China Seminar | 9 August 2007

“The Chinese Garden” in Madeira in May

Daniel W. Y. Kwok

The May China Seminar did not meet on account of Daniel Kwok’s giving a plenary talk on “the Chinese Garden” at the Congresso International Jardins do Mundo: Discursos e Práticas (International Congress on Gardens of the World: Discourses and Practices) held in Funchal, Madeira, May 9-12. The event was planned and organized by a combination of academic and civic bodies in Portugal and other Portuguese areas. A few other international institutions were involved also. Kwok’s invitation came via the good offices of Luis Felipe Barreto, President of the Centro Cientific e Cultural de Macau in Lisbon.

Daniel Kwok is the founding convener of the China Seminar, formally named in 1978 but meeting since the fall of 1975. He is professor emeritus of history at the University of Hawaii, where he served at various times as chair of Asia Studies, director of the Center of Chinese Studies, and chair of Department of History. Publishing mainly in Chinese intellectual history, his 1997 Urbane Imagination: Ideas of Civilization in the Chinese Garden tries to broaden “intellectual” history. His recent publication (co-authored with Robert Aitken) is Vegetable Roots Discourse (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006), a Ming dynasty work on wisdom and life.