The Eurasian land mass is home to two of the most enduring complexes of ornament the world has seen: the Classical European and the Chinese. In both Europe and the Far East, the visual motifs employed and the rules governing their organisation yielded easily recognisable coherent systems. Durable and also highly flexible, these encompassed the embellishment of dress, artefacts and buildings.1 They embraced a huge variety of patterns in two and three dimensions as well as representational images embedded within larger ornamental programmes. The sources of the two tradi tions, however, were radically different. That of the West was founded upon the visual and structural vocabulary of Greek and Roman architecture, while that of China was primarily pictorial, based on images of birds, animals and plants. In the West, structural principles derived from architecture determined the rules that governed the organisation of the motifs; in China, language offered several devices that bound the motifs together.

To understand both the Western and the Chinese ornamental systems demands that they be approached as the means of defining spaces for human activity. In architectural spaces this may include wall coverings, furnishing and other artefacts. Those individuals - usually members of an elite - who inhabit these spaces (be they interior or out-of-doors) bring to them also their dress and personal adornments, which inevitably vary from day to day. Indeed, for those who commission and occupy a complex ornamented space such an environment is almost equivalent to a second layer of formal dress.2 It gives identity to the people who inhabit it, as well as being a product of that identity.

The role of ornament in defining a space within the Western tradition is exemplified by Nostell Priory in Yorkshire (Fig.I).3 Rooms in this house also neatly illustrate the contrast between Western Classical architectural ornament and Chinese bird-and-flower designs, as displayed on imported wallpaper.4 This example has been chosen not only to illustrate contrasts between the two systems, but also to demonstrate that the ways in which the ornament was under stood were dependent on context. The Chinese wallpaper in its Yorkshire home provided associations for the Winn family, the house's inhabitants, very different from those it would have offered Chinese viewers. 

Nostell Priory was designed by James Paine, who was employed there for thirty years beginning in 1736, and further decorated by Robert Adam, who was commissioned to complete the interior in 1765. The 4th and 5th baronets of the Winn family were responsible for these extensive plans which demonstrate their personal enthusiasms. Sir Rowland Winn, the 4th baronet, had undertaken the Grand Tour in 1725-27, and the facades of the house and the State Dining Room and its Classical ornament reflect this experience (Figs.1 and 2). His son, the 5th baronet, also called Rowland, turned to Adam as a more modern, up-to-date architect, and it was under Adam's supervision that the chinoiserie was introduced in the form of Chinese wallpaper and furniture by Chippendale (Fig.3).

James Paine's State Dining Room (Fig.2) of the late 1740s has a Classical scheme and displays a composition with frames and mouldings across all four walls, later elaborated by Adam in a Rococo style in 1772.5 Not only are the doors and fireplace framed, but so too are a 'capriccio' of ancient Rome over the fireplace and roundels by Antonio Zucchi, presenting allegories of leisure, over the doors. Two pedimented picture frames contain paintings of members of the Winn family at either end of the room. Both are crowned by the family coat of arms and the Winn eagle. All the frames on the walls are derived from mouldings, columns and capitals typical of Classical buildings. Decorative panels on the walls, devised by Adam, enclose patterns based upon Classical scrolls and candelabra, and the mantelpiece over the fireplace is supported by caryatids/Friezes and dentils frame the cornice and the ceiling. Here, the cornice carries Bacchanalian vines and masks of satyrs, while on the ceiling the central roundel depicts Ceres and the abundance of agriculture. The furniture of table and chairs, buffet and candelabra also carry Classical ornament in the form of mouldings and scrolls, although only the buffet and the chairs were part of the original commission. Architectural embellishment, pictures and furniture harmonise to create a coherent visual effect. It would be arbitrary, for example, to remove the paintings and consider them as in some way divisible, not only from their frames, but from the room.6

Related architectural ornament in plaster covers the cornice and ceiling of the State Bedroom, but the walls are given over to imported Chinese wallpaper put in place in 1771 (Fig. 3). The paper provides a series of tall flowering shrubs; among these are peonies and prunus with an array of birds perched upon them. The scheme was probably one known in Chinese as the bai niao tu - picture of one hundred birds. The green-painted furniture in chinoiserie style is by Thomas Chippendale, supplied in 1771, and the porcelains are Chinese, mostly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As in the State Dining Room, the furnishings form part of the ornament along with the embellishment of the walls. Here, too, removal of any one part would destroy a composition intended to be seen as a whole. To the eighteenth-century owners of the house, the bedroom represented the height of fashion. But what almost certainly passed them by were the original meanings in China of the bird-and-flower ornament, not only on the paper but also on the porcelains.

If we imagine the two rooms before these ornaments were applied, they would have been plain boxes. Both the Classical and the chinoiserie elements effected a profound transformation, the ornamentation turning the blank walls and surfaces of furnishings and ceramics into the specific rooms and possessions of members of the Winn family at a given moment in their history. They reflected the identities and experiences of the 4th and 5th baronets and also reinforced them. The two rooms presented the family’s vision of itself and its standing in the world.

The Classical ornament system of Paine's Dining Room (Fig.2), and indeed the exterior of the house (Fig.I), were made up of elements derived from Greek and Roman architecture. To these structurally derived components were added a variety of wreaths and flower scrolls and, above all, figures, as in the scenes on the ceiling of the Dining Room.7 The pictures in the roundels above the doors and even the portraits of the Winn brothers were also essential components of the room's embellishment.

Before the development of art academies in the eighteenth century, figural scenes in painting or sculpture were not usually regarded as distinct from the rest of the ornamentation that the elite could command.8 They were, as at Nostell, fully integrated within the embellishment of a building, a box or a vase.9 Such representations might include small incidental figures in capitals and range through a wide variety of minor and major examples to a central icon in a religious building. Even in the latter case, the ornament was an essential component in framing and directing attention to the image, as indeed the ornament focuses attention on the portraits of the Winn brothers in the State Dining Room.

Most importantly, the combination of architectural components and figural representations allowed two essential forms of interpretation. First, they organised the ways in which a room was assessed. For among the rules that governed the organisation of the architectural parts was the implicit ordering that they determined. This established the relations between the sections of the walls in the State Dining Room, for example, with a narrow skirting or plinth, a greater height given to the dado and yet more to the area below the cornice. A similar concern with vertical ordering is seen in Nostell Priory's facade. The emphasis on visible order affected the relationships of parts of buildings one to another in a variety of styles from Romanesque to Neo-classical. This ordering also enabled the inhabitants of the structures to interpret them, recognising through the ordering the relative importance and roles of the different parts. Again, through such an ordering, comparisons across a number of related buildings might be made, and such comparisons could be and were harnessed to social, political and religious institutions and their hierarchies. Secondly, the rules governing the ordering of the architectural parts also determined the organisation of the representations, or images, among them. Architectural components made possible a systematic placing of interrelated scenes, as over the doors of the State Dining Room. Equally, they might emphasise a single painting, as with the architectural fantasy over the fireplace, or a pair, as in the portraits of the Winn brothers. The frames, wreaths and roundels all contributed to the ways in which the viewers assessed the relative importance of these different images. Thus viewers were inevitably dependent on architectural features to assist them in seeking out the relative importance of the various representations and their intended meanings. The contents of these images and, indeed, of symbols deployed at all periods were also dependent for their interpretation on the organising capacity of the Western system of ornament.10

In China, structural components of buildings have, in themselves, played little, or indeed almost no, role in generating systems of ornament.11 Instead, one of the most dominant ornamental systems comprises birds, animals, insects and plants, especially flowering plants and fruits.12 Inevitably, the conventions or rules by which they were combined, at least superficially, were based upon the representation of seeming ly natural scenes. But, as we shall explore below, the composition of the scenes actually depended upon the auspicious meanings that the patron and craftsmen wished to evoke. For the individual motifs could be and often were closely linked to literary allusions, narratives, puns and rebuses. These motifs were composed into semantically coherent units, just as individual words charged with their own meaning can be put together in phrases. Within the Chinese system of ornament, these units of meaning usually conveyed wishes for good luck. Thus, the Chinese system differed from the Classical, not only in its parts, but in the conventions by which those parts were combined. Both systems were flexible enough, however, to incorporate foreign elements. Architectural motifs and foliage scrolls derived from Western sources penetrated China along with Buddhism. Travelling in the other direction, eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper, as well as earlier textiles and ceramics, brought Chinese bird-and-flower patterns to Iran, Turkey and Europe.13 The two systems were modified, but not significantly altered, to accommodate such imports.

Those who imported and adapted Chinese motifs were ignorant, it seems, of the strong literary and linguistic elements, for they did not know the Chinese language. The familiar bamboos, prunus and peonies, magpies and pheasants on typical wallpapers exported to the West each carried meaning for their Chinese makers. Bamboo, which bends but does not break, represented principled but flexible Confucian gentlemen; the prunus flowering in the winter was a sign for purity and endurance.14 The peony with abundant and lavish blooms was a symbol of wealth and rank, having been much cultivated by the Empress Wu Zetian and her court in the late seventh century A.D. A pheasant, through textual refer ences to its constancy and firmness, was a symbol of loyalty, while the magpie, in Chinese xique, puns on xi, meaning hap piness or good fortune.15 A pair of magpies presents double happiness.

An eighteenth-century painting of two cranes by Shen Quan (1682-1760; Fig.4) belongs to the category of painting on which wallpaper that became popular in Europe was modelled. The cranes are associated with loyalty, longevity and reclusion, while the word for crane, he, is a homophone for he, harmony.16 On the right are a pine and a flowering prunus, and to the left of the birds is a nandina plant with brilliant berries. The nandina is known in Chinese as tian zhu, or heavenly bamboo. The nandina groups with the pine and prunus to form the Three Friends of Winter, implying uprightness and endurance in difficult situations. The word zhu, as well as being a homophone for the word for bamboo, is also one for zhu, 'to wish'. Thus the three plants are combined to offer good wishes for a good outcome in all circumstances.17 Similar paintings would have been intended to hang in a grand mansion or a palace and would have contributed to the auspicious associations of the decorative scheme of a room or a pavilion.

The ornament of boxes, textiles or hangings might be much more complex, invoking several visual and verbal puns in an integrated range of motifi.18 A box in the collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing provides an especially complex set of puns or rebuses (Fig. 5). It is decorated with a gourd shaped vase inscribed with the words da ji, or 'abundant auspiciousness'. Therefore the gourd, which on its own carries aspirations for immortaHty and for many sons, here combines with the characters on it to give the saying ping an da ji - 'peace and auspiciousness' - because the word for vase, ping, puns on the word for peace. The actual box too is deployed in combination with the plum blossom on the lid to read he he mei mei, where the word for box, he, puns on the words for entire and for harmony, with mei, the prunus, evoking beauty, also mei. The nandina, or heavenly bamboo, tian zhu, in combination with the pine also in the vase, which refers to the longevity of the virtuous, makes the saying wan nian chang qing - 'ten thousand years forever green'. The zhu of tian zhu suggests the offering of wishes, and the pine stands for longevity. As already noted, the nandina can also take the place of the bamboo in combination with the prunus, as well as with the pine, to provide the Three Friends of Winter, symbolic of endurance. The goldfish in the bowl, jin yu, can be read as jin yu man tang - 'may gold fill your hall'. The word fish, yu, is also a homophone for yu, plenty, and the stone chime, qing, offers the homophone qing, 'congratulate'. Together they provide the saying ji qing you yu - 'to overflow with auspiciousness'. The various fruits near the side of the box give another range of meanings. The green apples, qing ping guo, evoke the saying qing ping wufu, 'peace and tranquil lity with the five blessings'; grapes and pomegranates with their many seeds offer good wishes for many progeny. The narcissus, shui xian, literally 'the immortal of the water', stands for early spring and eternal youth.

These two examples illustrate the principal sources of the meanings that such motifs habitually carried. The natural features of the plants and creatures are among the most straightforward of sources. The flexibility and endurance of the bamboo have been noted. The gourd with its many tendrils, and the pomegranate with its many seeds, both suggest progeny and the wish for male descendants. Pine trees, stone, rocks and mountains embody longevity and are analogies for prosperity into old age and even immortality. The most fertile source of meaning is the ready creation of puns or double meanings arising from the monosyllabic structure of Chinese and its use of many homophones, characters with the same or similar pronunciations but different meanings. In addition, a wide range of stories, such as the one concerning the peaches of immortality that grew in the garden of the Queen Mother of the West, were potent references. Immortality was, indeed, celebrated in many images, as is suggested by the repeated appearance of the islands of immortality in the Eastern Sea. The system was open-ended, and additional motifs and meanings could always be added. The varied combinations were also, it would appear, almost without end.

The role of representation within an ornamental system is especially pertinent to this discussion, as the bird-and flower motifs were in themselves representational images that remained recognisable in their various permutations as ornamental designs. Pictures of many kinds accompanied the furnishings in rooms of the imperial palaces or grand mansions, as illustrated by a small chamber in one of the halls of the Palace of Eternal Spring in the Forbidden City in Beijing (Fig. 6). A panelled screen, with auspicious plants in inks and inlay as representations, provides the background to a narrow kang (seat or bed) behind a curtain. Carvings, patterned silk and lanterns, also decorated with plants and creatures, all con tribute to match the screen and elaborate the overall compo sition. However, unlike the Western context, where the content of figural sculpture or painted scenes was distinct from their frameworks of architectural elements, in China the rep resentations shared their subject-matter with embellishment of furnishings, dress and utensils, which here include lanterns that carry the characters da ji, or 'abundant auspiciousness'. These tell the viewer in words how to read the whole complex.

The consequences of a link between bird-and-flower motifs employed for some painting genres and as the foundations of an ornamental system have rarely been explicitly examined. Despite pioneering work by Maggie Bickford, who has recognised the parallel phenomena in several of her studies, the role of the bird-and-flower paintings as integral components of an ornamental system has not been fully considered.19 It has been assumed generally that the bird and-flower paintings, once the genre was fully developed, should be treated as one category, while the embellishment of boxes, ceramics and dress be treated as another, even if these are recognised as sharing a common vocabulary. Yet at all early periods, paintings were part of the ornament of rooms and were used on both walls and screens. Indeed, as with the framed paintings at Nostell Priory, representations contributed to creating whole environments. Among such paintings were scenes adorning throne rooms in the Hanlin Academy at the Imperial Palace of the eleventh century. We know from texts that wall paintings of cranes and bamboos were presented in the corridors on either side of a dramatic painting of a mountainous island, one of the islands of immortality, rising out of the Eastern Sea.20 The cranes enhanced the content of this image, as their presence promised longevity and harmony.

This integration of painting on walls, decorative panels or screens, with furnishings and boxes, chests and utensils, had a wide currency. A tenth-century tomb, excavated at Quyang in Hebei province, provides a surviving example of such combinations (Fig.7).21 Its occupant, Wang Chuzhi, who died in 923, had been a military governor. His tomb is famous for a large representation of a screen with a landscape painting on it, in front of which was placed the epitaph and cover, presenting the governor symbolically in terms of his biography, as he would in life have sat in front of such a screen when greeting visitors.22 The rest of the room is highly instructive. Around the walls of the main chamber are representations of screens, each panel of which displays a large flowering plant, with many also showing birds, rocks and insects (Fig. 8). The shrubs include tree peonies, roses and morning glory, all of which indicate wishes for prosperity and for permanent spring and summer (Fig.9). These screens are frequently discussed as important examples of the bird-and-flower genre of painting, known from texts to have become popular during the eighth century. What is equally significant, however, is that such screens cannot have been seen simply as independent paintings, but were part of a room ornamented to provide an auspicious environment for Wang Chuzhi in his afterlife.

The screens cover the lower part of the walls of a square chamber; above them are painted two rows of hanging textile fringe suspended from the representation of a beam that is embellished with floral patterns. Twelve small roofed niches, each of which originally held a stone-sculpted human figure, accompanied by one of the creatures of the zodiac, occupy a further level.23 Between each niche are pairs of cranes and clouds. The cranes, known for their longevity and symbolism of immortahty, and the zodiac figures form a border below the domed roof which is covered with images of the constel lations and the Milky Way. In other words, the ornament of the room leads from what appears to be the everyday world to the limits of the universe with its cranes, zodiac figures and constellations. The whole scheme seems to have been intended to provide this universe for the afterlife of Wang Chuzhi. The painted representations of the screens suggest the actual screens of a prosperous household (as in Fig.6). At the same time the representations in the tomb would have had a purpose beyond that, namely to ensure eternal summer and prosperity for Wang. Under either interpretation, the com position has to be considered in its totality and the screens cannot be viewed separately. The ornamented tomb did much more than simply represent the environment within which, it was hoped, Wang Chuzhi would exist happily through eternity: the tomb and all its elements, of two and three dimensions, were under stood to be the actual constituent elements of this environment. Moreover, this construction was not simply a physical presentation. It reflected and created the social and political status of the occupants. In addition, it fitted into and conveyed the meanings that the intellectual environment of the time propagated, namely that by providing images, the actual three-dimensional objects would be available in the afterlife. Finally, these screen, beams and zodiac niches would not only have been present in the afterlife, they would also have benefited the dead man in his posthumous existence.

Within this scheme, the bird-and-flower screens were essential components. Their usage in the tenth century depended upon a development over several centuries and their links to a quite separate literary and linguistic tradition. Further, the ways in which the screens were deployed required two further conditions, namely the expectation that images would have auspicious effects, and that motifs com posed in a highly pictorial form and, at the same time, deployed in the decoration of dress and of other artefacts, might together form whole environments that would benefit their owners and viewers.

Chinese ornamental systems had not always comprised compositions of birds, animals and plants. An earlier system, or systems, dating from about 1500 B.C. down to the third century B.C., had been based essentially on the designs of ancient ritual bronzes, lacquers and textiles.24 Although no doubt some parts had had auspicious meanings, these schemes had not been exploited in this way so readily. The bird-and flower system owed its existence to several major political and social changes, namely the unification of China in the third century B.C. under the Qin dynasty, and to the collapse of the Han, their successors in the third century A.D. The political, social and cultural consequences of these upheavals made possible the conditions already outlined.

Such major changes in ornamental systems are rare; continuity and consistency rather than complete change has been the norm. In any one region, among a well-established society, a given repertory tends to become set and to be frequently modified but rarely abandoned. The stability was often, in effect, dictated by craft practice, by apprenticeship in that craft, and by understandable demands by patrons for continuity and development of established practice. Behind immediate demands for continuity have always been social, political and ideological conventions. Even more than craft practice, the institutions of all states and religions determined the ways in which buildings, dress and artefacts for the elite were made and finished, that is ornamented. For these reasons significant changes in ornament are associated not with changes in fashion so much as with political, social and ideological revolution, as already mentioned. It is, in fact, one of the traits of ornamental systems that they are difficult to introduce or to alter fundamentally without major political or religious, and consequently social, change.

The motifs that were incorporated in the bird-and-flower ornamental system arrived in two or three stages, mainly from Central Asia and points further west. First to appear were birds and animals. Although creatures of different sorts had always been abundant in pre-Qin ornament, they had not generally been realistically represented. Following the Qin and Han expansions in the third to first centuries B.C., realistic animal and bird designs were introduced (Fig.10).25 Evidence of their Inner Asian connections is found in the scroll patterns in which many were embedded; these were ultimately derived from the Western acanthus and palmette designs.26 Within China, these scrolls were reinterpreted as cloud scrolls and landscapes, thus giving the creatures a pictorial setting, very different from earlier creatures on bronzes and textiles that had appeared without such frameworks (Fig. 11).

Plants came in a much later stage, following the fall of the Han, most especially with the introduction of Buddhism. As has been recognised by Ellen Johnston Laing, Buddhism was an important source for the value placed on flowers and for the forms required to represent them.2? The birth of the Buddha was said to be accompanied by floral showers. And flowers falling from heaven are shown in many of the early paintings at Dunhuang, the site of the greatest surviving repository of Buddhist paintings in China (Fig. 12). From the fourth century, the flowers appear as star-like dots, but during the fifth century, fuller blooms were shown tumbling from the sky.

Many of the major patrons of Buddhism were Tungusic or Turkish peoples, entering the Han-Chinese region from the north, who brought further naturalistic scenes into the reper tory. We see this best displayed in the tomb scenes of non Han Chinese elites in the fourth to sixth centuries. Near Datong in Shanxi, a fifth-century tomb presents the occupants under a canopy in the open air, a distinctive change from interiors of their Han-period predecessors (Fig.13).28 On the tomb slabs of a Sogdian, a certain Anjia, buried at Xi'an in the sixth century, hunting scenes with tents, animals and plants against a gold ground have a distincdy Inner Asian flavour (Fig.14).29 The narrow format of the slabs employed around a bed for the coffin reproduces a screen. Such exotic compositions contributed to the eighth-, ninth- and tenth-century screens as described above.

Although so many of these motifs can be traced to a Central Asian source, they joined in China a long literary tradition in which plants and creatures were analogies for human charac teristics. The verses in the earliest anthology, The Book of Poetry, or Shi?ng, collected around 600 B.C., make abundant use of plant and animal analogies to describe female beauty and male accomplishments.30 Other early writers expanded on this tradition, as in the works attributed to Confucius. Thus, while the depictions on the screen in the tomb of Anjia would have had special meanings for Sogdian viewers, when such ornament was reinterpreted in a purely Chinese context, literary interpretations would have been recognised. From an early date, not only literary allusions but also puns were exploited to stimulate particular interpretations. Poems by Tao Yuanming (third century A.D.) played with the many senses that the word ju, chrysanthemum, might suggest. Its sound is close to that of jiu which offers three meanings, wine, nine (an auspicious number) and 'for a long time'.31 Poems about, and later images of, chrysanthemums were intended to recall these meanings.

Motifs and characters that exploit double-meanings to suggest auspiciousness go back much further in time, to the Qin and Han periods, when phrases embodying good fortune were moulded on roof tiles.32 This is a minor example of a widespread effort to ensure good fortune. The desire to ensure auspicious outcomes is, as noted above, an essential concomitant of the bird-and-flower ornamental system. Two principles were involved. In the first place, over the last centuries B.C., a view of the cosmos had developed which envisaged a universe that could be interpreted through signs, namely strange phenomena such as earthquakes and meteors, rare creatures including dragons, and odd plants such as fungi and grain with excessive heads. Heaven revealed its responses to rulers and worldly events through such omens, which were eagerly sought. The second important principle was the notion that if good omens were correlated with auspicious outcomes, the latter could be assured by images, that is by producing pictures and models of the phenomena. So began the reproduction of images of cranes, associated with longevity and harmony, or of peonies that suggest abundance and prosperity.33

The possibility of identifying the effects associated with sightings of actual cranes or peonies with those of their images was also a factor at work in the other major concomitant of the ornamental system, the growing combination of representations and decorative motifs to create whole environments with the intention of promoting auspiciousness and good fortune. This attitude had been developed by the third century B.C. The most famous artefact surviving from that time, the tomb of the First Emperor, demonstrates the role of representations in transforming spaces and creating new environments with specific intentions in mind. Inside this tomb, it is recorded, were models of towers and palaces and representations of the rivers of the country and the constellations of the heavens. They, like the famous terracotta warriors, now excavated, were not merely representations; together they were also functional, providing a universe, a territory and an army in the afterlife.34

A later tomb at Mi Xian of the first and second century A.D. shows the ways in which such representations came to be combined with patterned surfaces (Fig.15).35 It seems likely that the pictures of servants and of furniture on the walls of this tomb were intended to provide these for the tomb's occupant in the afterlife. The 'cloud scroll' surrounding them was probably associated with the notion of qi, the vital force of the universe, essential for the afterlife, as for life. We know from textual sources that models and representations, as at Mi Xian, were thought to have the effects of buildings, constellations and soldiers of which they were analogues.

Moreover, this practice of exploiting representations was not confined to tombs, but was also developed for the living. The First Emperor had models of all the palaces of the states he conquered placed near his palace at Xianyang, in the vicinity of present-day Xi'an.36 The great Han Emperor, Wudi (140-87 B.C.), constructed the ShangUn Park that brought the features of the world, as the Han then knew it, into one delimited space.37 Both gave their creators intellectual control, in a very intimate sense, of what was otherwise invisible. The model palaces and park enabled an understanding of distant places; with their presence in the immediate surroundings of the emperor, they presumably reassured him, in a very concrete way, of his control of the states. Many representations seem to have been employed, not only in China but also in the West, to give their owners or viewers access to the otherwise invisible and so allow them some sense of control, if only in the imagination.

In the State Dining Room at Nostell Priory (Fig.2), the Roman 'capriccio' above the fireplace conferred upon those who occupied this space an aura of prestige and authority, evoked in eighteenth-century Britain by all things associated with the Classical past. The architectural components of the room directed attention to this representation and, more importantly, to those of the Winn brothers, thereby linking them to the achievements of the Classical past. Likewise, the combination of the decoration of the beams and niches and the painted cranes with the bird-and-flower screens in the tomb of Wang Chuzhi (Fig. 8) determined how this space was understood and read. The screens in the room in the Palace of the Eternal Spring (Fig. 9) also benefited from the ornament around them. The characters on the lanterns, as mentioned, were indeed explicit instructions on how to view the screens and the surrounding patterned silks and ribbons.

The Chinese bird-and-flower tradition was and is a power ful system of ornament because, like the Western Classical tradition, it combines what we more usually think of as decoration with representation, making for complex compo sitions in buildings, on furnishings, utensils and dress. In both cases, the messages of the representations are inextricably linked with the systematic character of the ornament. The systems were open-ended and could be and were altered to fit different circumstances. The Chinese system was versatile, also, because of the large range of meanings it could carry. Both systems also shared another characteristic: they provided clues to the world views of their owners. Ornamental schemes and their underlying systems were and are more than passive records of taste and fashion. As both systems carried meanings, though in very different ways, both provided clues and cues as to what might be expected for those encountering either the room in the Palace of Eternal Spring or the State Dining Room at Nostell Priory.

Ornament systems can thus be regarded as forms of instruction. In China, the bird-and-flower designs provided well proven allusions through literary and folk traditions. In addition, however, these motifs contributed not simply highly developed visual compositions with obvious meanings, but also assured the prosperity of their owners. In the West, the manipulation of ornament has been similarly effective in its impressive capacity to convey important messages about social, political and religious hierarchies. In addition, the ordered architectural system carried representations within it that explained and supported essential aspects of the intellectual and ideological values of the times in question - in the case of Nostell Priory, the value of the Classical past.

This article is an edited version of a paper presented as the Clark Lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, on 4th November 2004. I am grateful for comments from Robert Harrist, Lothar Ledderose and Alfreda Murck.

1 In using the term system, two conditions are implied. The first is a set of elements, be they abstract motifs or images; the second is a way of combining the parts. The interest in systems thus directs attention to a complex of elements rather than to individual images or motifs. It has usually been the practice to address the morpho logy of individual motifs as the basis of ornament. The classic example is Alois Riegl’s Stilfragen, now available in an EngUsh translation; A Riegl: Problems of Style. Foundation for a History of Ornament, transl. E. Kain, Princeton 1992. This motif-based approach also stimulated E.H. Gombrich: The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, Oxford 1979. Many other studies have followed motifs and their rendering in a variety of styles, for example, P. Thornton: Form and Decoration: Innovation in the Decorative Arts, 1470-1870, London 1998.

2 Many attempts to describe ornament have started with individual items or pieces of dress or jewellery, an approach taken, for example, in J. Trilling: The Language of Ornament, London 2001. However, such divisions usually prove artificial, for people have a tendency to organise their physical environments to provide not only necessary functions, but also to reflect their social status and intellectual position. In these wider enterprises, buildings, artefacts and dress are matched or even co-ordinated. Pierre Bourdieu's work would have been impossible if this had not been the case; see P. Bourdieu: Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London 1986 (translation of La Distinction. Critique sociale du judgement, Paris 1979).

3 G.Jackson-Stops: Nostell Priory, Yorkshire, London 1978.

4 For other examples of Chinese-type wallpapers, see L. Hoskins, ed.: The Papered Wall. The History, Patterns and Techniques of Wallpaper, London 1994, pls.62-67.

5 The role of Classical architecture as the basis of Western ornament has been discussed by J. Summerson: The Classical Language of Ornament, London 1963 (rev. ed. 1980); B. BroUn: Architectural Ornament: Banishment and Return, New York and London 2000; and J. Onians: Bearers of Meaning. The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Princeton 1988. K. Bloomer: The Nature of Ornament: Rhythm and Metamorphosis in Architecture, New York and London 2000, reUes entirely on Western architecture for an account of ornament.

6 The contrast between the obvious content of the architectural features and the representational content of the paintings is the principal reason why, in the present day, it is usual to separate ornament from representation. This contrast was much less marked in East Asia.

7 Such scrolls are the subject of Riegl, op.cit. (note I).

8 Efforts were made from the fifteenth and sixteenth century to elevate painting and sculpture above other visual arts, but it took some centuries for this to be achieved; see M. Belozerskaya: Luxury Arts of the Renaissance, London 2005, pp.75-76.

9 Similar points have been made by C. Marconi: 'Kosmos: The Imagery of the Archaic Greek Temple’, Res 45 (Spring 2004), pp.211-24, and Belozerskaya, op. cit. (note 8), pp.31-32.

10 The social import of ornament has been well recognised; see M. Snodin and M. Howard: Ornament. A Social History Since 1450, New Haven and London 1996.

11 Architectural features are deployed in some instances, as in tombs (see Figs.7 and 8). Here, they are part of a depiction or representation for the purposes of creating a resemblance to a building. They are not taken apart and used as frames or stands, as are the Classical components at Nostell Priory. On the other hand, in China, architectural features could be used to make miniature buildings, as coffins or as reliquaries, and in these instances they come closer to the Western uses of architectural components. Yet in China, these examples were relatively rare exceptions, rather than part of an ornamental system.

12 Major contributions to the study of bird-and-flower ornament have been made by E.Johnston Laing: 'A Survey of Liao Bird and Flower Painting', Journal of Song Yuan Studies 24 (1994), pp.57-99; idem: 'The Development of Flower Depiction and the Origin of the Bird-and-Flower Genre in Chinese Art', Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities64 (1992), pp. 180-223; idem: 'Auspicious Motifs in Ninth- to Thirteenth-Century Tombs', Ars Orientalis 33 (2003), pp.33-75. These papers are more concerned with the genre of painting than with ornament and do not examine in detail the nature of the close relation between the two.

13 For discussion of exchanges of motifs across the Eurasian continent, see J. Raw son: Chinese Ornament: the Lotus and the Dragon, London 1984.

14 The significance of the plum in a variety of guises is discussed in M. Bickford: Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painting Genre, Cambridge 1996; see also idem, et al: Bones of Jade and Soub of Ice: The Flowering Plum in Chinese Art, New Haven 1985.

15 For a discussion of the associations of the pheasant and other plants and animals featured in classical Chinese Uterature, see C. Hartman: 'Literary and Visual Inter actions in Lo Chih-ch'uan's "Crows in Old Trees'", Metropolitan Museum Journal 28 (i993),Pp.i29-67.

16 For a discussion of puns, see Q. Bai: 'Image as Word: A Study of Rebus Play in Song Painting (960-1279)', Metropolitan Museum Journal 34 (1999), pp.57?72.

17 Grouping images that present phrases is one of the fundamental methods for creating auspicious ornament in China. This subject is well illustrated by N. Nobuchika: Kissho zuan kaidai: Shina fuzoku uo iehi kenkyu, Tokyo 1940, better known in its Chinese language version: Zhongguo jixiang tu'an: Zhongguo fengsu yanjiu zhi yi, Taipei 1980.

18 Among the exhibitions dedicated to three-dimensional artefacts illustrating motifs with a variety of meanings, see L.A. Cort and J. Stuart: exh. cat. Joined Colors: Decoration and Meaning in Chinese Porcelain. Ceramics from Collectors in the Min Chiu Society, Hong Kong, Washington (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery) 1993; exh. cat. Jixiang - Auspicious Motifs in Chinese Art. Special Exhibition in Honor of the 30th Anniversary of the Toyokan Gallery of Oriental Art and Antiquities, Tokyo (National Museum) 1998; S. Pierson: exh. cat. Designs as Signs: Decoration and Chinese Ceramics, London (Percival David Foundation) 2001. For further comments on motifs with verbal meanings, see W. Qingzheng: A Dictionary of Chinese Ceramics, Singapore 2002, pp.243-60.

19 Bickford has examined, for example, the sharing of subject-matter between Uterati paintings and decorative textiles. It remains, however, for a further examination to illustrate in greater depth the continuity between painting and room furnishings and dress; see M. Bickford: 'Textiles as Texts. Emending the Song Literary Record with the Material Evidence of Huang Sheng's Tomb', in Chinese Textiles, Percival David Foundation Colloquies on Art and Archaeology 19, 1997 (forthcoming).

20 See S. Jang: 'Realm of the Immortals: Paintings Decorating the Jade Hall of the Northern Song', Ars Orientalis 22 (1992), pp.81-96. Jang's article is much indebted to O. Hiromitsu: 'Incho no meiga', in Suzuki Kei sensei kanreki kinen chugoku kaigashi ronshu, Tokyo 1981, pp.23-85.

21 The tomb is described in Hebei Sheng wenwu yanjiusuo, ed.: Wudai Wang Chuzhi mu, Beijing 1998.

22 For an imaginative discussion of screens and their roles, see Wu Hung: The Double Screen. Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting, London 1996.

23 Although the architectural features are essential to the representation of a room within the tomb, neither there nor in other contexts are they part of the ornamental system in the ways in which columns, pediments and architraves were in the West.

24 An early discussion of the different categories of Chinese ornament is found in M. Loehr: 'The Fate of Ornament in Chinese Art', Archives of Asian Art 21 (1967-68), pp.8-19.

25 A brief survey of different categories of animal motifs is set out in J. Rawson: 'Strange Beast in Han and Post-Han Imagery', in A. Juliano and J. Lerner, eds.: Nomads, Traders and Holy Men Along China's Silk Road: Papers Presented to a Symposium held at Asia Society in New York, November 9-10, 2001. Silk Road Studies VII, Turnhout 2002, pp.23-32. 

26 This topic has been inadequately researched. However, undulating scrolls enclosing a leaf-Uke appendage within each wave occur on lacquers, mirrors and even tomb of the Warring States and the Han periods, indicating the ubiquity of borrowings from Inner Asia; for examples on mirrors, see Guo Yuhai: Gugong zangjing, Beijing 1996, pp.32, 33, 41, 46 and 53.

27 Johnston Laing 1992, op. cit. (note 12), pp. 182-83.

28 Wenwu (July 2001), pp.40-51.

29 Shaanxi sheng kaogu yanjiusuo: Xi'an Bei Zhou Anjia mu, Beijing 2003.

30 A. Waley: The Book of Songs, London 1937, pp.78, 106, 85, 128 and 196. The Book of Poetry also contains laments, which in later centuries were especially important in all poetry forms. They found a different visual expression from those used for auspicious motifs.

31 S. Owen, transi, and ed.: An Anthology of Chinese Poetry: Beginnings to 1911, New York 1996, pp.315-16.

32 Johnston Laing 2003, op. cit. (note 12), p.47.

33 For the Han period, see M. Loewe: Divination, Mythology and Monarchy in Han China, Cambridge 1994. Influential for this topic is P. Sturman: 'Cranes above Kaifeng: The Auspicious Image at the Court of Huizong', Ars Orientalis 20 (1990), pp.33-68. This has been extensively built upon by M. Bickford: 'Emperor Huizong and the Aesthetics of Agency', Archives of Asian Art 53 (2002-03), pp.71-104.

34 J. Rawson: 'The Power of Images: The Model Universe of the First Emperor and its Legacy', Historical Research 75, no. 188 (2002), pp. 123-54.

35 Henan sheng wenwu yanjiusuo: Mi Xian Dahuting Han mu, Beijing 1993.

36 B. Watson, transl.: Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian, Qin Dynasty, Hong Kong and New York 1993, p.45.

37 L. Ledderose: 'The Earthly Paradise: Religious Elements in Chinese Landscape Art', in S. Bush and C. Murck, eds.: Theories of the Arts in China, Princeton 1983, pp.165-83.