Imperial plots? Shugborough, chinoiserie and imperial ideology in eighteenth-century British gardens

This article examines the place of the Chinese House (c. 1748) at Shugborough, Staffordshire, within the context of the mid-eighteenth-century craze for chinoiserie architecture in British gardens, and within the longer history of Sino-British encounters more generally. Drawing on evidence from published and archival sources, it argues that the expression of imperial ideology manifest in the garden at Shugborough represents an exceptional case for the period, during which more nuanced and ambivalent attitudes towards Britain's expanding presence in Asia generally prevailed. Attention is drawn to the need to locate the specific social settings of art objects within their wider historical contexts.