Battle of Kulongkui - Jean Damascene Sallusti

A detailed copperplate engraving depicting the Battle of Kulongkui, created by Jesuit missionary Jean Damascene Sallusti for the Qianlong Emperor.

This copperplate engraving depicts the Battle of Kulongkui, a military engagement during the Qianlong Emperor's campaigns in the Western Regions. Jean Damascene Sallusti, an Italian Jesuit missionary stationed at the Qing court, produced this work as part of a series commissioned by the Emperor to document his military successes. The print reflects a synthesis of European perspective techniques and traditional Chinese pictorial conventions.

The composition is expansive, showing a wide-angle view of the battlefield. Soldiers on horseback, infantry units, and encampments are distributed across the terrain. The artist employs fine, precise lines to render the rocky outcrops, the flowing river, and the individual figures engaged in combat. The use of cross-hatching and varied line weights creates a sense of depth and volume, a characteristic of the European engraving style introduced to the Qing court by Jesuit artists.

In the upper right corner, the work includes calligraphy featuring an imperial poem composed by the Qianlong Emperor himself. This integration of text and image is a hallmark of the series, which served both as a historical record and a display of imperial authority. The scene captures the chaos of the conflict while maintaining a structured, orderly arrangement of the various military elements. The print offers a view into the cross-cultural artistic exchanges that occurred within the eighteenth-century Chinese imperial court, where European technical expertise in printmaking was utilised to serve the political and historical objectives of the Qing dynasty.