“Make the Past Serve the Present": Reading 'Cultural Relics Excavated During the Cultural Revolution' of 1972 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The preservation of cultural property is never a neutral activity; and the question of who is to possess, care for, and interpret artifacts is highly politically charged. This paper examines how preservation was used as a justification for the removal of pieces of immovable archaeological sites in the early twentieth century, and became a tool for building museum collections. This study focuses on a collection of 12 wall painting fragments from the site of Dunhuang, China, which were removed by art historian Langdon Warner in 1924 for the Fogg Art Museum. The removal process resulted in significant damage to some of the fragments as well as to the site itself, calling into question what is preserved: an intact ancient artifact or an ancient artifact scarred by and embedded with its modern collection history? Using the Harvard collection as an example,
China Information, 2018
In China, as in many other modern and contemporary states, the past is often used to inform public opinions and legitimate the political regime. This article examines two examples of archaeological exhibitions in China: at the National Museum of China (中国 国家博物馆) in Beijing and the Liaoning Provincial Museum (辽宁省博物馆) in Shenyang. It discusses the development and change over time in the content of these archaeological exhibitions, the way they were organized and presented to the public, and the explanations that accompanied the prehistoric artifacts. I argue that the way the past, and in particular the distant, prehistoric and proto-historic past, is presented in Chinese museums reveals a process of entrenchment of the standardized narrative of Chinese history, with a powerful sense of connection and continuity between the past, no matter how distant, and the present. I also argue that although the general outline of the historical trajectory of the 'Chinese civilization' is universally accepted, small variations in the way it is presented and the different emphases of the two exhibitions can inform us about various ways of constructing local and national identities in China during the 20th century and up to the current time. The relationship between archaeology and politics, and more specifically, the relationship between archaeological displays and various national agendas, has been discussed at length in a range of articles and books published since the early 1990s. 1 China is by no means unique in this respect, but it is frequently cited as an example of this phenomenon, not
Chinese Cultural Relics Journal Sample Article Brochure
This is a pre-press sample article brochure for the readers to get a glance of the journal. Interest in Chinese antiquities is growing globally. A key resource on the fascinating history of Chinese archaeological artifacts and art is now available in English. Chinese Cultural Relics is the official English translation of the prestigious award-winning Chinese archaeology journal Wenwu (Cultural Relics). Published since the 1950s, Wenwu is well known in China and abroad for its quality articles and in-depth reporting of Chinese archaeological surveys and fieldwork. Until the publication of Chinese Cultural Relics, the information presented in this key resource has only been accessible to those who can read Chinese. Each issue of Chinese Cultural Relics contains content from three recent issues of Wenwu; the premier issue of Chinese Cultural Relics includes articles from issues No. 10, No. 11 and No. 12, 2013. In addition to high-quality translation, each article includes the same high-quality, detailed photographs and beautiful hand-drawn illustrations as in the Chinese publication. Subjects covered in Chinese Cultural Relics include: new archaeological findings research and exploration bamboo slips and documents bronze wares inscriptions and epitaphs ancient towns and villages archaeological preservation the archaeology of science and technology museum exhibitions...and more As interest in China's history continues to grow, your students and research community will no doubt appreciate having this rich information on Chinese archaeology and cultural relics available to them in English. For more information regarding the journal or to subscribe the journal, please visit: http://eastviewpress.com/Journals/CulturalRelics.aspx
Theorizing (IM)MATERIAL Heritage in China - International Conference
2019
Two days of interventions and discussion are hosted by the Department of Archaeology and Museum Studies, School of History, in Renmin University of China, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge Mongolian and Inner Asian Studies Unit (MIASU), through the generous sponsorship of the Institute for the Promotion of Chinese Language and Culture, Renmin University of China. The first day, with a strong regional emphasis on the Inner Asian steppe and the historical Chinese ‘frontier’, confronts archaeological and anthropological research on the culture of the area, questioning the notion of ‘intangible’ in its methodological and theoretical dimensions. The second day gathers on-going projects in the fields of Museum Studies, Creative Practices and Religious Studies questioning the boundaries between ‘material’ and ‘immaterial’ in Chinese cultural heritage around the themes of authenticity, religious sites and perception. To present day, China has made great strides in developing a comprehensive cultural heritage preservation regime—including ‘material’ heritage, ‘intangible’ heritage, etc.—. In recent years China has attempted to both incorporate and integrate its cultural protection mechanisms into global discourses of cultural preservation regimes. China’s unique history, national circumstance, and special considerations all contribute to an equally unique outlook on cultural heritage and heritage protection, yet nevertheless done through an internationally recognized vocabulary of preservation norms. It is precisely due to this unique history and development process that Chinese cultural heritage preservation concepts differ from other regions and countries. Particularly in the case of ‘intangible’ cultural heritage, international preservation regimes are understood to begin at the ‘grassroots’ where local recognition of cultural heritage protection leads to locals seeking out support from governments or IGOs/NGOs so as to preserve, develop, transmit, and even promote heritage that they themselves perceive as valuable and endangered. Yet in China, the process is quite the opposite. Chinese conceptualizations of heritage protection begin with Party and central government institutions, which are then filtered down to regional and local governments, and finally to the common people. That is to say, the state formulates policies which require lower levels of government to seek out and identify local cultural heritage to be protection, transmitted, and promoted. To be sure, neither worldview is more correct than the other, where each has its merits. Nevertheless, this alternative outlook and system of practice has developed a radically different understanding of ‘heritage’—and has yet to be properly theorized.
The China Quarterly, 2011
This article examines the response of Shanghai's cultural bureaucracy during the Attack on the Four Olds, the Red Guard repudiation of old culture launched in the early years of China's Cultural Revolution (1966-76). It focuses on how local officials, acting in a space created by the Central Cultural Revolution Group and the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, worked to control the damage wrought by the political campaign and justified their activities by adapting the rhetoric of revolution. Based on the archival documents of the Shanghai Bureau of Culture, this article traces the reinvention of the cultural bureaucracy and the subsequent shift in the language of preservation. It argues that during the Cultural Revolution, there was an institutionalized and ideologically legitimated movement to protect historic sites and cultural objects. Faced with the destruction of antiquity, Shanghai officials instead proposed its rectification, defending cultural relics in the name of revolution. * I am grateful to for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this article.
In the fall of 1924, the pre-eminent modern Chinese scholar Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877−1927) wrote a long acrimonious letter to Shen Jianshi 沈兼士 (1885–1947) and Ma Heng 馬 衡 (1880–1955), directors of the National Beijing University’s Department of Chinese Classics (guoxuemen 國學門) and its archaeology program. The letter came in response to a ‘Manifesto for the Preservation of the Ancient Site at Dagongshan’ (Baocun Dagongshan guji xuanyan 保存大宮山古蹟宣言) by the University’s Archaeological Society, which Wang Guowei had just seen printed in a newspaper (Lui, & Yuan 1984: 405−407; Yuan & Lui 1996: 431−433; see also Bonner 1986: 202−204). The manifesto deplored a Manchu prince’s destruction of the ‘state property’ (guanchan 官產) at Dagongshan in the Dajue 大覺 temple, in the western suburbs of Beijing. It went on to accuse the abdicated Last Emperor Puyi 溥儀 (1906−1967), who was still living in the back quarter of the Forbidden City, of having ‘taken ancient artefacts (guqiwu 古器物) handed down through the ages as his personal property’, and called on the Chinese people and the Nationalist government to stop the destruction of national heritage.
The Pitfalls of Second-hand Information: On the Traditionalist Dogma in Chinese Excavation Reports
Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquties 78-80 (2018): 31-72.
"The emergence of archaeology as an independent discipline during the early 1950s directly resulted in the establishment of three major archaeological journals – Wenwu (1950), Kaogu Xuebao (1951), and Kaogu (1955) – as outlets for information gathered in fieldwork; full site reports followed suit. Nowadays, we have roughly three dozen archaeological periodicals and surely more than a thousand monographs covering all areas and periods of Chinese (pre)history at our disposal. Said publications are our primary sources of information. However, the fact that they are anything but primary sources in a strictly methodological sense hardly gets acknowledged. In reality, excavation reports – preliminary as well as monographs – most often only provide a sample of actual data collected from archaeological sites. Consequently, we are constantly dealing with deliberate choices of editors on what particular information to divulge. This paper shall demonstrate that nature and quality of findings are the main decisive factors in this process. For instance, even looted tombs dating from the Zhanguo and Han periods yielding manuscripts generally take precedence over undisturbed graves discovered at the same cemetery simply because they contained manuscripts. Many conclusions concerning such burials are therefore based on a rather small number of published tombs while the often more representative majority of equally accessible graves remain unnoticed. In short, the paper is aiming to raise awareness for a pressing methodological problem. In doing so, it will address various rationales behind the practice of presenting selective evidence in excavation reports and suggest ways to cope with it."
archaeology in China, developed over the past century from its traditional historiographic and antiquarian roots, has brought to light an extraordinarily rich and often unexpected cavalcade of new finds, many of which are explored in detail in the present volume. These outstanding discoveries are fundamentally changing our understanding of the development of early cultures and the rise of social complexity in ancient China, and their relationships with other cultures across Asia. However, this progress is being seriously threatened by an alarming rise in the destruction of archaeological sites across China. Of course, China is not alone in having a serious problem with the looting of ancient sites and the theft of antiquities -virtually every country in the world continues to suffer to valying degrees the loss of irreplaceable ancient cultural material. Given the importance of new archaeological discoveries in China, it is essential to understand both the magnitude of the problem there and the significant efforts being undertaken in China as well as among the international A Companion to Chinese Archaeology, First Edition. Edited by Anne P. Underhill.