This lecture will explore the dynamic spread of Buddhist print culture in China and beyond, drawing on a wealth of printed books — many bearing illustrations — that were discovered in remote archaeological sites, retrieved from inside statues, or found in museum collections. It will examine Buddhist woodcuts, not merely as static cultural relics, but holistically within multicultural contexts, and as objects on the move, transmitted across a sprawling web of transnational networks, “Buddhist Book Roads.” Prime examples include:
- the world’s earliest dated printed book, the Diamond Sutra (868), discovered in Dunhuang’s “library cave” in northwest China and now in the British Library’s collection
- the exquisite book art of the Lotus Sutra produced in the thriving printing center of Hangzhou in southern China in the twelfth-to-fourteenth centuries, and later widely circulated throughout Japan, Korea, and Central Asia
- previously un-identified printed fragments discovered in Turfan that shed light on a long-distance network of elite Uighurs who migrated from their homeland in Eastern Central Asia to Mongol-Yuan China
- the Dharani Sutra, which became extremely popular in fifteenth-century Beijing, especially among female donors who sought its protective and healing powers to address childbirth complications
But Buddhist woodblock images spread well beyond Asia reaching European audiences by the seventeenth century where they were seen as prime visual examples of Chinese art, religion, and culture. This is evident in four illustrations from a Dutch travel book compiled by Olfert Dapper in 1670. Though copperplate etchings, these illustrations simulate the linear quality of traditional Chinese woodblock prints, which in turn evoke Chinese calligraphic brushstrokes. Their templates are direct copies of the Buddhist frontispieces adorning the Avatamsaka Sutra widely reproduced in south China in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Organised by Dr. Stephen Whiteman, Reader in the Art and Architecture of China, The Courtauld, as part of the research cluster Courtauld Trans Asias.
Speaker
Dr. Shih-shan Susan Huang is an Associate Professor at Rice University’s newly-founded Department of Transnational Asian Studies. Her first book, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Harvard Asian Center, 2012; Chinese translation published by Zhejiang University Press, 2022), investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion. Huang’s second monograph, The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture: Mapping Buddhist Book Roads in China and its Neighbors was published in November 2024 as part of Brill’s series, Crossroads – History of Interaction across the Silk Routes. In this second book, Huang examines a vast cross-section of Buddhist printed text and image, not merely as static cultural relics, but holistically within multicultural contexts related to other cultural products, and as objects on the move, transmitted across a sprawling web of transnational networks, “Buddhist Book Roads”. Among her other numerous articles and publications, along with Patricia Ebrey, she co-edited Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China (Brill, 2017). Huang’s current projects include representations of hellscape in Ming-Qing paintings and prints, Daoist talismans for healing, and Buddhist and Daoist images in 17th century European travel books. For more information, please visit https://shihshansusanhuang.com.
