IMEMS Research Showcase: Professor Dame Jessica Rawson (University of Oxford), “The Great Wall of China: An Eternal Symbol of China’s Distinctive Culture”.

Too often we look at China and judge its culture in our Western terms. The talk will introduce the landfall and the climate that determined both China’s ancient culture and its relations with Eurasia and the West. Our foods, our architecture and our beliefs are different. They are indeed so different that they form a wall, a barrier to understanding and even appreciation. There are no stone buildings in central China before the modern era and no paired institutions of State and Church. Instead, we shall look at why in China and across all of East Asia ceremonial buildings are of wood, standing on earthen platforms. And in place of the paired intuitions of Church and State governed by rules, we find a culture in which the word, the character, carries power.