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Olivia Milburn. Cherishing Antiquity: The Cultural Construction of an Ancient Chinese Kingdom. HarvardYenching Institute Monograph Series. Nonfiction. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Asia Center. 2013. 392 pages. $39.95 USD. ISBN 9780674726680
Cherishing Antiquity: The Cultural Construction of an Ancient Chinese Kingdom investigates the history of famous figures, objects, and physical structures or sites related to the ancient southern kingdom of Wu, which collapsed 473 BCE. It is a highly informed and broad-ranging account of the remnants of tales and objects as they have changed and developed from ancient times to the present. Milburn takes as her archive a variegated array of materials and texts, including Zhou Dynasty bronze inscriptions, pictorial mirrors of the Eastern Han, tombs, sites, gazetteers, ancient chronicles and treatises, poems, and more. Such an inquiry reveals not only the complicated lives and afterlives of historical figures and lore associated with this once-peripheral, ancient, and non-Hua (non-Chinese) state, but also sheds light upon the accumulated nature of group memory as it is embedded in the stories and objects under discussion.
In the introduction, Milburn explains that the...