Opium-smoking group, toy figures
Executioners, toy figures
Years ago, I took my nephew to visit the
Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. He was five years old at the time, and already a voracious and very astute consumer. He was an avid collector of action figures (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were all the rage) and he possessed an impressive knowledge of the entire toy category. So it was no surprise that en route to the Intrepid, he negotiated that we begin our visit at the gift shop. I was leaving on a trip to Europe the next day, and I asked him what country, were he to travel, would he most like to visit. It took all him of three seconds to answer, “China.” Why China? “Because that’s where they make all the toys.”
Probably 70% of all toys found under the tree this Christmas were manufactured in China, but in 1901, when German linguist and sinologist,
Berthold Laufer embarked upon his three-year shopping spree for the
American Museum of Natural History, China was only just beginning to modernize. American museums were woefully lacking in collections pertaining to Asian cultures and
Franz Boas, the influential anthropologist of the AMNH and Columbia University enlisted Laufer, to change that. As the sole member of the Jacob H. Schiff Expedition, Laufer was charged with studying the history and culture of the Chinese people and acquiring specimens representing every aspect of ordinary Chinese life, including the home, commerce, the arts, and recreation.
Laufer sent back 305 crates containing some 7,500 objects, plus books, rubbings, photos and wax cylinder recordings. The haul accounts for about half of the Chinese objects held by the museum today. In the spirit of the season, I’ve chosen some toys, games, puzzles, etc. from among the 6,500 digitized items available on the
AMNH website.
I started this post quite a while back, after attending a
Bard Graduate Center symposium in 2012,
Anthropology of Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, Afterlives. It was Laurel Kendall of the AMNH whose talk about Laufer's expedition in China prompted my own protracted excursion deep into the vast digital archives of the AMNH. There, you can see Laufer's own field notes along with thousands of objects you will probably never see displayed in the museum.
Box of toy insects
Toy monkey on a swing
Toy axe
Toy bow and pellets
Toy dog
Playing cards
Toy mask
European steam boat, toy
Horse drawing cart, toy
Insect kite
Fish kite
Peach of long life, kite
Two men, kite
Toy cats
Toy figure
Game ball
Magical blocks puzzle
Toy animal
Toy camel
Toy rooster
Toy monkey
Toy elephant
Toy duck
