Liu Tingxun pursued his illustrious, if turbulent, career in the high days of the Tang Dynasty, which ran from 618 to 906 AD. The famous Silk Road was in full swing. The Tang era represents for many Chinese a "golden age" of achievement, both at home and abroad. This great outward-looking empire, along with the Abbasid Islamic Empire in the Middle East, together created what was effectively a huge single market for luxury goods, that ran from Morocco to Japan. You won't find it written in many European histories, but these two giants, in effect, shaped and dominated the early medieval world. Western Europe, by contrast, when Liu Tingxun died in 728 and our tomb figures were created, was a remote and underdeveloped backwater, an unstable patchwork of small kingdoms and precarious urban communities. The Tang ruled a unified state that stretched from Korea in the north, to Vietnam in the south, and far west along the Silk Road into Central Asia. The power and the structure of this state-along with its enormous cultural confidence-are vividly embodied in Liu Tingxun's ceramic tomb figures.