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  • The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures
  • Shana J. Brown (bio)
Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott with David Shambaugh. The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures. A Samuel and Althea Stroum Book. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2005. xiii, 178 pp. Hardcover $24.95, ISBN 029-598522-4.

Vast treasures, whether real or fictional, cast a spell over many of us. The lure of riches and of artifacts of indescribable beauty motivates many escapades, and the treasures of the Chinese imperial houses were even more fabulous than one can imagine. Countless jewels, paintings, jades, bronze vessels, rare books, porcelains of the most varied and opulent kind-imagine the storehouses cluttered to the rafters. Where is all that loot now? This is the central question that Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott sought to answer in The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures.1

After discussing the history of imperial art collecting in earlier dynasties, Elliott narrates the movement of these treasures over the past century, including the establishment of two rival museums to house the artifacts: the Palace Museum in Beijing-the jewel in the crown of museums in the People's Republic of China-and the similarly exalted National Palace Museum in Taipei, under the control of the Republic of China. As the two regimes have at times claimed political legitimacy over Greater China, they have used their possession and stewardship of the imperial treasures to signify their right to rule-mimicking the earliest Chinese royal houses, who collected bronze vessels because of their "magico-religious power" (p. 10). Although this slim volume references few of the Chinese archival materials that document the formation of the Qing collection, it is a useful and entertaining overview of the modern fate of the dynasty's art objects. Furthermore, this work raises several significant questions, in particular the meaning of "ownership" of these materials-private versus state-and the ongoing political significance of the treasures to the regimes that now possess them.

For millennia, Chinese emperors collected objets d'art to establish their education, taste, and political legitimacy. Up to the Qing dynasty (est. 1644), most of the existing collections were destroyed, sold, or stolen upon the turn of each new dynastic cycle. Indeed, the detritus of the imperial collections replenished the national art markets, as looted imperial treasures were sold to private and state collectors, or bartered away by fleeing royalty. As with pharaonic tomb gold in ancient Egypt, treasures of various kinds circulated slowly but consistently within political and cultural circles.

Before the Yongle emperor of the Ming dynasty established his capital in present-day Beijing in the early fifteenth century, he first commanded the building of the enormous walled courtyards of the Imperial City, now the Palace Museum. [End Page 114] Although two centuries later much of the extensive Ming collection was lost even before the conquering Qing established control, still the Manchus inherited the palace and much of its storerooms, which became the basis of their own fabulous collection. Indeed, the Qing emperors were avid (if not particularly sophisti-cated) collectors. Under the Qianlong emperor, the imperial collection came to number some fifteen thousand paintings and works of calligraphy, including over two thousand produced by the emperor's own brush. Not all of these works are esteemed today, however; Elliott quotes Michael Sullivan as calling Qianlong "a niggardly and opinionated connoisseur" (p. 53).

When the young Puyi, the last Qing emperor, abdicated the throne in 1912, the collection's ownership became highly contested. The issue, at heart, was whether Puyi actually owned any of the artworks personally. As Elliott explains, the abdication agreement stipulated that "the emperor's private property would be protected by the government of the Republic of China. But it did not specify who actually owned the personal property of the Qing household" (p. 57). This ambiguity enabled both Puyi and various Peking governments to claim legitimate ownership over the artworks. For a decade, Puyi's family and attendants made up shortfalls in his budget by selling choice items from the collection. When the warlord Feng Yuxiang ousted Puyi from his palaces in 1924, he unilaterally declared the "treasures and historical relics" to...

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