ARTICLES

Shaping the Forbidden City as an Art-Historical Museum in the 1950s

Fig. 1 Wang Xun's calligraphic work Bo Yuan tie, collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing

In November 1949, the new government of the People's Republic of China selected Zheng Zhenduo (1898-1958) to serve as both Vice-Minister of Culture and Head of the Cultural Relics Bureau. These positions gave Zheng direct jurisdiction over the Palace Museum, and his sound working relationship with the museum's director, Ma Heng (1881-1955), ensured that fresh energy could be devoted to the tasks of protecting and revitalizing the museum.

Zheng Zhenduo was an excellent choice. His career and range of interests coincided with many of the most important aspects of the Palace Museum's work. Like Lu Xun, a friend and associate, Zheng's work as a writer and journalist was intimately entwined with the dramatic events of 20th century Chinese history that prompted intellectuals and their students to attempt to direct those events by effecting positive changes (reform or evolution) in all aspects of cultural and intellectual life. While some intellectuals would disavow the past in all its manifestations, most were educated in the traditional manner. Intellectuals attempted to redefine China, as well as its history and heritage, within a world that enunciated popular continuities as cultural sources, as well as resources of strength. Thus, for Zheng Zhenduo and Lu Xun, the mission of the writer came to encompass the documentation of Chinese literary history, and that in turn led to the recognition of the primacy of vernacular and folk literature. Their folkloric interests and the stress they gave to popular and folk culture resulted in both men collecting the material artefacts (wenwu) that document literary history. This confidence in the authenticity of evolutionary material artefacts then translated into a parallel interest in archaeology and conservation, a juxtaposition often seen to be contradictory in a Western context, where the shift from the literary to the material, rather than from the artefact to the interpretative, is sometimes regarded as being a heretical reverse of scientific or historical methodologies. For many Chinese scholars of the May Fourth era, these heresies did not exist, because intellectual priorities entailed practical action, and knowledge, like literature, was deemed irrelevant if pursued simply for its own sake.

Neither Zheng Zhenduo nor Lu Xun allowed their neo-populism to exclude them from elite culture and the connoisseurship in which they were trained. Their tastes enabled them to appreciate the finest aspects of China's intellectual and cultural traditions, without their succumbing to terrified parochialism or irrelevant exotica. For example, in the 1930s, due to their concern for the threatened state of the ancient art of wood-block colour printing and its skilled artisans, Zheng Zhenduo and Lu Xun compiled a collection of decorative writing paper in what was then called Beiping. Rongbao Studio (Rongbao Zhai), an antiquarian publisher and dealer in Beiping, arranged for the printing of the work. It was in appreciation of their heritage skills, rather than out of obligation, that Zheng Zhenduo, as Vice-Minister of Culture, joined other intellectual leaders in ensuring that Rongbao Zhai be preserved as a jointly owned state-private company in the 'New China'.

Zheng's appointment to a position that put him in effective control of the Palace Museum was a result, in part, of his active involvement in saving significant Chinese documents and antiquities during the Japanese assault on Shanghai in 1937. His passion for literature and bibliophilia drew him to libraries and museums, and hence aroused in him a more general concern for the conservation of literary and historical materials.[1]

During his first month overseeing the Palace Museum, Zheng prepared a preliminary report for the new premier Zhou Enlai on readying the exhibits in the museum for display. He immediately acted to ensure that the 10,000 or so remaining crates of antiquities temporarily stored in the Palace Museum's Nanjing branch be returned to Beijing. In January 1950, the first consignment of 1500 crates arrived in the capital more than a decade after their removal.

In 1949, the grounds of the former palace were neglected and in a ruinous state, but the essential task Zheng faced was to redefine the nature of the Palace Museum itself. His philosophy was expressed in two papers he wrote in the early 1950s, ' An overview of cultural relics work' (Wenwu gongzuo zongshu) and 'Cultural relics work in the New China' (Xin Zhongguo de wenwu gongzuo), both included in his anthology Zheng Zhenduo wenbo wenji (Zheng Zhenduo's writings on cultural relics and museology). Zheng's vision, articulated in the second article, marked a distinct break with the notion of a 'palace' museum; he saw the exhibited collection as reflecting the sweep of Chinese material civilisation from the painted pottery (caitao) of the neolithic period to the palace paraphernalia of the late-Qing years.

He evoked the concept of innovation as encapsulated in the formulation 'tuichen chuxin' ('cull the old to bring forth the new'), an expression often prefaced by the notion of 'baihua qifang' ('let a hundred flowers blossom').[2]

Zheng's ideas were reiterated, and in full, in the following passage in his 1953 draft 'Report on addressing the plan for reforming the Palace Museum' (Gugong Bowuyuan gaijin jihua de zhuanti baogao): "The nature of the Palace Museum should be that of a comprehensive cultural, artistic and historical museum with art works forming the central exhibits. Such a museum will have much in common with the Kremlin Museum and the Hermitage." His vision was endorsed, by and large, at a March 1957 meeting of the Ministry of Culture on the nature, policy and tasks of the Palace Museum, which defined it as a "museum of cultural and artistic quality" (wenhua yishuxing de bowuguan).

With some of the finest works from the original Palace Museum collection removed to Taiwan, where they remained inaccessible to the general public in mountain bunkers for 15 years, the Palace Museum under Zheng Zhenduo embarked on an acquisitions policy to widen and vary the remaining collection. Whenever possible, the museum sought to obtain items from the original collection that had been dispersed outside Taiwan. In 1950, the central government commissioned Xu Bojiao to go to Hong Kong on a clandestine mission to locate any items that had once been part of the collection with a view to purchasing them.

Among the most treasured works in the collection of the Qianlong Emperor that had gone missing from the Forbidden City were the rubbings of the calligraphy of the "Three Rarities" (San xi), notably works by Wang Xizhi (d. 365?), Wang Xianzhi (d. 386), and Wang Xun (d. 401). They represented the maturation of Chinese calligraphy and the earliest attainment of calligraphic perfection. In October 1951, Zheng, travelling from China on an official visit to India and Burma, learned that Xu Bojiao had located works by two of the Three Rarities in a 'foreigner's' collection. These were Wang Xianzhi's Zhongqiu tie and Wang Xun's Bo Yuan tie (Fig. 1), the latter being regarded as an early masterpiece of grass script calligraphy. Both works were available for purchase, so Zheng despatched Xu to Beijing to report to the State Council. From India Zheng wrote to Guo Baochang to explore avenues for purchasing these two works. Wang Yeqiu, deputy-director of the State Cultural Relics Bureau, and Ma Heng were sent to Hong Kong and the masterpieces were successfully bought and 'repatriated'.

In 1952, the central government purchased a number of major ancient paintings for the museum's collection: Han Huang (Tang dynasty), "Five oxen" (Wu niu tu); Gu Hongzhong (Five Dynasties), "The night revels of Han Xizai" (Han Xizai yeyan tu); Zhao Ji (Emperor Huizong of the Northern Song), "Auspicious dragon and rocks" (Xiang long shi tu); Ma Lu (Song dynasty), "Two venerable men gazing at the waterfall" (Er lao guan pu tu); Ren Renfa (Yuan dynasty), "Zhang Guolao's audience with Emperor Minghuang of the Tang dynasty" (Zhang Guo jian Minghuang tu); and a landscape scroll painting by Wang Meng (Yuan dynasty) simply called Shanshui zhou. These paintings are now some of the finest pieces in the museum's collection.

Fig. 2 Scroll painting by Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty, "Listening to the lute" (Ting qin tu), collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing

Also on the open market from the time of the Japanese surrender and into the early 1950s were many of the treasures once in the hands of the Manchukuo royal household of the former Emperor Puyi. In August 1952, the Ministry of Culture issued a nation-wide 'notification' (tongzhi), designed to recover items from the Palace Museum's original collection still circulating among the Chinese public. Although this had the indirect effect of increasing the flow of antiquities being smuggled to Hong Kong, the government netted 2,876 items, including the valuable Shang dynasty bronze piece termed the San yang zun. Some of the paintings which the former Palace Museum director Yi Peiji (1880-1937) had once been accused of stealing also again saw the light of day, namely Emperor Huizong's 'Listening to the lute' (Ting qin tu) (Fig. 2) and Ma Lin's flower painting titled 'A layered icy flutter' (Cengdie bingshao tu).

The hunt was on in earnest. The museum's acquisitions department also sought to retrieve not simply those objects that went missing after the 1911 Revolution, largely through the agency of Puyi and his retainers, but the Ministry of Culture also concentrated on private, and public, collections that had acquired palace objects over the previous two centuries, or even collections that had acquired valuable objects that had never been in the palace collection or acquired at any time by the palace.

One valuable late-Qing private collection was that of Pang Yuanji of Wuxing in Jiangsu province, whose Xuzhai Studio contained more than 700 fine calligraphic works and paintings, reportedly making it China's largest private collection. After his death, more than 400 Xuzhai Studio items were scattered in different locations in Shanghai and Suzhou, and his descendants wanted to sell them. In 1952, Zheng Zhenduo sent a report, on behalf of the Ministry of Culture, to the Government Administration Council's Culture and Education Committee proposing that funds be raised so that this private collection could be bought in its entirety, thereby ensuring that the Palace Museum could open a painting exhibition hall in 1953. [3]

As early as 1950, Zheng recommended that Zhang Heng and Xu Bangda, two noted scholars, be brought from Shanghai to Beijing to set up a purchasing department for the museum in the Circular City (Tuan Cheng) in Beihai Park. This then became the Palace Museum's main collection point.

The year 1952 was a high point in acquisitions by the Palace Museum, but most of the retrieved works still tended to be those that had been removed from the collection by Puyi and Pujie. However, a number of 'popular organisations' (renmin tuanti) also acquired works for the museum in these early days, and in this the Ministry of Culture played a vital role. Mao Zedong himself is credited with contributing a number of rare calligraphic works to the museum. In 1951, Mao wrote to Zheng Zhenduo urging that a friend's copy of Wang Fuzhi's 'Prose-poem on the auspicious dance of paired cranes' (Shuanghe ruiwu fu) be passed on to the museum via the Cultural Relics Bureau. Mao also personally presented to the museum Qian Dongbi's copy of Lanting xu shisan ba in 1952 and Li Bai's Shangyang-tai tie in 1958.

The wave of patriotism that swept the PRC in the early 1950s ensured that a many prominent scholar-collectors, including Sun Yingzhou, Zhang Boju and Liu Jiu'an, contributed valuable works to the museum. In the decade to 1959, the museum acquired 140,000 new works, and by the end of 2003, post-1949 acquisitions totalled 223,506 items, of which 20,000 were donations from individuals and 324 were classified as Class One cultural relics. Zheng Zhenduo played a key role in acquisitions, as well as opening up exhibitions in the Three Halls, the Rear Three Palaces, the Six Western Palaces and Dongshou Tang, a total exhibition space covering 6,300 sq m. Exhibits now displayed works of art from throughout the ages—painting, calligraphy, sculpture, bronzes, ceramics, textiles, jewellery and cloisonné, as well as weapons, costumes, regalia, bamboo, timber and ivory carving. The inscribed Stone Drums believed to date from the Qin dynasty were also exhibited in the Jianting (The Arrow Pavilion).

The tasks of authenticating and cataloguing the collection with its new acquisitions were monumental, and a publishing house was established by the museum in the early 1950s. Zheng Zhenduo was also responsible for diversifying the collections in line with the principles he originally formulated for the Palace Museum. The imperial collection, for example, eschewed funerary goods because these were regarded as inauspicious, but among archaeologically recovered items and art objects, funerary objects predominate and they ironically provide a more accurate reflection of ancient daily life than do rare objects deemed fit for collection. Zheng was a specialist collector of sancai (tricolour) figurines and other ceramic mingqi (funerary objects, especially figurines), most of which he purchased on the open market in 1947 and 1948 when such items from tombs were being snapped up by Chinese and foreign collectors in Shanghai and other places. Zheng studied these and produced "a definitive monograph on these objects. His discoveries in the early 1950s near Qin Shihuang's mausoleum outside Xi'an led him to speculate, with acute foresight, that major finds would be made there, a prediction that was realised 16 years later with the discovery of the terracotta armies of Qin Shihuang.

Zheng also promoted sculptural and ceramic studies at the museum. In 1958, the Palace Museum planned the creation of a sculpture hall, and the work was entrusted to the palaeographer Tang Lan, the archaeologist Yan Wenru and the sculptor Liu Kaiqu. The sculpture hall marked another major break from the collection principles ascribed to by the emperors, the ruling classes and the traditional gentry. This change in curatorial direction was largely due to the intimate involvement of Zheng Zhenduo in museum work. The exhibit came to contain 357 pieces, of which 56 were reproductions, and it included carved bricks, illustrated stones, clay and stone sculptures and Buddhist statuary. The pieces ranged in date from the Shang to the Qing dynasties. One third of the pieces in the collection were Zheng's donations from his own collection. Regrettably, Zheng died in a plane crash in 1958, but he set his stamp on the institution that was to continue until recent times. [BGD]

Notes:

[1] Zheng's move from letters to archaeology is documented in an article titled 'Cong wenxue zhuandao kaogu de Zheng Zhenduo' (Zheng Zhuo's transition from literature to archaeology) which appeared in the 30 May 1948 issue of the newspaper Xinmin wanbao.

[2] Mao first articulated this slogan in 1951 at the time of the establishment of the Chinese Theatre Research Institute.

[3] Zheng Zhenduo, 'Draft proposal that these ancient calligraphic works and paintings be purchased on behalf of the Ministry of Culture', (Guanyu shougou gu shuhua shi dai Wenhuabu nigao).

Reference:

Zheng Xinmiao, 'Gugong xueren erti' (Two Gugong scholars), Gugong xuekan (Journal of Gugong Studies), Beijing: Zijincheng Chubanshe, 2005:2, pp.8-25.