INTRODUCTION: THE LIVES OF OBJECTS

This chapter examines the lives of a set of five Chinese Buddhist deity figures in Liverpool Museum, from 1867 to 1997. The largest figure, an almost-life-size bronze statue of the Goddess of Compassion, Guanyin (see Fig 12.1), probably dates from the early 15th century. The other four – Wenshu, Puxian, Weituo and Guangong – are early 17th-century creations. All five belonged to a temple on Putuo Island, off the east coast of China. For over a thousand years this was one of the most important Buddhist pilgrimage sites in the country, devoted to the worship of Guanyin. The statues were taken from their temple in the 1840s by a British soldier just after the First Opium War (1839–42). Once transported to England, they appeared at the Great Exhibition in 1851 and the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, and were auctioned at Sotheby's two years later. After passing through the hands of antiquarian collectors, the Chinese statues were accessioned into Liverpool Museum in 1867, where they remain to this day (Tythacott 2009, 90–97).

This chapter draws upon igor Kopytoff's essay, ‘The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process’ (1986), in order to examine the biographies of these figures at Liverpool Museum. Kopytoff was the first to suggest that objects, like people, have ‘social lives’. Just as we may analyse the biography of a person, he argued, so too it is possible to examine the lives of objects and ask of them similar questions: