Artisans in China

Capturing China’s past in all its complexity, this multi-faceted history portrays China in the context of a larger global world, while incorporating the narratives of Chinese as well as non-Chinese ethnic groups and discussing people traditionally left out of the story—peasants, women, merchants, and artisans.

Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France constructs the first cultural history of porcelain-making in France. It takes its title from two types of “bodies” treated in this study: the craft of porcelain, making shaped clods of earth into a clay body to produce high-end commodities, and the French elite shaping human bodies into social subjects with the help of makeup, stylish patterns, and accessories.

In the mid-1950s about 1800 Kazak refugees settled in Turkey. They had left Xinjiang in the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s due to the political changes in northwestern China.