terra-cotta warriors, Xi'an, China, sculpture, art, archaeology
Detail of the terra-cotta warriors of Xi'an, reflecting individual portraits

Imperial China and the Yangtze

Discover China's treasures, both ancient and modern, on a classic journey through China's Middle Kingdom including a Yangtze cruise
Starting at $5,034
Including airfare, airline taxes & departure fees
Call 855-330-1542
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 Dorothy Borei
Dorothy (Dottie) Borei is an expert in East Asian history with interests ranging from Imperial to 20th century China, the history of Chinese women, and contemporary Chinese society in film. Dottie earned her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and is now an Emerita Professor of East Asian history at Guilford College in North Carolina. As the Director of International Studies at Guilford, Dottie wrote and administered several grants to develop Asian Studies at the college. She has taught American college students in Beijing and Hangzhou for China Educational Tours and Duke University, and has also been the director of several summer programs for faculty and students in China and Japan. Dottie has also traveled independently to South Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. She will lead the May 7, 2013 departure.

Robert Foster
Robert W. Foster has been fascinated by Chinese culture since he first read a translation of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching in high school. Since that early encounter with a strikingly unfamiliar worldview, he has spent his academic career developing a better understanding of the history of one of the world's great civilizations. After receiving a B.A. in History from Kenyon College in Ohio, Foster pursued graduate work at Harvard University, where he earned his Master's degree in East Asia Studies (1990) and his Ph.D. in Chinese History (1997), during which time he was an exchange student at Peking University (1990-1991). Since 1997, he has been a member of the faculty of the Department of History at Berea College, where he created the Asian Studies program. Although his courses at Berea focus on Chinese and Japanese history, Foster has also developed a broader understanding of the cultural interactions throughout East Asia and between China and Central Asia. Foster has been a participant in National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes on the Silk Road sponsored by the East-West Center in Hawaii and seminars on modern China at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria. Foster has worked to make Chinese culture more accessible to a Western audience. He has translated key Classical Chinese texts, has written on China's relation to the Silk Road, on Confucian philosophy, and on the modern use of Confucian imagery in the PRC and Japan. Recognizing the value of directly engaging Asian cultures, he has taken student and faculty groups to the Peoples' Republic of China and Japan. He has served as Smithsonian Lecturer in China and has led workshops on Asia with organizations as diverse as the U.S. military and secondary school educators in Kentucky. Robert will lead the September 2013 departure.

Maggie Bickford
Maggie Bickford is Professor Emerita of the History of Art & Architecture at Brown University, where for 25 years she taught the arts of China from the Stone Age to the 20th Century. A graduate of Bennington College, she did post-graduate work in studio ceramics at Goldsmiths College School of Art, took her MA in Chinese studies at Yale and her MA and PhD in Chinese Art & Archaeology at Princeton. Among her many books and articles, Ink Plum: the Making of a Scholar-Amateur Painting Genre won the Association for Asian Studies Joseph P. Levinson Award for the best book of its year on pre-modern China. Ink Plum has just been issued in a scholarly Chinese-language edition in a series intended to share Western research with our Chinese colleagues. She also is co-editor (with Patricia Ebrey) and contributor to Emperor Huizong and Northern Song Culture: the Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Member at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, a Clark Art Institute Fellow and has twice received National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. She has made many trips to China, where she organized or led study tours for scholars in the field, museum benefactors, and private collectors. She is working on two books: The Shape of Good fortune: Auspicious Visuality in China (about how artisans and artists gave form to wishes for good outcomes in elite and popular culture) and Learning from Emperor Huizong (which shows how the Song emperors created new works to stand in for lost masterworks by the early Great Painters of China). Maggie will lead the October 2013 departure.