Event Date: 15 April 2010 Dr Laura J. Newby (University of Oxford) – The Chinese Emperor’s New Copper Plates: Art and Politics in the Late 18th Century In the early 1760s, Jesuit missionaries serving as court artists in Peking were instructed by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736 – 96) to produce a set of sixteen sketches in celebration of his recent …