Tea, Fragrance, and Music - Ancient Languages and Civilizations by Kin Sum Li Hardcover

About the Book

This book changes the way how we research on the formation of scholar-artist communities. It argues to attend to ephemeral artistic practices and sensory experiences that are often ignored in historical studies due to the lack of evidence.

Book Synopsis

This book explores one of the central questions among many disciplines: how communities are formed. It investigates this question through the perspectives of scholar-artist communities in Northern Song China. You will learn how some of the then popular ephemeral artistic practices, such as whisking tea, burning aromatic substances, and playing and listening to qin music, were performed. Through these practices related sensory experiences were generated. The formation process of communities invovled many other aspects such as the interplay among people, materials, ephemeral arts, and sensory experiences, which is hard to identify in pure textual sources.

About the Author

Kin Sum (Sammy) LI, PhD (Princeton 2015), is Associate Professor at the Department of History, Hong Kong Baptist University. He has published articles on the history of mass production in the ancient world and he attempts to study industrial art with the assistance of modern technology. Recently he develops an interest in the history of tea cultures.