My friend, the art historian Ann Paludan, who has died aged 86, had an extraordinary life of travel in the diplomatic service, professional achievement at the Treasury, and pioneering research into Chinese history and culture.
Her China experiences started in the 1970s, when her second husband, Janus Paludan, served as Denmark’s ambassador to Beijing, Hanoi and Pyongyang. While living in the Chinese capital, Ann added Chinese to her already impressive list of languages. She also opened up the study of sculpture in China, a subject she made her own.
Her publications included The Imperial Ming Tombs (1982); The Chinese Spirit Road: the Classical Tradition of Stone Tomb Statuary (1991); Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors: The Reign-By-Reign Record of the Rulers of Imperial China (1998); and Chinese Sculpture: A Great Tradition (2003). Her lively and informative writing style won many admirers.
Ann was born in London, daughter of Pauline (nee Newton) and Basil Murray. Her father died as a reporter in the Spanish civil war. Educated at St Paul’s school and St Hilda’s College, Oxford (where she studied philosophy, politics and economics), Ann went on to join the Foreign Office as a diplomat, and to live in Colombia, Greece and Congo, with her first husband, John Powell-Jones, whom she married in 1949.
After the marriage ended in 1966, she joined the Treasury, working there until her marriage in 1968 to Janus and the move to a diplomat’s life in Beijing, where I met her in 1975 when we were both students at the Beijing Language Institute.
Fascinated by the great changes that Mao had set in train, and the evolution that began after his death, the couple travelled widely in China, Vietnam and North Korea, ending with a journey to Tibet. Time at the language institute in Beijing, which she believed made the Danish Foreign Service think she might be a Maoist, led her to write a book on the Ming tombs and to her long engagement with Chinese sculpture and Chinese history. An intrepid traveller and an excellent photographer, she compiled, over many years and many journeys, an extraordinary and valuable record of stone sculpture in China.
After China, further diplomatic postings followed, until eventually Janus and Ann retired to Upper Denton in Cumbria in 1984, to a house they filled with pictures and books, and a garden full of roses. Trips to China, and hard and rewarding work on successive books, were interspersed with visits to and from friends, and the arrival of more grandchildren.
With her fine features, sharp intelligence, idiosyncratic opinions, and enjoyment of people and ideas, she was a remarkable person.
Her son Robert died in 1998 and Janus died in 2004. She is survived by a son, Mark, a daughter, Elizabeth, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
