This is a seat for a leader, for the chief of a village or a region. Taino leaders were both male and female, and the duho embodied their social, political and religious power, and it was crucial to the functioning of their society. We know that in a...
The Taino people believed that they lived in parallel with an invisible world of ancestors and gods, from whom their leaders could seek knowledge of the future. A duho would be owned only by the most important members of a community, and it was the v...
Within a century of the arrival of the Spanish, most of the Taino would have died of European diseases, and their land would have been shared out among the European conquerors. It was a pattern that we repeated across the Americas, but the Taino were...
065:EPISODE 65 - Taino Ritual Seat泰诺仪式用椅 Taino ritual seat (made between thirteenth and fifteenth century). Wooden stool; from the Dominican Republic This week we've been talking about high-status objects that belonged to leaders and th...
So, eventually, centuries after its creation in Muslim Iran, and its transformation in Mongol China, blue-and-white arrived in Europe and triumphed. Willow-pattern, the style that many people think of when blue-and-white is mentioned, was invented in...
Foreign rulers, the Mongols; foreign materials, Muslim blue; and foreign markets, Iran and Iraq; all played an essential part in the creation of what to many outside China is still the most Chinese of objects, blue-and-white porcelain. Soon these cer...
Zhang Wenjin, from Jingtang community, Dejiao village, Shuncheng township, Yushan county, Xinzhou circuit, a disciple of the Holy Gods, is pleased to offer a set comprising one incense-burner and a pair of flower vases to General Hu Jingyi at the Ori...
Iran, and what's now Iraq, are the kind of areas where this sort of colouring comes in. This is a technique that comes from elsewhere, and therefore it tells us something about this period, when China is unprecedentedly open to the rest of Asia as pa...
Porcelain is a special ceramic fired at very high temperature: 1200-1400 degrees centigrade. The heat vitrifies the clay, so that like glass it can hold liquid, in contrast to porous earthenware. And the heat also makes it very tough. White, hard and...
Seven hundred years ago most of Asia and a large part of Europe were reeling from the invasions of the Mongols. We all know Genghis Khan as the ultimate destroyer and the sack of Baghdad by his son still lives in Iraqi folk memory. Genghis's grandson...