Clockwork wonders tell tale of cultural exchange

Some of the most elaborate and culturally important artifacts from Beijing's Palace Museum have gone on display at London's Science Museum for the first time, as part of an exhibition looking at the art of clockmaking, and the way it brought two distant cultures together.

The exhibition, entitled Zimingzhong: Clockwork Treasures from China's Forbidden City, contains 23 examples of how 18th-century technology from the United Kingdom found an enthusiastic home in China, and how the meeting of cultures produced some spectacularly complex and decorative pieces of what was then cutting-edge technology.

The media release for the exhibition says how these "opulent constructions … combined timekeeping, music, and movement in a triumph of artistry and spectacle", and offer an insight into the two cultures' early perceptions of one another.

Translated as "bells that ring themselves", zimingzhong pieces are a fusion of Britain's world-leading clockmaking technology and the artistic tastes of imperial China, with many pieces incorporating elements of Japan and India in a hybrid estimation of the tastes of a distant continent that the craftsmen responsible had never visited.

Some of the first zimingzhong to find their way to China were taken by Matteo Ricci, an Italian missionary in the early 1600s. His 1616 publication On the Christian Expedition among the Chinese was a hugely popular success, translated into numerous languages for a European audience keen to learn about China, and mention of the popularity of what the locals referred to as "foreign curiosities" encouraged the taking of such pieces to win favor in China in the years that followed.

Jane Desborough, keeper of Science Collections at the Science Museum, said it was a thrill to have such culturally and technologically significant pieces on display.

"The exhibition is part of our global work," she explained. "We recently had another of our exhibitions, about COVID, Injecting Hope, on at the Guangdong Science Center, which is the world's biggest science museum, so we are very keen to collaborate with China in particular."