(Pre-order, Available in 2027 Spring) How To Be a Collector

By the time Sir Percival David died in 1964, he had built one of the finest collections of Chinese ceramics outside China–a legacy now valued at over £1 billion and housed in the British Museum. Yet the public image he crafted as a scholar-collector tells only part of the story. Born into the Sassoon merchant dynasty in Bombay, David inherited a fortune that enabled a lifetime of collecting. He travelled the world in pursuit of rare Chinese treasures, did more than almost anyone to establish Chinese art as a field of study in the West, and kept his private life carefully hidden. Drawing on twenty-five years of research, this first full portrait follows him through empire, war, illness, his complicated family life, and the dispersal of China’s imperial art. He let his collection speak for him, as though the only self-portrait he meant to leave was the one assembled, piece by piece, in porcelain.

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Professor Stacey Pierson is a remarkable scholar who has brought the enigmatic Sir Percival David to life through her thorough research. As the museum that now cares for the collection he formed, we have long known the ceramics–but almost nothing of the man. This book changes that.

–Dr Jessica Harrison-Hall

Keeper of Asia and Curator of the Sir Percival David Collection, The British Museum

Descendants of opium traders have long treated their ancestors as taboo. This new biography of Sir Percival David is a breakthrough and an exception. The man himself–his Jewish background, marriages, relationships and travels–has been restored through painstaking detective work. It redefines his legacy and enriches our understanding of a great collector, whose inborn meticulous taste shaped a ceramic collection that has served as a cornerstone for generations of scholars of Chinese ceramics.

–Professor Peter Y.K. Lam

Honorary Research Fellow, the Institute of Chinese Studies, CUHK

Pierson always writes elegantly, and is the kind of scholar who revels in wearing her erudition lightly. Her subject, Sir Percival David, may be closely associated with exhibitions in London, but we learn of him moving between not just the Middle East, Asia and Europe, but also travelling around America. We get illuminating discussions of stamp collecting as well as porcelain collecting, and a cameo appearance by Sigmund Freud. This makes it an engaging tale of a colorful life.

–Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom 

Author of Everything You Wanted to Know about China* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)