"The 'superfluous things' of the title are the essential elements of luxury in seventeenth-century China: bronzes, incense burners, teapots, young boys who serve tea. Craig Clunas’s work on luxury consumption has been widely influential in Chinese studies. Generations of scholars had mined the seventeenth-century texts on connoisseurship that Cluna discusses for evidence of practice. Drawing upon Bourdieu and Appadurai, Clunas read these texts instead as rhetorical documents that testified to conceptualizations of consumption and commodification."