Trading Beauty: From Europe to China, from Canton to the World

A Cambridge Visual Culture event

Monday 19 October 2026, 3.30pm

Pembroke College Auditorium, Cambridge

Trading Beauty: From Europe to China, from Canton to the World — Qing Dynasty Canton Enamels

Joyce Ying-Ching Chou, Art Museum, CUHK

“It would be utterly impossible to have certain pieces executed with the same beauty and the same perfection by anyone other than them.”

Edmé-François Gersaint, the great eighteenth-century Parisian merchant in luxury Asian wares, so described the luxurious enamelled copperware produced by artisans in Canton, southern China. Using a technique introduced by European missionaries in the late 17th century, Chinese artisans made it their own. From Canton (Guangzhou), a city that acted as the Qing empire’s window to the West throughout the 18th and into the mid-19th century, enamelled wares reached courts, private collections and wider commerce across the globe.

Following the talk, Joyce will be joined by Dr James Lin (Senior Curator, Chinese Art, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge) and Dr Henning von Mirbach (Assistant Professor of Early Modern Chinese Art, University of Cambridge) for a panel discussion moderated by Dame Jessica Rawson (University of Oxford).

The event marks the opening of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s display “An Enamel Revolution: China and the World” (20 October 2026 – 21 February 2027), a partnership with the Art Museum of Chinese University Hong Kong. The partnership is generously supported by Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau, Hong Kong.