Presents 50 selected highlights of this world-renowned collection ... The accompanying text gives brief details and draws out their most significant features"--Cover flap.

Jade Snow Wong’s autobiography portrays her coming-of-age in San Francisco's Chinatown, offering a rich depiction of her immigrant family and her strict upbringing, as well as her rebellion against family and societal expectations for a Chinese woman. Originally published in 1950, Fifth Chinese Daughter was one of the most widely read works by an Asian American author in the twentieth century. The US State Department even sent its charismatic young author on a four-month speaking tour throughout Asia. Cited as an influence by prominent Chinese American writers such as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, Fifth Chinese Daughter is a foundational work in Asian American literature. It was written at a time when few portraits of Asian American life were available, and no similar works were as popular and broadly appealing. This new edition includes the original illustrations by Kathryn Uhl and features an introduction by Leslie Bow, who critically examines the changing reception and enduring legacy of the book and offers insight into Wong’s life as an artist and an ambassador of Chinese American culture.

Adopting the perspective of anthropology of art and combining it with global academic insights, this book helps the readers to recognize that “history is, in great measure, the record of human activity which spreads from the local to the regional, from the regional to the global, and from the global to the universal.” Readers will learn that China was not only the first country to create porcelain, but also the first to export it to the world, both the products and its techniques. Therefore, the history of Chinese ceramics reflects the history of Chinese foreign trade on the one hand and depicts the expansion of Chinese ceramic techniques and cultures on the other. In addition to ceramics types, molds, decoration, and techniques, the book analyzes the spiritual impacts and aesthetic conceptions embodied in the utensils of daily use by the Chinese literati. Therefore, it reaches the conclusion that ideological systems and not technological systems are what bring about social revolutions. In addition, the book is richly illustrated with pictures of earthenware and finely glazed pieces from later periods.

Chinese pottery has long been esteemed not only for its beauty and delicacy but also for the utility and efficiency evident in the potter's skill.

This classic guide to Chinese jade is of great interest to art collectors and casual readers alike. First published in 1936 and since then a collector's item of increasing rarity, Chinese Jade Throughout the Ages comprises a review of the characteristics, decorations, folklore, and symbolism of this esteemed mineral that has always held a proud place among gems of the world. The book presents a full descriptive account of the significance and meaning of the carvings produced in this prize stone by Chinese craftsmen from the earliest times, through the Chou and succeeding dynasties, down to the twentieth century. The text is illustrated with a magnificent series of more than 350 reproductions in color, black and white, and line drawings of choice pieces selected from the chief Asian, European, and American collections. In addition the Chinese art history book explains no only the wealth of symbolic designs used in the decoration of jade but also a large number of the marks and devices by which collectors identify the origin and the date of valued pieces.

This is the definitive guide to Chinese jades from the Ming dynasty through the early twentieth century