A fascinating story of resilience and ingenuity in the face of brewing global war.
The true story of the determined museum curators who saved the priceless treasures of China’s Forbidden City in the years leading up to World War II and beyond.
Spring 1933: The silent courtyards and palaces of Peking’s Forbidden City, for centuries the home of Chinese emperors, are tense with fear and expectation. Japan’s aircrafts drone overhead, its troops and tanks are only hours away. All-out war between China and Japan is coming, and the curators of the Forbidden City are faced with an impossible question: how will they protect the vast imperial art collections in their charge? A difficult and monumental decision is made: to safeguard the treasures, they will need to be evacuated.
The magnificent collections contain a million pieces of art — objects that carry China’s deepest and most ancient memories. Among them are irreplaceable artefacts: exquisite paintings on silk, rare Ming porcelain, and the extraordinary Stone Drums of Qin, which are adorned with 2,500-year-old inscriptions of cultural significance.
For sixteen years, under the quiet leadership of museum director Ma Heng, the curators would go on to transport the imperial art collections thousands of miles across China — up rivers of white water, across mountain ranges, and through burning cities. In their search for safety the curators and their fragile, invaluable cargo journeyed through the maelstrom of violence, chaos, and starvation that was China’s Second World War.
An excellent history of China between the two World Wars. It took me a while to get around to reading this (not sure why), but I am very happy to have done so — this is an excellent, engaging, and well-written history.
While this is, of course, a history of the incredible, immense efforts that the Chinese government and people went to in order to protect the country’s national treasures, it is much more than this. Brookes uses the protection plans and activities as a lens through which he discusses a much wider history. Specific treasures, for example, are used as invitations to offer digressions into art history, examinations of the development of certain techniques (scrolls, publishing, porcelain, etc.), as well as the evolution and development of China as a country and a people. As a result, the book is packed with fascinating and surprising details, and Brookes is a skilled enough author to make all of them interesting.
The story is primarily told through the experiences of three of the conservators: Ma Heng, Na Chih-liang, and Chuang Yen, drawing on their own texts, letters, and interviews after the fact. Their journeys across China (and abroad) offer a fascinating window into China at this time, taking readers from bustling cities to more-remote towns and regions. Brookes provides readers with clear and concise context; at the time, the Kuomintang and the Communists were engaged in a long struggle for control of the country, all the while Japan’s aggressive expansion was chipping away at the country’s edges.
As the Japanese forces advanced across China, these men were constantly forced to adapt their efforts and plans to keep the national treasures out of danger. Through their experiences and journeys, Brookes offers readers an impression of China’s incredible diversity and how it was affected by wartime refugee movements — in particular, how greater exposure helped develop a sense of shared Chinese nationality and community, despite their differences in fashion, food, customs, and dialect (on the latter, I would also recommend David Moser’s A Billion Voices; for a very interesting, short look at China’s search for a common language). Their experiences also offer a window into the effects of war on those who are not directly engaged in conflict.
In summary, Fragile Cargo is an engaging, informative, well-researched, and surprisingly broad history. Brookes’s prose is well-composed, the history is well-paced and remains accessible throughout. Definitely recommended.
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Adam Brookes’s Fragile Cargo is out now, published by Atria Books in North America and Chatto & Windus in the UK. Brookes is also the author of the Philip Mangan thriller series, which starts with Night Heron (I have all three of the novels, and hope to read them ASAP).
Civilian Reader 