Random British Museum

After doing some errands, I found myself close to the British Museum; since I haven't been there in quite some time, I went in to snoop around more of the collection.

There was quite a crowd in the Great Court when I entered the museum, and I joined the people who were waiting to see a performance by the Chinese Children's Centre, in honour of lunar new year. The kids got ready

and started the performance with a bit of dancing,

followed by this solo dancer, who then did a few singing sets as well.

The singing wasn't necessarily to everyone's liking . . . .

These kids played traditional instruments

and were followed by another dancing performance.

Since we hadn't done anything for lunar new year in London, it was nice to see this celebration, but I must admit that my good new year's mood was shattered when I returned home and heard the news that Seoul's Namdaemun (South Gate) had been destroyed in a suspected arson fire. I don't really know how to communicate the way in which this 600-year-old monument (the country's designated number one national treasure) figures in the Korean psyche. Perhaps a succinct indication is that one piece of video news coverage shows a male middle-aged onlooker crying and then falling to the ground in a sorrowful, respectful bow to the dying gate. I find the photos heartbreaking. Namdaemun was the oldest wooden structure in the country, originally built in 1398, then rebuilt in 1447. The former city fortification gate represented a tangible connection with past ancestors as well as the revered quality of resilience, having survived events that were devastating to historic architecture in Seoul, including Manchurian invasion, Japanese invasion, Japanese occupation, and the Korean War. Namdaemun represented history, survival, the Korean spirit. And now it's gone. The government was quick to announce that the gate would be rebuilt over three years and at a cost of £11 million, but, as Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo remarked, such a replica will lack the emotional resonance that made the actual structure so important to the country--the 21st-century Namdaemun will look like the old Namdaemun, but the actual connection with the past cannot be rebuilt. Anyway, I wouldn't find out about all of this until I got home, so for the rest of afternoon I thought about seeing the tangible past in a positive way, through the amazing range of artifacts I encountered on my random stroll through the museum, so let's get back to that . . . . This top portion of a 1270 BC statue of King Ramesses II comes from his mortuary temple in Thebes:

This 530 BC sarcophagus originally belonged to Ankhnesneferibre, the last "God's Wife of Amun,"

but was reused during Roman times by a priest, who added a new inscription and even changed the pronouns in the text!

This tiny Thebes hedgehog contained perfume in sixth-century BC:

More striking perhaps is the statuette known as "The Ram in the Thicket," although it actually represents a goat. Found in a grave in the royal cemetery of Ur (southern Iraq), the gold figure dates to 2600 BC.

Also excavated from the royal graves was the "Standard of Ur," given that name because it was originally presumed to be carried as a standard on a pole. Its exact use remains unclear, but it remains remarkable for containing one of the first known representations of a Sumerian army on one side, along with a peaceful banquet scene on the other side. You can guess which side this is:

A Babylonian stone kudurru (1099-1082 BC) documents the king giving a faithful officer a gift of land, while also cursing any government official who questions the gift. Amusingly, a later inscription (perhaps by a curse-fearing official) confirms the gift is considered tax-free.

Speaking of curses, these tiny demon amulets (2000-500 BC) are made of shells and were found in Ur:

I found these tiny bronze trumpeters (6th-8th century Anatolia)

and this equally wee gold chariot (5th-4th century BC, Tadjikistan) charming.

This next piece had me gazing into the display case, thinking about the craziness of London. The helmet is the only Iron Age helmet to be found in southern England, and the only such horned helmet found in all of Europe. Dating to 150-50 BC, it was found in the 1860s in the Thames near Waterloo Bridge!

Also excavated from the Thames, near Battersea Bridge, was this shield-piece:

Both items are thought to be ornamental, since they are rather impractical for actual use in battle, but that doesn't make their discoveries any less remarkable. At this point, my path became even more random, since some of the museum galleries are undergoing renovation, with some corridors being cut off. I just kept walking where the building would let me, and ended up at the most remarkable sight, albeit one that I somehow couldn't bring myself to photograph: Lindow Man. Tucked into one dark corner of an almost empty gallery (with many of the other rooms being incredibly packed today), it was a bit shocking to come across such a striking sight without any warning. Lindow Man will be sent to The Manchester Museum in April for a year's loan, so if you're in London and you've not yet seen this amazing sight, you have a few months left before you'll have to wait more than a year for another chance. More walking, some stairs, and I found myself thrust into more contemporary times, looking at the plates that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for his 1922 Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (the hotel has since been demolished).

I've never been a fan of chokers, but this Art Nouveau piece, meant to be pinned onto the front of a choker, was incredibly beautiful (designed by René Lalique in 1900, Paris).

When I think about the British Museum, I think about artifacts in glass cases, but I didn't know that it also contains a Department of Prints and Drawings, considered one of the top three such collections in the world. At any given time, a small selection of the holdings are on rotating display, and it was into this room that I wandered next. Eduardo Paolozzi's Marine Composition (1950)

and Prunella Clough's Still Life on Modelling Stand (1951) were two lithographs that I especially liked.

I next ended up in the Asian galleries of the museum, where Wu Guanzhong's enormous scroll painting Paradise for Small Birds (1989) took my breath away. For almost a decade during China's Cultural Revolution, he was banned from teaching, writing, and painting, and later confined and sentenced to hard labour for his views.

Yang Yanping's Autumn Lotus Pond (1985) depicts one of her favourite scenes, one that holds special resonance for her ever since she was struck by the resilience of the neglected plants one autumn day. She has said that "[t]he twists and turns of every stem were testimony of a stubborn fight against the passage of nature. This pathetic sight, set in the glowing light of an autumn sun, seemed to reveal the lotus as the representative of all living things."

Huang Miaozi's Sparrows in Snow

and The Gentlemanly Scholar (1994)

both contain critiques (in their poems and the images themselves) of the fickle qualities of Chinese politics and scholars. Made in the late 1800s, this Japanese box of interlocking birds was used to store letters and poem cards:

This Korean paduk (Go) set dates from the Chosun Dynasty (18th-19th century). The wooden board is filled with stretched wires that resonate with the sound of the shell and stone pieces being slapped on the board. My dad would like this, since he claims that you have to really slap your paduk pieces down; just quietly setting them on the board isn't the proper way to play! (He does this with his Scrabble tiles too, in spite of me pointing out that Scrabble isn't paduk.)

This Ming Dynasty figure (16th century) is one of two assistants to one of the ten judges of hell. As a way of measuring up an individual, this assistant holds the sum of a person's good deeds in life,

while his more surly counterpart lugs around a record of the person's cumulative sins!

A faded 15th-century painting of three Bodhisattvas, done by Hebei-province monks, hangs behind (from left to right) a 16th-century Daoist figure, a Buddhist saint who has achieved nirvana (907-1125), and Budhi, a fat, smiling monk who is sometimes considered to be the future Buddha (1486).

These impressive pottery figures are from the tomb of a Tang Dynasty official who died in 728:

The last photo from today's visit is of a long-tongued monster, a shaman guardian in a 4th-3rd-century-BC Hunan-province tomb:

On my way home, I stopped in front of a house that I've recently passed many times on double-decker buses and whose front lawn has made me smile, even (especially?) on days when it was pouring.