This beautiful book is the second in a major three-volume series that will survey China’s immense wealth of art, architecture, and artifacts from prehistoric times to the twentieth century. Volume 2 covers the most prolific and broad-ranging period of Chinese art history, from the Song Dynasty with its spectacular landscape paintings to the Ming Dynasty with its lovely pottery.

William Watson considers architecture, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts in equal balance. He follows styles and motifs as they are developed in each medium from one province to another and discusses materials and techniques as well as the iconography and function of every art form. He also explores relationships between one media and another, tracing, for example, the influence of Buddhist iconography on sculptural traditions and on the architecture of temples and towers and showing how ceramic ornament affected the development of ornament in other media.

William Watson is emeritus professor of Chinese art and archaeology at the University of London. He is also the author of The Arts of China to A.D. 900, available in paperback from Yale University Press.