Long book, not really my style only liked a few chapters and I will not retain anything from this book....too dense

I won this book in a goodreads giveaway. OMG I survived I thought I was never going to finish this. This book is very informative but really dry. I don't think I'm going to remember anything about this book by tomorrow.

This was both fascinating and infuriating, not necessarily because of the the writing but the content. The China Collectors focuses on American collectors of Chinese art, which is sort of a niche thing to write about except it spans centuries from the early 1800s through today. There's echoes of the nineteenth century naturalists' attitude that art collectors seemed to share with the 'If we don't take this now to preserve, no one will see it in the future!' as an excuse to take priceless cave paintings and bas reliefs from walls of the Dunhuang caves. The modern new age trend towards the east as exotic mysticism is really only a historical rhyme of previous trends towards an Asian aesthetic. Bookending historical record are cases of how modern China is now a player in the art collecting world, full of both the newly rich looking to collect and a nationalist group looking to repatriate stolen goods.

I'm a tad bit torn because some of the looting is about as bad as the theft of the Elgin Marbles from Greece, but on the other hand having collections stateside means they're much more accessible to me in the future.