Chinese Treasures Locked Up in Bunker Mentality

Somewhere beneath this leafy city, buried in a secret vault, a cache of priceless antiquities bears silent witness to the splendor of the Middle Kingdom’s twilight years.

More than 60 years ago, an invasion and approaching civil war ripped these imperial treasures from where they were kept in Beijing. An invidious and uncivil dispute now keeps them hostage, caught in the clash of two ancient capitals that both claim to be the artworks’ rightful owner.

Because of the bickering, the relics sit forlornly gathering dust in 2,200 wooden boxes in an underground bunker in Nanjing, left behind by Chinese Nationalist troops fleeing the advancing Communists in the late 1940s.

Few people alive today have laid eyes on the thousands of pieces of porcelain, scroll paintings and other objets d’art that once belonged to the emperors of China’s last two dynasties, the Ming and Qing, which together spanned nearly 550 years, from 1368 to 1912.

“We’ve kept them here [in Nanjing] for 50 years,” said Xu Huping, curator of the Nanjing Museum. “We’ve preserved them very well.”

Too well, say some of Xu’s colleagues in Beijing, who insist that the relics ought to be put on display in a museum rather than languish unappreciated in a subterranean holding pen.

And not just any museum, these colleagues say, but specifically their own: the Palace Museum, or as it’s more commonly known, the Forbidden City, the grandiose imperial compound in the center of Beijing. After all, Xu’s critics contend, the treasures originally lived there--and should by rights be sent home.

“We’ve asked Nanjing to give the relics back, but they’ve refused,” said Tan Bin, deputy curator of the Forbidden City. “We’ve worked on this issue for a long time, but they won’t return them.”

How such precious possessions from the royal household wound up so far away provides a window on China’s tumultuous history in the first half of the 20th century, a period of virtually nonstop conflict against enemies both internal and external.

The antiquities’ odyssey also demonstrates their powerful totemic value for China’s warring forces, who believed that control of the nation’s cultural patrimony symbolized their right to rule.

For the first three decades of the 20th century, the vast imperial collection remained fairly intact in the Forbidden City, even after the Qing Dynasty was toppled in 1912 by a republican revolution.

In 1928, the ruling Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek decided to move the capital south to Nanjing--which had been the capital of the first Ming emperors--and soon began shipping out cultural relics, to be displayed eventually in a national museum there. This also kept the imperial heirlooms, as well as countless other antiquities, out of the hands of invading Japanese forces who seized control of Beijing in July 1937.

The pieces’ safety in Nanjing, however, was short-lived. The Japanese took over the city months later.

Desperate to protect the treasures, Chiang had them packed in 20,000 wooden crates, Xu said. The boxes were dispersed to locations across China, from Guizhou to Sichuan, and stored in temples and other makeshift warehouses until the end of World War II.

In 1946, the collection was briefly brought together in Nanjing again. But then civil war raged between the Nationalists and Communists, and Chiang and his army, backed into a corner, started fleeing to Taiwan. They transported hundreds of boxes of artwork with them in the boats and ships that sailed across the Taiwan Strait.

Gone from mainland shores were matchless examples of Chinese craftsmanship in porcelain, jewelry, calligraphy, cloisonne and bronze work. These pieces are now housed in Taiwan’s enormous National Palace Museum in Taipei, and so convinced was Chiang of their power that he is said to have built his personal bunker under the museum, believing that the treasures would protect him from attack.

Meanwhile, on the mainland, the Communists restored the capital to Beijing. Many of the relics left behind by their vanquished rivals gradually made their way back north.

But domestic political turmoil in the 1950s and ‘60s interfered with the process. By the end of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, 2,200 boxes still remained in Nanjing, hidden in a secret storehouse dug deep into a hillside.

Most of the items, Xu said, are porcelain, and a lot of them are of lesser quality.

But officials at the Beijing museum disagree. “There are many valuable things inside those boxes, not just porcelain, yet nobody from the Palace Museum in Beijing has ever seen them,” said Wei Wenzao, a retired deputy curator at the Forbidden City.

“The people in Nanjing refuse to let us look at them,” Wei said. “Of course, they claim that most of the stuff inside the boxes isn’t so valuable, because they want to keep it in Nanjing. They don’t want to return those treasures to Beijing.”

Wei said old packing lists from the Forbidden City prove the antiquities’ provenance. During his tenure there, he tried to force his counterparts in Nanjing to hand over the antiquities, saying higher authorities agreed that the relics were rightfully Beijing’s. But it was to no avail, and the matter remains under protracted negotiation.

Xu, the Nanjing Museum curator, insists that the contents of the 2,200 boxes must first be sorted and confirmed to have belonged to the Forbidden City.

He seems in no hurry to do so. Instead, his museum concentrated its efforts on opening new exhibition halls two years ago, at a cost of $17 million.

Possession of the disputed crates would no doubt add to either museum’s cachet, as well as to the monetary value of its holdings. Chinese antiquities are hot items on the art market. Last month, a 17th century Qing Dynasty vase fetched $965,000 at an auction in New York, and in 1999, the highest amount ever paid for a piece of Chinese porcelain--$3.7 million--went for a Ming-era cup.

Exactly when ownership of the 2,200 boxes in Nanjing will be settled is hard to predict. Tan, the deputy curator at the Forbidden City, is confident his side will prevail.

“There’s no doubt that those relics belong to Beijing,” he said. “And they will eventually come back to Beijing.”