Configuring Ming-period Buddhist Texts and Images: Continuities and Changes

Speaker: Lucille Chia | 贾晋珠, Professor Emerita, Department of History, UC Riverside

By the Ming, Chinese printed materials displayed a wide range of old and new ways to present texts and images (or more accurately, tu 圖). Although many of these formatting elements are found in Buddhist and other religious works, the mise-en-page of these works also differed sufficiently from non-religious materials to reflect the particular requirements of their contents and of their readers. Moreover, the changes and continuities in configuring text and images in religious works are useful indicators of the changing demands of their readership.

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Lucille Chia (賈晉珠) is Professor emerita of the Department of History at the University of California at Riverside. Her research includes studies on Chinese publishing and book culture from the Song through the early Qing (commercial printing; religious printing, including the production of editions of the Daoist canon and Buddhist canon; etc.). Her most recent study in this area deals with the life and after-lives of the Qisha Buddhist canon, the printing of which took over a hundred years to complete and which remained in distribution for another three hundred years. She has also done research on the influence on Fujian of the early Chinese migration to the Spanish Philippines during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Another of her current projects is a historical (rather than art historical) examination of the rise and decline of ceramics producing centers in south and southeast China, especially in southern Fujian and the Chaozhou area in Guangdong.