The Path of Beauty

A survey of Chinese aesthetic history from prehistory to the Qing dynasty by the philosopher Li Zehou, published in 1981. In ten chapters it moves through Neolithic painted pottery and totems, the fearsome taotie masks on Shang and Zhou bronzes, the rational spirit of pre-Qin thought, the romantic art of Chu and Han, the cultivated style of the Wei–Jin era, Buddhist cave sculpture, the poetry of the High Tang, the suggestive poetry and song lyrics of the later Tang and Song, Song and Yuan landscape painting, and the literature and art of the Ming and Qing. Li's guiding idea is 'sedimentation': social and rational content gradually settles into sensuous form, so that patterns which began as signs of meaning come to be felt as beautiful in themselves. He links each style to its society and argues that Chinese art is marked by a blending of feeling and reason. The book was widely read during China's 'aesthetics fever' of the 1980s.

It connects Chinese art, poetry and philosophy from prehistory to the Qing in a single argument, and gives a clear introduction to Li Zehou's influential idea of sedimentation.