Treasures of China
by John Chinnery
Duncan Baird, HK$295
With fast-paced, globally connected lives now de rigueur, the intricacies of a carved bowl or a hair adornment that may have been part of a burial ritual 2,000 years ago provoke a particular fascination. One wonders how the people of the Song or Yuan dynasties lived, the sense of what their world was like and the art and culture they created. Lives would have been far shorter than today's; for most people, their lives would have been about their village or town and the surrounding area. They would have died where they were born and their children after them.
But as John Chinnery shows in Treasures of China, The Glories of the Kingdom of the Dragon, China throughout the millennia has produced artefacts, sculptures, paintings and jewellery that show a civilisation that has left travellers and observers from afar awestruck for centuries.
Chinnery guides the reader through 4,000 years of China's civilisation, through its art, culture and religion; the text is interspersed with sumptuous illustrations of paintings and maps of the rivers that provided the fertile land, plus photographs of sculptures, artworks, carvings, pottery and porcelain.
Chinnery begins with the Shang and Zhou dynasties and explains the landscape of China. It becomes more interesting in the past 1,000 years and the surprise of seeing how just under a millennium ago how many people were on the move and travelling long distances.
