The Lives of Chinese Objectsis a fascinating book. It is the result
of excellent historical research as well as curatorial expertise.
The reader is taken on an amazing journey starting with the
startling discovery of the image of five Chinese bronzes on display
as part of the Great Exhibition in 1851...The stories uncovered are
riveting, a mix of curatorial detail and description, historical
research and theoretical analysis. This book is beautifully written
- clear, detailed and informative. The author is ever present in
the text and the book is as much a story of her journey, as it is a
story of the lives of the 'Putuo Five'. I just wanted to keep
reading." . Suzanne MacLeod, University of Leicester
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.
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