The Legacy Of The Tek Sing

The Legacy of the Tek Sing

Chinese Export Porcelains

The blue and white porcelain exported by China in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is an important category of artifacts and antiques, a fashion-sensitive commodity that was affected by the ebbs and flows of style and consumer demand. In this copiously illustrated, comprehensive guide to Chinese export porcelain, Andrew Madsen offers both a broad overview and detailed identification and context information for the most common styles and motifs. His focus on the determination of manufacture dates, which are based primarily on data collected from armorial decorated export wares, porcelain cargoes from dated shipwrecks, and tightly dated archaeological contexts, will allow students, scholars, and collectors to refine associations with Chinese export porcelain, revealing the untapped quantity of information that mass-produced Chinese export porcelain has to offer.

Cultural Property and Contested Ownership

Against the backdrop of international conventions and their implementation, Cultural Property and Contested Ownership explores how highly-valued cultural goods are traded and negotiated among diverging parties and their interests. Cultural artefacts, such as those kept and trafficked between art dealers, private collectors and museums, have become increasingly localized in a ‘Bermuda triangle’ of colonialism, looting and the black market, with their re-emergence resulting in disputes of ownership and claims for return. This interdisciplinary volume provides the first book-length investigation of the changing behaviours resulting from the effect of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. The collection considers the impact of the Convention on the way antiquity dealers, museums and auction houses, as well as nation states and local communities, address issues of provenance, contested ownership, and the trafficking of cultural property. The book contains a range of contributions from anthropologists, lawyers, historians and archaeologists. Individual cases are examined from a bottom-up perspective and assessed from the viewpoint of international law in the Epilogue. Each section is contextualised by an introductory chapter from the editors.