Spotlight On: The Lives of Commoners in Pre-modern China

Join Rare East Asian Collection Curator Xiaoju Liu for a glimpse into the lives of commoners in Pre-modern China, a mostly untold and marginalised history absent from the pages of Dynastic records and historic narratives.

Over the past two centuries archaeological excavations have unearthed historic documents offering new and fragmented insights into the lives of everyday people in a period marked by bureaucratic imperial rule. In this Spotlight program, Xiaoju will discuss rare collection items including two of the earliest known personal letters in Chinese history, written by two brothers fighting in the Qin unification wars, and 10th-century divorce documents. Together these items, among others, illustrate and interrogate the divide between the perspectives captured by official histories and those of ordinary citizens.