Ancient Languages and Civilizations Tea, Fragrance, Music

This book changes the way how we research on the formation of scholar-artist communities. It argues to attend to ephemeral artistic practices and sensory experiences that are often ignored in historical studies due to the lack of evidence. This book explores one of the central questions among many disciplines: how communities are formed. It investigates this question through the perspectives of scholar-artist communities in Northern Song China. You will learn how some of the then popular ephemeral artistic practices, such as whisking tea, burning aromatic substances, and playing and listening to qin music, were performed. Through these practices related sensory experiences were generated. The formation process of communities involved many other aspects such as the interplay among people, materials, ephemeral arts, and sensory experiences, which is hard to identify in pure textual sources.