This paper specifically focuses the discussion on the only two surviving images of the cassowary at this time: “Cassowary” in the album Manual of Birds and Yang Dazhang’s hanging scroll Cassowary. In addition to determining that this bird is actually a cassowary that became fashionable among various royal courts and natural historians in Europe during the Age of Exploration, it has also been discovered that the “Imperial Illustration and Record of the Cassowary” of the Qianlong reign actually comes from the collection of anatomical reports by the French royal academician Claude Perrault published in his Memoires pour servir a l'histoire naturelle des animaux from 1671 to 1676.
How did the Qianlong Emperor in the Qing dynasty come to understand a world becoming increasingly global in his day? And what role did visual imagery play in his understanding of such? This paper starts with a small but complete case study focusing on the description of an exotic bird known as an “emo” by the Qing court and a series of images made of it.
