Watch: CGTN Art Series special program – Inspiration Across Time

[00:00:30]Welcome to the Asian Civilizations Museum. Many of you are very familiar here. This is home for you. Many of our live audience are from friends of the museum. And uh my name is Mirolu. Um I'm here uh we're here to record a special program for CGTN to celebrate the CGTN art series which you saw outside. We had run three four seasons now and uh from these uh immersive journey we brought classical Chinese art and cultural heritage to a global audience through innovative storytelling. There are documentaries, there are uh animations, there's even VR and AR. I highly recommend everybody to uh scan the QR code after this talk uh and really experience the show. So the latest season is called China Crafted and China Crafted is talking about Chinese material culture and it goes uh from the Shang dynasty to the Han dynasty and then to the town and so on. During the Shan dynasty, it covers uh bronze vessel, art, a jade objects. And to the Han dynasty, it talks about lacquer wear and silk. And then move on to the town aesthetic, which is dazzling and open and too much. And then goes to the Song Dynasty, which goes back to minimalist, which goes back to restraint. So we cover um thousands of years through artifacts. And I think there's no better place to uh unpack all these right here at Asian Civilizations Museum. This is the home of Asian civilization, Asian material culture. Uh and uh I'm sure a lot of those in here have more knowledge than me uh about the the treasures that's sitting right here in fact above us at the Tong shipwreck. And uh to unpack all these different stories, we have the panel here with me. And sitting right next to me, we have Dr. Huang Wing. And she is the uh from the department of Chinese studies at N National University of Singapore. And she teaches all these topics to her students uh during the classroom. And we also have uh uh Matthew Welsh. He's a heavyweight in the investment world, but today he's here as the president uh for Southeast Asian uh ceramic Society. and he's also a longtime collector, admirer, and learner of Chinese material culture.

[00:03:00]We also have Pampan Gung Pan. She is the founder of a Han Fu girl at many of you might be familiar with. She's also a designer and researcher. She lives and breathes Chinese culture. Everything she wears and put together has a story to tell. and uh uh she every day she tells Chinese aesthetics to a global audience on her platform. So first I would like to my panelists to give a quick self introduction and uh tell us how your connection to classical Chinese art, Chinese culture came about.

[00:03:36]>> Hi, I'm um Hang Yin and I teach uh Chinese art history at the department of Chinese studies in uh N US. So we cover every aspect of the field but personally my own interests in research are more contemporary and um I focus on sort of the late imperial era um and the republican period as well as Chinese contemporary art and uh print and visual culture. So um having returned to Singapore in 2016, a lot of my research now is sort of reconstructing a kind of history of ink in Singapore because I think that's an area that still needs quite a bit of research in. So that those are some of my current projects at the moment. Uh previous to this uh I had worked as an arts journalist and the managing editor of a international um Asian art magazine called Orientations which was based in Hong Kong and um while at graduate school um I also worked on projects with the British Museum and the VNA.

[00:04:51]>> Thank you. So good to have you with us Matthew.

[00:04:55]>> Thank you. Well, uh, as Miro said, uh, I, uh, president of the Southeast Asia Ceramic Society in Singapore, which is a 50-year-old society of people who have an interest in, uh, Chinese and other Asian ceramics. My background many years ago in England, I studied classical Chinese literature, history, and ceramics actually. Uh, and then I went to the dark side. I worked in banking for 30 40 years and now uh I get back to my first love of studying uh Asian material culture. So I've lived in Singapore for the last 30 years.

[00:05:35]>> Thank you Pampan. Uh I actually work in the intersection of Chinese traditional culture and craft and making them relevant for global audiences explaining certain misconceptions we have and trying to make them accessible to modern young people as well.

[00:05:53]>> Excellent. So let's uh dive in shall we?

[00:05:57]So we start from the Shang dynasty. Uh the Shang dynasty the the program start in the tomb uh a woman buried with hundreds of jays and a small army of bronze vessels lady Fuhao now Lady Fuhao is known in China as the earliest documented female general pamp you was sharing with me earlier that you there's a lot of story around this lady who is she uh from the stuff that's buried with her. Yeah. So the angle I took usually when I talk about her is people know Mulan but Mulan's not really documented officially as someone who exists in historical records and it was quite amazing that we managed to find Lady Fuha who much you know existed much longer before the story of Mulan came about and how this was a a show of um female general who you know go to war and she was also a you can she can read oracle bones so she was very important role in the pre-dynastic society and also buried with her were like almost 800 pieces of jade and jade from that period uh would have been coming from her area which meant that you know it traveled a long way before it reached her her area and also the story of jade was interesting because people now associate jade with jadeite but jade from that period was nefright so the item the idea of jade itself is a modern kind of construct that we need to unpack when that's when I created recently a video to explain you know the differences between these two kind of materials.

[00:07:31]>> Dr. Huang, you teach the Bronze Age as a course um about on ritual and technology rather than aesthetics. Now when visiting when we look at Shan uh Brown's vessel, what are we looking at? Um I think you um when you look at material culture I think learn um the starting point is how was it made and if you look at if you think of the bronze age and if you think of the complexity and scale of the bronzes technique the technology uh the manpower that's marshal to make that technology happen is very very important and as well as his function.

[00:08:17]So today in our present age we may just look at it in terms of its aesthetics but in its own time whenever you sit look at an object you should also situate it contextualize it in its own time. So in its own time it was a ritual object or in Lady Fuha's tomb um many of the many of the objects were for her personal use as well. But what was more important perhaps is the piece mold technology. A it's a very complicated um bronze casting technique that was used.

[00:08:58]So the so the bronze is not made in pieces and then soldered together. It's actually comes out of its cast as a hole. For this technique to resurface again and be more commonly used was only in the late 19th century and 20th century. So that just tells you how advanced their technology was then.

[00:09:20]Yeah. And um also maybe I could just also mention why fuhao is so important.

[00:09:27]uh because it's the only Shang tomb that has ever been found intact. In fact, all the other Shang tombs um of queens, kings, they were all already damaged and um raided.

[00:09:40]>> So, from the the items that's buried in the Fu house tomb, what does that tell us? You know, her status and her um beliefs.

[00:09:51]>> There is already a kind of ritual system forming. We know from sets of ritual vessels that um there's an understanding that there is there is an afterlife.

[00:10:06]Uh but uh it doesn't it it's not that complete. Uh we see sim we see a lot of um symbols imagery um appearing but at this uh at this stage we don't really know what these things mean. And one of it one of the uh notable things is a sort of famous toutier motif. So we we can recognize the taier but we don't know what it means.

[00:10:35]>> What is the tier motive? Can you elaborate on that? Any any panelists want to do you want to?

[00:10:42]>> Well it's the it's a sort of a beasty face I guess.

[00:10:46]>> Yeah. And if you can see it at all angles >> for the handles >> handles or even at corners and Yeah. So it it lends a sort of balance, geometricity, but also a kind of liliness to the figure. But the frequency with which the tier uh appears, it obviously has some meaning that is lost to us now. Yeah.

[00:11:10]>> And it's >> it's one of the four evil creatures of Chinese because we always know about the four auspicious creatures, but we hardly talk about the evil creatures. is supposed to represent greed and >> that's a very much later meaning. So in the shang in a scholarly view we we we would not attribute that meaning to it.

[00:11:32]>> So what are the four evil animals like the African ugly eyes?

[00:11:36]>> That's something I need to read up on.

[00:11:38]>> Yeah, there's so much to learn about this. That's the the beauty of it, right? Um so P let's maybe pick up on what you were saying. uh you know like nowadays when we think about jade we think about Burmese jade you know this beautiful green but jade comes with all shades from white all the way to black and and the Chinese people has been appreciating jade for for >> thousands of years um why is this uh piece this material so important and we also compare j people's virtual with jade right so why is it so important in Chinese aesthetics >> I think jade went through a few phases is the neolithic period it was really for rituals you've seen as like the stone of heaven that's what English speakers would be more familiar with the stone of heaven and then around the predestiny like uh sia shang jo that's when he sort of evolved into a symbol of power of ruling class and then I think in fuh how there was the tomb they had jad where his her son presented to her as a daily kind of like ritualistic kind of greeting stone and you also of course symbolized as a ruling party and of course as uh Dr. mentioned about bronze um you know techniques um the the technique of carving jade was very difficult in this period and they were really manual and people look at them as like oh so basic by today's technology you wouldn't think much of all these techniques but if you understood how it was done you realize that so much effort and so much resources have to go into creating them and then you gain a little bit more um understanding or appreciation of the creation of all these kind of motives that that was possible using the tenure of the period Um and jade later on evolved to represent the virtue of uh gentlemen which also I think is something quite foreign to uh non-Chinese speaker uh because the idea of jade has always been associated with beauty with um accessorizing but hardly with value and virtue. So that's also something that is very inherent to the Chinese um culture.

[00:13:38]But um which is also why I think jadeite was not really accepted as true jade back of and even until 1900s there was a book written about jade and it was teaching people how to differentiate between the true jade and the quasi jades. So that was quite fundamental to Chinese aesthetic, how it relates to culture and values.

[00:13:57]>> Because in old times, not only ladies, men also carry wear jade items, right?

[00:14:02]>> Yeah.

[00:14:02]>> Something to add.

[00:14:04]>> No, I was I was just going to say exactly. And and you see men would have jade belt hooks, right, for their belt.

[00:14:12]So I think jade also represented immortality, didn't it?

[00:14:16]>> So >> it was like an apicious thing to wear and it uh >> Yeah. uh represented immortality and so forth and of course later on as as as Pan Pan and Dr. Hang is saying it started out as a ritual thing but by the Ching and so on you see very beautiful purely aesthetic gates carvings and uh like brush holders and so forth. So the Shan built um ritual objects using browns and jade. In China we often say which means vessels preserve rituals and objects convey principles and from fu house tomb. That's like that's that's exactly what we have seen. And uh then we move on to the Han dynasty in the second chapter. That's another tomb called Maangdui. Uh I'm sure a lot of uh the audience here also familiar the the Maandui items are very different from the uh fu house uh items. Maandui people h people they have prepared a life beyond death. Um so there you found they found a whole set of lacquer wear uh and each of them intricately you know decorated and carved and some of them a lot of them also has a Chinese characters as which means bone appetite or itadima's like wish you a good appetite. Um they also have this beautiful silk gown that weighs only 48 grams. Uh apparently up until 1980s and 90s modern technology couldn't reproduce that. Um they also they also have a wellness chart called Dawing to uh where you have all these stretch movement uh you know >> Chinese yoga >> Chinese yoga. Exactly. So um what is what what is what does that say about Hind design and Han people? Dr. one >> I think two of the most significant things that you find uh in the Maang tombs are the two two banners of course the two tomb banners because in some ways it is almost like a a first inkling of what painting may be like even though it's highly decorative but it also shows that there is a very clear idea of a cosmos by the period that there is the underworld the world we live in and the world above us or the afterlife uh where where do we go in the afterlife and it's also the time when um a lot of dowist concepts are starting to form as well as uh Buddhism coming into China. So I I think the two uh the two funeral banners that we find in there are very significant as are um a lot of uh the written materials that are found as well. Uh they tell us a lot more about uh forms of writing uh because uh it's uh before the invention of paper. So you have them written on bamboo slips. Yeah.

[00:17:31]you want.

[00:17:31]>> I think the the the nice thing this was the tomb of Lady Dye, wasn't it?

[00:17:35]>> Yes. Lady D.

[00:17:36]>> Yes. So, not the modern Lady Dye, the uh 200 BC Lady Dye.

[00:17:41]>> Lady Dye and her husband >> and her husband and they had wonderful pieces of lacquer which was beautifully preserved and I think to the point that Dr. Huang and Pan Pan were making earlier. Uh, Miro, this was where we see you moved almost from ritual objects, the bronzes of the Shang by the Han and the tomb of Lady Dye. Uh, you can see the aesthetic appreciation. These are very, and you can go and Google Lady D Mang and just look at the pieces.

[00:18:14]They're really beautiful >> sort of luxury >> lacquer pieces and and you're beginning to see luxury precisely. This is luxury status items and uh we're very fortunate that Lady D's tomb has been so perfectly preserved and everyone should go on the internet and look at these pieces because they're still today very beautiful.

[00:18:34]>> Yeah. Pamphal um tell us this lady died this noble lady. I I saw in the documentary they she has a vanity set right with all the things. So what what's it what's inside? So what's inside is of course the combs what she uses for you know daily appearance but what interests me was actually the piece of fake hair that she has. So people always think that you know the common question I always get from public is that do people have so so much hair in the past to make all fancy hair do and I say you know hair loss is a real problem since 2,000 years ago. So, Lady Dye has this um piece of fake hair that she would use for accessorizing herself. And of course, it would have been a noble person who could afford to have fake hair because that would have been from someone who cut their hair. And normal Chinese traditionally, they wouldn't really cut their hair unless you know that is uh they're criminal or they're too poor then maybe they're forced to do it. So, her hair was quite uh it tells a lot about you know who she is. she could afford to have that kind of luxury to have a fake hair do.

[00:19:41]>> Now in the west lacquer has traditionally associated with Japan. Um but set the record straight for us. What is the Chinese story of lacquer wear?

[00:19:51]Because we found lacquer wear back in Han dynasty.

[00:19:54]>> Yeah. So I think the interesting thing about Shinrazeri it was that you know during that period China was ceramics and China represented ceramics. So then it was the same thing and Japan was lacquer. So having a cabinet that's leered was a Japan uh cabinet. So that's quite interesting because the Japanese leer was known for the urushi which is the more gold painted one and Chinese one uh slowly developed since uh I think dunam we found some of the layered leer and and eventually became more like a carved leer kind of craft and I think it's called guri as well in Japanese. So um so from the ma du it continue evolving but I think people are just not very familiar with it because leaer u because of lifestyle change. So Japanese continue using lea web for their um food whereas Chinese we adopted more heaty items. So in which lea wouldn't really serve the function which also brings me to the kinsuki. So people you know we know that kinsuki is part of the lacquerware uh system but the Chinese would use uh such which used like u metals kind of sapler looking thing to men the bowls and I was told that the reason also why lacquer wouldn't fit the Chinese tea drinking culture was that the tea will be too hot for you to pour into if you use a lacquer to men it kinsuki then you know you can't last too long whereas the Chinese way of mending ensure that the way it fits our lifestyle the way we drink and with the way we eat and that's why you know ceramics is probably adopted a lot more than lacquer.

[00:21:23]>> So what you use evolves with your lifestyle and your aesthetics. Matthew, you shared with me that you collect quite a lot of lacquerware uh from China, Japan and elsewhere too.

[00:21:35]>> Yes, that's right. And lacquerware is quite interesting is it's a it's um an aesthetic tradition that you get in East Asia. It's sort of unique to East Asia.

[00:21:45]But the the the aesthetic uh sophisticated kind of lacquer that we see in the tomb of Lady Dy in the early Han um was uh Chinese innovation.

[00:21:59]Um but what was interesting about it was that that Chinese lacquer then uh and this is classic of material culture spread around East Asia. So I think the the hand dynasty invaded gojoson North Korea today and from there laca the art of laca moved into Korea where it became a essential element in the three kingdoms. So, Pekj Schilla Goro and then it in uh Korea they improved on the lacquer with um uh mother of pearl inlay. I think they call it now John chili in Korean and and they were the ones that started a very fine abalone shell mother of pearl. You put it into the lacquer and then you paint over it and then you varnish it down and you get the mother of pearl inlay into lacera.

[00:22:54]Then from pecta lacquer spread probably with Buddhism during the tongue I think to Japan. So indeed it originally came from China. The Koreans improved it with mother of pearl. They went to Japan and as Pampam was saying in Japan they had more innovations specifically I think Makier Maki is sprinkle air picture. So they would sprinkle gold powder or silver powder into the clear lacquer and then you get that beautiful kind of uh gold powder effect in your lacquer. So this is again Japan and then what happened was that Japanese uh lacquerware technique and the Korean mother of pearl lacquerware went back to China. So in the ting uh so much later in China uh the lacquer is in so it's like much material culture it's not just China to Korea to Japan but it was a back and forth movement and then you also have a different style of lacquer in Okinawa the Rio islands so for collectors of lacquer it's quite difficult if you get a piece of lacquer and you don't know where it's from figuring out is it Korean is it rioku is it Chinese is it Japanese can be quite difficult. And then the Okinawans in the Rio Islands were there was an independent kingdom, right? And they used to pay tribute to China and to Japan. They were great traders uh including in Southeast Asia. So they incorporated Southeast Asian uh figurative elements into their lacquer and developed a particular type of red lacquer. If you're in Okinawa, you should go to the king's palace and see the throne, which is a wonderful piece of lacquer. And then so you've got Okinawan lacer and then uh Vietnam of course was occupied for a thousand years by China in the first millennium and they adopted lacer and interestingly and this sort of brings us up to the present. In Vietnam they did it differently. They used lacquer for painting.

[00:24:58]So um Vietnamese lacer you see these paintings and they were uh promoted into the 20th century actually at the cold de bozar in Hanoi and today at sbees and christies you can buy these Vietnamese lac and they're very precious items. So there's a there's a whole sort of circle circular movement of uh ideas cultural and >> I think that also depends on the um varieties of lacquer that you could grow in all these different places. So why you can paint with lacquer in Vietnam is because uh the lacquer that comes is very watery and it's not so easy to make into objects and um >> because of the climate.

[00:25:44]>> Yeah. And because a lot of the young artists had been in uh France uh learning to paint but also uh uh sort of doing side jobs in um >> at the workshops, right? at the lacquer furniture workshops that they started to experiment in the 20th century with painting in in Vietnam. Lack of painting in Vietnam. Yeah, >> that's fascinating. That actually ties very well to our second chapter like good things is worth spreading. We have to have more exchanges to make it better. And that goes to Town Dynasty.

[00:26:22]Now town is a is a super connector.

[00:26:26]town's aesthetic is grand, opulent and dazzling and it's uh deeply foreign. In fact, some of the Chinese objects of that age is also the most global. Uh when we come to this chapter, we're seeing um let's uh maybe start with uh where we are at ACM sits right above us, the town shipwreck. Um, Matthew, as the president of uh, ceramic society, you must be so proud of that collection and you visited many, many times. You went up right thing in the Asia Civilizations Museum. So, this was a shipwreck. It's called the Bellatong shipwreck because it sank near Bellaton Island of Indonesia.

[00:27:08]Um, and it's important, I think, for for many reasons as we look at the material culture of Asia and the Tong period.

[00:27:17]Number one, because shipwrecks are wonderful time capsules and ceramics in particular, because unlike organic material, they don't deteriorate. So, you have a perfect picture of what was happening in 9th century commerce by looking at the contents of the shipwreck which are displayed at the Asia Civilizations Museum. So, one, it's a time capsule of 9th century trade. Uh two, interestingly, the ship itself is Persian. The wood has been identified as coming from East Africa. The ship would have been run by Persians. The seafarers were probably Persian or Arab and Malay.

[00:28:00]I think there was one Chinese merchant on board. Uh Mike FCO who did the excavation, I think, told us that they found a inkstone. So they assumed there was one Chinese merchant on board. So the the ship and its crew although it was the cargo was Chinese-made ceramics largely but it was actually a Persian ship. So what was happening in the 9th century of course you had the Abbasid caliphate. So in Baghdad uh had become the intellectual center of Eurasia.

[00:28:31]Uh Changan capital of the Tong present day Xan was probably the largest city in the world with a million people. Baghdad probably had 800,000. So these were the the western end of the silk road, the maritime silk road and the land silk road and the eastern end were Changan and Baghdad. Um and and we used to think that this trade was like you'd go from Middle East to India and then someone else would go from India to Southeast Asia. But what the Bellaton shipwreck shows us was that there was actually trade from Persia or Oman all the way to China. We believe the ship probably loaded in Yangjo in the Yangza River Dela. probably started off in GuangDong because in some of the storage pots we find star anis which must have come from Guangdong and then it was going south down to Palembang in those days in the 9th century that would have been the Shagaya uh empire centered on present day Indonesia. So it shows also that Southeast Asia was the crossroads uh connecting the Islamic world uh the Indian subcontinent, China and and Southeast Asia itself. And last but not least, of course, the cargo which is on display at the Asia Civilizations Museum. And if your Chinese viewers ever come as tourists to ch to Singapore, you know, they all go and see MBS the casino and all this, but we wish they would walk over to the Asian Civilizations Museum because there's wonderful examples of Chinese tongue material culture. The ship is dated to 8:26.

[00:30:08]How can we be so precise? Because there's a bowl that's dated. It says it's the second day of the seventh month of the second year of the Bali Emperor.

[00:30:17]So we know it was around 8:26 and by the way there was a Persian embassy to Changan in 824. So it might have been that this was that going back. Uh and what were the contents? This was what was extraordinary. 60,000 objects of of which over 50,000 are Tongsha ceramics.

[00:30:38]So this shows the extraordinary um mass manufacturing capabilities of China in the in the 9th century. Right? Then the Persian merchants had stopped at Yangjo. Well, we know there were Persian communities in Tangan and after the Anushian rebellion, a lot of these elites and merchants had moved to the coast. So there was a Persian community, I think, in Yangjo in the Yanza river delta. uh and they stopped there and they would have ordered from Changa.

[00:31:10]Now the in addition to the 50,000 Chang Sha ceramic pieces um there are um I can't remember the exact numbers but I think there's 1500 Guangong pieces which is why we think it uh stopped in GuangDong and U teweares. So, we just had the CTN tea wear exhibition outside and anyone that knows the charging, the classic of tea, right? Uh, was that written by Lu? I can't remember. I think Lu and he said he wanted to drink his tea out of U tea wares. These are green celeradon bowls. We have them upstairs in the museum. Uh, and shining which is a white wear which from her or heran. So in other words, what it shows is the internal trade networks of China in the 9th century, Herb, Hernand, uh, Yangza River Delta, down to Guangdong, everything was connected um, mass production and then the dosent in the museum I know when they guide it, they like to talk about these 50,000 pieces of Chang Sha. It's like the EA of its day. It's what you would have eaten your rice out of or drunk your tea out of. But then the U wares. So the the charging uh Lu he says he wants to drink his tea out of U. These are luxury wares. And the shing wares which were white they were a predecessor of dingwear uh were also luxury wares. And then there were I think um uh 66 gold and silver objects. those pan was talking about these are truly exceptional because there's very very little gold objects from the tongue that survive.

[00:32:55]They really only survive they were state-to-state gifts and they really only survive in three different types of places. One is requaries. So the farmans uh temple where I think in 1986 or seven they found a requery chamber at that farmans temple. It contains gold and silver from the tongue. The other place you find it is they were sent as gifts.

[00:33:19]So in Nan Japan Shoen the repository of uh of uh treasures you find uh tangold and upstairs here in the Asian civilizations museum. So that's really really lovely and the and the forms I mean pampan I think you you can talk more about it.

[00:33:39]>> World famous gold cup. So actually that's very um that's very interesting because it also shows us um comparable things that were found in archaeological digs in China. So uh something so common place as the chang have shots left. So to be able to find something like that it gives it adds to the understanding of it. And actually um there are specific bowls in there that are very historical as well.

[00:34:12]>> There are and they're they're clearly made for the Persian market.

[00:34:16]>> So not only was China mass manufacturing 60,000 pieces of something, >> but they were actually designed for the Persian market.

[00:34:24]>> And there are also some that have Chinese writing. So for example, a very important small little Changa bowl is the one that says chin. It's the only one. is the first piece of POS uh ceramics that actually has the words written for the purpose of drinking tea.

[00:34:47]>> Yeah. So, we know it was for We don't need to wonder what it was for. It was for drinking tea because it says on it.

[00:34:52]>> Oh, multi-purpose because that's the other one that's got for collecting cash.

[00:34:56]>> Yes. And and I didn't say the other thing on the ship in addition to these 50,000 pieces of chunk and the high quality. So if if that was the EA right the Uware T-Boss and the Shing whitewares these were the Hermes handbags of their time every princess had to have a U tea wear or a white shing. So you you see the trade was not just mass produced but it was also luxury goods and and designed in this particular case for the Persian market >> the global trade was Sorry, the other thing I forgot which was incredibly important on this shipwreck. We also have three pieces of blue and white.

[00:35:41]>> Yes.

[00:35:41]>> And so in the past I think people thought blue and white ceramics started in China in the UN like the personal David ves that are in the British Museum. But now we know this shipwrecks like 726 730 something like that. There three pieces of blue and white. And of course the in blue and white the blue glaze comes from cobalt and the cobalt comes from Persia. So obviously what happened here was the ship the Persian guy that was running this ship had put the cobalt in sent it to China told them make me some blue and white which they had done in Persian designs and they were sending these bowls back >> and probably because the stone wear was much sturdier than the fritar of the abided I would assume. Exactly.

[00:36:29]>> So from town dynasty we move on to the Song Dynasty. The aesthetics has completely changed. What happened?

[00:36:37]>> So I think what happened was the tongue as you said earlier ma they were into gold and silver foreign objects bright colors and so forth.

[00:36:46]>> And by the way they tended to be very Buddhist >> right. And and as we were talking about the lacquer wares that went from Korea to Japan these were Buddhist ritual objects. the Sun uh because the Tonga at the end of the day had fallen right and Shan rebellion 755 and then another rebellion in the 9th century uh the Sun were trying to get back to Confucianism.

[00:37:11]So Sun were and indeed years ago when I was studying I had to read Jui Neo Confucian philosopher and he was the the the principal uh philosopher I would say of the song.

[00:37:27]So they're moving away from Buddhism.

[00:37:29]They're moving back to restraint, simplicity, subtlety and not big colorful stuff. So that's why if you look at the uh the the so-called five famous wares of the song, you see they're relatively restrained.

[00:37:45]They're not like bright uh colors and so on. It's more like form, glaze, elegance.

[00:37:56]So it's partly this Buddhist confusion thing and this >> and also that um you actually see this aesthetic um starting from the late Tang period >> and um as we've seen from uh some of the tea wares upstairs >> uh is the start of tea culture.

[00:38:18]>> So people were looking for sort of bombs uh to drink tea out appreciate the tea.

[00:38:24]Uh so the uh in terms of the color >> the bowl shape >> the the florate shapes of the bowl the purity of the glaze so you tended to have like white and green and maybe some brown.

[00:38:38]>> Yeah.

[00:38:38]>> Yeah.

[00:38:40]>> So tea wears of course and the whole tea culture and again we've just had a tea culture CTN exhibit outside here at the ACM.

[00:38:50]>> Yeah. But of course >> very important >> substrand of the material culture of China.

[00:38:55]>> Yeah.

[00:38:56]>> Korea, >> Japan >> and and as as Dr. Wong says t simplicity in tiw right like the brown like the genyao which the Japanese call timoku >> but of course >> which came from the tongue.

[00:39:10]>> Yes. And of course like we were discussing earlier on it's a different way of drinking tea. they cooked the tea rather than um sort of immerse it like we do today. But the idea of drinking tea as a form of cultivation really started in the late tank period and along with the ceramics as well.

[00:39:32]>> Yeah. talking about tea I think most of us are familiar with matcha and you know there's a shortage of matcha now but um actually that practice of grinding tea to very very fine powder started around the s dynasty and prior to that you know you know the town they were cooking with spices which I think is similar to our lea today the kind of taste and then it was quite a big kind of they couldn't grind too fine and in son they had actually the tea mill in which it became really really powdery and along you know it became so commercialized that you know mills were set up along the river and there were like a massive production of the tea powder in that way and that spread with Buddhism to Japan. So I think that is something that I find quite interesting whenever we share people always think of something but they didn't know really the origin of that and why it happened.

[00:40:21]>> There's quite a lot of similarity between the son style tea uh workshop we saw as the current day Japanese tea ceremony.

[00:40:29]>> Absolutely. and the and the Japanese tea wear came originally from the tongue and later from the to >> some of it through Korea and it reflects that uh so wabishabi restrained Japanese aesthetic rather than bright colorful stuff like lateqing uh polychrome ceramics. It's quite a different strand of restraint and elegance.

[00:40:55]>> Well, time flies when you're having fun.

[00:40:57]We're already a bit overrun, but uh we will stick to our original plan. We can have three questions. Um first one I'll reserve to pampan. I think you said you had some questions, right?

[00:41:08]>> Yeah. I have a question with the blue and white porcelain because we know that it was popular from the UN and then it became export where Ming, but the first one that we saw was the township red which is like hundreds of years ago over. Yeah. So what happened between then? Why wasn't it developed during the Song dynasty?

[00:41:27]That might relate to the fact that the tongue were very much global uh trade, right? As we were just talking about tongue and the abbased caliphate. During the Sun, of course, the land route was cut off because the Jin took over the northern Sun and then southern Sun uh didn't have access to the land route to Afghanistan and Persia where the cobalt came from. So I suspect that part of the reason might have been that it was difficulty getting the you need the cobalt for the blue glaze and it comes from Afghanistan and Persia and the the the land roots at least would have been somewhat cut off during the southern z but then you see they flourished during the UN because it was the Pax Mongolica from Korea to China Eurasia >> all across Eurasia all the way to Baghdad and and uh to the gates of Europe. Uh as Genghis Khan said, I think in my reign, a 9-year-old girl with a purse full of gold can walk across Eurasia and be not molested.

[00:42:34]>> So there was that peace and with that trade and with that trade, the cobalt blue could come in.

[00:42:42]>> Is that right?

[00:42:44]>> I would say yes. uh because uh supplies of cobalt were often very uh irregular and you can see that from what we call transitional period whereas when dynasties when when you're in between dynasties or the start of the dynasty and maybe they are still trying to kind of >> yeah they were they were short of the blue cobalt >> and you can see very >> so if you look at I think 1580 to 1600 they didn't have much cobalt >> so you've got very nice blue glaze on the top of the bowl and you got rather gray, not so good blue on the underneath of the bowl because there wasn't enough cobalt.

[00:43:20]>> But then by the ching obviously >> uh plentiful.

[00:43:24]>> Yeah.

[00:43:24]>> And and the bottom and the top are the same beautiful blue clays.

[00:43:27]>> Yeah. Right.

[00:43:28]>> Interesting.

[00:43:31]>> Yeah.

[00:43:31]>> Anyone from the audience would like to raise a question?

[00:43:36]>> Thank you. That was very interesting. Uh just picking up on the tea culture and all the uh discussion around them. I'm interested in the health care benefit of tea which is obviously tremendous with all the antioxidants and it was even quite global in its effect that when they started exporting tea in Britain and also it became tea drinking because you had to boil the water it actually helped with health. uh any comments you could say across the centuries that you've talked about about any other health care benefit because we know there's a huge culture around traditional Chinese medicines and her herbalism but um any comments from anyone >> maybe something with the the incense >> yeah I was just reading an article in the Harvard Medical Journal that was saying that it's probably a good idea to drink green tea so I think uh we And we don't know all the details of it, but it does seem to have medical benefits. And also, of course, tea drinking is better than wine drinking, which they had a lot of that in the tongue.

[00:44:43]>> Well, um, thank you so much. We started with the question, why do these objects still speak to us after so many years?

[00:44:51]And I think we've heard today is that they never is really about jade or lacquer or gold and silver or glaze. A shang bronze was a way of speaking to heaven. A hanum was a wish for life that doesn't end. A tongue cup was a civilization confident enough to take in the whole world and make it its own. And a sunbo was the discovery that the deepest beauty can lie in restraint. And uh I would like to thank my panelists to join us and friends of the museum and audience here. And thanks for watching.

[00:45:23]And this is the special program to celebrate CGTN's art Berries.