Giuseppe Castiglione, who later adopted the Chinese name Lang Shining, was already a skilled painter before coming to China as a Jesuit missionary. After his arrival in China in 1715, he lived in the Forbidden City as a court artist for the rest of his life and painted for three emperors, Qianlong, Yongzheng, and Kangxi. Castiglione developed a unique artistic style by subtly combining Western techniques with the traditional Chinese mediums of ink on silk. Qianlong had an exotic taste in art and loved this style of art and commissioned large quantities of it. This led to this zhongxihebi (east meets west) style becoming the characteristic artistic style of the Qing court. The influence of Western art is evident in many ways in the Portrait of the Qianlong Emperor in Court Ceremonial Dress. In terms of composition, it is symmetrical and the golden ratio (rule of thirds) is applied (the edge of the carpet is one third of the height of the entire composition), producing a sense of balance and harmony. The subtle highlighting and shading technique helped produce a rather realistic, volumetric and three-dimensional representation, as well as an illusion of space in contrast to traditional flat Chinese paintings. For example, where Qianlong bent his left arm to touch the beads of his ceremonial necklace, shading was applied to show the inward folds of the soft silk material, while the highlighting depicts