Longmen's Stone Buddhas and Cultural Heritage

When Antiquity Met Modernity in China

Dong Wang

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781538141120
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

This thoroughly researched book provides the first comprehensive history of how a UNESCO World Heritage site on the Central China Plain, Longmen's caves and the Buddhist statuary of Luoyang, was rediscovered in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on original research and archival sources in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, and Swedish, as well as extensive fieldwork, Dong Wang traces the ties between cultural heritage and modernity, detailing how this historical monument has been understood from antiquity to the present. She highlights the manifold traffic and expanded contact between China and other countries as these nations were reorienting themselves in order to adapt their own cultural traditions to newly industrialized and industrializing societies. Unknown to much of the world, Longmen and its mesmerizing modern history takes readers to the heartland of China, known as "Chinese Babylon" a century ago. With remarkable depth and breadth, this book unravels both a bygone and a continuing human pursuit of artefacts—shared, spiritual, modern, and above all beautiful that have linked so many lives, Chinese and foreign.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 How Longmen Was Remembered, Not Remembered, and Misremembered as an Ancient Site in Premodern China
• 2 Shaping Chinese Modern Identity: Antiquities in Public Opinion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
• 3 Voices of Silence: European Discovery of Longmen
• 4 “An Influence of the Souls of These Stone Saints”: Early American and Japanese Recognition, between Universalism and Nationalism
• 5 Longmen and Osvald Sirén (1879–1966)
• 6 Blighted Beauty: Longmen and Cultural Heritage Law in Early Twentieth-Century China
• 7 UNESCO’s Longmen and Chinese Urbanization: Better City, Better Life?
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Luoyang as Capital: A Brief Timeline
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Asia/Pacific/Perspectives