Resources

Asian Art Museum Storyteller, Liz Nichols, tells a Japanese story about Amaterasu, the sun goddess, in the museum’s Japan galleries.

Students will use images of samurai armor and weaponry to learn related vocabulary. They will describe the functional and aesthetic aspects of armor through focused viewing and reading, and they will draw conclusions about the changing code of the samurai over the course of 800 years.

Camel, approx. 690–750. China, Shaanxi or Henan province. Tang dynasty (618–906). Glazed earthenware. The Avery Brundage Collection, B60S95.

Buddhism was officially transmitted to Japan in 552, when the monarch of the Korean kingdom of Baekje sent a mission to Japan with gifts, including an image of the Buddha, several ritual objects, and sacred texts. Buddhism’s journey from India to China, Korea, and Japan had taken about a thousand years.

“Asia” is a term invented by the Greeks and Romans, and developed by Western geographers to indicate the land mass east of the Ural Mountains and Ural River, together with offshore islands such as Japan and Java.

The earliest surviving representations of the Buddha date from hundreds of years after his death, so they are not portraits in the usual sense. Buddha images vary greatly from place to place and period to period, but they almost always show these conventional features . . .

A date around 1050 BCE is generally accepted as the date of the defeat of the Shang dynasty (approx. 1500 to 1050 BCE) by Wen Wang and the establishment of the Zhou. The Zhou is divided into Western and Eastern stages, with 771 BCE a critical year, when the Zhou court moved east to Luoyang.

Much of China, a country slightly larger than the continental United States, is hilly or mountainous. To its east lies the Pacific Ocean; to its south thick jungles. Learn more.