History, Arts & Traditions

History, Arts & Traditions

How many people make one bowl?

At the Hutian Ancient Kiln site, UNESCO identifies bluish-white porcelain production from the tenth to the thirteenth century. The surviving production…

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History, Arts & Traditions

Was this imperial resort really a holiday?

Chengde's Mountain Resort was a place to stay, but also a place to rule.

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History, Arts & Traditions

What was hidden in the Library Cave?

One sealed chamber near Dunhuang held books and pictures that crossed languages and centuries.

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History, Arts & Traditions

Can a cliff tell several stories?

The Dazu carvings are not one giant picture with one simple meaning.

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History, Arts & Traditions

What do the statues at Longmen tell us?

A cliff full of Buddhist images is also a record of many different people making decisions over centuries.

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History, Arts & Traditions

The dams behind Liangzhu’s ancient city

Liangzhu’s jade objects belong to a much larger archaeological landscape of rice fields, raised ground, dams and waterways.

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History, Arts & Traditions

Why was a canal bigger than a shortcut?

The Grand Canal moved grain and tied distant regions to the needs of a capital.

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History, Arts & Traditions

Is your zodiac sign a calendar?

The twelve animals mark a repeating cycle of time. Personality quizzes are only one way people use them.

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History, Arts & Traditions

Can you see how fast someone wrote?

Brush-written characters can show movement as well as words, but they are built on serious practice.

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History, Arts & Traditions

Why unroll a painting slowly?

A handscroll does not give you the whole picture at once. That is part of the experience.

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History, Arts & Traditions

Why carve a page backwards?

A Chinese woodblock-printing workshop prepares, checks and carves a reversed page so the final impression can be read.

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History, Arts & Traditions

Animation before computers

Take one actual film from the studio’s history: Where Is Mama?, the 1960 ink-wash animation about tadpoles searching for their frog mother. It gives the…

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