A fire unpeels the walls of a stately home to reveal stunning hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, a ‘luxury good’ of empire. Here begins Hannah Lowe’s search to understand what this wallpaper, which still graces many of this country’s great houses, can tell us about Britain’s historical trade with China, the fashion for chinoiserie, and the little-known painting workshops in which the wallpaper was meticulously produced. The poems in Rock, Bird, Butterfly also recall the Chinese aesthetics of Lowe’s childhood home, considering how material cultures travel and what their journeys tell us of the past.