The Birth of a Child

When a wife was about to have a child, and the month of her confinement had arrived, she occupied one of the side apartments, where her husband sent twice a day to ask for her. If he so desired, and came himself to ask about her, she did not presume to see him, but made her governess dress herself and reply to him. When the child was born, the husband again sent twice a day to inquire for her. He fasted now, and did not enter the door of the side apartment. If the child were a boy, a bow was placed on the left of the door; and if a girl, a handkerchief on the right of it. After three days the child began to be carried, and some archery was practiced for a boy, but not for a girl.

When a son and heir to the ruler of a state was born, and information of the fact was carried to him, he made arrangements to receive him at a feast where the three animals should all be provided; and the cook took in hand the necessary preparations. On the third day the tortoise-shell was consulted for a good man to carry the child; and he who was the lucky choice, kept a vigil over night, and then in his court robes, received him in his arms outside the chamber. The master of the archers then took a bow of mulberry wood, and six arrows of the wild rubus, and shot towards heaven, earth, and the four cardinal points. After this the nurse received the child and carried it in her arms. The cook at the same time gave a cup of sweet wine to the man who had carried the child, and presented him with a bundle of silks, and the tortoise-shell was again employed to determine the wife of an officer, or the concubine of a Great officer, who should be nurse.

In all cases of receiving a son, a day was chosen; and if it were the eldest son of the king, the three sacrificial animals were killed for the occasion. For the son of a common man, a sucking-pig was killed; for the son of an officer, a single pig; for the son of a Great officer, the two smaller animals; and for the son of the ruler of a state, all the three. If it were not the eldest son, the provision was diminished in every case one degree.

A special apartment was prepared in the palace for the child, and from all the concubines and other likely individuals there was sought one distinguished for her generosity of mind, her gentle kindness, her mild integrity, her respectful bearing, her carefulness and freedom from talkativeness, who should be appointed the boy's teacher; one was next chosen who should be his indulgent mother, and a third who should be his guardian mother. These all lived in his apartment, which others did not enter unless on some special business.

At the end of the third month a day was chosen for shaving off the hair of the child, excepting certain portions,–the horn-like tufts of a boy, and the circlet on the crown of a girl. If another fashion were adopted, a portion was left on the left of the boy's head, and on the right of the girl's. On that day the wife with the son appeared before the father. If they were of noble families, they were both in full dress. From the commissioned officer downwards, all rinsed their mouths and washed their heads. Husband and wife rose early, bathed and dressed as for the feast of the first day of the month. The husband entered the door, going up by the steps on the east, and stood at the top of them with his face to the west. The wife with the boy in her arms came forth from her room and stood beneath the lintel with her face to the east.

The governess then went forward and said for the lady, 'The mother, So and So, ventures today reverently to present to you the child!' The husband replied, 'Reverently teach him to follow the right way.' He then took hold of the right hand of his son, and named him with the smile and voice of a child. The wife responded, 'We will remember. May your words be fulfilled!' She then turned to the left, and delivered the child to his teacher, who on her part told the name all round to the wives of the relatives of all ranks who were present. The wife forthwith proceeded to the festal chamber.

The husband informed his principal officer of the name, and he in turn informed all the young males of the same surname of it. A record was made to the effect--'In such a year, in such a month, on such a day, So and So was born,' and deposited. The officer also informed the secretaries of the hamlets, who made out two copies of it. One of these was deposited in the office of the village, and the other was presented to the secretary of the larger circuit, who showed it to the chief of the circuit; he again ordered it to be deposited in the office of the circuit. The husband meanwhile had gone into the festal chamber, and a feast was celebrated with the ceremonies of that with which a wife first entertains her parents-in-law.

When an heir-son has been born, the ruler washed his head and whole body, and put on his court robes. His wife did the same, and then they both took their station at the top of the stairs on the east with their faces towards the west. One of the ladies of quality, with the child in her arms, ascended by the steps on the west. The ruler then named the child; and the lady went down with it.

A second son or any other son by the wife proper was presented in the outer chamber, when the ruler laid his hand on its head, and with gentle voice named it. The other observances were as before, but without any words.

In naming a son, the name should not be that of a day or a month or of any state, or of any hidden ailment. Sons of Great and other officers must not be called by the same name as the heir-son of the ruler.

When a concubine was about to have a child, and the month of her confinement had arrived, the husband sent once a day to ask for her. When the son was born, at the end of three months, she washed her mouth and feet, adjusted herself early in the morning and appeared in the inner chamber belonging to the wife proper. There she was received with the ceremonies of her first entrance into the harem. When the husband had eaten, a special portion of what was left was given to her by herself; and forthwith she entered on her duties of attendance.

When the child of an inferior member of the ruler's harem was about to be born, the mother went to one of the side apartments, and at the end of three months, having washed her head and person, and put on her court robes, she appeared before the ruler. One of her waiting women also appeared with the child in her arms. If the mother was one to whom the ruler had given special favors, he himself named the son. In the case of such children generally, an officer was employed to name them.

Among the common people who had no side chambers, when the month of confinement was come, the husband left his bed-chamber, and occupied a common apartment. In his inquiries for his wife, however, and on his son's being presented to him, there was no difference from the observances that have been detailed.

In all cases though the father is alive, the grandson is presented to the grandfather, who also names him. The ceremonies are the same as when the son is presented to the father; but there is no interchange of words between the mother and him.

The nurse of the ruler's boy quitted the palace after three years, and, when she appeared before the ruler, was rewarded for her toilsome work. The son of a Great officer had a nurse. The wife of an ordinary officer nourished her child herself.

The son of a commissioned officer and others above him on to the Great officer was presented to the father once in ten days. The eldest son of a ruler was presented to him before he had eaten, when he took him by the right hand; his second or any other son by the wife proper was presented after he had eaten, when he laid his hand on his head.

Unauthorizedly to kill a child is punishable by tattooing and being made a wall builder or a grain-pounder. When a child is newly born and its body is deformed or not whole, to kill it is not to be considered a crime. If when a child is born and the child's body is whole and not deformed--merely for the reason that one has too many children and does not wish that it should live, and consequently not to lift it up but to kill it, how is this to be sentenced? This is (a case of) killing a child.

Mencius' mother lived near a cemetery when Mencius was small and he enjoyed going out to play as if he were working among the graves. Mencius enthusiastically made tombs and performed burials. His mother said, "This is no place to raise my son!" So they moved and dwelt next to the city market. But when her son began amusing himself by pretending to be a merchant, Mencius' mother once again said, "This is no place to raise my son." 1 Once again they moved, settling this time, beside a school. Here, the boy played at arranging sacrificial vessels and the rituals of bowing, yielding, entering and withdrawing. Mencius's mother said, "Here indeed is a place to raise my son." And that is where they stayed. When Mencius grew up he studied the Six Arts. 2 In the end he became a famous scholar. The gentleman says, "Mencius' mother understood enculturation by immersion." 3. . . .

When Mencius was young, after finishing his studies he returned home. At that moment, Mencius' mother was weaving. She asked him, saying, "How far did you get in your studies today?" Mencius replied, "About the same as usual." Mencius' mother then took up her knife and cut the cloth she was weaving. Mencius became alarmed and asked her to explain her actions. She said, "Your neglecting your studies is like my cutting the cloth I wove. Now a gentleman studies in order to establish his reputation, he asks questions to broaden his knowledge. This is the means by which he obtains peace and happiness at home and avoids harm when he goes abroad. If now, you neglect your studies, you will be unable to avoid a life of menial service and will lack the means to distance yourself from trouble and strife. How is it different from weaving and spinning to make a living? If midway I give up and abandon my weaving, how would I be able to clothe my husband and child and go for long without grain to eat? If a woman who abandons her livelihood and a man who neglects cultivating his virtue do not become burglars or thieves, then they will end their days as slaves." Mencius was frightened by his mother's words. Day and night he studied tirelessly. He then studied with the great master Zisi until he became one of the leading scholars of his generation. 4

1. Hsiung, Ping-chen. A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 103-27.
   This reading helps contextualize Primary Source No. 6 (early education). Since my module focuses on early China, Hsiung's book is an excellent introduction to the history of childhood in mid- and late imperial China
2. Kinney, Anne. Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 53-96.
   This reading provides further discussion of the parents' right of life and death over their offspring and may be used to supplement primary Source No. 3. The entire book also provides copious materials to contextualize all of the primary sources in this module.
3. Waltner, Ann. “Infanticide and Dowry in Ming and Early Qing China.” In Chinese Views of Childhood, edited by Anne Kinney, 193-218. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995.
   While this book is useful for providing background for this module, Waltner's article that discusses the link between the practice of female infanticide and girls' prospects for marriage can help contextualize Primary Source no. 3 (infanticide) as well as Primary Source No. 4 (A Girl prodigy).
4. Waltner, Ann. “Representations of Children in Three Stories from Biographies of Exemplary Women.” In Children in Chinese Art, edited by Ann Barrott Wicks, 84-107. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2002.
   This article, one of many useful resources in the book in which it appears, discusses several different depictions of the story relayed in Primary Source no. 1—the childhood of the philosopher Mencius (Mengzi)—and the cultural connotations of each individual representation. An additional illustration of this story appears in Hsiung's book (cited above), on p. 138.

by Jessica Hodgson
(Suggested writing time: 50 minutes)

Using the images and texts in the documents provided, write a well organized essay of at least five paragraphs in response to the following prompt:

• Evaluate the purpose and role of education for children in Ancient China.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following institutions for primary sources:

• E.J. Brill,
• Penguin Books,
• Shandong Cultural Relics and Archeology Institute,
• Stanford University Press,
• University Books,
• University of Hawaii Press,
• University of Virginia,
• Shandong Provincial Museum,
• Wenwu chubanshe, and
• Zhonghua shuju.

About the Author

Anne Kinney is a Professor of Chinese at the University of Virginia. Among her recent publications are Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China and The Establishment of the Han Empire and Imperial China. She is currently at work on an annotated translation of Lienüzhuan (Traditions of Exemplary Women) and a digital research collection for the study of women in early China.

About the Lesson Plan Author

Jessica Hodgson teaches Advanced Placement World History and World History and Geography at South County Secondary School in Fairfax County, VA. She has traveled to China as part of a Fulbright-Hays seminar, is a National Writing Project alumnus and has studied the life, music and history of J. S. Bach through a National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute. When she is not teaching, she plays the cello with an amateur string quartet.

The unprecedented interest in the child who assumed unique importance in the Han period was set into motion by a convergence of historically-specific conditions: (1) the establishment in the Qin dynasty (221-207 BCE) and the further development in Han times (206 BCE-220 CE) of a merit-based civil service, which increased the educational and occupational opportunities of boys moving up the social ladder; (2) and the frequency with which children came to the throne unprepared to govern; (3) the attempt to further the Confucian project by advising women about various methods of child-rearing and instruction for young children; (4) the effort to educate girls about their proper roles in society because of an increasing anxiety over the influence of women in political events; (5) the growing influence of Han Confucianism, which stressed early education and argued for the establishment of a large-scale public school system; (6) the new centrality of correlative and occult thought which linked the child to cosmic processes and by extension to all of the major disciplines of intellectual inquiry; (7) the formation of a textual canon, which defined cultural mastery and established a clear standard by which to measure achievement; (8) the emergence of biographical writing which took into account significant events of childhood. What follows is an elaboration on the factors and forces that led to the emergence of the child as a topic of significant cultural attention.

What contributed to the rising recognition of children's important in Han society was the consolidation of a unified empire that depended in part on a meritocratic system of advancement for its civil and military officials. The large-scale and complex activities and agenda of the centralized state required the ruler to take stock of, utilize, and develop the potential of his human resources to the fullest. Thus, in Qin times, we see the new imperial government registering, taxing, and demanding labor and military service from each household in the empire according to the age and gender of its family members. We also see the enactment of laws punishing infanticide, infant abandonment, and filicide in this period in order to husband state resources. But when the energetic and visionary First Emperor of Qin died in 209 BCE his son proved unequal to the task of imperial rule, and the Qin fell four years later.

When the first Han emperor, Liu Bang, emerged victorious in the wars that followed Qin's collapse, the Han faced the same tasks of training and installing a bureaucracy, but with the additional responsibility of inquiring into the reasons behind Qin's downfall and rectifying its errors. To that end, an increasing number of intellectuals urged Han rulers to take care in the education of heirs to throne, to ensure that when these boys replaced them they would govern wisely and maintain the health and continuity of the dynasty. They advised women about various methods of child-rearing and instruction for young children, and the sooner the better, because they saw early childhood training as crucial to the development of an accomplished adult. They also called for the establishment of a public school system to prepare boys for the civil service. The recent and precipitous demise of Qin and the fragility of the Han empire in the opening years of the dynasty provided a vivid reminder of what was at stake and gradually worked to train both imperial and intellectual attention on childhood as a means of stabilizing and fortifying imperial rule.

In contrast to the diverse and plentiful materials on boys in Han sources, we see little intellectual engagement with issues specifically concerned with girls. In Han times, women played a fairly small role in both the civil service and the military. Consequently the education of girls did not attract nearly the same level of attention as that devoted to the intellectual development of boys. A poignant example is the story of how, when the Empress Deng was a small child, her mother scolded her for attending more closely to classical learning than to needlework and asked her if she thought she was preparing for a post at the Imperial Academy as Erudite. Nevertheless, from the about 74 BCE onward, increased anxiety over the influence of women in political events and the threat they posed to dynastic stability resulted in efforts to educate girls about their proper roles in society, using as models for emulation the lives of exemplary women from antiquity. While it is impossible to say how many girls and young women outside of court or literati circles received this sort of training, we do know that the goal of female education differed from that for boys. Girls were not instructed to further their own ambitions but for the sake of the moral, intellectual and professional development of their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. Still, toward the end of the Former Han, as ambitious men of the gentry were increasingly appraised for their Confucian morals, their womenfolk also came under closer scrutiny. At the same time, drawing on both imperial Qin and Han Confucian models, the government made sporadic efforts to reach out to all of its subjects in an attempt to bind them more closely to the ruling house. This endeavor included not just women and girls of the court and the gentry, but a broader base of female subjects, who were recognized by way of special grants and awards for values such as chastity and obedience.

Confucian education, with its reverence for institutions that privileged elders, ancestors, and worthies of antiquity, promoted the study of classical texts and moral exemplars of ages past so as to gradually shape the child according to canonical molds. Thinkers associated with Daoist thought, on the other hand, traced the infant's life back to a cosmogonic process, linking it to the workings and laws of nature rather than to the power of ancestors and human artifice.

The theme of the precocious child, linked as it was to the struggles of worthy and often obscure figures in the establishment of a divinely sanctioned order, is another reflection of the sensibilities of the Qin and Han empires. They replaced, in varying degrees, aristocratic entitlement with a system of ranks based on merit. The merit system sought not only adult males but also young boys, who were groomed at increasingly earlier ages for bureaucratic positions and who were recommended in response to occasional imperial edicts that sought youths with extraordinary gifts and great promise. Biographical writings of the Han reveal a similar new fascination with the intellectual capacities of young children.

In conclusion, the dynamic convergence of a variety of historical conditions led children to became important topics of intellectual engagement and the significant subjects during Han times. And we can single out the creation of a unified empire as the most momentous and profound impetus for the unprecedented focus on children in early China.

The key themes in this module are (1) nature vs nurture (e.g., wisdom and virtue as inborn vs life-long cultivation of learning and virtue); (2) separating the sexes and gender differentiation: the "inner" (private/domestic) realm of women vs the "outer" (public/official) realm of men; (3) the low status of the child in a gerontocratic culture vs the child as an embodiment of cosmic process and heavenly order; and (4) the child's low status in the family vs the child as valued property of the state.

1. Compare the biographies of Mencius and Empress Deng (Primary Sources 1 & 4).

The fascination with precocity in the Later Han dynasty seems linked to developments in the civil service system and the testing of candidates for various posts, a system not that alien to our own civil service exams or SAT and GRE testing. As the Later Han bureaucracy became more entrenched along with abuses of the system, precocity came to stand for basic administrative promise and also for the possibility of stemming the tide of corruption. One of the general standards of moral behavior against which a candidate was measured was the requirement of incorruptibility. The virtue of incorruptibility in an official implied that he would remain pure in the company of less scrupulous individuals and in spite of temptations to abuse the power granted to him. Although the connection between incorruptibility and precocity is not immediately obvious, a statement of Confucius makes it clear in what sense early moral discretion may have vouched for an individual's integrity.

Confucius said that the highest form of wisdom is seen in those who are born wise. Furthermore, according to the Analects, only those possessed of extreme goodness cannot be changed. To claim that a child was born wise, and therefore good, was subtly to suggest that he was at the same time incorruptible, because a child born with a superior natural endowment could not be changed and thus tainted by even the most impure environment. Thus, the manifestation of moral traits in an infant or small child may have served as evidence of his inborn goodness, and by extension, as an indication of his imperviousness to corruption--a highly attractive prospect for those seeking honest officials for employment.

Finally, far from illustrating a belief in the importance of birth over merit, the motif of the child born wise is associated with the struggles of worthy and often obscure or socially challenged figures in the establishment of a divinely sanctioned or at least superior order. The biography of Empress Deng, in this way suggests that although she is a mere women and lacking in aristocratic credentials, the merit of her family has gained Heaven's favor, but only because she is seen as a fitting person to lead the world into a new and higher order. When such a hero or heroine rises from obscure or humble beginnings to a key historical role, he empirically 'proves' that the world is ultimately governed by virtue after all, despite all evidence to the contrary.

On the other hand, Han Confucian thinkers charted a child's intellectual and moral progress along a gentle upward curve that began its ascent at conception. By the time of early adulthood, the moral and intellectual abilities were considered complete, but only in the sense that the child was now a fully functioning adult. From this state of readiness, the mature cultivation of virtue could begin and was supposed to continue throughout the course of a lifetime. Like schematizations of the child's moral progress, Confucian attempts to chart the child's biological development also stress the incomplete nature of the infant and the body's gradual evolution into fully human form. This tendency stands in sharp contrast to the propensity to focus on well-developed capacities in young children.

In summary, then, early Han Confucian descriptions of a child's intellectual, moral and biological development are generally based on the notion that a virtuous adult is the culmination, and perhaps, the triumph, of a long, gradual process which begins at conception. While ignoring childhood as a valuable stage of human development per se, the emphasis placed upon the undeveloped nature of the infant and the child also represents a bold challenge to the notion that privilege is a matter of birth alone.

While the emphasis on merit accumulated over the course of a lifetime rather than privilege based on birth that may have originally served to warn young power-holders about the dangers of complacency, it also paved the way for poor but determined boys to rise to positions of national importance. It is historically documented, for example, that a boy named Ni Kuan (fl. 120 BCE), for example, who hired himself out as a manual laborer to pay for his education, and who "carried a copy of the classics with him as he hoed," eventually rose to the status of imperial counselor. Thus, according to Former Han Confucian thought, a boy's future social worth depended not upon pedigree alone but on the gradual accumulation of virtue and learning as well. And though family wealth must have frequently determined a boy's access to education, the path to privilege, at least in theory, was open to all boys who could match Ni Kuan's perseverance.

2. Compare gender roles as described in Source 4 (Empress Deng bio) and Source 6 (Early Education).

These two readings illustrate how we should question:

• the extent to which people in real life adhered to the dictates of prescriptive texts, and
• how writers in early China justified women whose behavior was not in keeping with traditional gender roles.

One of the key elements in the biography of Empress Deng seems to be the merit and virtue of her male kin and the empresses' seeming and seemly lack of ambition. She turns down her first opportunity to enter the court in order to mourn the death of her father, demonstrating her prioritizing filial piety over thirst for power.

Lesson Plan: Ancient China

by Jessica Hodgson

Time Estimated: three 50-minute classes

Prior Knowledge
Students will need to have an understanding of Confucian values in order to complete this lesson.

Objectives

1. Analyze the role that education and Confucian values play in childhood in Ancient China.
2. Compare the educational opportunities available to girls and boys in Ancient China.
3. Analyze how these differences demonstrate Confucian values.

Day One

Warm Up: The American Education System
Students will think about and answer some questions about their education. They will then share those answers out with the class.

Brainstorm
Students will brainstorm a list of Confucian ideals as a class.

Document Analysis
Divide the students into pairs and assign each pair one of the documents to read. They should complete the document analysis sheet. Using what they have learned from their document, they should identify specific quotes from the documents that demonstrate how education reflects Confucian values. They will then share what they have learned from the document with the rest of the class. Other students will record the responses on additional document analysis sheets.

Day Two

Poster Activity
Using the documents, students will work in groups of 3 to create posters. Divide the groups and randomly assign the students a topic for their poster (either a poster that is an advertisement for a girls' school in Ancient China or a poster that is an advertisement for a boys' school in Ancient China)

The posters should meet the following criteria:

• The title/name of the school
• A slogan that would make someone want to go to the school
• At least two neat and colorful illustrations that show what kinds of lessons someone would be taught in the school

Students will share their posters with the class

Homework
For homework, students will prepare for a Socratic Seminar.

Day Three: Socratic Seminar

Students will participate in a Socratic Seminar in which they will discuss the following questions:

• What seems to be the purpose of the American education system? How do you know? (Give examples)
• What seems to be the purpose of the Ancient Chinese education system? How do you know? (Give examples)
• Why are educational systems necessary?
• How do governments use educational systems to further their goals for the country?

Directions for a Socratic Seminar

• Understand the question(s) for the seminar.
• Read the source(s).
• Take notes from the sources to help you answer the question(s).
• Comment about one of the following (5 pts.)
  
  1. information in the sources
  2. validity of evidence used by the author(s)
  3. the strength of the argument (thesis)
  4. to respond to a question asked by someone else
  5. to respond to a comment made by someone else
• Ask a question about one of the following (5 pts.)
  
  1. information in the sources, e.g., vocabulary
  2. validity of evidence used by the author(s)
  3. the strength of the argument (thesis)
  4. to respond to a question asked by someone else
  5. to respond to a comment made by someone else

Maximum of 10 points per student.

Those interested in visual reflections of the daily life of children will find the Hedda Morrison Photographs of China (1933-1946) a useful collection. Morrison (1908-1991), a freelance photographer who lived in Beijing during the years that the collection covers, has left 28 albums, roughly 5,000 photographs, and 10,000 negatives to the archival holdings the Harvard-Yenching Library. All of the photographs from the 28 albums are available for view as are a useful bibliography and a time-line of Hedda Morrison's life.

As organized by Morrison, the albums address specific themes, including religion (particularly Buddhism), architecture and material culture, artwork, social rituals, everyday life, handicrafts, street markets and entertainment, and common people in the midst of their daily labors. Albums can be searched for individual themes and images with search terms "children" and "family" being particularly productive for those exploring the theme of childhood. The images can also be viewed as virtual albums in the same collections assembled by Morrison herself. Indeed, this framework generates a theme worthy of classroom exploration, prompting valuable discussion of how Morrison organized, conceived, and shaped the "China" she was viewing as well as the ways in which images of children helped to define broader frames of meaning in regard to nation, culture, gender, class, and more.

Utilizing the search engine using the keyword "children"returns 123 hits, including candid portraits of children, kids in shared spaces with other family members (both siblings and adults), along with urban and domestic settings (e.g., courtyards, marketplaces, family portraits, scenes of meals and play.) The images offer useful material for a variety of lesson plans and thematic analyses. One example would be an exploration of the material culture of childhood, pursued by students conducting their own visual survey of the items represented, including clothing, toys, furniture, tools and even architecture. These visual surveys of childhood can be usefully tied to investigations of intersecting themes (e.g. childhood and domestic space, children and street culture, children and work or material production). Students could assemble and edit an assembly of images from the collection and accompany their collection with analytical narration.

Another useful line of inquiry regarding this collection and the theme of childhood contained in it is also an exploration of the foci – and the limits – of one subject's view. In other words, what did Hedda Morrison see and what is missing? How is an image of childhood constructed through this collection and how does it compare with other sources and views?

This latter exploration invokes both the strengths and weaknesses of the Hedda Morrison collection. One key limitation is that the collection's scenes are limited largely to the city of Beijing and the surrounding region of North China. As such, it does not capture the variety of material and social practice embodied across China's full range of regional and ethnic diversity. It is, nevertheless, a valuable collection that, matched with other resources, serves explorations of the dual themes of visual culture and childhood in early-to-mid 20th century China.

The Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art offers a rich collection of images of Asian art and architecture. It is based upon the core collection created by John and Susan Huntington, professors of Asian Art History at The Ohio State University who engaged in over 35 years of field work in Asia. Nearly 300,000 images are held in the full collection, representing religious imagery and architecture (both on site and in museums) from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, China, and Japan. The historical range begins in 2500 B.C.E. and runs through the present day. Roughly 30,000 black and white images along with a limited number of color ones are accessible through an online "Digital Database Collection." Images are available in multiple sizes, with a zoom feature for more detailed views.

A variety of child-related features are presented at the Huntington site. A collection of links to "Online Exhibitions" currently offers valuable material from China, Japan, India, and Tibet. Exhibition themes include pictography and posters from China, modern art and devotional imagery from India, calligraphy and material arts from Japan, and the material icons and imagery of Tibet. While these collections do not address childhood directly, there are occasional iconographic images of children as well as domestic scenes of religious practice.

Other elements of the exhibit collections can be tied to a culture of childhood as well. For example, the exhibit "Literature in Line: Lianhuanhua Picture Stories from China" offers a collection of drawings from picture stories in popular print during the mid-20th century. One useful collection among these includes illustrations from Zhao Hongben and Qian Xiaodai's Monkey Beats the White-boned Demon (1962), based on the classic tale of Journey to the West. This story (available in an English-language translation by Arthur Waley) has been relished by both adults and children in China and continues to be presented globally as both theater and cinema.

The "Digital Database Collection" is another rich resource for the theme of Buddhism and Asian Art. It consists of nearly 30,000 images collected as documentation of Asian sites and architecture by John and Susan Huntington between the years of 1969-1984. Imagery related to the theme of childhood can be located through simple keyword searches. Images of children largely originate from India and include iconographic figures embracing a child as well as visual presentations of "Buddha life scenes." Such images could be usefully tied to textual sources, Buddhist themes, life-stages, allegory and iconography for research projects. Finally, the projects page at the site offers links and teaching resources related to art history, discussion outlines and presentations, as well as a "Visual Encyclopedia of Buddhist Iconography." Though not directly related to childhood as a major theme, these nevertheless offer valuable resources for those interested in exploring the broader context for the imagery of children and childhood.