Yi Lantai

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Yi is the family name here, Lantai is the first name.

Yi Lantai (伊兰泰, Yī Lántài ) was a Manjurian painter of the Qing Dynasty of China. He lived in the second half of the 18th century and belonged to the Pure White Banner (正 白旗). He drew the templates for a series of copperplate engravings depicting the Xiyang Lou garden and its buildings north of Beijing under Emperor Qianlong .

Lantai Yi: European style palace (1786)

Act

Yi was a student of the group of European Jesuits led by Giuseppe Castiglione who worked for Emperor Qianlong. Yi had adopted the western style of representation using the central perspective. He began documenting the Xiyang Yuan ("Western Style Garden") under construction in the spring of 1781. At that time, the Yuanying Guan ("View of the Distant Sea") building was in the process of being built. After a year, Yi had completed six sheets. The entire work comprised twenty sheets and was completed in 1786. Five series were printed; the originals are now in the Chinese National Library in Beijing .

The order of the stitches follows a walk through the garden. Some representations have small (possibly intentional) errors in perspective. The series is a valuable document of the garden that was destroyed by colonial troops in 1860.

literature

• Lantai Yi: Palais, pavillons et jardins construits par Giuseppe Castiglione ... 20 planches gravées 1783–1786. Emphasis. Jardin de Flore, Paris 1977.
• Hui Zou: A Jesuit garden in Beijing and early modern Chinese culture. Purdue University Press, West Lafayette 2011. ISBN 978-1-55753-583-2 , pp. 16, 101-102.