LAI Yu-chih：”Casting the Territory: A Study of Two Cabinets of Coins from the Qianlong Period in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg”, Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Vol. 101 (2018), pp.1-62. (more…)
55. Paizi – printed colophons and Chinese charms
David Helliwell of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, writes the excellent blog Serica – some notes on old Chinese books. In his latest post he included an illustration of a paizi 牌子 (literally, a “plaque”). It reminded me of pieces in the BM’s collection of Chinese charms. Was there a connection? (more…)
54. Dictionary of modern Chinese banking organizations and people
Many thanks to Ms WU Danmin 吴旦敏, numismatist at the Shanghai Museum for donating this book to the British Museum. (more…)
53. The Millenium Medal, by Marian Fountain
I came across “The Millenium Medal” by Marian Fountain last week. I’ve known her name and some of her work for a long time, but had never seen this medal before. Intrigued by the way it references East Asian coins, I asked if she’d tell us more about it. I’m very grateful to Marian for writing this post, and for sharing these images with us, and also to Dr Alexander Chang for agreeing to share his response to the medal. (more…)
52. Workshop: Eastern Zhou Metal Technologies (21 Sept 2018)
A one-day workshop to explore the scientific study of metal technologies in the Eastern Zhou period (770-221 BC) in China and to present the most recent studies on Eastern Zhou bronzes from the Houma foundry in the British Museum collection. (more…)
51. Waves of Globalization – the XVIII World Economic History Congress
The XVIII World Economic History Conference took place in Boston last week. The theme was “Waves of Globalization” – the programme is available online here . I was going to pick out the papers relating to China, but there are so many and, as the theme is “globalization”, it would have taken too long. Instead, I’ve listed the panels below (highlighting in bold any panels with the words China, Chinese, Asia, Japan, or silver in the title). (more…)
50. The use of silver ingots in Ming dynasty tax payment
LI Xiaoping 李晓萍 , of the Zhejiang Provincial Museum 浙江省博物馆, has authored several books on silver currency, and edited Academic Conference Proceedings of Gold and Silver Currency and Social Life. (She publishes under two different names, which look the same in the romanised form – LI Xiaoping – but have different characters for Xiao: 李晓萍 and 李小萍) (more…)
