Add Or 2127-2128

2 drawings of the garden of a Chinese merchant, bound into a volume together with Add.Or.2084-2126, 2129-2196.

By a Canton artist, c.1800-05.

Gouache; 16.5 by 21.5 ins.

Deposited c.1806.

Note: Add.Or.2127-28, which are inscribed Paan Khaquar Gardens, show the garden of a wealthy Chinese merchant, ‘Puan Khequa’. This was the name given by foreigners to P’an Chen-ch’eng (1714-88) and then to his son, P’an Yu-ti, who inherited the firm and died in 1821. He was the chief of the Co-hong from 1796 to 1808 and was one of the two senior Hong merchants sent by the Governor of Kwangtung to the Commissioners of the East India Company in March 1792 to make preliminary enquiries about the projected English embassy (see J.L. Cranmer-Byng, ‘An Embassy to China’ (London, 1962), note 76). The name was also given to his descendants for William Hunter records ‘Pwankeiqua’ as one of the Co-hong in 1825. He also refers to the fine houses of the Chinese merchants and their beautiful gardens: ‘Their private residences, of which we visited several, were on a vast scale, comprising curiously laid-out gardens, with grottoes and lakes, crossed by carved stone bridges, pathways neatly paved with small stones of various colours forming designs of birds, or fish, or flowers. One of the most beautiful was that of Pwankeiqua, on the banks of the river, three or four miles west of the Factories’ (see W.C. Hunter, ‘The Fan Kwae at Canton’ (Shanghai, 1938), pp.20, 24).