Treasures from Tang China: Two Chapters from Saved from Desert Sands: Re-Discovering Objects on the Silk Roads

China Research Seminar Series talk given by Kelsey Granger University of Edinburgh and Hajni Elias University of Cambridge.

The re-discovery of forgotten manuscript archives and sand-buried cities in the twentieth century has brought to light thousands of manuscripts and artefacts from the Tarim Basin and Taklamakan Desert. To date, preserved textual content has largely been prioritised over unearthed physical objects in scholarship, but the material aspects of these objects are just as important. Saved from Desert Sands, edited by Kelsey Granger and Imre Galambos, united historians, codicologists, art historians, archaeologists, and curators in the study of material culture on the Silk Roads. The volume, a direct result of FAMES’ Dunhuang and the Silk Road Seminar series, has now been published with Brill (https://brill.com/display/title/69897). 

In this seminar, editor Kelsey Granger will introduce the volume Saved from Desert Sands and present her own research on Tang ceramics of seated ladies. She will be joined by volume contributor Hajni Elias who will discuss an intriguing silver dish and its connections with the Belitung Shipwreck. Covering the overland and maritime trade routes, these talks use prestige goods to uncover the religious, economic, and social history of Tang China.

Kelsey Granger is a sinologist and historian of dynastic China and the wider Silk Roads, specialising in material culture, gender, and animal history. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2022 with a thesis focusing on lapdog-keeping among elite women in seventh–tenth century China. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh once again working on the topic of lapdogs, this time in the context of nineteenth-century Britain. She is in the process of preparing her monograph, Sex, Sentiment and Subversion: Women and their Lapdogs in Tang China.

Following an established career at Sotheby’s Chinese Works of Art Department, Hajni Elias obtained her Ph.D. in 2018 from the University of Cambridge. She is currently an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and the History of Art Department. She has widely published articles in the field of Chinese art, history, and culture and is awaiting the publication of her book Remembrance in Clay and Stone: Early Memorial and Funerary Culture of Southwest China (Columbia University Press, 2024).