Jankowski, Lyce

Specialist in East Asian numismatics, Expert of Chinese material culture

Lyce Jankowski (*1982) studied Latin, Ancient Greek, Hieroglyphs and traditional Chinese at high school in Paris. After her baccalauréat, she worked and traveled alone in China for one year. Her journey took her from the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, to the remote far North of Heilongjiang.

Back in Paris, she engaged in Antiquity studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris). She attended classes on codicology, epigraphy and Indo-European linguistics. Interested by the contacts between Imperial Rome and Han China, she studied Roman and Chinese archaeology. She discovered the Chinese coin collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF). François Thierry was curating the collection and shared his invaluable knowledge with her. She decided to turn to numismatics and returned to China to study it.

Lyce Jankowski’s main interest is Chinese numismatics but she has also studied numismatics in New York at the American Numismatic Society E. Newman seminar, Greek and Roman coinage in Paris with Olivier Picard and Michel Amandry and Central Asian numismatics with Osmund Bopearachchi.

Her PhD explored the social networks of coin collectors in 19th century China and was awarded the Quadriennal Prize of the Royal Numismatic Society (Brussels) and the Flora Blanchon prize of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Paris). She has participated in many international conferences and published several papers on numismatics. She has organized workshops and conference panels in France, Russia, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Her research focuses on the diffusion of Chinese coinage in East and South-East Asia.

From 2014 to 2017, Lyce Jankowski was a fellow of Worcester College, University of Oxford. She curated the East Asian coin collection at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. She catalogued the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese coins of the museum and organized two exhibitions displaying Asian coinage (“Pax Mongolica” and “Chinese coins from the scholar’s study”). She is now the curator of the extra-European art collections at the Royal Museum of Mariemont (Belgium).

Lyce Jankowski graduated in Classics (Licence and Maitrise at the Université Paris-Sorbonne), in Chinese (Licence at the Institut National des Langues Orientales, Paris), in Antiquity (Magistère at the Ecole Normale Supérieure) and in Art History (Licence, Master and Doctorat at the Université Paris-Sorbonne).

She is a member of the Société Française de Numismatique (Paris).

You can contact Lyce Jankowski via e-mail.

To know more about her monograph on Chinese coin collectors, please click here.

To view her profile and download her articles on academia.edu, please click here.

Her catalogue of the Korean and Japanese coins of the Ashmolean museum is available online here.

*24 April 2020