Dr Kelsey Granger
IASH-HCA Postdoctoral Fellow, October 2024 - June 2025
Home Institution: Ludwig Maximilian University
Dr. Kelsey Granger is a sinologist and historian of dynastic China and the wider Silk Roads, specialising in material culture, gender, and environmental history. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2022 with a thesis focusing on lapdog-keeping among elite women in seventh–tenth century China. She was then awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich where she worked with excavated documents to access the lives of postal horses on the fringes of China’s Han empire. While at Edinburgh, she will be returning to the topic of lapdogs, this time in the context of nineteenth-century Britain.
Her research has been published in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Journal of the American Oriental Society, and Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, with the latter article being awarded the 2023 Sir George Staunton Prize for an outstanding article by an early-career scholar. She also co-edited the collected volume Saved from Desert Sands: Re-discovering Objects on the Silk Roads (Brill, 2024) with Silk Road codicologist Imre Galambos.
Project title: A Triumph of Cultivation: The Reception and Re-imagining of Chinese Lapdogs in Britain (1860–1930)
The Pekingese dog breed, which would become a favourite of British elites, was perhaps the last element of chinoiserie introduced into Britain. Unlike long-established and well-studied chinoiserie including silk and ceramics, the Pekingese entered Britain as a unique souvenir of the fading Qing court in the 1860s. Just as China’s imperial future was cast into doubt, a symbol of its imperial past reached British shores. Pekingese breeding, breed histories, and ceramic reproductions thus became vehicles for expressing and actualising debates about who controls Chinese pasts and futures.
Combining historical methodologies with animal and material culture studies, my research will evaluate changing standards for Pekingese bodies and behaviour from 1860–1930 using newspaper articles, ceramics, correspondence, and breed histories. As a unique living souvenir from the imperial Summer Palace, the first Pekingese in Britain were defined by and celebrated for their Chineseness. But during the anti-foreigner violence of the Boxer Rebellion, anecdotes sought to re-define the breed as European in origin. With the decline of Qing power by the early 1900s, British breeders rewrote and exaggerated breed standards and histories in the vacuum. The development of the modern Pekingese thus complicates our understandings of colonial anxiety, material encounter, Orientalism, and loot from 1860–1930.