The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  “My grandmother said you still have some porcelain from Jiujiang,” I said.

  “Not anymore,” San Yi Po said. “If I’d brought any porcelain out with us, we’d be rich. It was antique and would have been worth a lot.”

  “You should have,” Da Biao Yi said.

  “But if we’d taken them, they probably would have broken,” San Yi Po said.

  “Well, you should’ve taken some small things, then,” Da Biao Yi said. “That would have been worth it. You know how hard it is to find imperial porcelain from Jingdezhen now?”

  “Aiya, we could barely even carry clothes!” she said, closing her eyes and rubbing her forehead with the palm of her liver-spotted hand. “How were we supposed to take porcelain?”

  Da Biao Yi shrugged. San Yi Po leaned toward me. “There was a set of bowls, let me tell you, they were like glass, they were so thin and transparent,” she said. “These bowls, you couldn’t stack them or they’d break. They all had imperial seals on the bottom.”

  “Do you know what happened to all the porcelain?” I asked.

  “The first time, when we returned from Chongqing, there was a portion of our things left,” San Yi Po said. “The good porcelain, the furniture, most of that was gone. The second time, after the Communists, there was nothing. The house was gone, the field had become a workers’ commune.”

  “How did you find out?” I said. By the time the Communists took Jiujiang, San Yi Po and her family had gone to Taiwan.

  “Andrew’s father, the first time he went back to the mainland, I told him, ‘When you get back there, here is where this stuff was, and here was where that stuff was.’ He found some people and tried digging but didn’t find anything. Nothing left at all. Even the house was gone. Just a vacant lot.”

  “Really?” I said. I couldn’t imagine Uncle Lewis neglecting to mention having looked for the porcelain.

  “He went by himself to Jiangxi. I told him what was where and where to dig. I joked with him, ‘Don’t worry about those plates and bowls. See if you can find the money.’ Pei Fu was still alive then. He got her family, her son and others, to go dig. I drew him a map. Pei Fu took one look at it and remembered.”

  Then San Yi Po rolled her wheelchair away, switched on the television, and cranked it so loud the entire building probably heard it. She did this every night at eight p.m. on the dot, without the assistance of any timepieces, and would spend the rest of the night watching Chinese serials, inches from the television, until she fell asleep.

  SAN YI PO didn’t think anything would come of my going back to Xingang to look for the porcelain, though she didn’t discourage me. “Our house isn’t even there anymore,” she said the next day as we sucked on brown sugar lollipops with sour plum centers. “How do you expect to find anything when it’s all been changed?”

  I asked if she could describe any of the buried objects in more detail. She couldn’t, but repeated, “It was all from the imperial kilns in Jingdezhen.”

  “How did Grandfather get it?” I said.

  “My grandfather’s middle son worked in Jingdezhen as the county commissioner,” she said. I found it curious that she didn’t just say her father, but I had her write down his name.

  “Those kilns used to make imperial stuff, and they’d let him have the leftovers,” she continued. “The six girls living at home all got a set of porcelain. It was mostly Qing, some Republican, some others. We never really used it.”

  “But you don’t remember what it looked like?”

  “How can I remember all the stuff in there?” she said. “I don’t know. But the ground was completely full of porcelain when we buried it. Big cisterns, small cisterns, little figures. Just one dining set might have a hundred pieces.”

  “Do you think there’s anything left in that hole?”

  “You can’t even locate the hole! The house, the land, it’s all been changed. The Communists used the house to run a cotton plant and a pig farm. It’s all gone.

  “What you should really do is try to find that villa on Lushan,” she continued. “That’s worth something, and if you found it, we might be able to get it back.”

  I had heard of Lushan only as a resort for foreign missionaries and Kuomintang elite. Did our family really have a villa there? Who had bought it?

  “Your grandmother’s family was the big landowner,” Da Biao Yi said. “They had money. Why wouldn’t they have a house on Lushan?”

  San Yi Po said that it had been her father, Ting Geng, who bought the house, and she described it with all the vivid detail that her recollections of the porcelain lacked. The villa was across the creek from Chiang Kai-shek’s residence—known as the Meilu Villa and technically belonging to his wife, Soong Mei-ling. Two roads ran on either side of the creek, He Xi Lu and He Dong Lu (West Creek Road and East Creek Road). The house had two floors and four bedrooms, along with a living room, a dining room, a library, and a servant’s room. Outside was a flower garden. “The Chiangs were on He Dong Lu, we were on He Xi Lu,” San Yi Po said.

  “Have you been to Lushan yet?” Da Biao Yi asked me.

  “No.”

  “Then hurry and go see if it’s still there!” Da Biao Yi said. “Soong Mei-ling’s house is still there, I know that. Our house was across from hers. Just find He Xi Lu and see if it’s there.”

  I promised that I would try. “If I wanted to see the kind of porcelain your family used to have, where could I see it?” I said.

  San Yi Po shrugged. “Maybe Jingdezhen would have it,” she said. “But even in Jingdezhen you can’t see what they used to have.”

  BETTER YET, I could go to the National Palace Museum. Built into the mountains north of Taipei, the sprawling NPM was home to the world’s preeminent collection of antique porcelain. The serenity of the setting ended at the main entrance hall of the museum, thronged with noisy tour groups from the mainland. As I stood in line to buy a ticket, volunteers ran from one knot of shouting mainlanders—far louder than any museumgoers I’d ever seen and easily identified by their volume, their smell, and the behavior of their children—to another, holding up signs bearing reminders to keep their voices low and refrain from taking photos. One volunteer told me this system was intended to avoid confrontation, but it didn’t make a big difference. “People who don’t care about proper behavior aren’t going to care about these signs,” she said.

  I spent the day gazing at the porcelain displays, arranged chronologically and accompanied with informative English texts. I walked from early earthenware to the subtle monochrome Song wares to the early blue and white of the Yuan, through the beginning of color in the Ming to the explosion of vibrant colors and exotic styles of the Qing, wondering if my great-great-grandfather had owned any similar objects.

  There were actually two Palace Museums, one in Taipei and one in Beijing, both claiming to be the original institution. In the nineteenth century, as reformist Chinese scholars traveled to the West, they became exposed to the idea of museums as civic centerpieces. The museum as an institution for the public to appreciate hitherto private collections of cultural artifacts had great appeal to Chinese literati like my great-great-grandfather, with their long traditions of treasuring antiquities and their reverence for education.

  After the 1911 revolution, though there was no royal family residing in the Imperial Palace, there remained the issue of who the imperial collections belonged to, what they signified politically, and what to do with them. The continued presence of the abdicated “last emperor” Puyi fostered the possibility of a return to dynastic times. So the impetus for the Palace Museum, to be housed in the Forbidden City, was as much about occupying palace space to thwart any restoration of the monarchy as it was about preservation or culture.

  With the creation of a museum came the challenge of filling it. The royal collections were scattered all over the country. Puyi, the abdicated royal family, and the court eunuchs who resided in an area of the Forbidden City had continued to regard the collections as thei
r personal property and they regularly filched items, either by claiming to send out objects for repair or presenting them as payment. In 1913 the imperial family even tried to sell the entire palace collection, “including pearls, bronzes, porcelain, etc.,” to J. P. Morgan for $4 million. But Morgan died just a few weeks after his staff received the telegrams, and the collection remained in Beijing. In 1923 Puyi announced an inventory of the Qianlong emperor’s collection, sending the eunuchs into a panic. The building housing the collection was suddenly and conveniently burned to the ground, and only 387 items were recovered from the 6,643 inventoried. Puyi expelled one thousand eunuchs, who opened up antique shops outside the front gate of the Forbidden City, and their counties of origin were suddenly flooded with imperial antiques.

  After Republican officials converted the Forbidden City’s halls into museum space, they put a stop to the thievery. Over the next few years, officials were able to recover more than 200,000 objects (including forty-three live deer) from the various royal collections and move them to Beijing. As the collection continued to grow, the staff also began to address the preservation and conservation of antiquities, the preservation and restoration of the buildings of the Forbidden City, and academic research and publication. The Palace Museum opened its doors to the public in 1925 and became so entwined with national identity that when Chiang Kai-shek assumed power, he appointed himself to the museum’s board.

  The bifurcation of the two Palace Museums, like my family’s, began during the Second Sino-Japanese War. As Chiang’s government focused on exterminating the Communist threat, a matter complicated by powerful warlords, corruption, and crippling self-interests (a trio of Chinese legacies that survives to this day), the Japanese attacked Manchuria in 1937, an area in northeastern China they envisioned as their future breadbasket. China offered little resistance while the Japanese rolled inland, taking cities with ease and prompting my great-great-grandfather to bury his porcelain and flee.

  In Beijing, Chiang Kai-shek initiated a similar but far grander endeavor, ordering the Palace Museum’s staff to box up more than one million pieces of priceless porcelains, jades, scrolls, bronzes, furniture, and—significantly—thrones for clandestine shipment to Nanjing, the Republic of China’s capital, for safekeeping; other items were shipped to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

  This was just the beginning of a six-thousand-mile, sixteen-year odyssey that saved China’s guo bao, or national treasures, from the Japanese, the most extraordinary art preservation effort in Chinese history. With no facility large enough to store the nineteen thousand wooden crates in Nanjing, the collection then traveled to Shanghai. After the Japanese took Shanghai, the collection was separated into three batches that would take different routes west with a military escort. Over the next decade, the dispossessed collection of China’s most valuable art was in constant motion, traveling on trains, trucks, steamboats, hand-towed barges, and the backs of laborers, often just a single step ahead of Japanese bombs, while also contending with floods, warlords, and bandits. It took refuge in bunkers, caves, temples, warehouses, and even private homes. Elderly residents in a host of rural Chinese villages who might never have traveled more than twenty miles from their birthplaces had childhood memories of seeing ancient paintings, scrolls of calligraphy, and books when staffers aired them out on sunny days.

  As the story goes, not a single item of the collection was lost or damaged, which speaks to the collective effort of its protection, as well as its cultural significance. But the elegance of that claim, like San Yi Po’s rose-colored memories, was probably more mythology than fact. Since 1991 a joint Sino-American team of archaeologists had been investigating the area around the ancient Song dynasty capital of Kaifeng for predynastic Shang cities. (The Shang were the ones with the oracle bones.) That area also happened to be on the route that one batch of Palace Museum objects took through the Yellow River valley in 1938. On the final day of one recent dig season, a farmer showed up to report the appearance of imperial ceramics in his fields. The archaeologists didn’t have time to make a full investigation but surmised that the museum trucks had rolled through Henan province the same year the Japanese had gained control of all of northern China. Chiang Kai-shek, in what was described as “the largest act of environmental warfare in history,” dynamited levees on the Yellow River, creating a massive flood that he hoped would stymie the Japanese advance. The flood succeeded in slowing the Japanese but also destroyed thousands of villages, ruined huge swaths of farmland, and created several million refugees. By the Kuomintang’s own count, nearly a million Chinese drowned as a result of the flood. The archaeologists in Kaifeng surmised that it was entirely possible that the floodwaters might have also overturned some of the museum trucks, spilling their goods into the fields. And given the chaotic circumstances, some of those treasures might have been left where they fell and remained silted over for decades, just another layer of the local history that stretched back to the beginning of China.

  The three Palace Museum shipments eventually rendezvoused in Sichuan province, near the wartime capital of Chongqing. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, they made the trek back to Nanjing, but the civil war between Chiang’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists had recommenced almost immediately. In 1949, as Chiang was planning the Kuomintang retreat to Taiwan, he called the treasure trucks back to Shanghai, where he cherry-picked more than 100,000 of the collection’s finest (mostly jades and porcelain, which had the best size-to-value ratio) to bring with him, along with most of the nation’s gold and silver supply.

  Under the life-size portrait of Chiang Kai-shek in the National Palace Museum’s library building was an English inscription that explained Taiwan’s version of the events: “Under his command, the treasures of the Palace Museum were rescued and shipped to the southwestern part of China. During these tumultuous years, they were saved from war destruction. In the aftermath of the Chinese victory, the insurgent Communists began to create internal strife. The cultural artifacts were therefore shipped to Taiwan, under the direction of Chiang Kai-shek, to protect them from the annihilative reign of the Communists, especially from their catastrophical ‘cultural revolution.’ ”

  The Communists viewed Chiang’s act as plunder, and the collection’s value, both monetary and symbolic, remained a flashpoint for the Chinese identity. Though in 1991 Taiwan declared that the Chinese Civil War was over, the combatants have never signed an armistice or peace treaty. The many acts of aggression by China since 1949—shellings, naval blockades, incursions of Taiwan’s offshore islands, and missile tests in the Taiwan Strait—indicating its willingness to go to war rather than lose Taiwan had just as much to do with what was in the NPM in Taipei as it did with politics. In dynastic China, ownership of the imperial porcelain collection had conferred the right to rule, and so long as it remained in Taipei, Chiang’s government could claim that it, not Beijing, was China’s capital.

  THE MORNING I left Taipei, San Yi Po was up early, and she told me one last story. When China finally opened up in the 1980s, she went back to Xingang to find my great-great-grandfather’s house. While there, she was invited to meet with a local party official in Jiujiang. “He was very tongzhan,” she recalled. That is, he was welcoming of overseas Chinese returning to the mainland.

  “If you come back, we can give you lots of things,” he told my grandaunt. “Many things for you to invest in. Just complete some applications.”

  “But my family’s house, it’s all gone,” San Yi Po said. “Our things are gone. You’ve built on our property. What can I possibly apply for?”

  “Oh, we have a lot of land. Just fill out some paperwork, and we’ll give you some other land.”

  San Yi Po considered the proposal.

  “Say, how long have you been away?” the official asked.

  “How long have you all been here?” San Yi Po snapped. “That’s how long I’ve been away.”

  The official frowned. “Well, if you add up all the ye
ars, that’s a lot of tax that you would owe on the land,” he said. “If we gave it to you, we’d have to charge you for the taxes.”

  “I couldn’t believe it,” San Yi Po told me. “I told him I’d have to go back to Taiwan and check on some things, see if it would work. And then I got the hell out of there. What do I want their land for, anyway?”

  She pulled a pair of silver coins from her shirt pocket. “Here,” she said. “A souvenir.”

  I tried to read the script on the obverse side. “Year three of the republic—”

  “Republic of China, third year!” San Yi Po said.

  I had mistakenly read from left to right instead of right to left. The coins had been minted in 1914. These were silver dollars that my great-great-grandfather had buried, recovered, and given to San Yi Po, who carried them with her, along with about twenty others, from the mainland more than sixty years ago. She had given them away as gifts, until these two were all she had left.

  “Been almost a hundred years,” San Yi Po said. “In the thirties we’d change one coin for 360 bronze pieces. They were worth even more before. You could buy a hundred pounds of rice with one coin. We buried a big jar of these in Jiujiang, next to the porcelain. One or two thousand coins in there.”