China's Southern Paradise

A survey of art from the lower Yangzi River delta that explores the region's influential role in defining Chinese art throughout history. Focusing on the artistic production and cultural impact of the lower Yangzi River delta, an area known as Jiangnan, this volume features more than 200 objects from Neolithic times through the eighteenth century that range in media from jade, silk, prints, and paintings to porcelain, lacquer, and bamboo carvings. Essays by internationally renowned scholars cover topics such as Jiangnan in poetry, the region's economy, silk production, southern green stoneware, landscape painting, color print production and urban culture, Buddhism, and garden culture. The essays and object entries consider how the region – home to such great cities as Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Nanjing, as well as hilly picturesque landscapes stretched along rivers and lakes – became the epicenter of the Chinese art scene and largely defined the image of traditional China. Presenting both iconic as well as previously unpublished works from collections around the world, this study is the first English-language consideration of a region that through the course of millennia has been one of China's most rich, populous, fertile, and artistically influential areas.