On January 1, 1912, the revolutionary leader and Christian convert Sun Yat-sen returned from foreign exile to be inaugurated in Nanking as the first provisional president of the Chinese Republic. On February 12, the new empress dowager, Longyu (the Guangxu emperor’s widow), signed the abdication papers that brought the Great Qing Empire to a close. In the presence of the six-year-old Puyi, with tears streaming down her face, she read the edict that swept away two thousand years of imperial rule. Under the terms of the agreement, the Xuantong emperor Puyi was allowed to remain among his relatives, eunuchs, and the imperial treasures in the Forbidden City on an allowance of four million silver yuan annually for household expenses.
Peking’s diplomatic community now faced a period of adjustment. A new American president, William Howard Taft, successor to Theodore Roosevelt and also a Republican, appointed William James Calhoun, an Illinois lawyer, to succeed Rockhill as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to China. Calhoun arrived in 1909 with his wife, Lucy Monroe. By his own admission, he unpacked “without knowing a single thing about the country . . . [with] no impressions for or against it,” but left in 1913 “with the heart strings pulling a great deal.” Until that time Peking had been deemed a difficult and isolated posting, but tourists had begun to appear and the American Legation played host to a procession of distinguished visitors. And by November 1908, according to a Russian diplomat, Dmitrii Abrikosov, the capital had become: “[A] perpetual merry-go-round of parties. Every Legation tried to eclipse the others: a ballet in the Russian Legation, where the charming daughter of the Minister was a comet surrounded by stars; a musical at the French Legation, where the beautiful wife of the French Minister danced the bolero to the music of Ravel; a fancy dress ball in the French bank with everyone under the influence of champagne, exotic costumes, Chinese lanterns in the garden, and romance in the air.”
Lucy Calhoun, diplomatic wife, collector of textiles, artworks, and celebrities, as Peking becomes a fashionable destination.
The minister’s wife, Lucy, was the sister of Harriet Monroe, the founder and editor of Chicago’s famed literary magazine Poetry, a leading force for the avant-garde in American literature. Harriet, while visiting her younger sister in 1910, slipped easily into the foreign colony’s routine: the seaside resort of Peitaiho for the summer, pony rides and state dinners in the fall—spinsters and bachelors at the table’s end, ministers and wives in strict order of precedence above. Quoting her letters home, Harriet notes two subtle changes presaging the revolution that would bring down the dynasty: “Manchu ladies are accompanying their husbands to foreign dinners, and it is becoming unfashionable for Chinese women of the upper classes to have bound feet.”
For well-heeled clients like the railroad magnate Charles Lang Freer, who stayed in a suite in 1909 and 1910, the domain of choice was the “Grand Hotel des Wagons-Lits,” built in 1905 to accommodate travelers arriving from Europe on the Trans-Siberian Express. Described in 1919 by the American writer Ellen La Motte as “the most interesting hotel in the world,” it was where all the nations “meet, rub elbows, consult together, and plan to ‘do’ one another and China too.” Located conveniently in the Legation Quarter, the Wagons-Lits served the finest in French wines and cuisine. A Dutchman, Henri Borel, conveyed his distaste for the changes that were beginning to overtake Peking:
A glass of sherry, a cigarette, a French newspaper. Am I in Paris or Peking? Round about me are exactly the people one sees at Ostend, Biarritz, Wiesbaden . . . smart business people and empty desoeuvres [the idle]. What in Heaven’s name are these people doing in Peking? “How do you like Peking?” I hear . . . the shrill high voice of a lady—“So pretty; so interesting. Yesterday we did the Ming Tombs near Nank’ou; oh it was lovely, lovely.” Thus appears Peking to me, the holy city of the Emperors, the Sons of Heaven, tarnished by the snobbery of white globe-trotters and loafers, who have forced themselves by the fuming, screeching train through its sacred ramparts, which can no longer shield its virginity. And outside to the right and to the left, louder than the buzzing of voices, I hear the hammering and knocking going on for ever—as if the Modern had conquered, and were triumphantly erecting a new, vulgar, cosmopolitan town in the ancient holy fortress of the Tartars of the North.
During Harriet’s time in Peking, not only did the Calhouns host a reception for Freer attended by American and Chinese officials, but the minister also provided him with logistical help and security escorts for his travels. Their abashed guest of honor wrote to his business partner, Frank Hecker, “Of course I don’t deserve such attentions and as you know, I really don’t care for them, but the things I unearthed in China last year and some of those recently secured have got known in Legation circles and they think me either a saint or a fool and I fancy they are trying to learn which.” Harriet wrote that, with Freer’s guidance, she had made “a sudden and very deep plunge into Chinese art,” particularly, it seems, painting. “The good news of high prices was traveling in mysterious undercurrents through China and the ‘head boys’ of centuries-old families were pussyfooting up to Peking from remote provinces with long-hidden precious rolls under their arms,” she reports. Freer was “hot on the trail,” and “there is blood in his eye; and consequently impoverished mandarins are revealing their rarest treasures.” Freer took her to the most famous of the shops and “to his Chinese palace [rooms in the Tartar City] where the new acquisitions were guarded by experts; and for my benefit many of them were unveiled and unrolled.”
The former viceroy Duanfang invited them to tiffin and showed them his bronzes that had been dug up in Shaanxi when he was the governor of the province. “He had in mind a project for a museum in Peking,” Harriet recalled some years later, “but impoverished heirs were compelled to scatter his collection, and the very temple set he showed us is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.” The sale of Duanfang’s collection following his murder, according to Juliet Bredon, Sir Robert Hart’s niece and the author of the guidebook Peking (1919), “brought native bidders from every province and caused as great a sensation in the Far Eastern art world as an auction of Greek marbles would in Europe.” (Lucy would score her own coup when, as a gift to the departing minister, Dowager Empress Longyu had a hanging scroll delivered to their carriage as they left the imperial palace. Now in the Art Institute of Chicago, it bears Longyu’s seal and a brief inscription, describing the painting as a work of the “imperial brush,” although the painter of the Tree Peonies in Full Bloom remains unknown.)
With interest in Chinese art growing, dealers like C. T. Loo and Yamanaka were sending scouts into the countryside. In Shanghai, the former missionary John C. Ferguson collected paintings that he would soon offer to the Metropolitan and Freer. Ancient tombs were discovered as railways expanded, creating new opportunities for collectors. Soon, professionals competed with amateurs joining in the fun, according to Bredon:
When one has seen all the palaces and ‘done’ all the temples and tombs, there still remains a never failing source of interest and amusement in Peking—shopping. . . . Few strangers can resist the temptation to bargain for old porcelains, bronzes, embroideries, or whatever appeals to individual taste, and in the resident this habit, sooner or later, develops a special mentality. We shamelessly examine the pictures on each other’s walls, turn over our host’s dishes at table in search of marks to prove their origin, pick up his lacquer after dinner to feel its weight, boldly inquire the price of his latest acquisition. Such manners, which would be ill-bred in Paris or London, are tolerated and understood in the “old curiosity shop,” as a witty traveler once called Peking, and if you stay long enough you will acquire them yourself.
The best time to buy was right before the Lunar New Year, when the Chinese were cash-strapped because of their obligation to lavish presents on relatives and pay their debts to shopkeepers in order to receive credit for the next year. Resident foreigners could shop at home; runners would come bearing blue cloth bundles to be examined while sitting comfortably in an armchair. This method was favored by old customers because the salesman knew their taste—or lack of it—and catered to it. Scroll after scroll would be unrolled for inspection: birds and flowers, rivers and mountains, framed by calligraphy and colophons. The second method was to visit the shops, as Bredon explains, where it was fatal to judge simply by appearances: “The biggest, and the cleanest shops in Peking may not have the best things. Often a merchant hidden away in a blind alley has the rarest treasures—just as his tiny store has the most high-sounding title. . . . A tiny dug-out known as the ‘establishment of Ten Thousand Glories,’ offers a most admirable box of Yung Cheng enamel. In the filthy local ‘Cour des Miracles,’ east of Chien Men Street, many a good piece has been picked up.” Shops were grouped together on streets with names like Jade, Embroidery, Silver and Lantern Street. The favorite haunt for antiquities was outside the Chien Men in Liulichang, the old glass quarter. Because travelers had by now become familiar with Chinese art in European, Japanese, and American museums, they assumed that treasures overlooked by looters during the Boxer Rebellion still abounded in Peking. Lucy Calhoun explained to American readers of The New York Times how you shopped on “the greatest curio street in the world.” After you enter the shop, the dance begins when the dealer raises the blue cloth hanging across a beckoning doorway, revealing
bits of Ming bronze, porcelain bowls, and in a glass case under the light exquisite carvings in white jade, brown jade, gray that shades into black, green that merges into white. Perhaps you make an offer for one of them, far below, but not too far, the price demanded. The dealer, spurning your offer, but perceiving that you have taste will then invite you to penetrate further into his domain. He leads you through a courtyard into a larger room. You stand bewildered before all this beauty—Han bronzes, exquisite medallion bowls of the time of Tao Kwang and Victoria, Chien Lung enamels, blue and white porcelain fired under the patronage of the emperor Kang Hsi of unerring taste, finger bowls of coconut shells covered with little figures in low relief and lined with silver, a graceful Kuan Yin in white jade, Ming pottery in blue and purple, a white Sung bowl perhaps or a priceless blue one splotched with purple.
All the while the dealer observes you, seeing if you are worthy of appreciating and buying the best pieces. If he approves, he will welcome you the next time like an old friend.
But in this golden age of art collecting, the Chinese were already creating expert forgeries with fake temple provenances. As Bredon warned her readers:
Never forget in the enthusiasm of the moment, when some attractive specimen strikes your fancy, that every trick of Western antiquarians, and a thousand original ones of their own are familiar to Chinese dealers. They peel their pearls, bury their bronzes to give them a fine patina, dye their furs, smoke their embroideries and ivories, imitate and colour jades, tint rock-crystals, forge date marks and cleverly insert old bottoms in new vases. The temptation to cheat the novice is generally irresistible, in quality, in price, or both, and the most ingratiating and convincing salesman is often the worst offender.
After the 1911 revolution that swept away two thousand years of imperial rule, pigtails were cut off, feet were unbound, and elaborate Manchu headdresses were replaced by shingled heads and, among the Westernized female flappers of the 1920s, bobbed hair. Formal attire became obsolete overnight as the court was dissolved. Officials once garbed in embroidered silk robes now wore Western clothing. “How horrible,” opined the visiting William Rockhill. “European dress is intolerable on them, and it is so with all these attempted imitations.” “I am not conscious,” Lucy Calhoun reported to Harriet, “that the Manchu princes are selling their treasures, but I have been getting some lovely paintings of late.” She now had a sideline as a “picker” for Chicago’s Antiquarian Society, an auxiliary of the Art Institute. Her small allowance, she proposes, would be spent on “an Emperor’s coat . . . an exquisite old ko-sse [kesi] coat . . . and some old ko-see temple hangings.” She claimed that the MFA’s expert, Kakuzo Okakura, then in Peking acquiring Chinese art for Boston, had pronounced them “the finest of their kind.” The Antiquarians approved. The articles were shipped from China and received in Chicago with enthusiasm. “I do not wonder that they thought the things modern,” Lucy responded in a letter to the chair of the purchasing committee, “they were so wonderfully fresh. But out here everyone knows them to be old. The quality of the silk, the nature of the colors and especially of the gold, the character of the workmanship are all of another age than ours. It is impossible to reproduce them today.” But the Calhoun’s Chinese idyll was over in 1913, and they returned home.
“There is a strange thing about foreigners who have lived very long in China: they never seem to be contented anywhere else. They are apparently bitten by some kind of bug which infuses a virus into their blood, and makes life in that country the only thing endurable,” observed William Calhoun. He might well have been describing his wife, Lucy. Following her husband’s death from a stroke in 1916, she spent time in France, working in hospitals during World War I. Afterward she returned to Peking, where as “Aunt Lucy” she reigned for the next two decades as the social lioness of the “expat set,” hosting “at homes” in a rehabilitated eighteenth-century Buddhist temple in the Ma Ta Jen Hutung, which she equipped with Western comforts like electricity and plumbing. One of “Aunt Lucy’s” parties in 1933, recalled George Kates, involved a barge towed under a full moon along a canal through hundreds of floating lanterns while her guests cavorted in full evening dress.
Not to be outdone by the literary efforts of her sister Harriet, Lucy, who had been an art critic for The Chicago Record Herald, contributed two articles to The New York Times: “The Streets of Peking” (November 26, 1922) and another on Puyi’s wedding (November 22, 1922) to Empress Wan Rong. Lucy described the wedding—one of the last occasions when the mandarins still dressed in their official embroidered robes, their dark plum-colored coats lined with white fox; their outfits crowned by necklaces of jade, amber, or coral; and their official hats with peacock-feather pendants in the back. Lucy was the only foreign woman in the group and, as she noted for her readers, “It was unprecedented even to see her [the incumbent empress].”
Peking’s expat community in the 1920s was divided into four groups: the diplomatic set, headed by the six-foot-six British ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, whom the local wags nicknamed “Tiny,” and who behaved like the benevolent headmaster of an English public school; the customs men, headed by Sir Robert Hart’s successor, Sir Francis Aglen, thought by the Chinese authorities to exhibit his predecessor’s arrogance minus his savoir faire; the missionaries (“mish boys”) who included teachers at Yenching University, YMCA workers, and the doctors and nurses at the Peking University Medical College (PUMC); and the civilians—businessmen who had chosen Peking over the more commercially minded Shanghai and, of course, tourists.
Peking University Medical College had been founded by British and American missionaries to teach Western medicine to Chinese doctors. At the time, American businessmen like the Rockefellers viewed China as an important new market, while missionaries saw it as their best opportunity to save millions of heathen souls. Although medicine was secondary to proselytizing, the Protestants had made few Chinese converts, while their medical missionaries rarely lacked patients. In 1914, the Rockefeller Foundation purchased the college from the London Missionary Society, and six Protestant denominations joined to form the PUMC under its resident director, Roger Greene. Over the next few years, with Rockefeller support, the college assembled a faculty of fifty professors and upgraded its facilities with fifty-nine buildings. Designed in an ersatz Sino-European style, with rooftops glazed in green tiles that were meant to blend in with the regional architecture of Peking, it would be known locally by its nickname, “The Oil Prince’s Palace.” According to Julia Boyd’s entertaining account of Peking life, A Dance with the Dragon (2012), the PUMC sent scouts to villages to find artisans who still had the long-lost skills to erect this new “palace.” In September 1921, John D. Rockefeller Jr. arrived with a large entourage for its opening.
One of its medical recruits was Dr. John Grant, a recent product of the Johns Hopkins Medical School’s graduate public health program. Grant had been born to Canadian parents in Ningpo, where his father served as a Baptist missionary doctor. After finishing secondary school at a German gymnasium at Tsingtao (Qingdao), he earned his undergraduate degree at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University and his medical degree from the University of Michigan. In 1917, he met and married Charlotte Hill Grant, who accompanied him in 1922 to his post as associate director for medical education and public health at PUMC. In 1925, working with the Peking police, he created a health station serving the 100,000 people living in Peking’s first ward, which surrounded the college. By 1928, he headed the PUMC’s Department of Public Health and Hygiene, which promoted fieldwork and established a number of community clinics in which the students could practice.
While John devoted his energies to furthering the research and educational goals of PUMC, Charlotte spent her time engrossed by the social and political history of China. During her fourteen-year residence, she began her collection of Manchu clothing and accessories with an inheritance left by her banker father. A particular Peking source was a Mr. Dai, in whose back room she made her selections. (According to Charlotte’s granddaughter Shand Green, when Abby Rockefeller accompanied her husband to Peking, she liked shopping with Charlotte, who, she said, knew all the best shops.)
In 1644, nomadic warriors from Manchuria precipitated the fall of the Ming dynasty. The Manchus possessed strict sumptuary laws, codified in 1759, under which color and pattern indicated rank and official status. Thus Confucian order also prevailed, in which the robes were indicative of the hierarchy of the universe, with the ruler at the peak. But Daoist and Buddhist symbols were popular as well, with their depictions of sea and land, turbulent waves and mountains, all adorning the bottom of the garments. Golden yellow was reserved for the emperor (and empress), and only he and “princes of the first-degree” were allowed the five-clawed dragon; other princes had to be content with four claws. Qing dynasty officials were permitted two badges on their outer coats: one in the center of the back, and the other at the front: civil servants were identified by different birds, while military rank was indicated by animals, usually mythological creatures. Fur-lined hats also indicated the rank of the wearer—telltale button finials topped them. A woman’s status was determined by that of her male relatives. Clothing was strictly governed by edicts issued twice a year, citing the exact day on which winter clothing made of heavy silk satin would be switched to summer garments of lightweight silk gauzes, whose open weaves provided ventilation.
As Alan Priest has written in the guide for the Met’s landmark exhibition “Costumes from the Forbidden City,” it was not until after Puyi’s abdication in 1912 that Manchu robes began to appear on the market (except, of course for those looted in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion). In the 1920s, they arrived “in avalanches.” First came the items looted by the imperial eunuchs, and then those that appeared after Puyi and his entourage were driven out of the Forbidden City. From 1925 to 1928, wrote Priest, “the Peking market was as full of court robes as Boston Common was full of sparrows.” In 1929, the market was flooded by theater robes reported to have come down from the palace at Jehol.
Charlotte’s collection contained more than five hundred items—robes, an extensive collection of badges, pockets, purses and pouches, hair ornaments and headdresses, shoes, fingernail guards, and decorative components of robes like sleevebands, collars, and cuffs. One item, a man’s semiformal court robe, or jifu (auspicious clothing), was worn at state audiences and bears twelve symbols of imperial sovereignty, signifying the sacred duties of the Son of Heaven (see color plates, figure 6). The other auspicious symbols, such as the round red wanshou, the bats, and the swastika fret pattern, convey a wish for longevity and happiness. Other decorative elements are the dragon, prism-shaped mountains on four axes and diagonal bands at the hem, depicting the ocean. According to John Vollmer, a leading authority on Chinese textiles, when the jifu was worn at court, the emperor faced the Dragon Throne to the north, the four mountains pointed to the cardinal directions of the compass, thus illustrating the cosmic plan upon which the Manchu government rested.
Charlotte stayed on in Peking until the advent of the Japanese, when she returned to Berkeley, California, along with thirty-nine steamer trunks filled with her collection. Charlotte’s children, James P. Grant and Betty Grant Austin, donated the items to the Denver museum at the suggestion of Denver’s longtime dealer in Asiatic antiquities and an honorary curator of Asian art, H. Medill Sarkisian, in 1977.
Among foreigners, the Longpao, the so-called dragon robes, garments worn on all formal court occasions except for certain designated ceremonies, became much sought-after items. They featured side closures, bottom slits at the sides, and horse-hoof cuffs. Charlotte’s collection, acquired during the 1920s and 1930s, contains a large number of robes and decorations from the period of Cixi’s reign. “Princess” Der Ling Yu, the dowager’s former lady-in-waiting, guided Mrs. Grant in these matters, explaining to her friend the intricacies of the imperial toilet, and Grant’s notes, gleaned from these conversations, are now archived at the Denver Museum.
Der Ling’s father, Yukeng, had been a minister to Japan and France. His wife was born of a Han Chinese mother and a Boston merchant. Half-castes were not generally well regarded, but even the disapproving Sir Robert Hart conceded that Yukeng had powerful backing and that their marriage had been a love match. In Paris, their young Westernized daughters, Der Ling and her elder sister, Rong Ling, studied dancing with Isadora Duncan and acting with Sarah Bernhardt. The family was summoned back to China in 1903, its members retained as translators and intermediaries between the court and the foreign community. The seventeen-year-old Der Ling spent two years at the court attending Cixi, an account of which she published in her much-reprinted memoir, Two Years in the Forbidden City (1911). In addition to acting as interpreter for the dowager, Der Ling was in charge of her jewels and ornaments, which proved helpful when she left the Forbidden City. Turning down Cixi’s suggestion of a Manchu prince, in 1907, she married a dubious American consular official, Thaddeus Cohu White, took up residence in the Hotel des Wagons-Lits, and, after the fall of the Manchus, pursued her sideline of assisting foreigners, including guiding them on tours through the Forbidden City and Summer Palace. (White, according to Morrison, “undertook many shady dealings as a commercial agent,” including trying to sell off the treasures of the imperial palace at Mukden.)
The fabulous Yu sisters: Der Ling (left), dressed for a lecture, and Rong Ling (right).
Der Ling’s linguistic gifts—besides Chinese and Manchu, she spoke Japanese, English, and French—enabled her clients and friends, among them Westerners like Sarah Conger, Lucy Calhoun, Charlotte Grant, Gertrude Bass Warner (who left her collection of textiles and antiques to the University of Oregon), and the visiting heiress Barbara Hutton (at the time Princess Mdivani), to collect items that were being sold off by impecunious courtiers. Der Ling, La Motte reported, was often found surrounded by young men holding forth as “the Scheherazade of the Hotel des Wagons-Lits lounge”—“very modern, very chic, very European as to clothes.” As Der Ling confessed, “At heart, I was a foreigner educated in a foreign country.” Chameleonlike, she changed her fashion to fit the times: in China during World War I, she donned a white Peking Red Cross uniform, then appeared as a flapper while staying at the Wagons-Lits during the 1920s; in the United States, she dressed as a Manchu princess for her popular lectures—“The Modern Woman of China,” “At the Manchu Court,” and “Chinese Politics of Today.”
In California, Der Ling resided at Berkeley’s Hotel Carlton while acting as a private curator to Barbara Hutton’s growing collection of Chinese art. She was a guest, along with Thaddeus, at the Woolworth heiress’s wedding in 1935 to husband number two, Count Kurt von Haugwitz-Reventlow. Fortuitously, Der Ling was able to spirit twenty-five packing cases of her belongings out of China just ahead of the Japanese invaders in April 1937. During the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair, where she was billed erroneously on souvenir postcards as “the last surviving member of the Chinese royal family,” she graced her own “Princess Der Ling Pavillion,” complete with a “throne room” and life-size mannequins, while dressed in the court costumes she managed to rescue. One of her own robes, decorated with a hundred butterflies, an auspicious symbol associated with weddings and birthdays, is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum and was, according to her biographer Grant Hayter-Menzies, a present from Cixi. Her other possessions, including imperial gifts of princess trappings, fell under the auctioneer’s hammer following her death in 1944, after she was run down by a grocery truck on her way to teach a Chinese language class at Berkeley.
In 1927, Peking, meaning “northern capital,” became Peiping, or “northern peace,” when Chiang Kai-shek moved his Nationalist capital to Nanking. Diplomats remained in Peiping but were faced with the inconvenience of traveling for days, by sea or rail, to conduct business with the Nationalist government. As the Italian minister remarked, “It was as if a foreign diplomat accredited to Washington were to live in London.” Now demoted to a provincial town, her red walls painted a Nationalist blue, Peiping was described by one writer as “a deposed empress, still clad in the remains of her imperial wardrobe, making ineffectual attempts to pose as an ordinary housewife.”
The 1930s found the Peking expatriate community still in the throes of its collecting fever. Helen Snow, a journalist married to another newspaperman, Edgar, reported that it was a paradise for foreigners, who could live royally for as little as $200 per month. With this nominal sum, you could rent a Manchu palace, furnish it with antiquities, and train a large staff of servants to entertain visiting celebrities. On weekends, there were tiffins and treasure hunts at rented temples in the Western Hills, and a stable of ponies at Paomaochang for riding or racing. If it was canines you fancied—perhaps a Tibetan breed made to resemble a small lion—there was the dog show, or you could always find a foursome for tennis at the Peking Club.
Harriet Monroe visited her sister again in 1934, and she found the city changed in many aspects, but the splendor of the royal enclosure was still intact: “[T]he Forbidden City was no longer forbidden; its imperial gardens were parked and tended for us, its palaces were open to citizens of the Republic of China and to wanderers like myself. . . . The streets were cleaner on the whole, and a few great ones were paved out wider to make room for the automobiles . . . and the Legations were still giving dinner-parties in their trim and stately mansions, even though the Government had departed and the business the diplomats came for must be conducted in Nanking.”
In between bridge parties, visits to the Ming tombs or the Great Wall, and picnics in the Western Hills, the favorite expat sport was still shopping. In Harold Acton’s roman à clef, Peonies and Ponies, about Peking in the 1930s, his heroine, Mrs. Mascot, perhaps inspired by his friend Lucy, observes: “In Peking we all have collections. One simply has to collect you know. . . . It’s in the air, an epidemic that catches everyone sooner or later.” An act of generosity from Acton’s Chicago uncle, Guy Mitchell, enabled the Anglo-Italian Oxford graduate to live and collect in China. Harold moved to Peking in 1932, then settled down to study Chinese theater and to teach English at Peking University. Four years later, he moved into George Morrison’s luxurious digs at Number 2 Kung Hsien Hutung, owned by a decrepit Manchu nobleman riddled with debt. (Its previous occupant had been the American Museum of Natural History’s dinosaur-hunter, Roy Chapman Andrews.) To the one-story buildings connected by roofed and pillared galleries, Acton added a swimming pool in an inner garden surrounded by white lilacs, ornamental rocks, and an English lawn where the front courtyard had been. Inside, he hung his growing collection of Chinese scrolls and arranged his antique furniture. In the cabinets where the former owner’s collection of ritual bronzes—now sold and scattered—had been displayed, Acton arranged vases and brush pots, twisted and carved to resemble specimens of fossilized fungi and roots. Among this coterie of those who had “gone native” were three Americans—“the flitterati,” Harvard graduates whom we have already met: the Met’s Alan Priest, Kansas City’s Larry Sickman, and George Kates.
Harold Acton (top row, center), aesthete at large, hosts a party for his friends in Peking, including Larry Sickman (top row, right) and Alan Priest (bottom row, third from left).
During the late 1920s, in his pre-Metropolitan days when scouting for the Fogg, Priest resided full-time in Peking. His mornings were spent learning Mandarin, studying Chinese classical drama, or examining the blue-wrapped bundles of silks, paintings, and sculpture brought to him by local dealers. On days when he felt ambitious, he visited the shops or swanned about the Forbidden City. His small house on a moat by the Forbidden City boasted an impressive flagstone courtyard where breakfast was served beneath the branches of an enormous tree. A border of flowers surrounded the courtyard, and every day a gardener brought great panniers of plants, all in full bloom. Large earthenware pots displayed shrubs, bamboo, or a superb lotus. Three servants, about the same age as Alan (late twenties), scuttled about, ready to fulfill his smallest wish. Alan presided at home à la Chinoise, where for special occasions he donned one of his many silk-embroidered Manchu robes while the impressionist sounds of Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande wafted through the air. Priest was enchanted by textiles; he owned a collection of sumptuous brocades and embroideries, which, according to Acton, he understood better than human beings. During his more than thirty years as the Met’s curator of Far Eastern Art, he greatly expanded its collection of Chinese textiles and was known as a gifted impresario of the shows that featured them.
Lucy Calhoun and Ma, her number-one boy, provided logistical help to Alan and his guests when they would all traipse to the Chieh-t’ai-ssu (Jietai so), the Temple of the Ordination Platform, so-called because it was where neophytes were admitted to the Buddhist priesthood. The majestic retreat was situated in the cool, wooded recesses of the Western Hills some fifteen miles from Peking. To get there, Priest’s party boarded a train for the first part of the trip, then the ladies switched to palanquins and the men to donkeys. Lunch was a lavish picnic, provided by Ma, starting with cocktails and climaxing with strawberries and ice cream. A final hike to the monastery followed, where cots were set up for naps. The highlight of the trip was an evening service in the candlelit great hall of the monastery, the great wood sculptures hidden by incense while monks chanted to the accompaniment of the drums.
Lucy was also a regular at Alan’s soirees along with the Yu sisters, Der Ling and Rong Ling, the “Princess Shou Shan,” the very Parisian wife of a wealthy Republican army general from Canton known by her married name, Madame Dan Paochao. “Nellie,” as she was called by her intimates, lived in the past and missed the pageantry of the Qing court in which she had spent her youth. According to Acton, those who had helped bring down the dynasty “were crowding around the magnificent tomb for relics,” but “as time wore on she played up to them and supplied some of the relics herself.” She lived in a palace stuffed with Ming porcelains, jade, agate, and crystal snuff bottles, brush stands on lacquered furniture atop thick carpets. Described by the Eurasian writer Han Suyin as having “a delicate oval face like a melon seed,” Rong Ling served as mistress of ceremonies to three-time president Li Yuanhung in the 1920s. In a gossipy letter to Paul Sachs, Priest claims that the opium-addicted Madame Dan “was given to performing terrible pseudo Chinese and Denis shawn [sic] dances.” She “persists in being a professional court beauty (she must have been lovely) and talks as if she had run the empire for a decade or so. She does not collect antiques like other people—oh no—she collects perfumes—fifteen hundred and seventy three bottles I think and she gets one out to suit her every mood. I have sometimes thought she got them all out at once.”
After the Wall Street crash removed some American buyers from the art market, an opportunity was created for the richly funded survivors such as William Rockhill Nelson, the publisher of The Kansas City Star, who donated $11,000,000 to the city’s museum, with Larry Sickman working as its scout. Sickman, who arrived in 1930 on a Harvard-Yenching fellowship, lived for several years in a charming house with his mother in the Hsieh Ho Hutung. Not only did he acquire the world-famous dragon Bi, the Longmen Procession of the Empress, but also the polychromed wood Water and Moon Guanyin (see color plates, figure 16), one of the stars of the Kansas City collection bought from C. T. Loo in 1934. Sickman also collected a number of stellar scrolls, including the masterpiece Fisherman’s Evening Song (see color plates, figure 15), by the Northern Song painter Xu Daoning (Hsü Tao-ning) purchased in 1933. Colin Mackenzie, Kansas City’s curator of Chinese art tells the story: “Late one night there was a knock on Sickman’s door and the Chinese servant of the mayor of Peking was standing outside with a scroll that ‘the master needs to sell.’ The asking price was not inconsiderable, and Sickman had to make the decision very quickly—probably overnight. He borrowed the money from his friend Burchard.” As Sickman later described it, it appeared that “the things I seek are seeking me.”
Another tale involves a 1931 visit to Puyi in Tianjin, where the former emperor lived together with his Empress Wan Rong, his concubine, his brother, various officials and his Alsatian dogs. Between the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and 1924, when he was deposed, Puyi lived virtually under house arrest in the Inner Court of the Forbidden City. During those years, the legal title to the imperial treasures remained ambiguous. Were they national treasures or the personal property of the Manchu Aisin-Gioro family, as the emperor claimed in his autobiography? Always short of funds to maintain his large household, Puyi began to sell the imperial treasures or to use them to secure loans. In 1923, he ordered an inventory of the Palace of Eternal Happiness, where the favorite works of the great collector, the Qing Emperor Qianlong, were stored, frightening the eunuchs who had been engaged in pilfering. It has been claimed that they set the palace on fire, destroying a large number of objects. (The origin of the fire is still controversial; it may have been caused by an electrical fire while the former emperor was watching a movie.)
Taking advantage of the “Articles of Favorable Treatment of the Qing Royal Family,” bestowed by China’s republican government before the court departed from Peking, Puji’s brothers, Pujie and Pujia, helped the former emperor smuggle out items that they considered the prizes from the imperial collection. Small items were taken, since they were readily portable. They were wrapped in yellow silk brocades and disguised as their student textbooks. As Puyi confessed, “We have removed over a thousand handscrolls, more than two hundred hanging scrolls and album leaves, and about two hundred rare Sung Dynasty printed books.” The removal of still more objects was prevented by the arrival of the Zhili Army under General Feng Yuxiang. Puyi and his remaining courtiers were evicted summarily from the palace on November 5, 1923. Subsequently, the treasures were crated and shipped by rail to Puyi’s new residence, the Zhang Yuan garden, in the Japanese concession in Tianjin. Pressed for funds, Puyi sold off his art mostly to foreigners. With the help of courtiers and dealers. Sickman thus acquired two paintings from the imperial collection including Towing Boats under Clearing Snow, a Song Copy after Guo Zhongshu (Kuo Chung-shu), and a Ming dynasty handscroll Life Cycle of the Lotus by Chen Chun, while their owner was distracted by his new European motorcycle.
One final note on tombs and textiles: In 1934, thieves broke into the royal tomb of Kuo Ch’in Wang (1697–1738), where the scholar-prince, the seventeenth son of Emperor Kangxi, and his consorts were buried. Inside the tomb they found robes, hangings, bolts of brocade, and spirit tablets bearing names of the entombed, allowing scholars to date the articles to the period before 1738. The bodies were dressed in their best ceremonial robes, with additional clothing provided for their afterlife. At the time, they were the only robes associated with a known imperial tomb. Of the group that appeared on the Peking market in the 1930s, Sickman bought six complete robes, three damaged robes, fragments, and cloth totaling some seventy items for the Nelson Gallery in Kansas City. Other robes from this find were acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, as well as by Priest for the Metropolitan Museum. Because of their fixed date, they serve as a touchstone for Qing robes, enabling scholars working backward and forward to make stylistic comparisons with other textiles. They remain among the finest examples of early Qing textiles in this country, reminding us that “made in China” was once synonymous with luxury.
Lucy Calhoun continued to collect textiles. Most of her collectibles, including some purchases for the Antiquarian Society, are now in the Art Institute of Chicago. She also demonstrated her affection for and appreciation of Alan Priest by donating three Chinese robes and a Tibetan painting to the Met. She remained in China until 1937, when the Japanese marched into the city unopposed and she returned to Chicago, where she died, aged eighty-five.
“China is now a subject of interest to everyone,” the archaeologist Carl Whiting Bishop wrote in 1937. “Recent books about her have attained the rank of ‘best sellers.’ Her history, her civilization, her language—all that concerns her, in fact—are receiving a steadily growing amount of attention in our universities, our colleges, and our high schools. We find collections of Chinese art in all our larger and many of our smaller cities.” Yet older conceptions of an exotic China now collided with a new stereotype of a timeless peasant society beset by natural disasters and human villainy, as epitomized in 1937 by MGM’s epic film The Good Earth. Based on Pearl Buck’s novel, the film nurtured timely support for a China besieged by Japan, but tellingly, none of its five principal actors were Asian, much less Chinese. Popular sympathy for a beleaguered nationalist China, pervasively promoted by Henry Luce’s mass-market Time and Life, and further kindled by Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s speaking tours, helped develop a certain proprietorship about China—implicit in the self-flattering charge that America “lost” a country it never owned and barely understood. This was a legacy that would both bedevil and benefit collectors and curators of Chinese art in postwar years to come.