1785 Empress of China, the first American mercantile vessel to reach Canton, arrives back in New York.
1787 Salem’s Elias Hasket Derby’s Grand Turk begins regular trade with China. By 1800, Salem’s ships make it America’s wealthiest city, per capita.
1838 Nathan Dunn opens the “Chinese Museum” in Philadelphia
1839–42 First Opium War, which ends in the Treaty of Nanking, the first of “unequal treaties,” which grants extraterritoriality to the British in five specified treaty ports and establishes the cession of Hong Kong.
1845 Massachusetts’s Caleb Cushing arrives at Macao aboard the frigate Brandywine and secures a treaty according Americans access to five ports, plus extraterritoriality: U.S. citizens subject only to U.S. laws.
1845–47 “The Great Chinese Museum” exhibition in Boston.
1851–64 Taiping Rebellion: China’s deadly civil war claims as many as 20 million lives.
1856–60 Second Opium War, also known as the “Arrow War,” culminates in the destruction and looting of Yuanmingyuan, or Summer Palace.
1870 Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts founded; in 1909, moves to its present location, where it houses one of the country’s foremost collections of Asian art.
1870 The Metropolitan Museum of New York founded. In 1905, it moves to its Fifth Avenue site; initially it displays Chinese porcelains from the Altman and Morgan collections, then in 1915 founds Asian art department.
1886 Launch of the “porcelain bubble” when William Walters buys a “peach-bloom vase” at auction in New York for $18,000.
1888–89, 1891–92 William Rockhill’s two trips to Tibet.
1897–1904 Chinese railway construction boom.
1898 Harvard’s Fogg Museum founded in Cambridge, bearing the name of William Hayes Fogg whose fortune grew out of the China trade.
1898–1905 Minister Edwin Conger and his wife Sarah’s sojourn in China.
1900 Boxer Rebellion leads to siege of foreign legations and looting of Chinese treasures as royal family flees Peking. Rockhill plays key role in negotiations, establishing inter alia Indemnity Fellowships for young Chinese to study in America.
1901–04 Schiff expedition, led by Berthold Laufer, for the American Museum of Natural History.
1902 Guangxu Emperor and the Dowager Empress return to Peking.
1903 Isabella Stewart Gardner opens her museum in Boston.
1904 Katherine Carl’s portrait of Dowager Empress Cixi exhibited at St. Louis Exposition, informally known as World’s Fair.
1905–06 Five Chinese commissioners including Duanfang tour Japan, Europe, and the United States for eight months, their mission being to identify usable models for a constitutional regime in China.
1905–09 William W. Rockhill serves as Minister to China.
1907 French Sinologist Edouard Chavannes visits Longmen.
1908 Four-day auction of the Conger’s Chinese collection is criticized in the New York press.
1908 William Rockhill meets the Thirteenth Dalai Lama at the Buddhist monastery of Wu Tai Shan.
1908 Both Guangxu Emperor and Dowager Empress Cixi die; Puyi proclaimed emperor.
1908–10 Blackstone Expedition led by Berthold Laufer for Field Museum of Chicago leads to the acquisition of a large collection of Tibetan objects.
1909 Congress enacts the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act, exempting artworks over 100 years old from import duties.
1909, 1910 Charles Lang Freer’s two trips to China. On second, he reaches Longmen and inspects its caves.
1909–13 William Calhoun serves as Minister to China. His wife Lucy returns after World War I and lives in Peking until 1938.
1911 The great collector Duanfang executed in Wuchang; his set of ritual bronzes is acquired by Metropolitan Museum in 1924.
1911–12 Fall of Qing dynasty. Emperor abdicates in January 1912.
1913 Benjamin Altman dies and bequeaths his porcelain collections to the Metropolitan Museum.
1913 J. P. Morgan offered Chinese imperial works from Forbidden City, Mukden, and Jehol. He dies in Rome; his collection of porcelains is sold by Duveen.
1913–14 China introduces laws banning the removal of “ancient objects”
1914 Royal Ontario Museum opens in Toronto
1915 With two million dollars provided by his father, John D. Rockefeller Jr. buys from Duveen choice porcelains from Morgan collection.
1923 Freer Gallery opens in Washington; first federally funded museum devoted wholly to fine arts.
1923 Laufer returns to China on a collecting trip funded by Marshall Field.
1923–24 First Fogg expedition to Dunhuang, led by Langdon Warner.
1925–26 Second Fogg expedition to Dunhuang, led by Langdon Warner and Horace Jayne.
1928 Royal Ontario museum acquires the first of its three Yuan wall paintings, The Paradise of the Maitreya.
1930s Laurence Sickman, Alan Priest and George Kates reside in Peking; golden age of harvesting Chinese art, including friezes from Longmen.
1930 China enacts law on preservation of ancient objects.
1930 Los Angeles Museum advances $200,000 to General Munthe for a collection of ceramics.
1933 Nelson Art Gallery opens in Kansas City, Missouri. Sickman will develop the museum’s outstanding Asian collection.
1935 Denman Ross dies. His collection of 11,000 works, including major paintings and sculptures, goes to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1,500 go to the Fogg).
1935–36 International Exhibition of Chinese art held by the Royal Academy at Burlington House, London; American museums well represented.
1942 The U.S. Office of Alien Property authorizes auction of artworks and records of Yamanaka & Co.; this follows 1935 seizure and sale in Berlin of Otto Burchard’s Asian holdings.
1943 Grenville Winthrop leaves his collection of early jades and bronzes to Harvard’s Fogg Museum.
1949–50 Chinese Communists assume power. In Shanghai, authorities confiscate C. T. Loo’s gallery; he retires from the antiquities trade.
1950 Bequest of Alfred F. Pillsbury establishes Minneapolis as one of the important centers for the study of Asian art.
1959 Avery Brundage agrees to donate first part of his collection to San Francisco if the city agrees to fund a named gallery to display it; voters approve bond issue to underwrite costs.
1961 “Ancient Chinese Art Exhibition” from Taiwan’s National Palace Museum goes from Washington’s National Gallery to New York’s Metropolitan Museum, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum
1966 Brundage collection opens in a wing of M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park. In 1973, it is incorporated in a new and renamed Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
1973 After a legal battle in U.S. courts, thirteen Asian works, formerly property of Baron Eduard von der Heydt, are now property of Freer Gallery under provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act. They are formally accessioned to the permanent collection in 1978.
1973 Delegation of leading North American curators and art historians, led by Cleveland’s Sherman Lee, visits the People’s Republic of China, signaling a détente in cooperation policies.
1973 Metropolitan Museum acquires key paintings from Chinese-born collector and connoisseur C. C. Wang.
1973–75 Nearly four hundred items from Beijing’s Palace Museum travel to museums in Washington, Kansas City, San Francisco, and Toronto.
1974 Asia Society, founded in 1956 by John D. Rockefeller III, opens gallery in New York with a collection of objects donated by JDR III and his wife Blanchette.
1974–75 Exhibition of the Archaeological finds of the People’s Republic opens at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, and the National Gallery in Washington.
1981 John Crawford collection of calligraphy and paintings acquired by the Metropolitan Museum.
1981 Chinese Courtyard in the style of the Ming dynasty donated by Brooke Astor opens at Metropolitan Museum.
1982 China enacts Cultural Relics Law designating all antiquities found in caves and tombs as national property.
1987 Opening of Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, twinned with the Freer in Washington.
1992 Metropolitan opens new galleries for the decorative arts donated by Herbert and Florence Irving.
1996 “Splendors of Imperial China” exhibition from the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, tours Washington, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.
1997 Paul Singer bequeaths extensive collection of early bronzes and ceramics to Sackler Gallery.
1998 “Studio of Gratifying Discourse,” a Qing dynasty library and rock garden, is gifted by Bruce and Ruth Dayton to the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts.
2000 Christie’s/Sotheby’s joint imperial sale in Hong Kong features three heads from the old Summer Palace, all fetched by China’s Poly Group for its new museum.
2003 Yin Yu Tang, Qing dynasty merchant’s house, makes its debut at Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. Building relocated intact from China in agreement brokered by then-PEM curator Nancy Berliner; proves a magnet for visitors.
2005 Beijing establishes Cultural Relics Recovery Program to identify museum-quality art taken from China between 1860–1949.
2009 State Department approves Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) restricting the importation to the United States of Chinese antiquities older than 250 years.
2009 Sale in Paris of the Yves St. Laurent collection. China protests sale of two bronze heads looted from the Old Summer Palace; sale proceeds, but winning bidder, Cai Mingchai of China’s National Treasures Fund, refuses to pay. Heads eventually presented to China by François-Henri Pinault, a French businessman whose firm owns Christie’s.
2010 China surpasses New York and London as the world’s leading art market, but sales totals later disputed.
2014 KODE museum in Bergen, Norway, agrees to return to China twenty-one columns presumed to have been looted from Old Summer Palace by Anglo-French forces in 1860.