Chinese workers in the third century b.c. created seven thousand life-sized terracotta soldiers to guard the tomb of the First Emperor. In the eleventh century a.d., Chinese builders constructed a pagoda from as many as thirty thousand separately carved wooden pieces. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China exported more than a hundred million pieces of porcelain to the West. As these examples show, the Chinese throughout history have produced works of art in astonishing quantities - and have done so without sacrificing quality, affordability, or speed of manufacture. How have they managed this? Lothar Ledderose takes us on a remarkable tour of Chinese art and culture to explain how artists used complex systems of mass production to assemble extraordinary objects from standardized parts or modules. As he reveals, these systems have deep roots in Chinese thought - in the idea that the universe consists of ten thousand categories of things, for example - and reflect characteristically Chinese modes of social organization. Ledderose begins with the modular system par excellence: Chinese script, an ancient system of fifty thousand characters produced from a repertoire of only about two hundred components. He shows how Chinese artists used related modular systems to create ritual bronzes, to produce the First Emperor's terracotta army, and to develop the world's first printing systems. He explores the dazzling variety of lacquerware and porcelain that the West found so seductive, and examines how works as diverse as imperial palaces and paintings of hell relied on elegant variation of standardized components. Ledderose explains that Chinese artists, unlike their Western counterparts, did not seek to reproduce individual objects of nature faithfully, but sought instead to mimic nature's ability to produce limitless numbers of objects. He shows as well how modular patterns of thought run through Chinese ideas about personal freedom, China's culture of bureaucracy, Chinese religion, and even the organization of Chinese restaurants. Originally presented as a series of Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art, "Ten Thousand Things" combines keen aesthetic and cultural insights with a rich variety of illustrations to make a profound new statement about Chinese art and society.

雷德侯 1942年12月7日齣生於慕尼黑。

1961-1969年在科隆、波恩、巴黎、颱北、海德堡等地學習東亞藝術、歐洲藝術、漢學、日本學。

1969年以《清代的篆書》論文獲海德堡大學東亞藝術史博士，隨後至美國普林斯頓大學、哈佛大學修學。

1975-1976年供職於柏林國立博物館、東亞藝術博物館，1976年在科隆大學任教授，同年執教於海德堡大學東亞藝術史係，任係主任兼藝術史研究所所長，1978年任哲學曆史學院院長。

雷德侯還是德國東方學會會長、柏林學術院院士、德意誌考古研究所通訊員、海德堡學術院院士、英國學術院通訊院士。曾任劍橋、芝加哥、颱灣大學客座教授或特約研究員。

其主持的展覽有紫禁城的珍寶、兵馬俑大軍，日本與歐洲，中國明清繪畫等。著《米蒂與中國書法的古典傳統》、《蘭與石——柏林東亞藝術博物館藏中國書畫》，《萬物》於2002年獲列文森圖書奬。

2005年9月7日，雷德侯因對亞洲藝術史的貢獻榮獲巴爾贊奬。