About this tour
Join us in the galleries as Botao Zhao, a PhD candidate in anthropology and environmental studies at Yale, situates Edward Lear’s depiction of tea pickers in Kangchenjunga from Darjeeling (1879) in the context of Sino-British conflict over the control of Tibet. Arguing that a tiny tea leaf can offer a window into global geopolitics, Botao’s talk considers how the practices of seeing and painting operate as forms of imperial vision.
About the speaker
Botao is a PhD candidate in anthropology and environmental studies at Yale. His research interests lie in the intersection of environmental anthropology, historical geography, and borderland studies. Fascinated by the landscape and multicultural dynamics around the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, Botao is currently looking at the peasant livelihood transformation, social-spatial changes, and shifting human-environmental relationships through the lens of salt-grain trade (a critical component of the Tea-Horse Road) in the Sino-Tibetan frontier, with a particular attention to how transformation in a local sphere is tele-connected with extra-local or global forces.
