cultureFEBRUARY10
8
Chinese
whispersOne hundred objects spanning 3,000
years of Chinese history make for a
colourful and thought-provoking
exhibition, as David Whetstone reports.
C
hina is a country as big as
Europe and its history, says Neil
MacGregor, director of the
British Museum, "is one the
world needs to know, now more than
ever".
To this end, the British Museum has
sentmorethan100ofitsChineseobjects
out on a regional museum tour. It is the
largest UK loan of Chinese material ever
made by the institution.
I watched items being unwrapped and
displayed at Sunderland Museum & Winter
Gardens where the exhibition China: Jour-
ney to the East will be until May 9 before
moving to York.
The Sunderland museum has a good
relationship with the British Museum and
has been loaned single items for display.
This exhibition, part of the British Mu-
seum's Partnership UK programme, em-
phasising that its collections are meant to
benefit the whole of Britain, takes that
relationship to another level.
Itisclearfromtheoutsetthattheyhaven't
just trusted us with the unbreakables.
As well as pots and paper-based arte-
facts are a handful of pastries dating from
thetimeoftheTangDynasty,whichistosay
725 to 775 AD.
"Old tarts coming to Sunderland," ran a
cheery headline in the Echo.
Describedastwothinwafers,twoflower-
shaped tartlets, an open-work cake and a
pretzel-shaped biscuit, they reside, as pre-
cious as rare diamonds given their re-
markable survival across the centuries, in a
glass display case.
They were found perfectly preserved in
the desert conditions of a cemetery near
Xinjiang by Hungarian archaeologist Sir
Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) and donated
by him to the museum in 1928.
Exhibitions such as this are fascinating
for what they tell us about other countries
and civilisations.
A stoneware headrest of Song Dynasty
vintage (960 to 1279 AD) shows warriors
carrying fire guns, long bamboo tubes
packed with gunpowder - invented in about
850 AD - and arrows.
Then there's the little wooden cabinet of
traditional Chinese games, mah jong, play-
ing cards and dominoes, the pieces beau-
tifully crafted and begging to be handled -
which the British Museum's Tom Hock-
enhull does carefully with gloved hands.
Dating from the Qing Dynasty (1850 to
1900), it was donated to the museum in
1908 by a Mrs Langenbach.
Equally fascinating, I find, is what an
exhibition like this reveals about the nature
of collecting.
Nobody would ever consider a biscuit
worth keeping for posterity yet how amaz-
ing that it should have survived and found
its way into one of the most famous mu-
seum collections in the world.
Often, as you will see here, it is the
relatively mundane that connects us to
people far away and long gone.
Almost as miraculous as the pastries is
the appearance here of an exquisite 18th
Century Chinese tea set which was among
130,000 porcelain objects found in the
wreck of a ship off the southern tip of
exhibitioncultureFEBRUARY10
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