‘Every Picture Tells a Story’: China, Britain, and the Politics of the Willow Pattern

The chapter makes comparisons between the operetta The Willow Pattern, performed at the Savoy Theatre in 1901 via The Mikado, and the circulation of the famous Willow Pattern image on the factory-produced ceramics. Using a mixture of post-colonial theory and cultural geography, the chapter argues that both the play and the pattern were performative utterances of class relations that paradoxically displayed and disguised how the industrial revolution altered perceptions of wealth and relationships to the British landscape.