In the spring of 1966, a number of large wooden crates arrived at the gate of George Watson’s College in Edinburgh. Few at the time knew that these crates contained the collection of Sir James Stewart Lockhart, an alumnus of the College, who had enjoyed an extraordinary career in Hong Kong and northern China as a British colonial officer. This talk will explore the biography of Sir James Lockhart in Hong Kong (1879-1902), a life that was interwoven with events of both local and global significance, through the little-known Lockhart collection of Chinese art in the National Museum of Scotland.
Dr Qin Cao is Curator of the Chinese collections at National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK. She studied Archaeology for her BA at Nanjing University and then her MA at University College London. She obtained a DPhil on the subject of Shang dynasty weapons from the University of Oxford in collaboration with the British Museum. Dr Cao has interned and worked at a number of heritage institutions, including the Bangkok office of UNESCO; Jinsha Site Museum, Chengdu, China and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. In 2012, she joined the British Museum as part of their Future Curators programme and also worked at the Manchester Museum. Her primary interest is Chinese material culture, in particular bronzes of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, and numismatics.
This lecture is co-presented by The Oriental Ceramic Society of Hong Kong and the Friends of Hong Kong Museum of Art.