Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (41 page)

M
urray Marks' success with Chinese blue-and-white ceramics showed just how widely Victorian collectors were beginning to spread their net. The idea of collecting from remote and unfamiliar lands was taking hold, part of a fascination with voyage and adventure that characterized an age of discovery. In the early 1850s, the slightly scandalous Captain Richard F. Burton captivated audiences with accounts of how he undertook the haj pilgrimage to Mecca disguised as a Muslim. From 1852 to 1856, news of David Livingstone's conquest of the African wilderness was delighting the public. By the 1870s, the British Empire was at its peak, with Victoria declaring herself Empress of India in 1877 and extending her rule to huge swathes of the globe. The opportunities for travel had never been so great.

It was no longer only the rich, or the heroic, who had the chance to see new sights, and it was no longer only the familiar, traditional European destinations of the Grand Tour which drew the crowds. Taking the opportunities for employment that lay in building railways, roads, bridges and canals; in ministering to the sick and the religious; and in completing the reams of paperwork that kept the Empire working, the sons of the middle classes soon filled the
berths on ships taking them to a new life overseas. The rising numbers of ordinary people who set sail from ports all over the country only added to the fascination with travel, bringing it ever closer to home, while a generation of writers brought tales of exploration into libraries, parlours and nurseries in articles, stories, poems and biographies. The flamboyant Henry Morton Stanley published journal pieces and reports of his African journey throughout the 1870s, including his famous meeting with Livingstone in 1871. In the 1880s and 1890s, Rudyard Kipling's exotic, romanticized tales of Indian life secured him a place as one of the most popular writers of his age. Victorian society relished the frisson of the foreign, and everywhere there were accounts of new lands, astonishing peoples and remarkable journeys.

The appetite for real-life stories about those who came and went across the Empire was accompanied by an equally voracious desire for the objects they carried with them. The world was brought into the Victorian home in the shape of silks and muslins; extraordinary plants, pinned insects and butterflies and stuffed birds; shells, furs and feathers; spices, teas and spirits – and in portable art objects. As today, few travelled to foreign lands without picking up something to remind them of their journey, and before long there was a booming international trade in souvenirs. Whereas in previous centuries souvenir-collecting had been largely the domain of aristocratic travellers on the Grand Tour, the Victorian middle classes were now adopting the same habits, in new contexts. The souvenir trade was by no means confined to exotic destinations. By the middle of the century, the main sites of Europe, such as the Alps and the great Italian cities, were swamped with low-grade memorabilia on sale to tourists. In Dickens'
Little Dorrit
(1855–7), Mr Meagles boasts a collection of ‘model gondolas from Venice; model villages from Switzerland; morsels of tesselated pavement from Herculaneum and Pompeii. . . Roman cameos, Geneva jewellery, Arab lanterns, rosaries blest
all round by the Pope himself, and an infinite variety of lumber'.
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But this familiar trade in cheap collectables was also being reinvented in far-flung lands as new types of objects caught the traveller's eye.

On the whole, as in Europe, these foreign souvenirs were manufactured quickly and cheaply to supply the rapidly expanding market and to give even the poorest visitor the opportunity to purchase a memento. Modelled clay figures from India, known colloquially as Poona figures, for example, were shown at all the international exhibitions, including the Great Exhibition, and in turn became extremely popular with European travellers, so much so that the manufacture of affordable souvenir versions helped sustain the economy of Pune, the Indian city where they were produced. Visiting Mexico City in 1884, the American anthropologist and archaeologist William Henry Holmes was amazed to find ‘relic shops' on every corner, selling ceramic vessels, whistles and figurines.
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Most of these souvenirs tended to be clumsy imitations of genuinely exotic objects, rapidly produced to cash in on current fashions. Quite often they were not even made abroad. While the people of Pune and Mexico City manufactured modern reproductions and fashionable cultural artefacts to sell to tourists, plenty of other objects were made in Europe, with European tastes firmly in mind. In Thomas Hardy's 1873 novel
A Pair of Blue Eyes,
naïve young architect Stephen Smith tries to impress Elfride Swancourt by sending her some glamorous souvenirs of his life in India, but he manages only to waste his money: ‘One day I bought some small native idols to send home to you as curiosities, but afterwards finding they had been cast in England, made to look old, and shipped over, I threw them away in disgust,' he laments.
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Hand-made objects crafted by local people were supplemented by mass-produced souvenirs churned out in enormous quantities in British manufacturing centres such as
Birmingham. With the Victorian commitment to exploration, and rapid improvements in shipping and rail, the volume of travellers across the world had become industrial and demanded souvenir production on an industrial scale. Little bits and pieces for tourists became another cog in the huge wheel of Empire.

Few of these objects were meant for serious collectors. They acted more as evidence of distances covered and lands visited than as objects of aesthetic pleasure or financial investment. Those with a more incisive eye were nonetheless aware that among all the false knick-knacks and tacky keepsakes there were important and handsome objects that encapsulated the mystery and glamour of the places they were made. But you had to know where to look. Just as in Europe, serious collectors had to be both wary and astute. They needed to be energetic enough with their research to keep one step ahead of the mass-market travellers and the traders who profited from them. And, just as in Europe, it was often a great advantage to be first on the scene. As Stephen Smith discovered in
A Pair of Blue Eyes
, by the middle of the nineteenth century, countries at the heart of the Empire, such as India, were enmeshed in a complicated and profitable souvenir trade: those who wanted to find the best objects had to be prepared to go to more remote, inaccessible, and often more risky, destinations.

On 29 February 1868, Stephen Wootton Bushell sailed from Southampton on a boat bound for Shanghai. He was twenty-three years old and had graduated as a doctor from Guy's Hospital in London less than two years previously. He was clever, likeable and mildly adventurous, but his experience of life so far had been sheltered and comfortable. He had grown up on his father's substantial farm in Kent, spent happy years at a minor public school and won easy success as a scholar. His natural talent for learning, an excellent memory, a personable manner and money in his pocket had allowed him to glide through childhood and
adolescence and to emerge as a thriving and upright young man well equipped to begin a medical career. Now, however, his life was changing. For the first time, he was facing a challenge and striking out from the solid middle-class ways of his upbringing. As he joined the bustle in the Southampton docks, showed his papers and began the steep walk up the wooden gangplank, Bushell was setting foot firmly in the unknown.

It was a long journey. Back at his father's farm, the spring lambing was over and the summer crops ripening before Bushell reached his destination. At sea, there were wide, alien views and strange stories. There were long days of bright calm, and nervous stormy nights. There were dinners and concerts and games. And there was plenty of time to think. Bushell was not on a pleasure trip. He had his formal letter of appointment as Medical Attendant to the British Legation in Peking (now Beijing), a promise of £600 a year, and official approval ‘to engage in private practice at Pekin' if he so wanted.
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He was determined to use the months at sea to prepare himself properly for his new job. He began the task of learning Chinese and he brushed up on the medical conditions he might expect to encounter. He read and reread the scant official documentation he had been given. Yet he did not know what to expect. Very few European travellers had spent time in China, or travelled extensively there, and there was limited reference material for him to consult. He had little idea what his life was going to be like and he could not help but suspect that his preparations might all turn out to be useless. Huddled in his berth as he sailed across the world, Bushell had nothing in his experience to compare with where he was going. He would just have to wait and see.

Shanghai was noisy, crowded and prosperous. It was a city growing quickly and erratically, a newly affluent port on the mouth of the Yangtze river, ideally placed to trade with the West. It was a hub of commerce, a centre for travellers and a maze of
narrow streets leading into still narrower alleys. From the moment he landed, Bushell was captivated by the colours, smells and sheer noise of such foreignness. He found himself welcomed into a thriving cosmopolitan community. But his journey was not over; he was hardly acclimatized to the light and the dust – or to the unfamiliar cadences of the Chinese language – before he was travelling onwards to Peking, around 1,300 kilometres to the north, away from the mercantile centre of China to a much more traditional heartland. As he left the modernity of Shanghai, Bushell became more and more a foreigner, a strange man with curious ways.

If Bushell had been hoping to find himself part of a community comparable to the one in Shanghai, then he was to be disappointed. When he finally arrived in Peking, tired and exhilarated by his journey, he discovered that there were fewer than fifty non-Chinese residents enclosed in a compound within the city, walled in with their families and servants, a fives court and bowling alley, a library, a billiard room and a stage for regular performances of amateur dramatics; an entrenched and unremarkable group of administrators and bureaucrats carefully recreating European society deep in the heart of China. There were luncheons and parties and evenings around the piano. There were lengthy discussions of British politics and imperial ambitions. The national anthem was sung, and the Queen toasted. But the restrictions of life within the legation did not dishearten Bushell. He enjoyed the security and comfort, and he became determined to use the legation as a springboard for exploration instead of a barrier to it, a safe retreat that would allow him to make forays into the bewildering city that lay all around him.

Bushell's fascination with China, inspired by his brief stopover in Shanghai, had become only more potent as he had moved north. His ten-day journey by boat up the Beihe river, and then overland on a mule cart, had given him the opportunity to begin a study of
the country. Now he was eager to discover more. Not content to shut himself off in an expatriate enclosure, he wanted to learn more of the language, meet more of the people and explore more of the landscapes and the intriguing histories that China seemed to offer. Above all, he wanted to acquire some of the tempting things he had seen. China, he had already observed, was a country of extraordinary objects. On landing at Shanghai, Bushell wrote, ‘one sees on the wharf a number of pedlars offering for sale teapots and cups of quaint form' fashioned like a dragon rising from the waves or a mythical phoenix, a gnarled tree trunk or an elaborate flower. In Peking, ‘a garden of any pretension must have a large bowl and cistern for goldfish, and street hawkers may be seen with sweetmeats piled up on dishes a yard in diameter, or ladling syrup out of large bowls; and there is hardly a butcher's shop without a cracked Waul-li jar standing on the counter to hold scraps of meat'.
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Although Bushell had not been a collector before, the extravagance and abundance of Chinese objects quickly seduced him.

Despite his enthusiasm, the contrast with the neatly kept fields of Kent was a culture shock, and settling in took time. Bushell knew he could not simply go out and start bartering for wares. First, he had to become familiar with the arcane workings of the British government abroad and the idiosyncrasies of his patients. He had to learn how to fit in with his colleagues and their families – and he had to improve his Chinese and begin to understand the habits of the Peking inhabitants, who were frequently hostile. Throughout the East, the British presence was often resented: in Japan, the legation's native interpreter was murdered at the compound gate in 1860, and the following year the building was stormed by angry locals. In China, the Second Opium War of 1855–60 pitted French and British troops against the Chinese in a series of bitter battles punctuated by incidents of kidnap, torture and looting. Unsurprisingly, when Bushell arrived
in Peking in 1868, relations between the British and their hosts could be awkward, and the city could seem unwelcoming. Mary Crawford Fraser, the wife of the secretary to the legation, noted in her journal that the British ‘were detested in the city and never passed outside the Compound without being made to feel it', and many preferred to spend as much time as possible in the Western Hills where they felt more welcome and secure.
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But Bushell was not intimidated. With the determination and optimism of youth, he knuckled down to establishing himself, and soon found that, with such a small British contingent to serve, his medical duties were reasonably light and relaxed. He had a great deal of spare time. So he set his mind to the community beyond the compound, studiously reading about Chinese history, improving his language skills and researching the country's ancient culture. He worked enthusiastically and conscientiously, and he made rapid progress. What might have begun as the naïve experiment of a young man soon developed into something more. His excursions from the compound became increasingly lengthy and ambitious; his conversations with the locals increasingly fluent. He grew in knowledge and confidence and within a couple of years he was moving boldly across the city, a familiar figure among its residents and an object of wonder to Mrs Fraser: ‘our good Doctor Bushell,' she noted in amazement, ‘could talk to the people of their ailments in excellent vernacular and gave them medicines free of charge. This fact alone set him quite apart from other human beings in their estimation.'
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