YouSaid · the spoken record

Frances Wood

lines on the record: 60
first: 2010-12-05
most recent: 2010-12-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It is the case, yes, he's the most amazing, painstaking work, repairing tiny holes, repairing creases, pulling pieces together, but repairing it in a way that does allow us to see the paper as it originally was. I mean, this is obviously the beginning of printing in the world, if you like. There's tons of work now to be done, and really it's only just beginning.”
2010-12-05 · Desert Island Discs · Frances Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the moment it's in the conservation studio, it's just been conserved and it is phenomenal the work that our conservators have done because it's now actually really in the same state as it was in eight sixty eight. You can even see which is amazing a trace of the block, the indent of the block where it was printed and pressed down on the wood block when it was first created.”
2010-12-05 · Desert Island Discs · Frances Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a book, we say, in the form of a scroll, but it's 30 feet long. So, I mean, it is a complete article the Chinese at the time rolled their books up. It's a huge piece of printing.”
2010-12-05 · Desert Island Discs · Frances Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“great phrases the world's earliest securely dated printed book, we have a wonderful edition in the British Library, which was printed in eight six eight AD, which is five hundred years before Gutenberg. Woodblock print with an incredibly beautiful frontispiece. It's a glorious thing”
2010-12-05 · Desert Island Discs · Frances Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We start with something that I suppose I've been engaged with very recently, but which is, of course, one of the oldest aspects of the Chinese collections in the British Library. It's Chinese Buddhist monks and a few nuns chanting the diamond sutra. The text of the diamond sutra is a very standard one. It was a translation from the Sanskrit. And the diamond sutra is a dialogue between the Buddha and his little disciple Subhuti, and we happen to have in the British Library the world's earliest dated printed book which is a copy of the diamond sutra printed in eight sixty eight AD. One of the things that the Buddhist faithful do to accrue merit is to sing or chant the sutra, and so as we play this, we are accruing merit and they are accruing merit.”
2010-12-05 · Desert Island Discs · Frances Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely yes. Yes, old ladies used to kind of stagger and clutch at trees as we walk past, and people would always say to you kind of right in your face Wygor and Foreigner thought, yeah, I know, I know, I am a bit different and so on, and yeah, we were complete freaks.”
2010-12-05 · Desert Island Discs · Frances Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The difference is I just sort of think of the view of Shanghai then when Pudong was cabbage fields and the clock on the Hong Kong and Shanghai bank was still playing the East is red and now you look at it and you've got the Pearl Tower. You've got lights, you've got shining, you've got giant buildings which glisten in the sun. It's completely different. Except, of course, if you get away from these major cities, I mean, and the absolute bling, I think, of it as Peking now. But go out into the countryside and you're still back with sort of China immemorial.”
2010-12-05 · Desert Island Discs · Frances Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really wrote it because I wanted people to think more than anything else. You know, we look at China through his eyes. We don't think, what are the Chinese saying? What are they doing?”
2010-12-05 · Desert Island Discs · Frances Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't mention chopsticks, didn't mention tea drinking, enormous amounts of things that didn't appear. I think that the collections are, you know, they're stories that were told by one seaman to the next, and so it's not a first hand account of a place.”
2010-12-05 · Desert Island Discs · Frances Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's I think absolutely no definite proof that he went the little manuscripts that we have which say they are the book of Marco Polo or they are a description of the world are compilations of medieval knowledge about the Far East, but the whole idea of an author and of this little man sort of picking his way slowly across the Central Asian deserts is absolutely unproven”
2010-12-05 · Desert Island Discs · Frances Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source