Elizabeth Herridge Boeken

There is great interest in WW1 but almost nobody knows that China not only supplied 340,000 labourers to support the war effort of the allies, but also in August 1917 declared war on Germany, thus earning a place at the Versailles peace conference.

"Shining a light on a little-known area of Chinese decorative arts from 1850 to 1930, this lavishly illustrated book presents dazzling jewellery from an important private North American collection. Immortals, dragons, magpies, monkeys and bats populate this pioneering book on Chinese jewellery of the late 19th to early 20th century. In so many aspects, these exquisite objects - made with silver, jade, tourmaline, amethyst, rock crystal, rose quartz, carnelian and serpentine -- reveal a previously unexplored journey, not just from Heaven to Earth but from the West to the East and back again. The appeal of the jewellery is more than just aesthetic, and their varied design and decoration speak of the social, religious, economic and political climate of their time. Their period of production, from the Late Qing dynasty through to the 1930s, is one that has been insufficiently explored by historians as a whole. This was the time when the Treaty Ports attracted foreign residence and tourism, when Western visitors flocked to Shanghai and Peking to buy Chinese souvenirs, and when fashionable young Chinese of the Republican period embraced aspects of foreign life and design. Many of the pieces naturally reflect Chinese designs and motifs, particularly in the bold association of colours, their use of re-purposed carved plaques and the emphasis on luck-bearing emblems. Western influence creeps in, however, in the form of secure box-and-tongue clasps and the occasional maker's or retailer's names, as well as stamps such as 'Chinese sterling'. Do these makers' marks suggest that the items were produced for export or do they simply represent a nod to modernity?"--Publisher's description

Discover - or rediscover - the major achievements of Chinese culture and civilization.Great Books of China offers concise introductions - each of them accompanied by generous quotation (in English) from the book in question - to sixty-six works in the canon of Chinese literature.The books chosen reflect the chronological and thematic breadth of Chinese literary tradition, ranging from such classics as The Book of Songs and the Confucian Analects, through popular dramas and novels (The Romance of the Western Chamber; The Water Margin), twentieth-century political and biographical works (Quotations from Chairman Mao, the autobiography of the last emperor) and modern novels that are little known in the West (Memories of South Peking, Six Chapters from a Cadre School Life).Frances Wood presents a comprehensive, accessible and richly informative primer for the uninitiated; a box of delights that opens up an entire literary culture to the inquisitive reader.