PATRICIA FERGUSON: One of the most important designers of the eighteenth century in terms of Chinoiserie is a French artist, François Boucher. And he did several series of prints that involved the creation of an imaginary China.

So we recognize vases, we recognize bamboo furniture. There might be fretwork or geometric fences. They’re drinking tea. Everything in it is kind of referencing China.

But as we know, he had no experience of China. The people looking at his print sources, the makers, the buyers, they had no sense of what China really was like. And it was extraordinarily influential amongst potters around Europe.

MICHELLE ZAUNER (NARRATOR): Here, you’ll see the form of a woman with a parrot. She’s a figure of Boucher’s imagination: an allegorical fantasy of China, spun for a British audience.

FERGUSON: We can see that the woman is clearly based on a Boucher design. She’s opening up a cage to allow a bird to fly away. And she kind of represents freedom, which, for a woman in the eighteenth century, kind of doesn’t exist. So, in a way, she’s a scary figure for a lot of men in eighteenth-century England.

They don’t want to be around a woman that’s free, a woman who’s clearly from another country. In this case, it’s assumed she’s from China. And the British feel threatened by the commercial trade of China, that China could overtake them and destroy Britain’s wealth.

ZAUNER: Threatened. Overtaken. Destroyed. How quickly a small, breakable object, in the form of a woman, becomes a political symbol. This figure who has no breath or blood: who we never asked to represent us.

FERGUSON: And it’s just possible that whoever was buying this or looking at this object was able to see that this was quite a blatant message.