A Peek Into the Forbidden City

Only hours before the grand opening of an unprecedented exhibit of treasures from China’s Imperial Palace at the Bowers Museum, work crews struggled to remove several large heavy wooden crates.

The smell of sawdust lingered over the mess strewn throughout the Santa Ana cultural center, where a replica of the gate to the Forbidden City remained shrouded in masking tape and packing material.

Then Anne Shih emerged looking almost like part of the exhibit herself in a creaseless ensemble of ornately embroidered pale-blue silk. For the Taiwanese-born Shih, a volunteer who serves on the museum’s board of governors and as president of its Chinese Cultural Arts Council, the exhibition is the culmination of nearly five years of delicate negotiations with Chinese officials.

The collection of objects from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), “Secret World of the Forbidden City: Splendors From China’s Imperial Palace,” opens to the public today, and will remain until Sept. 3 before traveling to Oakland and Houston.

After nine trips to China, three contracts, $1 million raised and several weeks in the United States with the Imperial Palace curators who oversee every inch of the exhibit, Shih was unfazed by the last-minute preparatory chaos.

As she floated from one treasure to the next, describing their significance and the emperors to whom they belonged, Shih bubbled with a passion for the objects and their history that made the clutter around them seem to disappear.

It was precisely that enthusiasm, museum president Peter C. Keller said, that helped convince the Chinese cultural ministers to authorize the exhibition.

“There’s no way this exhibition could have happened without Anne,” Keller said. “She has such an energy and, at the same time, a charm about her that you can’t say no.”

And so, from Shih’s first visit to the Forbidden City in 1995, the exhibit grew in breadth and length. What emerged is a collection of about 360 objects, ranging from an Imperial throne room and elaborate gowns and dress armor worn by the Emperors to a bath tub.

“Anne brought her own perspective on this, as a Chinese person who being from Taiwan has managed to transcend political obstacles and make incredible inroads in China,” said Janet Baker, the museum’s curator of Asian art. “That is still quite rare, and it puts her ahead of many people at this point. Because she is Chinese, she can bridge the cultural gap. None of us, no matter how good our Chinese is, can ever reach that.”

Even without a language barrier, Shih said, she had to bridge a great many cultural differences with Chinese authorities.

“They have a totally different system,” Shih said. “For example, they do not know: ‘What is a volunteer?’ They wanted to know, ‘What is your purpose?’ They never do things for free.”

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Indeed, the exhibition came at a cost that includes a monthly $30,000 loan fee and arrangements for some 28 curators and experts who will travel from China at various times throughout the exhibition’s stay at the Bowers. The first three, including the palace’s lead curator Li-Hua Chen, arrived Jan. 2. Five more officials were due to arrive before the opening celebrations.

The Chinese overseers are supposed to be the only people who touch or move the objects.

“Every piece is so delicate,” Chinese curator Chen said through an interpreter. “We have to make sure not even one bead or one thread will be damaged.”

Pausing before a somewhat inconspicuous 18th-century Tibetan ritual object--made from the skull of a high-ranking monk--Shih looked mischievously over her shoulder.

“Quick, nobody’s here,” she whispered before lifting a brass lid to reveal the gleaming silver-plated interior of the bowl-shaped skull.

If this mother of two from Huntington Beach seems somewhat at home among objects that most people in China will never see, let alone touch, it is because of an interest in Asian art that dates back to a treasure box her grandmother gave her when she was 10 or 11.

She and her husband, importer Danny Shih, came to the United States in 1979. Although she had worked with her husband in Taiwan, Anne became a full-time mother. For years she focused her energies on her children’s school and Chinese academies. But as her children matured, (they’re now 24 and 28), Shih’s involvement in the Chinese art community, and her relationship with the Bowers developed.

Keller recalled meeting her in 1992, when she was vice president of the museum’s Chinese Arts Council. Keller had been trying to get a jade exhibit from the national history museum in Taiwan and had been turned down several times. Shih was planning a trip to Taiwan and asked if there were anything she could do for the museum while she was there.

“I was so frustrated. I said jokingly, ‘Yes, get me the jade exhibit,’ ” Keller said. “And she came back and said, ‘OK, you’ve got it. What else do you want?’ ”

These days, Keller tends to want what Shih wants. Which helps, because Shih tends to get that.

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Shih was exploding with excitement as she showed off a display from one emperor’s bedroom.

For the emperor’s safety, he was not permitted to sleep the whole night with his concubines. The chosen woman on any given night would be bathed by eunuchs and dressed in a cloth so she could not conceal any weapons, then carried into the emperor’s bedroom. Later in the night, she would be carried away.

“So it’s not good to be the emperor. No sleep,” she said with a giggle.

If you ask her assistant, museum staffer I-Huey Chu, 29, of Anaheim, Shih isn’t so big on sleep herself.

Chu--who, out of respect, calls her boss A-yi, Chinese for “auntie”--said Shih would frequently call her at 11 p.m., her mind racing with details she didn’t want to forget in the morning.

Because of the time difference with her counterparts in China, Shih said she has become accustomed to nightly telephone calls that last until midnight.

Some of her most sleepless nights, she said, came after NATO troops accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, last May. Shih thought for sure the exhibition would be canceled, as U.S.-Chinese relations soured. “I was so scared, I couldn’t sleep,” she said. The board of directors encouraged her to look for a back-up exhibit.

But the Chinese draw a distinction between politics and culture, Shih said. “They never mentioned it.”

At other times, she fretted about the safety of the objects during their flight. She made sure the 100 giant crates that they were packed in arrived before the new year and any potential Y2K problems.

Although the exhibit remained in stark disarray, Shih was ready to put the chaos and panic behind her.

Last-minute preparations would continue late into the night Friday, in preparation for a VIP reception Saturday morning. But Shih calmly excused herself to meet the arriving Chinese dignitaries, disappearing in a swish of blue silk.