HDW Colloquium: The Chinese Emperor's Islamic Jades: IIIF, QGIS, and Leaflet as Tools for Digital Art History

Kristina Kleutghen

In China during the second half of the eighteenth century, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795) actively collected carved jades from across the Islamic world. Although these precious exotic arrived from Mughal North India, the Ottoman empire, Central Asia, and Xinjiang province, the Chinese emperor referred to them collectively as "Hindustan" jades and wrote many poems about them which he ordered incised on the objects themselves. By using IIIF, QGIS, and Leaflet, this project aims to map the objects over time and space, and to link their texts and images in bilingual English-Chinese presentation in order to make the material available to a much wider audience. This combination of digital tools not only expands public access to the objects, but also links the objects, their texts, geographic origins, and current locations to provide a much broader picture of China's international engagement during the global eighteenth century.

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