Word: yuan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Coterie in the Country. As seen in Cleveland, the Yuan period emerges as one of sleek sophistication, technical innovation and fertile alienation. Though the Mongols established peace and reopened trade routes to the West, their court at Peking remained essentially barbaric. They were frank admirers of China's traditional culture and encouraged conservative sculptors to turn out temple and palace art, some of which has been preserved. The Cleveland show includes 15 bronze and wood statues, twelve silver vessels, jade and ivory carvings. Yet for all the emphasis on tradition the period was not stationary. Tremendous strides were made...
...empire overrun by the invading Mongols, China's last Sung emperor was cast into the sea. Kublai Khan became lord of an empire that stretched from Korea to Mesopotamia. In the next 90 years under the Yuan dynasty, which he founded, China experienced what seems to have been a wideranging artistic reorientation. Yet until recently, Chinese scholars could never bring themselves to study in depth this hated era of foreign domination...
Before the Mongols, porcelain was glazed in one color. Under the Yuan rulers, blue-and-white vessels were developed, and became widely popular. One of the 32 pieces in the Cleveland show belonged to the 17th century Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan, builder of India's Taj Mahal. Among other exports on exhibit are Chinese silks found in Arab tombs in Africa and early carved cinnebar lacquerware, lent by a Japanese temple. But it was in defiance of Mongol tastes that one of the greatest of China's arts-scroll painting-made the largest advance of all. The most...
Beyond the Great Wall. During the Han Dynasty, there lived an Emperor named Yuan Ti with a harem as big as all the Playboy clubs. He tried manfully to give all his wives the personal touch, but there were so many he never got around to meeting them all. To remedy the situation, his highness had a court painter limn pictures of the girls, then present the likenesses to him. Those that passed the silk-screen test got to play the palace...
...Filthy Soviet revisionist swine!" cried the Peking People's Daily. In Moscow itself, the Chinese charge d'affaires, An Chih-yuan, called his hosts "paper tigers" and warned ominously: "The day will come when we will make the Soviet revisionists repay their blood debts." Since Mao Tse-tung launched his Cultural Revolution, the scale of invective that has long marked relations between Red China and the Soviet Union has risen to new heights of shrillness. Last week, however, even the versatile Chinese language, which lends itself naturally to invective and exaggeration, seemed hardly equal to the task...