Picturing Suzhou: Visual politics in the making of cityscapes in eighteenth-century China

This dissertation examines the picturing of cityscapes as a site of place-making, as an arena of imperial and local interaction, and as an apparatus in the dynamic interactions between commercial and political centers in the eighteenth century. I argue that the visualizations of a city are products of mercantile culture, bureaucratic practices, commercial enterprises, imperial agendas, and above all, the visual politics between the imperial court and local society. Following the trajectory of images depicting Suzhou, the most prosperous city in eighteenth-century China, this dissertation analyzes how local commercial culture transformed images of this city from representations of suburban scenery to cityscapes of urban prosperity and how this shift was then appropriated for and overseen by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795). After examining representations of Suzhou, I also consider how the imperial projection of the capital of Beijing was shaped by imperial and local interactions and by the visual politics between the political and commercial centers of the Qing empire (1644-1911), namely the capital and the provincial metropolis of Suzhou. The interactive production of cityscapes from the two cities demonstrates how a dynamic network of local and imperial exchange altered not only representations of a provincial city but also the visual politics in which the court was transformed from an absolute supremacy to a still-dominant power that had to respond to the economic center of the empire.