subtle undulating contour of the petal with a precise image that perfectly echoes the meaning of the signature, “pure incense” (jing xiang 淨香).

To recall several sensory experiences coupled with vision in a particular cultural practice, the illustration designer may choose a culturally coded image to invite the reader to re-experience the cultural scenario. For instance, a landscape illustration entitled “Sunset” (xi yang tu 夕陽圖) is appropriated to convey the experience of wearing sunglasses (xi yang jing 夕陽鏡) (Fig. 3): “Using the lens makes cool air permeate your skin and your hurt in eyes instantly ceases. Even if it is in scorching sunshine, it feels like dusk time in mountains.”⁵² The landscape painting depicts a site populated with temples and mansions. The presence of many mountains implies that it is not an urban space but rather a suburban area for elite strolling or vocational retreat. Although a black and white woodblock print cannot fully represent the rich color of twilight, the image is culturally legible to the readers and easily calls to mind the haptic, visual, and even acoustic experience of hiking leisurely during sunset hours. This is the experience that the author persuades the readers that they could have if they wear a pair of sunglasses in scorching sunshine.

Fig. 3

Xi yang tu 夕陽圖 (Sunset), from the History of Lenses, main text, 10

Product Differentiation

Both the rhetoric of efficacy and the culturally affective strategy eventually contribute to augmenting the readers’ desire to own these foreign but comprehensible lenses. To return to the comparison of illustrative paratexts and textual commentaries, the practice of publishing commentary had flourished since the second half of the Ming dynasty and coincided with a period of phenomenal commercialization. Previous scholarship relates the literati’s enthusiasm for commentary to the crafting of civil examination essays. Much less attention has been paid, however, to the commercial rhetoric of many of these commentaries, especially the pictorial commentaries, as seen in the present case. In other words, my analysis of the transcultural configuration in this booklet teases out the implicit advertising rhetoric.

Customization is another prominent strategy employed in the booklet. Eight out of eleven entries include words suggesting the targeted client. For instance, Sun Yunqiu claims to be able to alter the presbyopic glasses and myopia glasses according to the vision of the customer: “He prepares the glasses according to your vision. Each customer obtain[s] what fit him the best.”⁵³ And “He measures the capacity of individual vision and prepare lenses for them without slightest mistake.”⁵⁴ “Reading glasses” (tong guang jing 童光鏡), are declared to be best for young people, mostly male civil examinees who read to prepare for the examinations: “This lens is suitable for youngman.”⁵⁵ “The Burning Glass” might cater to merchants and officials who travel a lot: “It is easy to carry and therefore indispensable for traveling on boat and carriage.”⁵⁶ A portable makeup mirror (duan rong jing 端容鏡) should be the “extraordinary treasure of [the] boudoir.”⁵⁷ “Incense Burning Lens” is “indispensible for literati’s pure offerings under the window facing south.”⁵⁸ And “Microscope” enables “natural historians” (bo wu zhe 博物者) to “know what they did not used to know and see what they had never seen.”⁵⁹ It is not a coincidence that the concluding sentences of eight entries are programed to identify the most suitable client. While the textual entries suggest potential customers, the illustrations are all the more suggestive in persuading readers to buy.

Seven out of eleven illustrations feature an artifact that is conventionally presented as a collectible luxury. Although the illustrations do not represent the lenses for sale, the artifacts, such as a fancy rock, a large piece of bi jade, rare bamboo strips mounted on an exquisite letter paper, a hardwood screen, and so on, perpetuate the psychological lure of ownership. The illustration for the makeup mirror is a pictorial synecdoche, as it portrays a lavishly dressed young lady, which is often seen on contemporary decorative art, in order to signify the tiny mirror in her hand. Although the treatise also mentions the benefit of a makeup mirror for men “xu mei bi bei 須眉畢備,” the illustrator prioritizes the female figure because the image of a woman here is the objectified desire and therefore excites the desire for objects. To illustrate the last lens, “kaleidoscope” (wan hua jing 萬花鏡), the designer allegedly appropriates a leaf from The Catalogue of Flowers (hua pu 花譜) and seemingly focuses on the peony (Fig. 4). Yet the composition which foregrounds two peacocks and a fancy perforated rock, puts peonies in the background, suggesting an elegant garden estate. The inscribed poem, signed by the author himself, makes this real estate reference even more explicit: “The imperial beauty embosoms the fragrance as if they are curtain screens made of brocade. The immortal birds spread their wings to rival the flowers in blossom.”⁶⁰ Apart from stock literary allusions, many of the illustrated luxurious collectibles in the treatise also come from a repertoire of images.

Fig. 4

Hua pu 花譜 (The Catalogue of Flowers), from the History of Lenses, main text, 12

Last but not least, I want to call attention to the similarities between the enumerative approach to representing artifacts in this treatise and Min Qiji’s twenty-leaf illustration to The Romance of the West Chamber, now in the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne.⁶¹ This is very close to what Lin Li-chiang calls “an encyclopedic layout.”⁶² The program of illustrations like the one in the booklet on lenses, including collectibles such as rocks, small bronze vessels, letter paper, hand scroll, is used as a visual semiotic frame to assimilate the illustrated subjects into the indigenous cultural practice of connoisseurship; each artifact seemingly retrieves the association with a particular cultural activity. Depending on the selling point, the cultural program of artifacts in The History of Lenses may choose to distract the readers from the foreignness of the lenses. They direct the reader to the familiar cultural practice of the literati in order to minimize the heterogeneous nature of the illustrated topic. Moreover, the illustrations here attempt to translate the efficacy of the foreign lenses and attract the readers to buy. It is likely that the images in illustrations for a particular text may come from a larger pictorial repertoire that the designer also employed for other illustrated books.⁶³ While we are painstakingly deciphering the tenuous semiotic relationship between the text and the “illustrations,” we must also keep in mind the proper logic of images and the way in which they were selected and crafted to fit the “illustrated” texts.

Conclusion

This chapter attempts a rhetorical analysis of text/image relations in an artwork generated by a transcultural encounter. Instead of reconstructing the interaction of two well-defined cultural poles, I instead trace how the border between the familiar and foreignness is drawn to promote commercial products. By analyzing the advertising rhetoric in History of Lenses, I show how the foreignness of certain artifacts is highlighted or glossed over according to the author’s agenda and eventually assimilated in the cultural inventory. Drawing insight from the study of senses, and from affect theory, I have developed a few analytical approaches with which we might be able to discover more forms of transcultural border-drawing effected in the presentation of artifacts across cultures, especially when we pay close attention to the underlying intention.

First, I analyze the rhetoric of ethos, which resorts to religious discourses and moral authority in commercial illustrations. Second, I show that the illustrations evoke particular sensory experiences by mobilizing established cultural tropes that are linked to specific cultural practices. This booklet on transcultural lenses exemplifies the formation of a genre of illustrated pamphlets in the condition of transcultural encounter that was facilitated by trade and missionary activity. Like quite a few other inventory-like booklets entitled History from this period, The History of Lenses provides no chronological information of optic devices. History of Vases, ⁶⁴ Addendum to the History of Tea,⁶⁵ and History of Lenses are not “history” in the literal sense. They are inventories of culturally reframed artifacts coming from familiar and unfamiliar lands.