The Empire’s New Cloth, the title of Mei Mei Rado’s book on cross-cultural textiles at the Qing Court, playfully evokes the title of Hans Christian Andersen’s literary fairytale The Emperor’s New Clothes. In it, a vain emperor, excessively fond of fancy new clothes, is exposed before his subjects through the audacity of a child. The tale’s moral lesson is clear: it is important to see things as they truly are, to question assumptions, and empower those with insights, even if such insights go against the mainstream. Rado’s book does all three. By taking a close look at European and European-style textiles at the Qing court of eighteenth-century China, she radically embraces their complexity in more detail than any scholarship on the topic has ever done before, making us acknowledge their sociopolitical implications. Fundamentally revising the assumption that textiles at the Qing court were mere “luxury objects” for pleasure, Rado’s new perspective on them as tools within the agenda of the Qianlong emperor empowers a multifaceted reading of these textiles as “a vast web of meaningful symbols that defined the identities of the members of the imperial household” (16) while “visually and psychologically, the textile medium enabled the symbols to appear as though they were emanating from the monarch himself” (18). At the center of Rado’s study stands an emperor who, like the one in Andersen’s tale, is heavily invested in self-fashioning. It is, however, not blind vanity that motivated the Qianlong emperor, but, of course, the political will to articulate and implement new cultural standards to cement his imperial agenda. A mission, in which textiles came in handy.

In contrast to other Sino-European works including glassware, ceramics, enamelware, prints, and paintings, which have previously been researched in relation to Qianlong’s management of imports and local court workshop production, Qing imperial dress, silks, and wool tapestries woven in China and Europe as well as the textile material culture of hunting and Manchu ceremonies have not yet received the attention they deserve. The Empire’s New Cloth puts an end to this by presenting us with what is likely to be the definitive study of the subject for years to come. Based on an impressive amount of material and textual evidence accumulated over years and from a wide range of archives in different countries, informed by scholarship on transcultural material connections as well as New Qing History (and the less established tiny field of what could be called New Qing Art History),  the book opens our eyes and our minds to the insight that the emperor’s body—far from being naked—is the heart of a carefully curated and, one is tempted to say, pulsing network of textile connections. Excavating the agency of threads, Rado focuses on material connections to break new ground in the history of art, overcoming outdated views on East-West dichotomies, chinoiserie, and the presumed opacity of textiles. Reading threads along and against the grain, she demonstrates how sensory art history, transcultural studies, technological knowledge, scientific analysis, iconography, semiotics, and recent scholarship on material culture in a global context help us grasp and decipher the complexity of the eighteenth-century textile worlds of Sino-European elites.

The book’s focus on the court is a strength of the volume in line with recent scholarship (some of it too recent to be considered in the manuscript like Martina Siebert’s, Kai Jun Chen’s and Dorothy Ko’s Making the Palace Machine Work of 2023) as it enables micro- as well as macro-historical analysis based on a clearly defined body of evidence and circle of actors, however, it seems like a missed opportunity not to engage the study more deeply in a conversation with scholarship on textiles in China that focuses on technologies and aesthetic practices beyond the imperial elite. At the center of the Qing empire and, accordingly, of Rado’s book, is a man—the Qianlong emperor—while in textile studies, female agency is often front and center. Although the book addresses dress in relation to some women at the court and concludes with a highly insightful and meaningful section on Empress Dowager Cixi (hereby bringing in an extremely powerful example of female agency), it seems that explicitly addressing gender (and how it is dealt with in literature on textiles in China) could have further added to the admirable scope of approaches that the volume skillfully juggles. These two points are, however, minor observations that in no way diminish all the many things that The Empire’s New Cloth masterfully achieves. In addition to marveling at Rado’s wealth of knowledge, command of theory, and elegance of prose, while admiring all the carefully researched textile discoveries that the beautifully illustrated book presents, for this reader, there are numerous personal highlights. They include, for example, chapter one’s discussions of workshop products from Jiangning, Hangzhou, and Suzhou, as well as locations across France, and a careful interpretation of textiles and theatricality through, for example, the use of Han dynasty costumes by Qing rulers to evoke “a poetic, cosmological time devoid of historical specificity and a transcendental, everlasting time” in an “eternal world inhabited by ancient sages, celestial figures, and personifications of seasons” (130). Especially insightful is chapter four’s masterful reconstruction of the ways in which textiles physically animated visual programs in architectural space, and chapters three and four’s analysis of twisted European chinoiserie visions of China that, once imported, became, against all odds, a source of knowledge on European culture.

Notable is a disinterest in postcolonial theory, which seems like a deliberate choice by Rado who interprets chinoiserie as a “liberating visual and cultural expression” (123), emphasizing the “semiotic fluidity of the so-called chinoiserie repertoire” and “a global style of universal exoticism” (123). To the present reader, this, as well as Rado’s interpretation of exoticism as “a safe zone of flexible significations” (102), may have the potential to open avenues of misunderstanding concerning the Qing empire’s endeavors to conquer and oppress, exploit and extract (regardless of whether one considers these endeavors to be strictly speaking protocolonial or colonial). At the risk of falling into the trap of aestheticization, we may have to look twice here and—like the child in Andersen’s tale—point a finger at the emperor, acknowledging the transparency of his agenda to maintain beautiful appearances with (be)dazzling cloth while at the same time knowing that the beauty of the visual and material culture of his reign cannot conceal stories of imperial violence, exploitation, extraction, and ethnic stereotyping for which he is equally responsible. This small observation on the price of imperial beauty aside, Rado’s book shines by highlighting certain political dimensions without blinding us to others, thereby changing the field of eighteenth-century art history through a unique transcultural perspective and by diversifying our understanding of Sino-European processes of exchange in art and visual and material culture. This book, which will doubtlessly attract a wide readership, is highly recommended to students and colleagues worldwide who are interested in crafts and transculturality and is likely to quickly become essential reading on eighteenth-century art and material culture in a global context.