Yongzheng Emperor’s Mandate of Heaven: The Story Behind Giuseppe Castiglione’s Gathering of Two Auspicious Signs

I n the first year of the Yongzheng reign, on the sixth day of the eighth month, a spectacular sight in the Taiye Pond of the inner gardens in the Imperial City ignites a flurry of activity in the inner court of the palace. The Emperor must be informed without delay. Lotus seed pods sharing a single stem with divided calyxes had been spotted in the pond – each uniformly round and identical, measuring three inches in diameter with exactly eighteen seeds per pod. Marvelling at the sighting of the Bingdi lotus, an auspicious sign symbolising “two hearts united as one,” the Yongzheng Emperor and his court officials make haste to capitalise on this rare phenomenon.

Just days earlier, the Yongzheng Emperor had received news of a bountiful wheat harvest in Shandong Province of several hundred stalks of auspicious grain – each vividly purple stalk bore double ears, with strong, upright yellow stems over a foot long. In Chinese agrarian mythology, the life cycle of grain is often seen as an analogy to human life, while the grain ear is symbolic of the imperial seed, thus auspicious grain is seen as representing the legitimate succession of imperial power.

That two extraordinarily rare auspicious signs appeared simultaneously in the first year of the Yongzheng reign (1723) was interpreted as Heaven’s will to herald the new emperor’s accession.

The Yongzheng Emperor’s accession to the throne had been marked by political instability, court schemes and conspiracy theories. For years, his father, the Kangxi Emperor (r.1661-1722) masterminded a clever strategy of court politics putting his sons in contest, scheming against one another to inherit the Dragon Throne. After he deposed the second prince Yinreng for the second time in 1712, no new heir apparent was ever decreed. Yet upon his passing, the fourth prince Yinzhen was named successor, ascending the throne as the Yongzheng Emperor. Suspicions arose that the Yongzheng Emperor had colluded to forge the succession edict, which was written several days after the Kangxi Emperor’s passing.

Personal tragedy and natural disaster within the first six months of his reign only further made the legitimation of his rule ever more pressing. A severe drought gripped the nation. Inside the palace, the Yongzheng Emperor’s mother, the Empress Dowager Renshou passed away in the fifth month, while just thirteen days earlier, his son born to Noble Consort Nian died in infancy.

All this, compounded by allegations that the Yongzheng Emperor had usurped the throne, left the new emperor facing heavy opposition.

According to Confucian ideals, the manner in which a ruler ascends the throne was important to the legitimacy of his rule. From the time of the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046 -256 BCE), political legitimacy was tied to the notion of the Mandate of Heaven (天命) – that Heaven chooses a virtuous individual on earth and installs him as the Son of Heaven (天子) to rule all under Heaven (天下). Natural disasters were seen as an omen that Heaven was displeased with the Son of Heaven, while the appearance of auspicious signs was seen as receiving the blessings of Heaven.

It was on these grounds that the phenomenon of auspicious grain and Bingdi lotuses in the eight month of the first year was seen as a signifier the Yongzheng Emperor had received the Mandate of Heaven, thereby receiving Heaven’s blessings as the legitimate ruler of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty (1644-1912).

With his legitimation no longer under threat, the Yongzheng Emperor worked tirelessly at stabilising the court and reforming his administration. Although the Yongzheng Emperor reigned for a short tenure just shy of thirteen years between 1722 and 1735, he proved his worth as a great ruler. Under his eagle eye, corruption was curtailed and by the time his fourth son, Hongli, succeeded the throne as the Qianlong Emperor (r.1735-1796), the imperial treasury was said to be full to the brim.

This legendary account of the Yongzheng Emperor receiving the Mandate of Heaven in 1723 is immortalised on silk in Giuseppe Castiglione’s Gathering of Two Auspicious Signs.

The Italian Jesuit painter Giuseppe Castiglione arrived in Macau, China, in August 1715 and spent five decades serving the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors with unwavering commitment. He was given the Chinese name Lang Shining (郎世寧). Castiglione’s artistic style blended Western technique with Chinese taste and subject matter. Many of the most significant historical events of the mid-Qing period were recorded for posterity through his brush.

Gathering of Two Auspicious Signs was received with such favour that merely days after Castiglione created the painting, an imperial decree granted him six individuals to study painting under his tutelage. The success of Gathering of Two Auspicious Signs and the subsequent companion painting Gathering of Auspicious Signs (now in the collection of the Taipei Palace Museum), executed during the same period of time, garnered the Yongzheng Emperor’s trust and laid the foundation for Castiglione’s position in the palace where he would ultimately be remembered as one of the most significant court painters in history. A third painting, compositionally similar to Gathering of Auspicious Signs and bearing the same name, was created in the third year of the Yongzheng reign (now in the permanent collection of the Shanghai Museum).

Arranged in a Song dynasty Ru-type bottle vase with raised bands sitting atop a sandalwood base, albeit with minor differences in the number of raised bands. Both vases contain the same auspicious plants: Bingdi lotuses, interconnected grain stalks, and arrowheads.

The various plants featured all symbolise the virtuous governance of the Yongzheng Emperor, and his legitimacy as the successor to the imperial throne.

The painting was kept in the imperial collection and documented in the third compilation of the imperial catalogue Shiqu Baoji 《石渠寶笈》 with an inscription by Castiglione. It is believed the Qianlong Emperor greatly cherished the painting throughout his life. After the Qianlong Emperor’s death, the Jiaqing Emperor (r.1796-1820) ordered all of Qianlong Emperor’s most prized art and treasures – including Gathering of Two Auspicious Signs – to be sealed and stored in the Jianfu Palace. A century later, as the Qing dynasty fell and China entered the Republican Era, the painting miraculously survives the rampant theft of the palace and a fire that devastates the palace.

In 1924, when Puyi (1906-1967), the last emperor of China, was expelled from the Forbidden City, he took the painting with him to Tianjin. From thereon, he gifts it to the influential Zhang Xueliang (nicknamed the Young Marshal), the son of warlord Zhang Zuolin. In another twist of fate, the painting enters the Soong family, likely as a token of the close bond between the Zhang and Soong families. The Soong family kept the painting during those turbulent years of political upheaval and regime change. At some point, it fell into the possession of Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Soong Mei-ling), remaining within the Soong family thereafter until recent years.

Giuseppe Castiglione’s Gathering of Two Auspicious Signs is a painting intimately connected to the fate of China. It is also the very work that marked the entry of a Western painter onto the stage of the Chinese imperial court, a figure forever etched into the canon of art history. From its very moment of creation as an allegorical painting in the imperial court to win the favour of the Yongzheng Emperor, Gathering of Two Auspicious Signs was destined to be symbolic of the Mandate of Heaven. Its silk threads bear signs of the vicissitudes of time, witnessing the nation’s fateful turns of fortune and a bygone era of the last three hundred years. Still in impeccable condition more than three centuries since its creation, there is perhaps very few paintings that beholds such a powerful line of succession, passed through the hands of many of the most influential figures in Chinese history from the Great Qing to this day.