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Eight studies examine key features of Chinese visual and material cultures, ranging from tombs and ceramics to Buddhist paintings and colophons on calligraphies. The essays connect visual materials to funeral and religious practices, drama, poetry, literati life, travel, and trade.

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Eight studies examine key features of Chinese visual and material cultures, ranging from tomb design, metalware, ceramic pillows, and bronze mirrors, to printed illustrations, calligraphic rubbings, colophons, and paintings on Buddhist, landscape, and narrative themes. Questions addressed include how artists and artisans made their works, the ways both popular literature and market forces could shape ways of looking, and how practices and imagery spread across regions. The authors connect visual materials to funeral and religious practices, drama, poetry, literati life, travel, and trade, showing ways visual images and practices reflected, adapted to, and reproduced the culture and society around them. Readers will gain a stronger appreciation of the richness of the visual and material cultures of Middle Period China.

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Acknowledgments vii
List of Illustrations viii
List of Contributors xiv

Introduction Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Shih-shan Susan Huang

Part 1: Making Art in Funeral and Ritual Contexts
1 Modular Design of Tombs in Song and Jin North China - Fei Deng
2 Visualizing Ritual in Southern Song Buddhist Painting - Phillip E. Bloom

Part 2: Setting a Scene
3 Dreams, Spirits, and Romantic Encounters in Jin and Yuan Theatrical Pictures - Fan Jeremy Zhang
4 The Ten Views of West Lake - Xiaolin Duan

Part 3: Appreciating the Written Word
5 A Forgery and the Pursuit of the Authentic Wang Xizhi - Hui-Wen Lu
6 Zhu Xi´s Colophons on Handwritten Documents - Patricia Buckley Ebrey

Part 4: Cross-Cultural Transfers
7 Paintings of Birds by Basins - Jie Liu
8 Chinese Objects Recovered from Sutra Mounds in Japan, 1000-1300 - Yiwen Li

Index 319

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Patricia Buckley Ebrey is Professor of History at the University of Washington. A specialist in Song history, her forays into Song visual and material culture include Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong (2008) and Emperor Huizong (2014). Shih-shan Susan Huang is Associate Professor Art History at Rice University (PhD., Yale University). An art historian specializing in Daoist and Buddhist visual cultures, she is the author of Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (2012).

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