Category: Art History

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Why talk about the Silkroad in China?

Birgitta Hoffmann

This autumn our Silkroad course is going to visit a slightly unusual element within the Silkroad studies – the transport within China.
Why would this be so interesting? We all know, that the land route enters China at the Gansu Corridor by passing through a gate in the Great Wall. From there it moved on to Xi’an/Changan, the ancient capital of China. We also know that Guangzhou on the Pearl River is the oldest of the China Sea harbours that carried the Maritime trade on the Silk Route to and from the Harbours. Guangzhou is even far enough in the South that it acts as China’s Monsoon Trade harbour.

So far this is very easy and hardly surprising. The question is what happens then?
Xi’an/Chang’an ceases to be the capital of China in the late Tang period, when the capital moves East beyond the passes first to Luoyang, then to Kaifeng. Very soon afterwards you hear of other capitals, with Beijing, Nanjing and Hangzhou being probably the most famous sites.
If we assume that the high luxury items of the Silkroad trade were destined particularly for the court, these changes of capitals and the creation of multiple capitals, when China disintegrates over centuries means that a trade route ending in Xi’an is of little use to anybody.

Other problems are the imperial monopolies: Silk, salt and tea are legally only available through the imperial government. But the place where tea is grown and the place where the harbours are, are in the Tang period at the opposite ends of the Pearl River and a long way from Chang’an.

We also have to consider the massive distances involved: From Guangzhou to Kaifeng is 1500km with another 700km to reach Beijing. Shanghai is 900 km away, Dunhuang another 2000 km. None of these routes is easy, often crossing mountains, sometimes deserts and several huge rivers. Creating a viable road network was a century-long project which started with the Qin emperors and was added and adjusted as time and money permitted or demanded. Heavy, bulky or fragile goods were always at risk on the roads, whether transported by horses or by carts and thus not really useful to the Silkroad trader of fragile luxury items.

In response the Chinese developed a very efficient use of waterways. With long rivers like the Wei, the Pearl River and the Yangtse East-West transport was possible, if the various hazards to navigations could be mastered, but what if you needed to travel North-South or needed to cross between river systems, for example, to take the pottery from Jingdezhen or Changsha to Guangzhou?

In this course we will take a look on how these transport problems were mastered during the different dynasties and what this meant for long-distance traders who wanted to obtain goods from the interior of China but weren’t necessarily interested in travelling there themselves or even not permitted to do so.

The Silkroad course on China starts on Thursday 3 October.
Places for the course or for individual lectures can be booked from this webpage here or via Eventbrite here.

 

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What has a German writer to do with the Grand Tour

Birgitta Hoffmann

On Saturday, 18th of July, I will be offering a dayschool on Goethe and the Grand Tour.
Isn’t that a contradiction? The Grand Tour is in origin a deeply English and later British Institution. Established in the mid 17th century as a way for nobility to extricate itself from political problems in England, it became in the 18th century a finishing school for the young men/late teenagers of the British nobility who were sent with their ‘bear-keepers’/teachers to familiarise themselves with the cultural highlights and high society in Europe, especially in Italy and return laden with statues,  architectural plans and paintings 3 years later.

So how does a successful German writer and court official in his early forties fit into this? The answer lies in his age and in the time of the publication of his memoirs. When he travelled in 1786-1788 the grand tour was at the height of fashion. The idea had spread to all over Europe, The King of Sweden was travelling, so was the Tsar of Russia and everybody who could afford it. There were travel guides, there were picture books, there were diary, it was the ‘in’ thing to do.  Hardly, surprising to find Goethe joining in.

However, Goethe decided to give this tour his very own flair. He set out alone with a backpack on the post chaises –  the first backpacker in Europe and stayed not in fashionable hotels but with artist friends and wayside inns, always accompanied by his book box. Well read he reflects on what it means to look at art (ancient and otherwise) and thus joining the discussion started by Winkelmann, what it means to travel and what it does to you. In between, visits and discussions he falls out with his girlfriend and tries to get back into her good graces. A forty year old in the grips of a midlife crisis, a very literate man in a mid-life crisis and the first one to describe it in all its glory.

But I am not a literature critic or a philosopher/psychologist, so why is this so interesting for an archaeologist and historian? The answer lies in the publication date. Goethe returned from Italy in June 1788, France was already in turmoil, a year later the French Revolution would start and until June 1815 Europe was increasingly a theatre of war, making travel more and more hazardous until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in the summer of 1815.

25 years is a long time, time enough for a fashion of the nobility to die.  But this is, where Goethe comes in. He published his memoirs of his time in Italy in 1815, twenty five years after the event. He was now an arbiter of taste in Europe, a polymath, a writer, a thinker. And his memoirs restarted the Grand Tour as a European phenomenon, not just for the nobility but also for the middle classes. Not just as an educational chore/opportunity, but very much as an emotional experience in the age of the Romantics. Thanks to him, travelling to Italy became the romantic dream of half a continent: off to the country where the oranges and lemons blossom to become more human, to experience the Italian way of life as well as the cultures of the past.

Without him, Thomas Cook and his tourists would have felt more than a little bit lost.

If you want to know more, there are still places on the course, you can find all the details here.  

I look forward to seeing you on Saturday.

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MANCENT blog: A Chinese Garden in North Staffordshire

Birgitta Hoffmann

Last week I went to #Biddulph Grange Garden in Staffordshire. Created by James Bateman in between the 1830s and 1860s, who displayed many of the plants that had been collected by the plant expeditions to Asia and America that he financed in the garden Since the 1960s it has been restored and maintained by the #NationalTrust. It is a glorious exercise in creating lots of themed gardens in comparatively little space. Most people go for the glorious Dahlias, but the idea for me was to have a look at the Chinese Garden which I want to include in my day school on #China in the 19th century for MANCENT. It is one of the first attempts in Britain to create a Classical Chinese garden similar to those of the World Heritage Site at Suzhou. Given the problems of the available descriptions and limited range of images and plants that could be used, it is a truly beautiful piece of reception (strange mistakes notwithstanding), copying the main elements of the Lake, the Wilderness, and the meandering ways for contemplation, as well as the viewing terrace and even an isolated teahouse. Even the axis towards a tall feature in the distance is there (alas not a pagoda, but a monkey puzzle tree).
The relationship between China and the West in the 19th century was fraught, no doubt about it. But it is also worth remembering that in between these mountains of problems, there were people who were trying to engage with the Chinese culture and tried to understand it better.

If you want to know more tickets are still available and can be got via the website or via Eventbrite.

View from the ‘Wilderness’ and the Teahouse towards the lake.
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Why talk about Silkroad in the Indian Ocean?

Birgitta Hoffmann

Everybody knows the Silkroad. Originally, we thought it went overland from Xi’an to the Mediterranean. But this is only one of many, many routes that were used since about 6000 BC to facilitate long-distance exchange between Africa, Asia (including the Western Pacific) and Europe. Today we know these routes were a huge network, forever changing and adapting to political and climate change, but always driven by the need to carry goods and ideas from one end of the world to the other.

One of the biggest parts of this network is the Maritime Routes and the Indian Ocean and in the middle of it, the Indian Subcontinent is a crucial turntable for this trade.

According to the ancient sources the biggest harbour in the South of India, in the area now known as Kerala was Muziris or Muchiri in the Tamil texts. During the Roman Period goods were brought here from the West and fortunes could be made by bringing Indian produce from spices to Cotton to Gemstone back. in 2009 the Archaeologists found this site at a place known as Pattanam, which means the harbour/port. The picture shows some of the amphora found at the site, but I also could have shown you pictures of gemstones and the remains of a wharf and store buildings.


Pattanam is probably the best-known of the sites that were discovered in the last 20 years of research into the Maritime Silkroad in India and I really look forward to talking about these new discoveries in my Course on the Silkroad trade in the Indian Ocean on Thursdays for MANCENT 
The course is online and recorded and open to international enrolment via Eventbrite and thanks to the recordings available at a time convenient for you.

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MANCENT 2023 Programme now out

Just in time for the bank holiday weekend, MANCENT is publishing its Autumn programme.

Courses will start in September and there is a wide range of humanities courses from Music to literature to History and Archaeology.

We are also reviving our Cultural day trips to various museums and sites and hope that will once again prove popular.

The full programme is on the website and can be booked either by contacting the lecturers or with many of them the online courses via Eventbrite links, which are very popular with our overseas students.

All the best and we look forward to seeing you soon at one of our events.

Birgitta Hoffmann
MANCENT Course Director and her team.

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Why study Greek and Roman Myths by Tony Keen

Whenever I visit the National Gallery in London, I always stop in front of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-1523). It is one of my favourite paintings ever because mythologically it’s so rich.

Most mythological paintings of the sixteenth century and later draw upon the work of the Roman poet Ovid and his fifteen-book epic the Metamorphoses. Titian (full name Tiziano Vecelli) certainly drew upon Ovid’s work for paintings that came late in his career such as Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon, and the Death of Actaeon. But the source for Bacchus and Ariadne, painted when Titian was in his thirties, was not the Metamorphoses. Ovid does mention the story, but not in detail. The best-known version of the tale is in an earlier poet, Gaius Valerius Catullus. Catullus’ poems were mostly short, but a small collection of longer poems survive. Of these, the longest is Poem 64. A ‘mini-epic’ of 408 lines, it covers a number of mythological accounts, including that of Bacchus and Ariadne.

Ariadne was a daughter of King Minos of Crete. She aided the Athenian hero Theseus when he came to Crete to kill her half-brother, the half-man, half-bull Minotaur. Understandably, afterwards, she had to flee Crete with Theseus. But then, for reasons no account really explains properly, Theseus abandons Ariadne on the island of Naxos. This is the moment Titian dramatises.

Ariadne is caught waving towards the ship of Theseus, which can be seen on the horizon, sail billowing in the wind. But Ariadne is suddenly distracted by the coming of the god Bacchus (the Greek Dionysus), the god of wine and revelry. We see her having turned her head towards the new arrival.