Empire of Emptiness

by Patricia Ann Berger

"Imperial Manchu support and patronage of Buddhism, particulary in Mongolia and Tibet, has often been dismissed as cynical political manipulation. Empire of Emptiness questions this generalization by taking a look at the huge outpouring of Buddhist painting, sculpture, and decorative arts that Qing court artists produced for distribution throughout the empire. It examines some of the Buddhist underpinning of the Qing view of rulership and shows just how central images were in the carefully reasoned rhetoric the court directed toward its Buddhist allies in inner Asia. The multi-lingual, culturally fluid Qing emperors put an extraordinary range of visual styles into practice - Chinese, Tibetan, Nepalese, and even the European Baroque brought to the court by Jesuit artists. Their pictorial, sculptural, and architectural projects escape easy analysis and raise questions about the nature of hybridity, the commensurability of different visual styles, the difference between verbal and pictori