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The Shaman Hounds: Animal Portraits and Qing Authority in Frontier Areas

Fri, March 17, 3:00 to 5:00pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: Lower Concourse, Grand Ballroom West

Abstract

As one of the first domesticated animals, dog played an inextricable role in the daily life of Chinese society, and its emergence in visual art enjoyed a long tradition. Nevertheless, dogs in art have never been treated in the same way as horses, since the latter were mostly considered as tributes from Central Asian states, and their artistic representation was hence highly embedded with political statements. In the Qing dynasty, to be precise, in Qianlong Emperor’s (r. 1736-1796) court, dogs increasingly gained an equal status to that of tributary horses. Relying on three sets of nearly unexamined dog images (one by Giuseppe Castiglione, one by Ignaz Sichelbart, and the other by Chinese court painters), this paper investigates the hounds collected and kept in Qianlong’s palaces and imperial parks that engaged in Manchu ritual, martial and political life through an analysis of their various forms of visual representation, meanings and historical events associated with them. Primary focus will be paid to hounds’ origin (mostly from outlying provinces and frontier areas that borders the territories of Mongolian or Tibetan tribes, discussing their roles in constructing multi-ethnic Manchu (royal) identity and establishing symbolic control of these areas. Other research questions also include, but not limited to, the examination of the interconnectedness of various hound images that co-existed in Qianlong’s court, the division of labor in the making of these images, as well as the compositional features that embedded early modern European concept of animal portrait.

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