For Tuesday I chose to read Arthur Waldron’s “The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth” and William Lindesay’s “The Great Wall in 50 Objects”. Waldron’s text offered a historical background on the Great Wall and its construction. What interested me most was looking at how the wall was set up location wise when we covered the Great Wall in class, the wall had certain breaks in it in different regions. The Great Wall was portrayed to me as always being continuous which was a myth itself, and I was truly surprised when I had learned it was discontinuous. Lindesay’s text fit perfectly with the Waldron text as it covered the wooden communications sent between military officers. The wooden texts shown in the reading were extremely intricate and an immense amount of effort was put into them, despite them being military correspondence.
For Thursday I read “Chinese Art Heists: Purloined Treasures” and I truly really enjoyed it. The article was a nice starting off point for exploring the topic of repatriation, along with the many examples presented the article had pictures to accompany the text. It was written for a wide audience it did not exclude specific readers and provided a decent amount of background informationAlthough the text lacked a specific author, which does not validate the source as reliable, I believe it is an amazing source to use to begin researching the repatriation of Chinese art. I found the topic itself to be very interesting so I would definitely consider exploring it further possibly as my final project.
Waldron, Arthur. The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Lindesay, William. The Great Wall in 50 Objects. Paperback ed. Melbourne, Vic.: Viking, an Imprint of Penguin Books, 2015.
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