Ethnographic album depicting peoples of the southwestern border regions

This album of twelve leaves belongs to a category of ethnographic paintings made in China especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was a time of expansion for the Qing empire, with new territories being rapidly added to an already diverse, multiethnic state. Officials in newly incorporated border regions commissioned depictions of the non-Han people who lived there, often accompanying these with textual descriptions of their dress and local customs. These artifacts, which were widely copied, have come to be known as “Miao albums,” following the most commonly used term for non-Han ethnicities that appear in the albums.

This example depicts peoples of the southwest border regions, primarily in what is now Guizhou Province. Groups of figures are shown eating, working, engaging in religious worship, and going about their everyday lives in dramatic landscape settings of mountains and rivers. Each image is accompanied by a lengthy textual description explaining more about the group being depicted. While many ethnographic albums were painted with a perfunctory, documentary approach, this example is unusual in the artistic accomplishment of the landscape settings and the lavish use of gold pigment.