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The Shugborough Dinner Service and Its Significance for S ino‐ B ritish History
Author(s) -
MCDOWALL STEPHEN
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/1754-0208.12034
Subject(s) - gratitude , service (business) , crew , history , advertising , art , business , visual arts , psychology , marketing , social psychology
Tradition has it that the Shugborough dinner service was presented to Commodore Anson (1697‐1762) by the European merchants of C anton in gratitude for his crew's part in extinguishing a fire that threatened the city in 1743, and the service has come to symbolise the ultimate triumph of this courageous and determined commodore over dithering and obstructive C hinese mandarins. This article argues that the link between the dinner service and the fire is actually a twentieth‐century invention, and that its story, as currently presented to us, distorts our understanding both of C anton in 1743 and of mid‐eighteenth‐century Sino‐British relations more generally.