When it comes to taking stock of an era’s bad tastes, satirists are usually right on the money. The “Continental Europe wind” (欧陆风) style that has been blowing across China’s world of design since at least the late 1990s—spawning “copycat” architecture such as Shanghai’s “Dutch Town” and countless bedrooms gilded to oblivion—has been lampooned by the hipper portions of the Chinese public as the “basic necessity of the tuhao,” the crude nouveau riche.

Jumping some centuries into the past, however, and the ill European wind starts to sound more like Europe’s revenge for having once been inflicted with what observers at the time dubbed as a mania for “splendid deformities” from China in the 18th century. An English clergyman named Joseph Warton, writing in The World journal in 1753, accused the tasteless public of “[spending] their lives and their fortunes in collecting pieces, where neither perspective, nor proportion, nor conformity to nature, are thought of or observed.”

Eighteenth-century English writer Charles Lamb also poked fun at the China-inspired kitsch—including literal china—from his childhood, on which landscapes were drawn as a confused potpourri of “horses, trees, pagodas.” Other satirists of the period asked, one day soon, would England’s country dairies and churches also come bedecked with dragons, bells, and oriental roofs?

Called “chinoiserie” (literally “China stuff” in French) by art historians and “China wind” (中国风) in Chinese, the mania for Chinese motifs was a movement in the consumer culture of mid-to-late 18th century Europe. Tantalized by earlier, semi-mythicized snippets of China from the tales of travelers such as Marco Polo, Europeans’ taste for the exotic found fulfillment in this period through increased contact with the Qing Empire through court envoys, such as the Jesuits, and merchants trading in ports such as Canton and Portuguese-controlled Macau. These voyagers brought back stories and sketches of peoples, buildings, and landscapes that made up the basic blueprint of how Europe imagined the East.

Meanwhile, the goods they traded became all the rage: fine teas, delicate porcelains, and luxurious silks, admired for their intricate quality as much as the mystery behind their making.