This text deals with Chinese art during the Tang Dynasty, from 618 to 907. It presents the artistic findings from the last ten years of archaeological excavation in China--findings that have never before been published in the West. Court Art of the Tang reveals the magnificence of Tang art through the presentation of ceramics, wall paintings, and utensils made of gold, silver, bronze, and porcelain. The book aims to place these new materials in their artistic and historical context. It structures the new findings in chronological order, using culture and history as a background. The study treats each class of art separately and distinctly, exploring the aesthetic evolution of both secular and religious art. Relevant literary expressions incorporated into the discussions make Court Art of the Tang an especially unique work. The book gives readers a comprehensive and diverse look at the glorious and extraordinary achievements of a ruling family. The book consists of 233 pages of text, a bibliography and an index, a glossary, and 117 illustrations. Court Art of the Tang will provide insightful reading for art collectors and museum-goers and serve as an important text in Asian Studies Departments and in courses in the arts of China.Contents: List of Illustrations; Preface; Ackowledgements; Introduction; Early Tang 618-712; Middle Tang 712-805; Late Tang 805-907; Conclusion; Illustrations; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.

Early China is best known for the dazzling material artifacts it has left behind. These terracotta figures, gilt-bronze lamps, and other material remnants of the Chinese past unearthed by archaeological excavations are often viewed without regard to the social context of their creation, yet they were made by individuals who contributed greatly to the foundations of early Chinese culture. With Artisans in Early Imperial China, Anthony Barbieri-Low combines historical, epigraphic, and archaeological analysis to refocus our gaze from the glittering objects and monuments of China onto the men and women who made them. Taking readers inside the private workshops, crowded marketplaces, and great palaces, temples, and tombs of early China, Barbieri-Low explores the lives and working conditions of artisans, meticulously documenting their role in early Chinese society and the economy. First published in 2007, winner of top prizes from the Association for Asian Studies, American Historical Association, College Art Association, and the International Convention of Asia Scholars, and now back in print, Artisans in Early Imperial China will appeal to anyone interested in Chinese history, as well as to scholars of comparative social history, labor history, and Asian art history.

The roles of women in Chinese archaeology, with only a few exceptions, have at worst been overlooked, and at best consigned to conventional Marxist theory that prescribes formulaic frameworks for understanding gender—until now. Renowned archaeologist Katheryn M. Linduff and fellow researcher Yan Sun have brought together a fascinating collection that reexamines gender in ancient Chinese cultures. Acknowledging and negotiating the complications that challenge their efforts, the authors analyze and begin to reconstruct the roles of women in various regions of China from the late Neolithic to the early Empire period. Topics range from mortuary ritual, social status and structures of power, economic influences on cultural practice, textile production, and art in these early Chinese societies. This book is a must for students, professors, and practitioners of archaeology that seek a more complete examination of the archaeological record, for scholars in the fields of Asian Studies, Art History, and Chinese History more generally, as well as for those interested in the roles of women in ancient Chinese society.

Early Chinese ideas about the construction of an ordered human space received narrative form in a set of stories dealing with the rescue of the world and its inhabitants from a universal flood. This book demonstrates how early Chinese stories of the re-creation of the world from a watery chaos provided principles underlying such fundamental units as the state, lineage, the married couple, and even the human body. These myths also supplied a charter for the major political and social institutions of Warring States (481–221 BC) and early imperial (220 BC–AD 220) China. In some versions of the tales, the flood was triggered by rebellion, while other versions linked the taming of the flood with the creation of the institution of a lineage, and still others linked the taming to the process in which the divided principles of the masculine and the feminine were joined in the married couple to produce an ordered household. While availing themselves of earlier stories and of central religious rituals of the period, these myths transformed earlier divinities or animal spirits into rulers or ministers and provided both etiologies and legitimation for the emerging political and social institutions that culminated in the creation of a unitary empire.

Song Blue and White Porcelain on the Silk Road disproves received opinion that pre-Ming blue and white dates to the Yuan (1279-1368 A.D.) and establishes the proper foundation for 21st century study of ancient Chinese porcelain.

The Cambridge History of Ancient China provides a survey of the institutional and cultural history of pre-imperial China.