Albums like this illustrate how Qing officials perceived the people and culture of the southern borderlands of their empire. Categorised as ‘Miao’, this term was applied to many non-Chinese groups, illustrating how imperial China perceived ethnic minority cultures. Here, some Miao people are practicing wet rice cultivation, while others are praying at a Buddhist shrine.
Non-Chinese groups
People of the Qing were of diverse heritage. The governing Manchus themselves were hugely outnumbered by other groups, especially the Chinese, and fused different traditions into their brand of rulership.
Emperor Qianlong was routinely depicted as a Manchu-style hunter and warrior on horseback, as a Chinese-style Confucian scholar with books and writing utensils at a desk, and as a Tibetan-Buddhist enlightened being. Their ever-expanding frontier brought the Qing in contact with people from multiple cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
These albums were produced with a standard set of images, maybe copied from one original source. Here is one example of an image in our album compared to another held by the Wellcome Collection.
This image could be described as "Two men and a woman praying at a Buddhist shrine". We have exactly the same description for the other image. There are some differences in colours and landscape but the arrangement of figures and objects is almost identical.