Fragile Cargo
The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China's Forbidden City
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The “gripping and meticulously researched” (The Times, London) true story of the determined museum curators who saved the priceless treasures of China’s Forbidden City in the years leading up to World War II and beyond.
Spring 1933: The silent courtyards and palaces of Peking’s Forbidden City, for centuries the home of Chinese emperors, are tense with fear and expectation. Japan’s aircrafts drone overhead, its troops and tanks are only hours away. All-out war between China and Japan is coming, and the curators of the Forbidden City are faced with an impossible question: how will they protect the vast imperial art collections in their charge? A difficult and monumental decision is made: to safeguard the treasures, they will need to be evacuated.
The magnificent collections contain a million pieces of art—objects that carry China’s deepest and most ancient memories. Among them are irreplaceable artefacts: exquisite paintings on silk, rare Ming porcelain, and the extraordinary Stone Drums of Qin, which are adorned with 2,500-year-old inscriptions of cultural significance.
For sixteen years, under the quiet leadership of museum director Ma Heng, the curators would go on to transport the imperial art collections thousands of miles across China—up rivers of white water, across mountain ranges, and through burning cities. In their search for safety the curators and their fragile, invaluable cargo journeyed through the maelstrom of violence, chaos, and starvation that was China’s Second World War.
Told for the first time in English and playing out across a vast historical canvas, this “compelling story of art, war, and adventure” (Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs: 1613-1918) follows the small group of men and women who, when faced with war’s onslaught on civilization, chose to resist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Brookes debuts with a novelistic account of Chinese curators' largely successful efforts to save priceless antiquities first from Japanese bombs during WWII and then from potential looters during Mao Zedong's Communist takeover. Led by Ma Heng, director of the Palace Museum in Beijing's (then Peking) Forbidden City, the curators packed and shipped nearly 17,000 cases of objects, including a 10th-century scroll depicting a river in winter and a mid-15th-century red porcelain ewer, deep into China's hinterlands, where they were stowed in caves, warehouses, and even a Buddhist temple. Many of the most valuable pieces ended up in Taiwan, while others were returned—after nearly 17 years—to the Forbidden City. Along the way, Brookes describes the objects in mesmerizing detail and vividly recounts the human toll of war. The most poignant portrait is of Ma Heng, who came under suspicion and endured a relentless program of "ideological transformation" in the 1950s. The Communist Party, Brookes writes, "took his devotion to the collections and turned it against him, hounding and humiliating him in his final days." Art lovers and WWII buffs will devour this riveting and bittersweet history. Photos.
