Frances Wood

[KALKI]

Frances Wood is an English historian known for her writings on Chinese history, including Marco Polo, life in the Chinese treaty ports, and the First Emperor of China. She has argued in her 1995 book, Did Marco Polo go to China?, that the book of Marco Polo (Il Milione) is not the account of a single person, but is a collection of travellers' tales.


BiographyWood was born in London in the late 1940s, and went to art school in Liverpool in 1967, before going to Newnham College, Cambridge University where she studied Chinese. She went to China to study Chinese in 1975–1976.

Wood is currently Curator of Chinese collections at the British Library in London, England. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the International Dunhuang Project, and the editor of the Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society.


Bibliography1985 Chinese illustration. British Library. ISBN 9780712300537
1991 (with Norah M. Titley). Oriental Gardens. British Library. ISBN 9780712302395

1995. Did Marco Polo go to China?. Secker & Warburg. ISBN 9780436203848

2000. Hand-grenade practice in Peking: my part in the Cultural Revolution.
John Murray. ISBN 9780719557811

2000. No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China, 1843-1943. John Murray. ISBN 9780719564000

2002. The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520237865

2005. The Forbidden City. British Museum Press. ISBN 9780714127897

2007. The First Emperor of China. Profile Books. ISBN 9781846680328

2008. China's First Emperor and His Terracotta Warriors. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 9780312381127

2010 (with Mark Barnard). The Diamond Sutra: The Story of the World's Earliest Dated Printed Book. British Library. ISBN 9780712350907