Time, Culture and Identity

The project Time, Culture and Identity took place from 1 December 2018 to 30 April 2020, run by the Science Museum Group and collections partner, The Palace Museum. It fostered creative and commercial collaboration between cultural partners and businesses in the UK and China by exploring the history of cultural and economic exchanges between the two nations through the lens of timekeeping.

The project brought together exquisite but rarely-seen clocks from the collection of The Palace Museum in Beijing via new digital experiences, which were co-designed by UK and Chinese creative businesses. By stimulating knowledge exchange and brokering commercial relationships between the UK and China, the project developed methods for cross-cultural approaches to connecting audiences with their scientific heritage.

The research outputs from the project are available here to view and download. Despite the museum’s best efforts, we are unable to make these PDF documents fully screen reader accessible

Collection Details

Creator (organisation)

Science Museum Group

Contributor (person)

Yan-an, Yao

Blyth, Tilly

Xing, Huang

Stirling-Middleton, Emma

Chung, Carol

Language

English

http://english.ihns.cas.cn/

https://intl.dpm.org.cn/index.html?l=en

Keywords

economic exchange

Institute for the History of Natural Sciences (Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Beijing Jiaotong University

Beijing

The Palace Museum

digital interpretation

Related collection

Research and Public History Research Projects

Now showing 1 - 10 of 16

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Time, Culture and Identity: A Digital and Creative Professional’s Perspective on Interpreting Historical Clocks in Museum Environments
(2021-04-06)
Robson, Dominic
Digital media offer unique opportunities for museums to bring to life the secrets and stories of their historical collections. To bring insight into the process of developing digital media exhibits, this paper presents the perspective of a creative practitioner in approaching technology- and media-based interpretation for collection objects. It follows the Time, Culture and Identity digital workshop held in Beijing in October 2019, which explored and shared ideas about collaborative research and interdisciplinary practice in digital interpretation between academics, institutions, creative practitioners, and developers. Following the direction of the workshop, the paper takes as its focus the clocks and automatons of the imperial collection at the Palace Museum in Beijing. Observations are based on the author’s practice-led experience in running a design studio, Harmonic Kinetic, developing new media exhibits using digital technology and audiovisual media for museums, galleries, and exhibitions in the UK, including the Science Museum, V&A, Barbican, Tate, and the Tower of London. Taking a broad interaction-design-led outlook, the paper explores a personal design perspective for developing interpretive content and considers the particular opportunities and approaches these historical devices suggest. The paper concludes with a final section that reviews the process and reflects on outcomes from the Time, Culture and Identity digital workshop. This explored possibilities for an interpretive exhibit on the Country Scene clock from the Palace Museum collection.
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British Clocks in Eighteenth-Century China: Presents, Tribute, or Trade?
(2021-04-06)
Smith, Roger
It is commonly believed that most European clocks that reached China before the nineteenth century were sent to the emperor as diplomatic presents from European rulers, or were given to Chinese officials by European merchants in attempts to improve trading conditions. Although such presents had been given in earlier times, British records show that, by the eighteenth century when the export of clocks to China reached its height, most clocks, including the finest, reached China as private trade goods. Once in Canton (Guangzhou), the best clocks were bought by local Chinese officials for inclusion in their annual tribute to the emperor and senior members of the government in Beijing, where many of these clocks survive in the former imperial collection.
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Transfer of European Clock-Making Technology into China during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
(2021-04-02)
Baichun, Zhang
From the 1580s onwards, Catholic missionaries introduced European mechanical clocks into China as gifts for officials or emperors, with the aim of establishing a good relationship with the Chinese leadership in order to do missionary work. After the seventeenth century, European clock-makers in the imperial palace made complicated clocks according to the emperors’ desires. There were a number of workshops for producing European-style clocks in Guangzhou, Suzhou, Nanjing, and other cities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was, however, difficult for the experienced craftsmen to innovate new clockwork. The main reasons for the development of European clock technology in China were its technical superiority, the missionaries’ introduction, and the Chinese interest in clocks.
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Audience Research in Hong Kong, Beijing and London
(2019-05)
Science Museum Group
From March to May 2019, Co-Investigator Emma Stirling-Middleton and consultant Terry Watkins (TWResearch) conducted audience research in three locations: Hong Kong Science Museum, the Palace Museum in Beijing, and the Science Museum. The audience research examined the ways in which British and Chinese museum visitors engage with the Palace Museum’s horological collections. This report captures their conclusions.
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UK-China Collaboration in the Creative Industries: Reflection and Lessons Learned
(2020)
Science Museum Group
This report details the set of reflections and lessons learned for collaborative work in the museums and digital heritage sectors in the UK and China.
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On the Motions of Four Pagoda Clocks in the Forbidden City
(2021-03-23)
Yezhuo, LI
;
Yu-Hsun, Chen
;
Hong-Sen, YAN
Ancient mechanical clocks and automatons are solid evidence regarding the evolution of technological development. At least four ingenious eighteenth-century clocks with pagoda automatons are preserved in the Palace Museum in Beijing. Two were made in China, the other two in Britain. Although the internal mechanical components were maintained and recorded in the late twentieth century, their mechanism structure is mostly not made available to the public owing to the historical value of these artefacts. This study introduces feasible mechanism structures for the four pagoda automatons based on published works, along with considerations of mechanical design. Five subsystems of the clocks are analyzed, and two mechanisms of the pagoda automaton are illustrated. In particular, feasible mechanisms of the four pagoda automatons for raising their stories are explained. The analysis procedure presented in this paper expands the feasibility of reconstruction work on ancient mechanisms with unknown structures.
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Blackbow Exhibit: Left screen
(2024)
Science Museum Group
This digital exhibit (film) builds on knowledge about the Imperial clock collection and cultivates interpretation techniques for cultural heritage in different contexts. It was created as part of the Zimingzhong exhibition. This film captures the left screen of the exhibit.
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Blackbow Exhibit: Inside film
(2024)
Science Museum Group
This digital exhibit (film) builds on knowledge about the Imperial clock collection and cultivates interpretation techniques for cultural heritage in different contexts. It was created as part of the Zimingzhong exhibition. This film captures the inside of the exhibit.
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A Conservator’s Perspective on the Approach to Historical Clocks
(2020-09-21)
Read, Matthew
This paper investigates a conservator’s approach to a particular subset of physical cultural property: clocks. It looks at established conservation frameworks and practical elements of codes of practice, and considers how the conservator’s perspective will differ from that of a peer engaged solely with an approach to static objects. The paper considers, through examples of historic technological development, how what we mean by “clock” and how we consider clocks are in a state of constant change of context. Clocks are a diverse group of objects, some of which are technically complex. The conservator must draw together many influences in order to demonstrate professional competence in thinking, delivering an accountable decision-making process. In order to illustrate the breadth of the challenge the conservator faces when approaching clocks, the paper gives examples of three contrasting case study objects including one automaton and one electromechanical model. Clocks as a group comprise multimedia and multimedium objects. The perspective of the conservator will draw on professional networks within and without the immediate field, including at times the work of philosophers, scientists, sociologists, and historians in order to maintain objectivity, inform and engender new ideas. The paper concludes with the statement that the perspective of the conservator engaged with clocks should never be fixed, and that solutions to the challenges presented by clocks are never absolute and never permanent, but are in constant context-driven flux.
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Blackbow Exhibit
(2024)
Science Museum Group
This digital exhibit (film) builds on knowledge about the Imperial clock collection and cultivates interpretation techniques for cultural heritage in different contexts. It was created as part of the Zimingzhong exhibition. This film captures the whole the exhibit.
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Time, Culture and Identity

Time, Culture and Identity

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