Chinese art / [Stephen Wooton Bushell].

  • Stephen Wootton Bushell
Date:
[1909]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Chinese art / [Stephen Wooton Bushell]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    after the headquarters of the faith had been shifted from India to China. Hindu monks, expelled from their native country, brought their sacred images and pictures with them, and introduced their traditional canons of art, which have been handed down to the present day with little change. Chinese ascetics, on the other hand, wandered in successive parties to India to investigate the holy land of the Buddha and burn incense before the principal shrines, studying Sanskrit and collecting relics and manuscripts for translation, and it is to the records of their travels that we owe much of our knowledge of the ancient geography of India. Stimulated by such varied influences Chinese art flourished apace, ^he T’angdynasty being generally considered to be its golden period, as it certainly was that of literature, belles lettres, and poetry. But the T’ang power during its decline was shorn, one by one, of its vast * dominions, and finally collapsed in go6. The Kitans, who gave their name to Marco Polo’s Cathay, as well as to Kitai, the modern Russian word for China, were encroaching on the north, a Tangut power was rising in the north-west, a Shan kingdom was established in Yunnan, and Annam declared its independence. Of the five dynasties which rapidly succeeded one another after the T’ang, three were of Turkish extraction, and they may be dismissed with a word as being of little account from an artistic point of view. In 960 the Sung dynasty reunited the greater part of China proper, shorn of its outer dominions. The rule of the Sung has been justly characterised as a protracted Augustan era, its inclinations being peaceful, literary, and strategical rather than warlike, bold, and ambitious. Philosophy was widely cultivated, large encyclopedias were written, and a host of voluminous commentaries on the classics issued from the press, so that the period has been summed up in a word as that of Neo-Confucianism. The emperor and high officials made many collections of books, pictures, rubbings of inscriptions, bronze and jade antiquities, and other art objects.
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