Zhao Feng will be coming to speak at the Seminar in Comparative Medieval Material Culture (China, Islam, Europe) on Wednesday, October 31, 2012. His talk is entitled “Silks from West and East: A Study on the Textiles from TAM170, Astana, Turfan, Xinjiang.”

Zhao Feng is Executive Director of the China National Silk Museum in Hangzhou. He is also Director of the Chinese Center for Textile Identification and Conservation, a Directing Member of the Centre international d’étude des textiles anciens (CIETA) in Lyon, and Professor at Donghua University in Shanghai. He received his doctorate from the China Textile University (now Donghua University) in 1997 and subsequently was a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is the author of six monographs on Chinese silk textiles and editor of eleven more, including: The Art History of Silk Textiles(1992), Tang-Dynasty Silks and the Silk Road (1992), Liao Textile and Costumes (2004), and Textiles from Dunhuang in UK Collections (2007). More recently, he co-authored a catalogue with Qi Dongfang for the Sackler Museum in Beijing on Western-Style Designs on Textiles of the Silk Road from the 4th to 8th Centuries(2011) and a new history of Chinese silk (Yale 2012) with Dieter Kuhn.

In his talk, Professor Zhao will re-examine the textiles discovered in the 1970s in tomb no. 170 at Astana, Turfan, in Chinese Central Asia. The tomb, which could be dated to the sixth century, contained three corpses and a large amount of well-preserved silk textiles. At the same time, archaeologists discovered three inventories naming silks from both Persia and the northern Chinese Wei dynasty. This rare find still proves crucial to our understanding of medieval textile consumption, trade, and technology.

Light refreshments will be served at 5:45 pm. The presentation will begin at 6:00 pm.

RSVP is required.

PLEASE NOTE that our Lecture Hall can only accommodate a limited number of people, so please come early if you would like to have a seat in the main room. We also have overflow seating available; all registrants who arrive late will be seated in the overflow area.