Ann Paludan
Encyclopedia
Ann Paludan is a British author of several books on Chinese history, sculpture, and architecture.

Biography

Ann Paludan is the daughter of Basil Murray
Basil Murray
Basil Murray was the second son of the scholar Gilbert Murray and his wife Lady Mary Howard, daughter of the 9th Earl of Carlisle....

. Her father was the second son of the eminent classical scholar Gilbert Murray
Gilbert Murray
George Gilbert Aimé Murray, OM was an Australian born British classical scholar and public intellectual, with connections in many spheres. He was an outstanding scholar of the language and culture of Ancient Greece, perhaps the leading authority in the first half of the twentieth century...

 and his wife Lady Mary Howard, and Ann would visit her grandparents at Yatscombe, on Boars Hill
Boars Hill
Boars Hill is a hill hamlet southwest of Oxford, straddling the boundariy between the civil parishes of Sunningwell and Wootton. It was part of Berkshire until the 1974 boundary changes transferred it to Oxfordshire.-History:...

, particularly during her undergraduate years in St Hugh's College, Oxford
St Hugh's College, Oxford
St Hugh's College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. It is located on a fourteen and a half acre site on St Margaret's Road, to the North of the city centre. It was founded in 1886 as a women's college, and accepted its first male students in its centenary year in 1986...

 when she cycled up to Yatscombe every Sunday. Her parents had split up when she was young and her father died in Spain when she was eight, so her visits to her grandparents gave a welcome sense of continuity. On her mother's side she was the grand-daughter of the painter Algernon Newton RA
RA
RA may refer to:- Science :* Right ascension, an astronomical term* Relation algebra, a type of mathematical structure- Medicine :* Relative analgesia machine, a type of sedative* Right atrium, one of the four chambers of the heart...

, of the family which founded the Winsor and Newton paints company, and a niece of the actor Robert Newton
Robert Newton
Robert Newton was an English stage and film actor. Along with Errol Flynn, Newton was one of the most popular actors among the male juvenile audience of the 1940s and early 1950s, especially with British boys...

.

After graduating she worked as a British diplomat, marrying and starting a life abroad in 1949. Her son, Sir Mark Jones
Mark Jones (museum director)
Sir Mark Ellis Powell Jones is a British art historian, numismatist and museum director; he is director of the Victoria and Albert Museum...

, was born in 1951; he is now an art historian and museum director.

Janus Paludan, a Danish diplomat, had served as Danish Ambassador to the Congo 1962–1965 and to Brazil 1968–1972, and he and Ann married before he took up the post of Danish Ambassador to China in 1972. They lived in Beijing
Beijing
Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...

 until 1976, and thereafter she returned regularly to China on research trips. He then served as Ambassador to Egypt in 1976 and to Iceland from 1977 to 1984, after which they retired to northern Cumbria
Cumbria
Cumbria , is a non-metropolitan county in North West England. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local authority, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. Cumbria's largest settlement and county town is Carlisle. It consists of six districts, and in...

. Ann was widowed in 2004.

Books

Ann Paludan researched the history of China and wrote a number of authoritative and widely cited books:
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK