Smithsonian Events - One Time

Keynote and reception: Thursday, March 7: 6–8 p.m. 
Symposium: Friday, March 8: 10 a.m.–5:15 p.m.
 
To celebrate the National Museum of Asian Art’s centennial in 2023, the museum organized Anyang: China’s Ancient City of Kings, an exhibition devoted to the art and archaeology of the last capital of the Shang dynasty. Occupied between roughly 1250 BCE and 1050 BCE, the Anyang site is associated with the earliest surviving corpus of Chinese writing; palatial building foundations; immense underground royal tombs; large-scale human sacrifice; the arrival of horses and chariots in China; and an extensive system of urban factories, where sophisticated goods in a variety of materials, including bone, jade, ceramic, and bronze, were manufactured at an industrial scale. Drawn exclusively from the museum’s collections, the exhibit features over two hundred remarkable artifacts that can be linked with Anyang and other material cultures contemporary with the Shang, including ornaments, ritual vessels, bells, weapons, and chariot fittings. 
 
In conjunction with this exhibition, the museum is holding a two-day international symposium in Washington, DC. Bringing together specialists from a range of disciplines, the program will speak to the primary topics addressed in the exhibition, including the twentieth-century discovery of the Shang city and the advent of Chinese archaeology, the infrastructure that supported daily life at Anyang, the role of writing in its bureaucratic administration, and the evolution of design and technology reflected in the products created in the city’s various craft workshops. 

Speakers include: 

• Robert Bagley, Princeton University 
• Cao Dazhi, Peking University 
• Yung-ti Li, University of Chicago 
• Ariel O'Connor, National Museum of Asian Art 
• Kyle Steinke, National Museum of Asian Art 
• Donna Strahan, National Museum of Asian Art 
• Tang Jigen, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 
• Wang Haicheng, University of Washington 
• Keith Wilson, National Museum of Asian Art

This program is generously supported by an anonymous donor.

Image: National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Photo by Colleen Dugan; background images: Courtesy of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica