Our first and abiding debt is to the many scholars and curators who helped us find our way in a complex terrain; to the archivists, publicists, scholars, and librarians who helped us locate and secure permission to recycle relevant quotations or images; then to friends who offered encouragement and shelter; and finally to our publisher and agent, who enabled us to transfer words from our computers to paper and/or digital pages. In the prologue, we have already described our book’s origin at Oxford, where we met senior China hands Michael Sullivan and Craig Clunas, attended conferences on Asian themes, and renewed acquaintance with Frances Wood, at the British Library, and Helen Wang, curator of Chinese coins at the British Museum. Special thanks are owed to America’s reigning authority on the British Empire, Professor William Roger Louis of the University of Texas, who first suggested a term’s residency at St. Antony’s College, and to Warden Margaret MacMillan, who made it possible. In New York, our base was Columbia University, notable for its Avery Library, its rich menu of events at SIPA (School of International and Public Affairs), its outstanding foreign policy seminars, and for Professor Dawn Ho Delbanco’s lectures on East Asian art. Other vital New York resources include the archives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and the Frick Collection.
Invariably helpful were veteran curators and their associates at major museums. Among our patient tutors were Nancy Berliner at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts; the Metropolitan Museum’s Maxwell Hearn and his predecessor as chief curator of Asian art, James C. Y. Watt, and for textile advice, Denise Leidy; Emeritus Director Marc Wilson and Curator Colin Mackenzie at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City; Laurel Kendall at the American Museum of Natural History; also Daisy Wang and her colleague Karina Corrigan at Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum; Ronald Otsuka and Alice Zrebiac of the Asian and textile departments at the Denver Art Museum; Nancy Steinhardt at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia; Chen Shen at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto; Anne-Marie Eze at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; Elinor Pearlstein at the Art Institute of Chicago; and Adriana Proser at the Asia Society in New York.
Archivists are the unsung enablers of specialized scholarship. Leading our list is David Hogge, chief archivist at the Freer/Sackler galleries in Washington (in whose offices we met Ian Shin, a Columbia graduate student who reviewed our early drafts); and Holly Wright at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, who provided plentiful copies from the Laurence Sickman files. At the Rockefeller Family archives, we were efficiently assisted by Nancy Adgent and her colleagues; and at Harvard, our academic Sherpa at the university’s rich art archives was Megan Schwenke; we were also helped by Mai Reitmeyer at the American Museum of Natural History and by James Moske at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Special thanks to Joy Goodwin at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art; to Maureen Melton at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts; to Bayard Miller and Charles B. Greifenstein at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia; to Dr. Manfred Rasch at the ThyssenKrupp Group Archives in Duisburg, Germany; to Wei Zheng, Chinese cataloguer at the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University, who vetted our index; and to Esther Tisa Francini, provenance researcher at Zurich’s Rietberg Museum.
In obtaining images, we were especially grateful for the assistance of Isabel Donadio at Harvard University; Nicola Woods at the Royal Ontario Museum; Leise Hook at Asia Society; Matt Empson at the Seattle Art Museum; Elizabeth Reluga at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Elizabeth Saluk at the Cleveland Art Museum; Barry Landua at the American Museum of Natural History; Eric Schnittke at Penn Museum; Jane Burke at the Denver Art Museum; Jennifer Riley at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Angie Park at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Stacey Sherman at the Nelson-Atkins Museum; Henrik Berg at the KODE Museum in Bergen, Norway; Barbara Puorro Galasso at George Eastman House; Jacqueline von Hammerstein at the Pagoda Gallery in Paris; Cynthia Altman at Kykuit; Jonathan Bloom at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco; and Eileen Travell and Alison Clark at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In a special category, we are especially obliged to Harold Holzer, director of public affairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; to the Peabody Essex Museum’s Whitney Van Dyke; and to Miranda Gale of the public affairs department at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries.
We thank as well the heirs and/or descendants of key figures in our book for both sharing information and permitting quotation from personal letters, notably Katherine Reid (Sherman Lee); Anne Warner (Langdon Warner’s granddaughter); Elizabeth Winthrop and William Patten (heirs to Joseph Alsop); Dawn Ho Delbanco (daughter of Wai-kam Ho); Sarah Cahill (James Cahill); Pat Pratt (Denman Ross); and Holly Fairbank (John and Wilma Fairbank’s daughter). As helpful were principal biographers, notably John Roote (George Kates) and Noelle Guifredda (Sherman Lee). For firsthand accounts of China’s past we benefited from conversations with Seymour and Audrey Topping, who lived the history we describe, as did Yale’s Emeritus Professor Michael Coe, who was posted in Taiwan while an early recruit in the CIA. Those years were resurrected in otherwise impossible-to-find books on the shelves of the New York Society Library presided over by its director, Mark Bartlett, the Fort Knox of obscure past popular literature. We likewise were helped by the staffs of the Westport, Pequot, Fairfield, Wilton, and Weston Public Libraries in Connecticut.
What made our travels possible on a frugal budget was the hospitality of friends and colleagues, most especially Michael Horowitz and Gillian Darley (London); John and Elisabeth Onians (London); Bob and Hannah Kaiser (Washington); and in Boston, June Erlick, Carol Cerf, and Judy Chute. As before, we benefited from attending the annual Wellfleet Conferences on Cape Cod, initiated and chaired by Robert Lifton, where among those who counseled us were Isabel Hilton, a longtime and astute British-based China watcher; and Wally and Celia Gilbert, artists and collectors of Western and Asian art. Add to this helpful advice and support from Kathy Kline and Mark Pevsner, at Longbow, a China-oriented production company specializing in documentaries.
Finally, in putting our work between covers (and online), credit belongs to our agent Richard Morris at Janklow & Nesbit, successor to Tina Bennett, who encouraged us during the early stages of our project, as did Peter Osnos. At Palgrave Macmillan, we benefited from the tireless and informing assistance of Elisabeth Dyssegaard, and her associates, Donna Cherry, Lauren Lo Pinto, and Laura Apperson. As they might have said in dynastic times past in China, to all the above, the Order of the Discerning Owl, First Class, although the opinions expressed in these pages and factual blunders are solely the responsibility of the authors.
—Shareen Blair Brysac and Karl E. Meyer (2015)