Cantonized Calcutta: Global Encounters in a Coffee Pot with a View of the Calcutta Waterfront

Stella Wu

The year 1757 witnessed not only the victory of the British East India Company (EIC) at the Battle of Plassey and the subsequent conquest of Calcutta, but also the establishment of Canton as the sole legal port of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) open to official trade with the West, under the ‘single port commerce system’ of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95). Decades later, a gilded porcelain coffee pot with an underglaze-blue design of the Calcutta waterfront (fig. 1) exemplifies the convergence of these two events, intertwining the narratives of the EIC, Calcutta, and Canton (Guangzhou). Made in China around 1790 for the English export market, the ‘coffee pot with a view of the Calcutta waterfront’ (hereafter, the coffee pot) acts as a ‘contact zone’ where cultures of Britain, China, and India ‘meet, clash, and grapple with each other’ through transnational circulation, manufacture, and trade (Pratt, 2008, pp. 8–9). Although the original patron remains undocumented, the piece was likely commissioned by an EIC member who either resided in or maintained connections with Calcutta.

1. Coffee pot with a view of the Calcutta waterfront
China; Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 1790s
Gilt porcelain with underglaze blue decoration; height 24.1 cm, diameter 13.3 cm
Hong Kong Maritime Museum, Hong Kong
Photo © Hong Kong Maritime Museum

Taking the form and size of a regular coffee pot and adorned with a scene of the Calcutta shore, the work seems to reduce its ‘Chineseness’ to materiality alone. However, through processes of translation and mistranslation, Chinese artisans amalgamated the Calcutta waterfront with the distant Canton port in its pictorial design, turning the object from a tailored commission into an unexpected heterotopia that negotiates the uncertainties and internal dissonances surrounding ‘Britishness’ in the late 18th century. Combined with a Meissen-style form and gilding, the vessel helps its patron resist metropolitan criticism while navigating nascent British identities in Calcutta’s increasingly intercultural milieu.

2. Backside view of figure 1
Photo © Hong Kong Maritime Museum

At first glance, the artefact, with a European pear-shaped body and a pictorial design of Calcutta, manifests ‘Chineseness’ solely through its translucent materiality and blue-and-white palette. From the 1720s, as Chinese porcelains became more readily accessible in Britain, their decorative styles minimized overt visual designs indicating ‘Chineseness’. Material origin and iconic colour schemes alone sufficed to suggest an exotic allure and signify elite status, allowing European consumers greater freedom in selecting both forms and motifs. By the 1780s, as David Howard observed, ‘anyone could order a service with personal initials and a pseudo-crest of two birds to indicate marital bliss or an anchor to remind a sailor of his years at sea’ (1994, p. 17). The coffee pot exemplifies the appeal of Chinese export porcelain in the 18th century, which rested in its adaptability as a versatile medium that could hybridize and cater to local tastes globally (Porter, 2002, p. 399).

3. Toddy jug
China; Qing dynasty (1644–1911), c. 1800–20
Porcelain with grisaille decoration and gilding; height 25.4 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Yet the passage of time left the piece incomplete. Minor irregularities on the back at the connection points of its symmetrical applique leaf decorations suggest the loss of its original handles, denoting that its functionality as tableware diminished at some point after production (fig. 2). The four-corner leaf motifs imply that the handles were likely crafted in a twisted, crossed strap form, similar to those on a toddy jug made in China between 1800 and 1820 for the American market (fig. 3). Given the absence of its handles, curators at the Hong Kong Palace Museum have displayed the porcelain with its back against the wall (fig. 4), drawing viewers’ attention to its underglaze-blue pictorial narrative of the bustling Calcutta waterfront.

4. Side view of figure 1
Photo © Stella Wu

Deploying picturesque formulas, the scene unfolds in three layers: a foreground with sprawling trees framing one side of the view, a middle ground animated by rowboats and canoes drifting across the water, and a background of open sky. A coconut tree stretches diagonally from the lower right corner to the upper left, while clouds, depicted in sea-wave-like patterns, waft from west to east. The convergence of these two visual flows leads toward a rectangular architectural form, partially veiled by mountains across the river.

The design of the main building, which likely draws from copies of the 1754 etching View of Fort William in Calcutta by the British artist Jan van Ryne (1712–60) (fig. 5), is evidence that the coffee pot was a bespoke order with a specified image. Both the porcelain decoration and the print depict a two-storey factory building incorporating local architectural elements, including high ceilings and thick walls suited to the subcontinental climate, while adopting neoclassical styles as a demarcation of British identity. These features, as later described by the English landscape painters Thomas Daniell and William Daniell, include flat roofs with roofline cornices replacing the supposed ‘bamboo ones’, and ‘marble columns’ supporting open porticoes instead of ‘brick walls’ (1810, p. 104). Compositionally, the coffee pot’s depiction of Calcutta resonates with the print’s waterfront perspective, centring on Fort William and accompanied by other rectangular, flat-roofed buildings that housed EIC officers and servants.

5. View of Fort William in Calcutta
By Jan Van Ryne (1712–60); 1754
Coloured engraving on paper; 25.8 × 39.5 cm
The British Library, London
Photo © The British Library

EIC members favoured representing Calcutta from the riverside perspective of Fort William, as its history epitomized loss, reclamation, and fortification during British colonization while also asserting the company’s dominance in maritime trade. The original fort, constructed in 1696 by the EIC, functioned as a central hub for procuring cargo bound for London. However, it was poorly fortified and fell to the forces of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah, during the 1756 Siege of Calcutta (Jasanoff, 2005, p. 28). Following the EIC’s victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Calcutta was reclaimed, and a new fort was constructed further south on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River.

Eleven years after the reclamation, EIC soldier-artist Major Antoine Polier (1741–95) sketched a panoramic view of Calcutta from the waterfront, including the new Fort William at the city’s southern end (fig. 6). Largely retaining the architectural style of its predecessor, the new fort was among the first sights visible to those approaching Calcutta by boat. John Prinsep, a visitor in 1771, was struck by its scale and compared it to European counterparts: ‘The fort opened to our view reminding me of Valenciennes, regular, majestic, and commanding’ (quoted in Losty, 1991, p. 36). This was the Calcutta the EIC sought to present: a carefully curated image of strength, prosperity, and architectural grandeur, appealing to merchants, soldiers, and patriots as a testament to British colonial achievement and trading triumph. From the perspective of ‘trade-within-trade’, the coffee pot, acquired through Canton, further amplified the EIC’s pride, serving both as evidence of Britain’s trading dominance over colonized territories and as a symbol of its expansive commercial network.

6. A View of Calcutta Taken from the Other Side of the River in the Year 1768
By Antoine Polier (1741–95); 1768
Etching on paper; dimensions unknown
The British Library, London
(After Jasanoff, 2005, p. 46.)

Although the pictorial design on the coffee pot celebrates the EIC’s overall success, it was likely not commissioned by the company itself but rather by a member residing in or connected to Calcutta. By the last decade of the 18th century, emerging English porcelain manufacturers, seeking to compete with Chinese counterparts, lobbied for higher tariffs. In response, the EIC deprioritized Chinese porcelain imports, relegating them to ballast on ships by 1791 (Howard, 1994, p. 34). Despite this shift, private commissions for Chinese export wares with tailored motifs remained prevalent. While Jingdezhen produced most commissioned porcelain, the growing demand for faster delivery led to the establishment of decorating workshops in Canton from the 1740s (ibid., p. 26). These workshops specialized in European-inspired designs, including Meissen-style gilding, scrollwork, and floral motifs. The gilding on the coffee pot was likely applied in one of these workshops.

7. Survey of the Country on the Eastern Bank of the Hooghly, from Calcutta to the Fortifications at Budgebudge
By Mark Wood (1750–1829); 1785
Etching on paper; dimensions unknown
The British Library, London
Photo © The British Library

While Chinese artisans skilfully created customized products reflecting clients’ tastes, issues of translation inevitably arose as referential images travelled long distances and entered a different linguistic and cultural system. A distinctive aspect of mistranslation in this coffee pot is the fusion of Calcutta and Canton. In its depiction of the Calcutta waterfront, layered mountains partially veil the building, despite the absence of such topographical features in both European prints and Calcutta’s geography. As a riverine city in the Bengal Delta, Calcutta is flanked by the Hooghly River to the west and merges into vast lakes, wetlands, and floodplains to the east. According to a 1785 cartographic work by EIC Captain Mark Wood (1750–1829), Calcutta’s topography consists of a vast network of waterways and low-lying forested plains, but no mountains in the vicinity (fig. 7).

8. Tureen (not shown) underplate with a scene of Canton
China; Qing dynasty (1644–1911), c. 1770–90
Porcelain with underglaze blue decoration; 36.2 × 27.3 cm
Dubey’s Art & Antiques, Baltimore
Photo © Dubey’s Art & Antiques

In contrast, mountainous landscapes are a distinctive feature of Guangzhou’s topography: the White Cloud Mountain (Baiyunshan), an extension of the Nanling Mountains, stretches along the city’s northern edge, while the Pearl River and the vast expanse of the South China Sea border it to the south. In export porcelain depicting scenes of Canton, the mountains serve to unify compositions by collapsing landmarks from disparate geographical locations into a single view. An underplate from a Chinese blue-and-white soup tureen presenting a Canton waterfront (c. 1770–90) employs this visual strategy (fig. 8), arranging landmarks such as the Flowery Pagoda, the Huaisheng Mosque, and the Five-Storey Pagoda (Zhenhailou) amid meandering mountains and city walls, viewed from across the Pearl River. In the coffee pot, the inclusion of mountains suggests that the artisans merged Canton with Calcutta, metaphorically uniting two distant port cities into a single milieu.

9. Dish with scene of Dutch Folly Fort at Canton
China; Qing dynasty (1644–1911), c. 1780–1800
Porcelain with underglaze blue decoration; length 36.83 cm
Heirloom & Howard Limited, England
Photo © Heirloom & Howard Limited

Another visual clue to this fusion is the depiction of vessels on the coffee pot, which resemble neither the majestic seagoing ships of the EIC nor the indigenous riverboats of Bengal. Instead, with their combination of canopy-covered cabins and single-masted square rigs, they closely resemble Cantonese chop boats used for trade or passenger transport. Similar boats appear on export porcelain portraying Canton itself (fig. 9), where local chop boats ply their trade alongside the Dutch Folly Fort on the Pearl River. Designed for versatility, chop boats often have a collapsible mast for hoisting cargo and cabins providing shelter for goods and passengers. In contrast, riverboats in Bengal typically have either an open deck or elevated cabins covering the entire deck, each designed for a specific purpose, such as transport, trade, or fishing. With elements visually linked to the waterscape of the Pearl River, the representation of the Calcutta waterfront on the object is amalgamated with that of distant Canton.

10. Punch bowl
China; Qing dynasty (1644–1911), c. 1785
Porcelain with grisaille decoration and gilding; 16.5 × 40 cm
National Maritime Museum, London
Photo © National Maritime Museum

This blending of elements across regions reflects a broader practice among Jingdezhen porcelain painters, who often combined imported imagery with local decorative motifs to create cross-cultural designs. A Chinese export punch bowl made around 1785 for the Barnard family of shipbuilders demonstrates this practice (fig. 10). It displays a grisaille design of the skeletal structure of a half-built ship, likely copied from a 1768 engraving in Architectura Navalis Mercantoria by Fredrik Henrik af Chapman (1721–1808) (fig. 11). While the designers followed European conventions in depicting the hull, the hut with sloped roofs and brush-style greenery in the background evoke a rustic Chinese landscape.

11. Pl. XXXVI, from Architectura Navalis Mercatoria
By Fredrik Henrik af Chapman (1721–1808); 1768
Engraving; 50 × 33 cm
New York Public Library, New York
Photo © New York Public Library

The punch bowl illustrates a bilateral cultural exchange, whereas the coffee pot introduces further complexity by depicting an Indian site. It also demonstrates how Chinese artisans exercised greater agency in shaping European imaginations. By fusing the design with a Chinese site, the makers created an unexpected compromise that reconciled the tensions between colonial patrons and metropolitan elites, who viewed collecting practices linked to subcontinental experience with scepticism.

During the 1780s, articles in the London press expressed disinterest in, or even censure of Calcutta, describing it as a city of ‘scattered and confused chaos jumbled into an undistinguished mass of corruption, equally offensive to human sense and health’ (Marshall, 1988, p. 160). Newspapers stereotyped it as a place of sickness and decadence, where European bodies risked contamination from its unhealthy climate and corrupt social environment (Eaton, 2013, p. 51). High mortality rates, coupled with stories of Britons ‘going native’, circulated widely among the elite and aristocracy. Until the early 19th century, British EIC civilians in India were still described as ‘deeply imbued with [India’s] manners, and having acquired something like the pride of nabobs, in their notions of self-importance’ (Huggins, 2010, p. 61). The term ‘nabob’, an anglicized version of the Persian nawab, itself conveyed the metropole’s unfavourable view of Britons who lived or had lived in India, associating them with dubious wealth, ostentatious living, and moral decay.

It is possible that the coffee pot was commissioned by an EIC member who had returned to London after residing in Calcutta. These individuals faced a dilemma: they wished to bring back objects from India as mementos, yet their British contemporaries assumed they had amassed ill-gotten fortune and adopted a corrupt oriental lifestyle. Some members, mindful of public scrutiny, brought back nothing they would be ‘ashamed to show’, while others returned with extensive collections accumulated in India, further fuelling the ‘nabob scare’ and anxieties about Indian corruption infiltrating metropolitan life (Jasanoff, 2005, p. 84). This tension reflected a broader ambivalence among the upper echelons of London: while proud of the empire’s expanding dominance and commercial achievement, they simultaneously viewed those who had directly facilitated its expansion in the subcontinent with suspicion and fear.

Meanwhile, Britain remained frustrated by Qianlong’s restrictive trade policies in Canton. As David Porter notes, the 18th century trading system was centred on a Sinocentric power base, and Chinese imports evoked ambivalent desires among Britons. While these goods fascinated with their exotic allure and alignment with Rococo aesthetics, they also carried a cultural and civilizational weight that stirred anxiety and resentment. Such objects served as constant reminders of Britain’s material dependency and its relatively peripheral position within the Sinocentric global trade economy. However, the coffee pot’s imagined convergence of Calcutta and Canton offered a symbolic resolution to these anxieties. By visually merging the two cities, Britons could project their authority over Calcutta onto Canton, and by extension, asserting an illusion of power over China. Viewed through the lens of a Canton-Calcutta synthesis, the coffee pot mitigated British anxieties about their limited influence in Sino-British trade, while tempering the metropole’s disregard for the representation of a subcontinental city that otherwise held little appeal.

Beyond its pictorial amalgamation, the coffee pot’s form and gilding also mediated tensions with the homeland. While the gold was likely applied in Canton, its form and decoration emulate the Meissen style, associated with the first European hard-paste porcelain factory, established in 1710 in Saxony. Although this style initially imitated the ornamentation of Chinese porcelain, European manufacturers soon developed new ceramic formulas and decorative approaches better suited to their aesthetic preferences and cultural conventions. Confronted with growing competition from the European side, Chinese artisans incorporated Meissen-style features, originally inspired by Chinese porcelain but refracted through European reinterpretation, to maintain their competitiveness in the global porcelain market. Through this recursive process of stylistic reappropriation, the coffee pot became a negotiated space, preserving the patron’s remembrance of Calcutta while integrating Europeanized elements deemed acceptable in Britain.

Apart from concerns of acceptability, the European features may also have soothed the patron’s anxieties about bodily exposure and cultural contamination, particularly if they remained in Calcutta. Contemporary European medical and philosophical discourse framed the body as permeable and in constant exchange with its surroundings, including commodities encountered and consumed. This belief necessitated the careful regulation of the body through controlled consumption and sensory inputs. For Britons with prolonged exposure in Calcutta, metropolitan criticism of their perceived transformation into ‘Indianized European bodies’ and their inability to resist ‘taboos of Indian things’ intensified the psychological need to assert their British identity (Eaton, 2013, pp. 52, 55). To counter these perceptions, they sought objects that retained European characteristics, safeguarding their bodily integrity against perceived threats of Indian surroundings. The European elements of the coffee pot likely contributed to this protective scheme and eased metropolitan disapproval.

12. The Auriol and Dashwood Families
By Johan Zoffany (1733–1810); c. 1783–87
Oil on canvas; 142 × 198 cm
The Holburne Museum, England
Photo © The Holburne Museum

However, while seeking to maintain ties to the perceived stability of Britishness in the homeland, Britons in Calcutta were also questioning what constituted a distinctly British identity in an environment where Indians selectively assimilated European elements and Europeans, in turn, judiciously adopted Indian ones. This negotiation of identity is reflected in works such as the late 18th century oil painting The Auriol and Dashwood Families (fig. 12), by Johann Zoffany (1733–1810). In this portrait, trans-Asian commodities including Chinese porcelain, Chippendale chairs, and Asian silk garments styled after current European fashions circulate around the bodies, acting as projections and constructions of British belonging, linking the Anglo-Indian elites both to the imperial centre and to their embodied presence in a hybrid environment. Similarly, the coffee pot, as a pictorially and structurally hybridized object guided not by ‘purity and integrity’ but by ‘thorough-going mongrelization’ (Porter, 2002, pp. 403–4), not only constructed part of the commissioner’s British identity by incorporating elements familiar in the metropole, but also situated the commissioner within a multicultural nexus.

Maya Jasanoff observes that ‘the process of cultural encounter involved crossing and mixing, as well as separation and division’ (2005, p. 7). This tension extended to ‘Britishness’, which became fractured between the subcontinent and the metropole through colonial expansion and cultural contact. Yet Chinese artisans created an object-scale heterotopia that actively mediated these divisions. As Michel Foucault defined, a heterotopia with compensatory function brings together multiple, incompatible spaces into an ideal unity in contrast to the chaos of reality (Foucault, 1986, pp. 24, 27). At a time when British colonial bodies were vulnerable to psychological and physical instability, the ‘coffee pot with a view of the Calcutta waterfront’ held redemptive value in its geographical synthesis and stylistic hybridity. In this tangible object, the patron could be shielded from metropolitan critique, distanced from full Indianization, yet adapted to the cross-cultural environment of Calcutta. The coffee pot thus reconfigures the fragmentation of British identities and complicates the metropolitan gaze that sought to discredit the hybridized British subjectivities taking shape in colonial India.

Stella Wu is a SMArchS candidate in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art (HTC) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Professor Kristel Smentek for offering thoughtful, detailed feedback throughout, to Professor Yeewan Koon for her constructive comments, and to editor Kelly Flynn for polishing the article. Gratitude is also extended to Yifawn Lee of Orientations and the three panelists of the Young Art Writers Award.


Selected bibliography

Thomas Daniell and William Daniell, A Picturesque Voyage to India: By the Way of China. London, 1810.

Natasha Eaton, ‘Excess in the City? The Consumption of Imported Prints in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1780–c. 1795’, in Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, eds., Empires of Vision, 2013, pp. 159–88.

Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–7.

David Sanctuary Howard, The Choice of the Private Trader: The Private Market in Chinese Export Porcelain Illustrated in the Hodroff Collection, London, 1994.

William Huggins, Sketches in India, Treating on Subjects Connected with the Government, Civil and Military Establishments, Characters of the European, and Customs of the Native Inhabitants, London, 2010.

Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850, New York, 2005.

Jeremiah P. Losty, Calcutta: City of Palaces: A Survey of the City in the Days of the East India Company, 1690–1858, London, 1991.

Peter J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India, 1740–1828, Cambridge, 1988.

David Porter, ‘Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (March 2002): 395–411.

Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed., London, 2008.