"Important and innovative" --China Review International, Fall 2003 (Download full review)

"In the west, art historians, including Berger, presently contribute more to the study of modern Chinese Buddhism than do scholars from any other discipline. Berger's approach incorporates architectural, artistic, textual, and material objects as evidence." --Religious Studies Review, October 2004

"Berger's writing is always engaging ... I especially appreciate her ability to crystallize visual styles within their cultural, political, and religious contexts.... [Her] elegant descriptive prose is supported by excellent illustrations, including 17 color plates. The University of Hawai`i Press has rewarded a beautifully crafted text with a well-edited, handsomely designed book." --Journal of Asian Studies, November 2003

"Berger has succeeded in providing a vivid, detailed and comprehensive picture of some crucial events of the Qianlong reign which we otherwise know only through the usually dry accounts in the Qing written sources." --Asian and African Studies 14 (2005)

"All scholars of the Qianlong era, of early modern Mongol studies, of Tibetan Buddhism, and of pre-modern China studies will find the book indispensable." --Pamela Crossley, Dartmouth College

"More than any other art historical study to appear recently, this book expands our view of the visual culture of late imperial China by highlighting its ethnic complexity." --Marsha Haufler, University of Kansas

Imperial Manchu support and patronage of Buddhism, particularly in Mongolia and Tibet, has often been dismissed as cynical political manipulation. Empire of Emptiness questions this generalization by taking a fresh look at the huge outpouring of Buddhist painting, sculpture, and decorative arts Qing court artists produced for distribution throughout the empire. It examines some of the Buddhist underpinnings 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 multilingual, 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 difference between verbal and pictorial description, the ways in which overt and covert meaning could be embedded in images through juxtaposition and collage, and the collection and criticism of paintings and calligraphy that were intended as supports for practice and not initially as works of art.

93 illus., 17 in color

Patricia Berger, former curator of Chinese art at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, is associate professor in the Department of the History of Art, University of California, Berkeley.

Read the introduction (PDF).