Ancient Greek painting in the British Museum

The Greek painting in the British Museum is easy to overlook. You will easily find the sculpture of Classical Greece, but painting? Who has ever hard of that? Well, perhaps not many people, but it is there and it is quite interesting, here are the examples. Seeing these examples one is tempted to thing that it is anything but primitive. However, you won't find big canvasses you might expect when you thing of great painting. Perhaps this is the very reason why not many people realise that it exists. These paintings are hidden in a few small glass cupboards in rooms upstairs, they are painted on clay vases. Greek vases are, of course well known, though few visitors to the Museum pays much attention. Even less realise that not all vases are decorated in black and ochre colours, that there exist also white vases with black paintings (or perhaps I should say drawings, or even sketches?) on them.

Marbles of Suzhou.

I wonder whether there is anyone who would be able to tell me what this is because I have no idea. I saw them in Suzhou in China in traditional pavilions in the famous gardens of the city. They are carefully framed and look as if they were pictures but they are not. It seems that these are cross-sections of marbles, framed and exhibited, sometimes next to a picture. I wander why. Is there a Chinese tradition of exhibiting marbles like that? I guess there must by, but where does it come from? Obviously there is no equivalent tradition in the Western world which is why I haven't found anything of the subject in a Western language.

Lingyin Zen temple in Hangzhou

Lingyin si is a Zen monastery in the hills around the West Lake in Hangzhou. It is amazing how quickly the monasteries have been restored after the orgy of destruction during the cultural revolution. In the hills around Hangzhou there are several monasteries and nunneries. Interestingly in one of them a nun gave me a book in English by Sheng Yen, a Taiwanese Zen master whom I met many years earlier in Taipei.

City God Temple in Shanghai

The City God Temple in Shanghai is a typical Chinese Taoist temple. Normally the centre of a Taoist temple is a yard with an incense burner. Next to the yard is a hall with giant figures. The Taoist saints usually have beards, unlike the Buddhist ones. Behind this hall there is another one with a nicely dressed figure of the City God. There people go to pray.

La Virgen de Guadelupe

Pictures of Our Lady of Guadelupe are ubiquitous in Mexico. One can see them not only in churches or roadside shrines but even as grafitti in cities 

Becoming a chief in Vanuatu

Eating human flesh is now illegal in Vanuatu but whoever wants to become a chief has to prove that he can kill. The victims are pigs nowadays. During the ceremony of a nomination of a new chief they wait turn quietly (or sometimes not so quietly), tied to a palm tree on a plaza in front of a nakamal. A band playing on slit drums sits next to the entry to the nakamal. A throng of dancers circles the victim. The candidate for a chief is easily recognisable, he is the one who wields an axe. At the correct moment the axe splits the pigs scull, the pig falls in convulsions, blood running down its snout. The dancers in the meantime circle another victim. (This is no literary fiction, I witnessed a ceremony like this on Pentecost island).

Araucarias

Araucarias, or monkey puzzle trees, in the wild only grow in southern Andes and only above 1000 metres. They are supposedly relics from the time of dinosaurs. Individual trees also can reach extraordinary age, more than one thousand years.