Representing Ming China in fifteenth-century Persianate painting

Yusen Yu*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This article preliminarily analyzes a corpus of fifteenth-century Persianate paintings preserved in the Topkapi and Diez albums. It investigates the album paintings as the pictorial evidence to the Persianate first-hand encounter with Ming China. The paintings feature their emphasis on physiognomic verisimilitude of the painted figures and faithful description of their props and clothing. As a totality, they formulate the proto-ethnographic knowledge on China in the Persianate consciousness of this period. The last section on the representation of Chinese beauty, on the other hand, shows how pre-existing stereotyped imagination merged with the first-hand observation.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)57-73
Number of pages17
JournalMing Studies
Volume2018
Issue number78
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018

Keywords

  • Ming China
  • Persianate painting
  • Timurids
  • Diplomacy
  • Representation of the other

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