Jessica Rawson interviewed by Neil MacGregor

Leading expert in Chinese art and archaeology Professor Dame Jessica Rawson tells the story of Ancient China through a dozen of its extraordinary tombs.

Rawson says that for Ancient China and the China of today ancestors are ever present alongside the living.  She looks at 11 tombs and a major sacrificial deposit from across China and from different historical moments and places to explain what they reveal about wider cultural and political developments. Rawson says the roots of many elements of distinctive Chinese civilisation still in place today are often recorded in how people entered the afterlife rather than in written history.

Rawson is professor of Chinese art and archaeology and a former warden of Merton College, Oxford. She worked in the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum for 20 years before coming to Oxford, including seven years as keeper. She has visited, researched and lectured in most of China’s provinces. Here she talks to art historian and former director of the National Gallery and the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, author of books including A History of the World in 100 Objects and Living with the Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples. From 2015 to 2018 he was founding director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.