No one knows where the dragons went. In 1762, 80 gilded dragons adorned the Kew Gardens Great Pagoda in London, but by 1784 there were none. The rumor that rings true is that the dragons were removed after rotting from the Little Ice Age that hit Europe around the time.
The three follies were statement pieces, a mini-grand-tour capturing architecture from across the continents and rather conveniently showing them in one place: the royal park of Kew Gardens, indicating to all that the Georgian royal family was wealthy, worldly, and highly educated.
Mr. Chambers’s Trading Trips to China
William Chambers, born in Sweden to a Scottish merchant, was well-equipped to design the pagoda; he made detailed studies of Chinese architecture on three trading trips to China in the 1740s, with the Swedish East India Company. He was the first European to make methodical studies of Chinese architecture and published these in his seminal work, “Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils.”Chambers completed his education in architecture, first in Paris and then Rome, before setting up practice in London. He became an influential figure in English architecture, and one of the founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, an organization approved of by his friend King George III. The Kew Gardens pagoda is one of Chambers’s most well-known structures still standing.
Reimagining the 18th-Century Dragons
For the design and painting of the Great Pagoda’s dragons, historians had to look to literature and art from around the time of its construction. The 1795 poem “The Botanic Garden” by Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s great-grandfather, gave the colors as “golden purple, cobaltic blues and metallic hues.” William Chambers’s original drawings and the previously mentioned watercolor of William Marlow’s were studied extensively to make the dragon designs.For the final dragons, two designs were decided on: 72 dragons, created by 3D printing, would have their wings drawn back, similar to those in Marlow’s watercolor. And eight hand-carved dragons on the lowest level would honor Chambers’s original drawings, where the wings are held high, ready to defend the pagoda from any attack, real or imagined.
Randall shared by phone how traditionally a woodcarver would take on a commission from start to finish; this is the way he prefers to work. But the pagoda dragon they were commissioned to carve came to them as a design package. All the preparatory work, the research and ironing out of any challenges in the carving process, which they would normally handle, had been done by someone else. The 3D model came with a set of full-scale printouts, each showing a different angle of the dragon to ensure that each of the dragon’s features could be meticulously measured and copied, so that all eight dragon carvings remained nearly identical.
The original dragons would have probably been made of pine, but these 21st-century dragons were carved into wood made up of multiple pieces of 4-inch-thick African cedarwood laminated together. “It’s the softest wood we’d ever carved; it was extraordinary, like carving butter,” Randall said, adding that the reason for the laminated block was so that the form wouldn’t crack inside or outside; anything larger than 4-inch pieces makes the sculpture susceptible to splitting.
To be able to work on such a large form, Randall and Sands adapted a wooden door to make a tilted workbench and bolted the heavy form into place. This allowed them to safely carve hard, to reach places such as the neck, without contorting themselves.
The first job was to “rough out” the dragon, transferring the design to the material. “You get the planes in first, as you can’t have just a big bit of wood and just start putting details in. You’ve got to get the actual planes of the surface of whatever it is you are carving around it, so it’s a bit like painting,” Randall said. This is done by first using a chainsaw, and then large chisels and larger tools are used to whack the wood off quickly, Randall said. This roughing-out stage took one month.
The next two months were spent carving out the details. This is where the tools get smaller, and more attention is paid to measuring every little detail, Randall said.
After three months, the over-eight-foot-tall dragon left the Sands and Randall workshop “in the wood,” as Randall puts it: woodworkers’ talk for untreated wood. The stark dragon went off, one might imagine, to meet his seven new siblings and to be dressed in the bright finery that all Chinese dragons need.
And, staying true to tradition, the paint used was made with 18th-century formulas. The dragons are decked in colors reflected in Darwin’s poem, with the wings in particular showing “metallic hues” achieved by gold leaf. The “golden purple” sheen was made by mixing a dash of Prussian blue with cochineal and painting directly onto the gold leaf.
Now, once again, 80 dragons can be seen on Chambers’s Great Pagoda, for the first time in over 200 years. One may wonder what Chambers would’ve thought of his Great Pagoda’s makeover, with its traditional paint, traditional carving, and then its 72 3D-printed dragons. That, we will never know—it’s as mysterious as the whereabouts of those 80 original wooden dragons.
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