Chinoiserie--the use of motifs, materials, and techniques considered "Chinese" in ceramics, furniture, interior design, and landscape architecture--has often been associated with luxurious superfluity, shallow escapism, and courtly decadence. In Siting China in German y, Christiane Hertel challenges conventional assumptions about this art form, demonstrating how it fomented reflections about cultural and historical difference in eighteenth-century Germany and beyond. Considering collections, gardens, and literature, including the extraordinary porcelain palaces at Dresden and Rastatt, Hesse-Kassel's Wilhelmsthal and Wilhelmshöhe palace gardens, and Thomas Mann's historical novel Lotte in Weimar , Hertel chronicles and interprets the extensive history of chinoiserie during the long eighteenth century in Germany. In particular, Hertel's study focuses on how the manifestation of chinoiserie made room in the initially courtly and then increasingly collective imaginary for an understanding of cultural and historical difference as well as identity. Hertel's erudite analysis of the cultural significance of German chinoiserie will interest art historians and scholars of Orientalism and German Sinophilia as well as Sinophobia.