Elaborate state rituals were a fundamental part of the Chinese program of foreign management during the Qing dynasty. During the reign of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795), the forms of these guest rituals and the sites where they were held dramatically changed. In tandem with this development, a new kind of painting was created for the sites where ritual was held. These large works utilized elements of Jesuit lineal perspective and European techniques of portraiture and scientific representation to depict real ritual sites. Building on extensive archival research and GIS analysis, this project restores these paintings to their original locations, revealing a new pattern of borrowed landscapes that clarify, enhance, and serve the power of the sites where they were hung.

This analysis addresses three unique sites, three different rites, and three separate modes of visual expression. First, I examine the annual Lunar New Year's rites in Beijing and a painting entitled Envoys from Vassal Countries (wanguo laichao tu), which hung in the emperor's private studio for celebrating this day. I show that the abstracted mode of representing landscape and figures reflects a theoretical system based on the power of cyclicality, repetition, and the slow Sinicization of foreign peoples. Next, I prove that Qianlong moved the formal celebration of his birthday, the wanshou shengjie from Beijing to the Imperial Hunting Lodge in Chengde. The paintings commissioned for the new ritual hall he constructed for this ritual, Horsemanship (mashu tu) and Ceremonial Banquet in the Garden of Ten Thousand Trees (wanshuyuan ciyan tu) borrowed a complete Mongol ceremonial landscape, linking annual patterns of ritual with the rites used to mark the surrender of foreign chiefs. The importance of Mongol ritual forms was rising at the court, and my final section follows the visual model first created for Chengde back to Beijing, where a visually similar program of landscape was constructed in a temple/war memorial called the Ziguangge (Hall of Purple Light). Here, three paintings constructed a unified vision of Mongol ritual united around the power of a single ritual moment to effect lasting change, establishing immediate personal and political relationships between the emperor and foreign countries. This conception of ritual, anchored in Mongol ritual forms, increasingly served as the basis of Qing guest ritual in the Qianlong era.

Together, this dissertation brings new focus to the manner in which European representational techniques were utilized at the Qing court for political effect. It explores a unique relationship between real and represented ritual sites, challenging our understanding of representation and its connection to real space. And finally, it incorporates art and architecture into a discussion of Qing foreign policy, bringing new clarity to the way in which ritual sites were constructed and used as political tools.