The West’s curiosity with Chinese-inspired design didn’t start online; instead, today’s fascination with Chinese aesthetics has deep and surprisingly familiar roots.
Scroll through social media right now and you’ll find a steady stream of Chinese aesthetics repackaged for global consumption. Whether it’s the power of Shanghai Fashion Week, the viral appeal of plush collectibles like Labubu dolls, or starting the day with a mug of warm apple-boiled water and qigong stretches: this is what the internet has dubbed ‘Chinamaxxing’.
Once dismissed as old-fashioned or niche, these aesthetics have suddenly found themselves in vogue amongst those in the West with a TikTok account. All the while, offline (read: the real world), China dominates as a global superpower. And it’s this omnipresence in news and culture, together with the ever-shifting perceptions that the US and China hold on one another, that has sharpened the West’s fascination with the country today.
Like most online movements, Chinamaxxing offers only a partial view, packaging fragments of a vast culture into something digestible and highly shareable. But the impulse and fascination with a stylized, curated version of Chinese culture is far from new.
In fact, you only have to look back to the 17th and 18th centuries, when Europe fell hard for what it understood (or misunderstood) to be ‘the East.’ Increased trade with China during the High Qing era brought an influx of porcelain, silk, and lacquerware into European homes – luxury goods that quickly became markers of taste and status.
From this grew chinoiserie, a decorative style that translated cultural admiration into interiors, architecture, and the curation of objects that were less about accuracy and more about creating an atmosphere. Chinoiserie wasn’t interested in faithfully reproducing China. Instead, it thrived on interpretation. Despite its name deriving from the French chinois (meaning ‘Chinese’), designers borrowed freely from across Asia, frequently collapsing Chinese, Japanese, and even Indian motifs into a single aesthetic.
Hand-painted wallpapers filled with fantastical landscapes, pagoda-style rooflines, delicate fretwork, lacquered furniture, and an entire cast of dragons, exotic birds, and improbable gardens created an escapist vision of a distant, harmonious world.
Royal patronage helped accelerate the trend. George III’s fascination with all things Chinese saw him encourage a scholarly exchange of sorts, where British architects, academics, and scientists were sent out with trading companies in order to bring back as many ideas as possible. London’s Kew Gardens opened shortly after in 1759, housing hundreds of new species of flora clippings from China and the Western New World. The Great Pagoda was completed in 1762 as a gift for Princess Augusta, as one of several Chinese buildings designed for Kew by Sir William Chambers.
In 1787, the Prince Regent, who would later be crowned King George IV, commissioned Brighton Pavilion as his newest holiday retreat. Despite lying on England’s south coast, the architecture ditched notions of nautical design for something more Middle Eastern-inspired – an onion-domed, bamboo-lined, lantern-lit Chinese palace like no other of its time.
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Nowhere was this more apparent than in the rise of the ‘China Room.’ By the mid-18th century, having one had become a quiet flex among Europe’s upper classes. At Harewood House, the late-18th-century interiors incorporated Chinese wallpapers and porcelain as part of a broader display of global taste, while Burton Constable Hall and Claydon House leaned more heavily into decorative fantasy, with intricate fretwork, lacquered surfaces, and densely layered ornamentation.
These rooms were designed to entertain, lined with imported (or import-inspired) porcelain, cabinets filled with curiosities, and walls covered in hand-painted wallpapers. Crucially, they were less a reflection of real Chinese interiors and more a staged illusion: most of the objects, while sometimes made in China, were created specifically for export or interpreted through European design. The result was an imagined version of China, assembled for display, conversation, and status.
Even without the unifying force of the internet, this aesthetic wasn’t confined to Britain. The Chinese House in Sanssouci Park is a gilded, playful interpretation of Eastern design, while Russia’s Chinese Village, commissioned by Catherine the Great in the late 18th century, turned the idea into a full architectural experiment – proof that chinoiserie was becoming a continent-wide fixation.
But for all its beauty, chinoiserie came with complications. Brighton Pavilion’s architects, John Nash and Fredrick Crace, had never been to China, which might explain why the palace’s decorative palm tree columns, hybrid dragons and gibberish Chinese characters were inaccurate. William Chambers, the architect behind Kew Gardens’ Great Pagoda, did visit China, yet his rendition was still built with an inauspicious number of floors.
At its core was imitation: an aesthetic built on what Europeans thought China looked like, rather than what it actually was. Many objects in these interiors were made specifically for export, tailored to Western tastes rather than reflecting authentic Chinese design. Others were produced entirely in Europe, filtered through imagination and second-hand references. The result was something visually rich but culturally distorted: a version of China that existed largely in the European mind.
Some saw chinoiserie as frivolous and illogical; others viewed it as a sign of cultural confusion, or worse, a superficial engagement with a complex civilization. With hindsight, it’s difficult to separate the aesthetic from the broader context of empire, trade, and exploitation that made these objects – and crucially this fascination – possible in the first place.
Which brings us back to now. The current wave of Chinese-inspired trends may be faster, more digital and more self-aware, but the pattern feels oh-so familiar. Then, as now, elements of a culture are selected, stylized, and circulated for consumption. The difference is the medium. The instinct, it seems, hasn’t changed much at all.
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