The Lives of Chinese Objects

Buddhism, Imperialism and Display

von Louise Tythacott

288 Seiten, Hardcover

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

This is the biography of a set of rare Buddhist statues from China. Their extraordinary adventures take them from the Buddhist temples of fifteenth-century Putuo - China's most important pilgrimage island - to their seizure by a British soldier in the First Opium War in the early 1840s, and on to a starring role in the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the 1850s, they moved in and out of dealers' and antiquarian collections, arriving in 1867 at Liverpool Museum. Here they were re-conceptualized as specimens of the 'Mongolian race' and, later, as examples of Oriental art. The statues escaped the bombing of the Museum during the Second World War and lived out their existence for the next sixty years, dismembered, corroding and neglected in the stores, their histories lost and origins unknown. As the curator of Asian collections at Liverpool Museum, the author became fascinated by these bronzes, and selected them for display in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery. In 2005, quite by chance, the discovery of a lithograph of the figures on prominent display in the Great Exhibition enabled the remarkable lives of these statues to be reconstructed.

• Reihe: Museums and Collections
• Themen: Lexika Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaften / Museumskunde Museologie und Heritage Studies
• ISBN: 9780857452382
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 23.06.2011
• Größe: 235 x 157 mm
• Verlag: Berghahn Books