From Buddhism to Nestorian Christianity with Frances Wood

Speaker Bio

Frances Wood studied art at Liverpool Art School before beginning Chinese at the University of Cambridge. She spent the year 1975–6 in the Beijing Languages Institute and Peking University and wrote a PhD thesis for London University on traditional domestic architecture in the Beijing area. She worked in the SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) library before moving to the British Library as curator of the Chinese collections, retiring in 2013. She has written many books on Chinese culture and history includingChinese Illustration (1986), The Blue Guide to China (2002), Did Marco Polo Go To China? (1995), Hand Grenade Practice in Peking (2000), The Silk Road (2003), No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port life in China 1843–1943 (1998), The Forbidden City (2005), The First Emperor of China (2007), The Diamond Sutra: The story of the world’s earliest dated printed book (2010), Chinese Export Paintings in the British Library(2011), and Picnics Prohibited: Diplomacy in a chaotic China during the First World War (2014).