Exotic Opulence at the Met: Qianlong Emperor’s Hidden Furnishings from the Forbidden City

"Portrait of the Qianlong Emperor" (detail), Qianlong Period (1736-95), Palace Museum, Beijing

It's Asia Week in New York and Qianlong Week on CultureGrrl. Having just posted about the over-the-top price at Sotheby's for what bidders apparently believed to be a Qianlong vase, let's wander crosstown to the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition of over-the-top objects, The Emperor's Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City (to May 1).

We'll conclude this journey with a CultureGrrl Video starring Bonnie Burnham, president of the World Monuments Fund (WMF), the preservationist organization that, in a sense, provided the impetus for the one-time tour of the Qianlong Emperor's luxury goods. They have never before been publicly seen and are unlikely ever to leave the Forbidden City again.

Last October, when I was in Beijing as part of a general-interest (not art-oriented) tour of China, I was aware that I was seeing just a small fraction of the buildings in the Forbidden City, the sprawling compound of courtyards and buildings for China's imperial rulers.

With a few exceptions, what I did see were façades, not interiors:



I also knew that I was seeing a very small sampling of the Forbidden City's vast cultural riches. Here's one of the pieces that I did get to admire:


Octagonal Case with Gem-Inlaid Gold and Openwork Floral Design, Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), on view in the Forbidden City

I did briefly enter the world of the Qianlong Emperor, whose furnishings and decorative objects commissioned for his two-acre, 27-building Qianlong Garden (in the northeast corner of the Forbidden City) are the subject of the 90-object exhibition now at the Met.

My tour group paused at the Qianlong Emperor's Terrace for Gathering Dew:



We marveled at the astonishing forms of one of his five weirdly marvelous rockeries:



Described by the Met as "one of China's most extravagant monarchs," the Qianlong Emperor never actually used the sumptuous hideaway that he had meticulously designed as a retirement retreat.

On its website for the show (linked at the top), the Met examined the extravagance:

The costliest materials, including rare woods, semiprecious stones, cloisonné, gilt bronze, porcelain, and lacquer were employed to ornament every surface of this world....The space remained a virtual time capsule relatively untouched since imperial times.

An accomplished poet and calligrapher, the Qianlong Emperor was an eclectic aesthete who, from the evidence of the Met's show, favored designs and materials that pushed the limits of opulence and ornamentation.