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Scholarly Visits to China: Two Accounts – Ancient China in NewChina
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2015
Extract
The Art and Archaeological Delegation which visited the People's Republic ofChina in November of 1973 was jointly sponsored by the National Academy ofSciences of the United States and the Scientific and Technical Associationof the PRC. Originally intended to be chiefly archaeological, the delegationultimately included specialists in Chinese painting, a historian and aconservationist as well as those of us more immediately concerned with“underground art” or recent archaeological finds (see List 1).
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- News of the Field
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- Copyright © Society for the Study of Early China 1976
References
1. Other groups have been able to hold meetings in the U.S. prior to departure. This is not essential, but it is desirable--for the division of tasks, collating lists, deciding who is to photograph what and with what film and camera, etc.
2. It is well when visiting the PRC to attend, in so far as it is possible, performances or other occasions to which the group is invited. At Sian, after a particularly long day, only five of the twelve of us emerged for an evening of revolutionary song and dance. When we arrived at the local theater we discovered that the twelve seats reserved for us in a row near the front had been kept empty, our three Chinese guides with four others they had rounded up were prepared to fill in our depleted ranks, and that the whole performance had been held up pending our (conspicuous) arrival, resulting in the omission of a much needed intermission. We subsequently attended everything.
3. An interesting problem arose at Sian in the bronze section of the Shensi Provincial Museum. Questions as to whether the Fu-feng kuang shown there and also a superb rhinoceros tsun were originals or reproductions (the labels did not say "Reproduction") elicited different answers from two of our hosts. The Fu-feng kuang must have been in Europe in 1973, on tour with one of the two great exhibitions sent abroad, and the rhinoceros tsun one would have thought was in Peking. This was probably an oversight in the labelling.
4. The question of how to repay kindnesses received in China was often on our minds. We gave two banquets (small return for the nine or ten given for us), and some of us gave or later sent articles or books we had written. The question of editing published works to be given as gifts to scholars and friends of the People's Republic by deleting or obscuring possibly "objectionable" terms (such as Chinese Turkestan or, worse, Central Asia when Hsinchiang Province is meant) or references (as to the National Palace Museum Collection of Taiwan) was apparently occasionally discussed. Whether such adjustments have ever been requested by the receiving side or not I do not know.
5. See Chaves, Jonathan, “A Han Painted Tomb at Loyang,” Artibus Asiae XXX, no. 1 (1968), pp. 5–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.