“In this beautifully written book, Christiane Hertel ‘sites’ China across a range of eighteenth-century German court arts, allowing the reader to travel between imagery as varied as silhouettes, the ‘Chinese’ village of Mulang, commedia dell’arte, and dining utensils. Each ‘siting’ creates, or is informed by, frames, mediations, imitations, and assimilations that challenge our conceptions of what ‘China’ might have meant in the eighteenth century. The work’s most important contribution is its ability to open the decorative arts to interpretive acts akin to sophisticated textual readings.”
—Dawn Odell, Lewis and Clark College