Art, Religion, and Politics in Medieval China : The Dunhuang Cave of the Zhai Family

The cave-temple complex popularly known as the Dunhuang caves is the world's largest extant repository of Tang Buddhist art. Among the best preserved of the Dunhuang caves is the Zhai Family Cave, built in 642. It is this remarkable cave-temple that forms the focus of Ning Qiang's cross-disciplinary exploration of the interrelationship of art, religion, and politics during the Tang. The author combines, in his careful examination of the paintings and sculptures found there, the historical study of pictures with the pictorial study of history. By employing this two-fold approach, he is able to refer to textual evidence in interpreting the formal features of the cave temple paintings and to employ visual details to fill in the historical gaps inevitably left by text-oriented scholars. The result is a comprehensive analysis of the visual culture of the period and a vivid description of social life in medieval China. The original Zhai Family Cave pictures were painted over in the tenth century and remained hidden until the early 1940s. Once exposed, the early artwork appeared fresh and colorful in comparison with other Tang paintings at Dunhuang. The relatively fine condition of the Zhai Family Cave is crucial to our understanding of the original pictorial program found there and offers a unique opportunity to investigate the visual details of the original paintings and sculptures in the cave. At the same time, the remaining traces of reconstruction and redecoration provide a new perspective on how, for over three centuries, a wealthy Chinese clan used its familial cave as a political showcase. color & b/w illus

In this groundbreaking work, Susan L. Burns examines the history of leprosy in Japan from medieval times until the present. At the center of Kingdom of the Sic  is the rise of Japan's system of national leprosy sanitaria, which today continue to house more than 1,500 former patients, many of whom have spent five or more decades within them.

Burns argues that long before the modern Japanese government began to define a policy toward leprosy, the disease was already profoundly marked by ethical and political concerns and associated with sin, pollution, heredity, and outcast status. Beginning in the 1870s, new anxieties about race and civilization that emanated from a variety of civic actors, including journalists, doctors, patent medicine producers, and Christian missionaries transformed leprosy into a national issue. After 1900, a clamor of voices called for the quarantine of all sufferers of the disease, and in the decades that followed bureaucrats, politicians, physicians, journalists, local communities, and leprosy sufferers themselves grappled with the place of the biologically vulnerable within the body politic. At stake in this "citizenship project" were still evolving conceptions of individual rights, government responsibility for social welfare, and the delicate balance between care and control.

Refusing to treat leprosy patients as simply victims of state power, Burns recovers their voices in the debates that surrounded the most controversial aspects of sanitarium policy, including the use of sterilization, segregation, and the continuation of confinement long after leprosy had become a curable disease. Richly documented with both visual and textual sources and interweaving medical, political, social, and cultural history, Kingdom of the Sick tells an important story for readers interested in Japan, the history of medicine and public health, social welfare, gender and sexuality, and human rights.

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Map of the Silk Road Chronology of the Mogao Caves Introduction 1. Iconography of the Original Early Tang Paintings: A Reexamination 2. Reconstruction: Historical Layers of the Zhai Family Cave 3. Historical and Cultural Values of the Zhai Family Cave Appendix One. Illustrations of the Bhaiṣajya-guru Sūtra In The Mogao Caves Appendix Two. Illustrations of the Western Paradise in the Mogao Caves Appendix Three. Illustrations of the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa Sūtra in the Mogao Caves Notes List of Chinese Characters Works Cited Index About the Author