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Difficult Histories: Changing presentations of the Liao in regional museums in the People's Republic of China over three decades

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2013

NAOMI STANDEN  and
GWEN BENNETT
NAOMI STANDEN
Affiliation:
School of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham, UK Email: [email protected]
GWEN BENNETT
Affiliation:
Departments of Anthropology and East Asian Studies, McGill University, Canada Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Museums have long been thought to be vital contributors to nation building and the creation of identity narratives, yet the stories they tell must be negotiated within the constraints set by differing levels of interpretive freedom. This paper examines how museum exhibitions changed between 1982 and 2009 at the museums serving the five capital sites of the non-Chinese Kitan-Liao dynasty (907–1125). While some of these places, such as Beijing, have now become unquestionably central to the national narrative, others are deep in rural areas and are peripheral even to provincial concerns. Exhibitions at these five museums vary considerably in the degree to which they either consider the Kitan and the Liao dynasty in their own right or attempt to place them within a national narrative. The wide range of approaches reflects the differing present-day concerns of the museums’ host locations, as well as the new multivocality that is developing in—among other places—China's regional cultural institutions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 6 , November 2014 , pp. 1519 - 1565
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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