In 1765, Governor-General Fang Guancheng gifted the Qianlong emperor with "Pictures of Cotton," showcasing cotton's production process in paintings and poems. This innovative tribute integrated Qianlong's poetry and his grandfather's prose into stone steles. The project aimed to emphasize imperial care for the empire's prosperity and people.

In 1765, Governor-General Fang Guancheng (1696/8-1768) presented the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-96) with the Pictures of Cotton (Mian hua tu), a suite of paintings, poems, and explanations on the procedures for the fabric’s production. Cotton was a relative newcomer to the Chinese textile traditions, and Fang sought to bring knowledge of it into Qing-era art. Qianlong was inspired to write his own set of poems into spaces on each album leaf that was provided by Fang’s original design. Fang then gathered up the writings, imagery, and a “Prose poem on cotton” composed by Qianlong’s grandfather, the Kangxi emperor, and reproduced them in stone steles. In Dr. Hammers interpretation, the Qing imperium and Fang Guancheng created the Pictures of Cotton to promote claims of imperial concern for the prosperity of the empire and the welfare of the people.

Dr. Hammers conducts research on the history of Chinese art and art theory. She is interested in the representations of labor and technologically-informed imagery. Her book Pictures of Tilling and Weaving: Art, Labor and Technology in Song and Yuan China (Hong Kong University Press, 2011) is a recipient of the College Art Association’s Millard Meiss prize. Her second book The Imperial Patronage of Labor Genre Paintings in Eighteenth-Century China explores later iterations of imagery related to the production of rice and silk. She is presently finishing a book-length manuscript on the Qing-dynasty Pictures of Cotton and writing an article on the reception of Chinese technological imagery in France and England during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Reference from School of Humanities, HKU