The face of the British Museum’s big summer show, China’s Hidden Century, is that of an elderly woman wearing jade earrings, dressed in a blue robe with ornate gold embroidery decorating its collar.
It is an image painted, we discover in the exhibition, by an unidentified artist in the Guangzhou area around 1876, as one of a pair. Lady Li is her name. Her husband, Lu Xifu, appears in the other image. All the information about them is contained in the script above the portraits. She managed the family household. He was a businessmen. That’s pretty much all that is known.
Making the vast sweep of Chinese history human and accessible has never been easy, particularly for non-Chinese audiences. The approach of China’s Hidden Century is to focus on details – on ornaments, clothes and artefacts – the sorts of things that figured in daily life in the 19th century.
