In 1749, at the height of the European mania for chinoiserie, a British employee of the Swedish East India Company named William Chambers returned to England after two voyages to the port of Guangzhou, China. Chambers' firsthand experience of China was hungrily lapped up by his compatriots eager for descriptions of that great civilization, and, after further studies in Rome and Paris, Chambers fashioned himself into the leading architect and landscape designer of his day, notably designing the Chinese Pagoda and the House of Confucius at the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in 1762 for King George III. A pet project of the well-heeled naturalist and explorer Sir Joseph Banks, the Kew Gardens presented a veritable encyclopedia of the natural and built world within reach of the British East India Company, whose agents assiduously brought back plants from numerous climes and soils just as specimens of world architectural styles past and present were built throughout the park.
in Artforum, March 2014.
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