Heart on her sleeve, and foot

SOMETIMES an obsession can start simply enough. In Beverley Jackson’s case, it began in 1975 with the desire to walk the Great Wall of China. Few outsiders were allowed into the country at the time, but with a Chinese friend’s help she gained entrance as part of a group that included Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows and seven other Americans attending an international carpet fair.

“We weren’t allowed to be on our own,” Jackson says. “But one night when everyone else was busy, I took a flashlight, sneaked out of my Shanghai hotel and walked a few blocks in the dark to visit the Friendship Store.”

There, in the antiques section of a shop for foreigners, she spied a 19th century robe that changed her life.

“It was turquoise silk with multicolor peonies embroidered on it,” Jackson says. “Ultimately, it proved to have been made for one of the last Empress Dowager Cixi’s ladies in waiting.”

So began a decades-long devotion to Chinese antiques and artifacts by a woman whose college studies were anchored in Italian Renaissance art. Today, Chinese cultural relics fill every room of her Santa Barbara home.

“I started building the collection and appreciating the superb work done on the robes and shoes,” she says. “I then became interested in the people who did that work.”

In the living room, a tiara made of kingfisher feathers sits on a 17th century English chest. “The Asian kingfisher is bright blue, unlike our American one,” Jackson says. “The most colorful birds were found in Cambodia. Many feel that Angkor Wat was built with the gold that the Chinese paid for kingfisher feathers.”

A late 19th century Chinese opera headdress made of the feathers sits in a tall case nearby. In 1975, Jackson says, she got into Shanghai’s main pawnshop shortly before it closed to Westerners, and she bought the headdress, which came with long earrings.

“If I had had the common sense and the knowledge, I would have bought much more,” says Jackson, who became so entranced with the colorful bird and its cultural importance that she wrote a book, “Kingfisher Blue: Treasures of an Ancient Chinese Art,” published in 2002.

A rare, early 20th century kingfisher lantern hangs from a wrought-iron dragon hook. On her coffee table lies a kingfisher flower boat, an 18-inch-long model of a floating house of prostitution, complete with tiny female figurines. Docked in harbors and canals, these flower boats operated in China for centuries and can be found rendered in paintings, etchings and ivory carvings.

Jackson also began collecting civil rank badges in the late 1970s. Starting in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), men indicated their rank in society by wearing large square badges embroidered with gold thread. The market, she says, is flooded with fakes, but legitimate originals now start at about $350 each. Rare ones can fetch as much as $50,000.

“My first two cost $35,” she says. Jackson owns about 80 badges, which have been framed and mounted on a living room wall. They spurred Jackson to co-write with David Hugus the 2000 book “Ladder to the Clouds: Intrigue and Tradition in Chinese Rank,” whose title refers to boys’ desire to raise their rank, or climb a ladder to the clouds. The exams on which rank was based were strict, Jackson says, and studying sometimes started at 3 years of age.

THE collection for which Jackson is perhaps best known, however, is that of her lotus slippers -- tiny silk or cotton footwear worn by Chinese women for more than 1,000 years. In the belief that small feet would attract a husband, mothers bound their daughters’ feet, a bone-breaking practice that lasted into the 20th century.

Despite their brutal history, the slippers are remarkably beautiful examples of folk art. Jackson says her collection, displayed in two glass cases in the hall, is one of the three finest in the world.

“The first shoe I bought was a simple, late 19th century red cotton one with peasant embroidery of cotton thread,” Jackson says of the piece, which measures only 4 inches from heel to toe. Her favorite is a white silk slipper worn during mourning and embroidered with weeping willow trees.

Jackson developed an interest in the slippers while lecturing at museums and universities. She would speak about her Qing Dynasty robe collection and China’s culture during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, but the questions she fielded were usually about foot binding.

She subsequently spent years researching the subject and traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province, where many women still had their feet bound in the 1990s. The research resulted in one of her first books, “Splendid Slippers: A Thousand Years of an Erotic Tradition,” published in 1998.

Is it difficult living with a collection that has such depressing associations?

“I’ve never been one to close my eyes to the horrors inflicted on any peoples or the injustices of the world,” Jackson says. In this case, the tangible proof of an awful tradition happens to be aesthetically exquisite.

“I reconcile their beauty with their dark history by the fact that women were so proud of their tiny feet,” she says. “Once the binding was completed, they spent endless time creating the most beautiful little slippers possible.”

It’s not her place to pass judgment, she says. “I can’t undo the horror tales in their history, so I don’t try to.”

INDEED, inside her house, the serious does share room with a sense of humor. Witness a late 19th century Chinese bed turned into a dining room. Between the purchase price and expense of converting the piece into a dining area, she says she could have bought a Rolls-Royce. (See related story.)

Such investments may sound extreme, but they do explain how profound her love for Chinese arts really is.

“I deeply respect their patience and skill in creating great treasures,” says Jackson, who was to fly to Shanghai earlier this month but had to cancel because of illness. “I enjoy the people, especially the people whose lives are so hard, but they are friendly toward me and love to laugh as I do.”

Walk through her home, and collections in every room testify to her devotion. The guestroom is adorned with paintings of concubines, Chinese advertising posters from the 1920s and a cheater’s silk handkerchief with test answers written on both sides. In the living room, draped over a mannequin, is a brown Qing Dynasty gown, one of about 20 that she displays and wears.

Jackson says she no longer can afford to buy these Qing pieces, so she has started collecting 1930s Shanghai women’s dresses, furs and accessories. The pieces will be part of an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai later this year and documented in a book.

“I’m very happy and comfortable in China and with Chinese people, even though I don’t speak the language,” she says. “Even when I get to a new city in the U.S. and go to Chinatown, I have a very good feeling. Maybe I could have been in China in a past life.”

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It’s breakfast in bed every day

THE first step in transforming Beverley Jackson’s 19th century Chinese wedding bed into an offbeat dining area was getting the hulking structure through the front door. The frame was carefully broken down into 50 pieces, she says, then reassembled inside the home using a nail-less joinery system. Craftsman Paul Schurch brought in carvers and gilders to restore the damaged upper part of the frame, and he built the floor and banquettes so they can be easily removed.

When Jackson purchased the piece from a Summerland antiques dealer, painted walls already filled in some of the window-like openings in the frame. “The bed would have had soft curtains of silk instead,” she says. A Chinese furniture expert suggested that the bed probably came from a house of prostitution. “The pictures would have been added to entertain men,” Jackson says.

Reactions to the piece are amusing. Friends often ask to come over for a meal in bed. “Kirk Douglas came for dinner,” says Jackson, who is friends with the actor and his wife, Anne. “It was his greatest joy that he could climb into the bed six weeks after surgery on both knees.”

-- Times staff