1 Transcultural Studies 2013.1 2013. 1 Editor's NotE Monica Juneja .04 trANsLAtioNs Yu-Chih Lai Images, Knowledge and Empire: Depicting Cassowaries in the Qing Court Translated by Philip Hand .07 Ōkubo Takeharu Ono Azusa and the Meiji Constitution: The Codification and Study of Roman Law at the Dawn of Modern Japan Translated by Gaynor Sekimori .101 ArticLEs Diamantis Panagiotopoulos Material versus Design: A Transcultural Approach to the Two Contrasting Properties of Things .145 Barbara Mittler “Enjoying the Four Olds!”—Oral Histories from a “Cultural Desert“ .177 2 Contributors to this Issue Transcultural Studies, No 1, 2013, ISSN: 2191-6411 Editors: Monica Juneja,Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Rudolf G. Wagner, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Managing Editor: Andrea Hacker Editorial Board: Christiane Brosius, Antje Fluechter, Madeleine Herren, Monica Juneja, Birgit Kellner, Joachim Kurtz, Axel Michaels, and Roland Wenzlhuemer. Transcultural Studies is an open-access e-journal published bi-annually by the Cluster of Excellence, “Asia and Europe in a Global Context: The Dynamics of Transculturality” at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. For more information see: www.transculturalstudies.org CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE: Lai Yu-chih received her Ph.D. in art history at Yale University in 2005. She has been Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, since July 2010. She previously worked as an assistant curator in the Department of Painting and Calligraphy at the National Palace Museum for seven years, participating in several important exhibitions. Her current book projects include “Visual Empire: Image Productions, Governance, and Empire-Building in the Qianlong Court” and “Moments of Change: Japan in Modern Chinese Painting.” Ôkubo Takeharu is associate professor of the History of Japanese Political Thought at Meiji University, Japan. He has published widely on the intellectual history of cultural exchange between Europe and East Asia including Kindai Nihon no Seiji Kôsô to Oranda (The Quest for Civilization: Encounters with Dutch Jurisprudence, Political Economy and Statistics at the Dawn of Modern Japan, University of Tokyo Press, 2010). Diamantis Panagiotopoulos is professor of Classical Archaeology at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. His research interests include the social structures of the Aegean civilizations, Aegean imagery, transcultural phenomena in the Eastern Mediterranean of the second millennium BCE, 3 Transcultural Studies 2013.1 and ancient sealing practices. He has excavated at major Aegean sites and co-directed the Zominthos excavations from 2005 to 2007. He is currently leading the interdisciplinary research program on Minoan Koumasa, aiming at the systematic exploration of the site and its landscape. Barbara Mittler holds the Chair in Chinese Studies at the Ruprecht-Karls- Universität Heidelberg and is a director of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context.” She studied sinology, musicology and Japanese at the Universities of Oxford (MA Oxon 1990) and Heidelberg (PhD 1994, Habilitation 1998). Her books touch upon Chinese avantgarde music, the early Chinese press, and artistic production during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Philip Hand is a British translator who lives and works in Xiamen, China. He studied Chinese at Cambridge University, obtained an MA in translation studies from Birmingham University, and today specialises in translation of academic papers. His research interests are the nature of the Chinese sentence and persuasive rhetoric in Chinese and English translation. Gaynor Sekimori is a Research Associate in the Centre for the Study of Japanese Religions at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and concurrently Visiting Professor at Kokugakuin University, Tokyo. Her research focuses on Japanese religious history. She is a professional academic translator and editor. 03_Titel 04_Contrib(1)