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9780295988269

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An extraordinary work, brimming with essential information available nowhere else about one of the characteristic products of Chinese civilization - the ink rubbing. For all scholars of Chinese material culture, rubbings are important resources, not only for their aesthetic and art historical interest, but also for the information in texts they record. Robert E. Harrist Jr., Columbia University There is no comparable history of ink rubbings in any Western language. Starr truly has the 'organic feel' for his subject, having made and studied ink rubbings for decades. His knowledge is encyclopaedic, and he describes materials and processes with graceful familiarity and clarity. The fine details of connoisseurship and aesthetic judgments, as well as the wealth of tradition and technique involved, are beautifully laid out, and the reader feels privileged to look over the shoulder of a great craftsman and scholar. Amy McNair, University of Kansas

A lively and enjoyable look into a world mastered by few... [Starr] has gathered a half-century of personal experience and study of ink rubbings, in China, Taiwan, Japan and the US, into this unique volume. T'oung Pao In the case of truly spectacular books, reviewers can find it difficult to know how best to begin singing the requisite praise-songs. Black Tigers is one such book, for it encapsulates, in remarkably lucid prose, the lilfetime of experience that its author brings to the study of ink rubbings... Black Tigers lays out every part of the process so methodically and with such quiet authority that the reader can only feel a degree of awe as she pours over the riches offered by Starr's account... Starr shows exemplary balance..and his own book is proof, if such were needed, of the level of refinement and erudition that proper training in connoisseurship and long experience can bring to particularly fraught subjects-fraught in this case because many latter-day nationalists cast rubbing histories as an index of Chinese identity. Starr's appendices alone are worth the modest price of this book. Journal of the American Oriental Society

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Kenneth Starr is the former director of the Milwaukee Public Museum and, earlier, curator of East Asian archaeology and ethnology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

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