Frances Wood

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the British chemist and statistician, see Frances Wood (statistician) .

Frances Wood on her honor at the School of Oriental and African Studies ( University of London ) in 2015

Frances Wood (standing) with Ksenija B. Keping (seated) in the British Library (March 2001)

Frances Wood (Chinese name Wú Fāng-sī 吴芳思; born  May 1, 1948 in London ) is a British librarian , sinologist and historian, best known for her works on Chinese history.

biography

Frances Wood, born in London in 1948, attended the Art School in Liverpool from 1967 and then went to Newnham College at the University of Cambridge . From 1975 to 1976 - at the time of the Cultural Revolution - she studied Chinese language at Beijing University .

“From 1975 on, I spent a year in Beijing, studying at the Language Institute, a dusty building complex in the north-western suburbs. [...] united by our strange experiences as "worker-farmer-soldier" students: We had learned to plant seedlings in the rice fields, to store Chinese cabbage for a long time so that we could not get anything else to eat between November and March, and hand grenades skillfully throw - at the expense of the British Council and as part of our compulsory sporting activity Wednesday afternoons. "

After her return she came to the British Library in London in 1977 and was head of the China department there until 2013.

In her 1995 book Did Marco Polo go to China? (German Marco Polo didn't get to China ) she critically deals with the inconsistencies of the travelogue and the seventeen-year stay of Marco Polo in China. She also held a number of radio seminars on the subject.

Fonts (selection)

• 1985 Chinese illustration . British Library, ISBN 978-0-7123-0053-7 .
• Andrei V. Subbotin, Frances Wood (Ed.): China . Caught in time, Reading: Garnet, 1993 ISBN 1-873938-30-6
• 1995 Did Marco Polo go to China? Secker & Warburg, ISBN 978-0-436-20384-8 .
  • Marco Polo didn't get to China . Translation by Barbara Reitz, Bernhard Jendricke. Munich: Piper, 1996 ISBN 978-3-492-03886-7
• 2000 Hand-grenade practice in Beijing: my part in the Cultural Revolution . John Murray, ISBN 978-0-7195-5781-1 .
• 2000 No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China, 1843–1943 . John Murray, ISBN 978-0-7195-6400-0 .
• 2002 The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia . University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-23786-5 .
  • Along the Silk Road: Myth and History . Translation Nixe Duell-Pfaff, Dirk Oetzmann. Stuttgart: Theiss, 2007 ISBN 978-3-8062-2068-1
• 2005 The Forbidden City . British Museum Press, ISBN 978-0-7141-2789-7 .
• 2007 The First Emperor of China . Profile Books, ISBN 978-1-84668-032-8 .
• 2008 China's First Emperor and His Terracotta Warriors . St. Martin's Press, ISBN 978-0-312-38112-7 .
• 2017 Great Books of China . Head of Zeus, ISBN 9781786694515 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Frances Wood in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Frances Wood in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Frances Wood: Marco Polo did not get to China , pp. 9-11.
2. ↑ Frances Wood on Desert Island Discs (broadcast December 5, 2010);
   Frances Wood on In Our Time discussing Marco Polo (broadcast on May 24, 2012)