Introduction to Special Issue on “Collecting, Collections, and Collectors”, Part 2

Abstract

The second part of our special issue of Ming Qing Yanjiu on “Collecting, Collections, and Collectors” in late imperial China brings together a total of five articles, which approach our topic from very different perspectives and with a wide range of methodologies. In her article, “Collecting Chinese Objects in Slovenia at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik addresses the practices of collecting Chinese objects in Slovenia as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a centre—periphery approach. She analyses how China was perceived in Slovenia through collected objects and how and to what extend these cultural contacts influenced collecting practices in Slovenia. Katharine P. Burnett, in her contribution on the famous collector, patron, and artist Pang Yuanji 龐元濟 (1864–1949) (“Pang Yuanji, Traditionalist/ Modernist”), sheds new light on the man who not only was a prominent proponent of traditionalist art circles in late imperial and republican China, but also—much less known—a “reformer and modernist” with a wide spectrum of social and cultural interests including, but not limited to, the arts. Exploring the connections between the British collections of Chinese plants and their commissions of China Trade art during the so-called Canton System period, Josepha Richard in her article “Collecting Chinese Flora: Eighteenthto Nineteenth-Century Sino-British Scientific and Cultural Exchanges as seen through British Collections of China Trade Botanical Paintings” elucidates Sino-Western exchanges during the late Qing dynasty, sparked by a newly