The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  When the family gathered one night to make funeral arrangements, I demonstrated my exquisite sense of timing by recounting my progress to Richard. “If I can figure out the exact location of the porcelain, how do you think I would go about trying to dig for it?” I asked.

  “I have no advice for you!” Richard shouted. “And when was the last time you listened to my advice, anyway? There’s nothing there! Grandma said so.”

  “I know what Grandma said. But San Yi Po said it could still be in the ground. And she said that you, or Lewis, or my mom, if one of you approached the government and told them that the family used to live there, they would be willing to work with you on it. So I’m just asking if she’s telling the truth.”

  “She’s oversimplifying,” Richard said. “Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not. Grandma wanted that history to stay buried. She had her reasons.”

  When I told Lewis about this exchange, he told me that it would have been a snap for Richard to buy our family’s old property. “When the Jiujiang government was treating him like a god, very eager to partner with him on a project, he could have bought the old property back for ten thousand dollars,” Lewis said. That was less than my family would spend on my grandmother’s gravesite. But the opportunity had passed.

  While my family navigated the state funeral monopoly, one of Richard’s business partners put me in touch with Zhang Songmao, who claimed to have amassed the world’s largest collection of 7501 porcelain, made in Jingdezhen by the state ceramic research center for Mao’s personal use and considered by some as the last imperial kiln in China.

  I met Zhang at his factory in the Western outskirts of Shanghai. He was sixty years old, short and slim but with a round belly, dressed in Converse sneakers, gray jeans with the cuffs flipped up, and a fitted, shiny black patterned shirt. He had a man purse tucked under his arm and a half-smoked cigar in his left hand. Inside the office building, he had his porcelain displayed in cases on all three floors. The walls in the atrium were covered with enlarged copies of press coverage and exhibitions of his collection.

  Born in 1950, Zhang grew up during the Cultural Revolution and earned an engineering degree. When China first relaxed its economic policies, he and some friends pooled their money to start a technology company. “That was hard work,” he said. “There were no venture capitalists then, banks weren’t lending to nongovernment projects, and the government wasn’t backing regular people. We had to fund it with our own hands.” He eventually built a string of successful companies and made his fortune from television chips. A few years ago Zhang decided to become the preeminent collector of Mao porcelains, approaching his hobby with the competitiveness of a businessman who had scrapped his way to a fortune.

  “I started with stamps, then coins, and once I had some money, I started collecting porcelain,” he said. “But then I thought, ‘Well, what can I collect?’ There are already people with great Yuan blue and white collections, museums in Turkey and Iran have tons of them … you can’t compete with them. And then Ming and Qing porcelain, I’d never be one of the best in those. But with Mao porcelain, I can have the best. What’s the point of collecting if you’re only second best?”

  Zhang led me around the different floors, and then we entered an inner sanctum where his best pieces were displayed. His assistant walked in and out of a storage room, showing us Qianlong-era watches, bronzes, paintings, and more Mao ware. “I started collecting Mao ware because it’s part of China’s porcelain history,” he said. “The tradition was passed from Song to Yuan to Ming to Qing, and then what happened? The history is incomplete without the Mao ware.”

  In 1975, while Mao’s Red Guards were destroying every vestige of ancient China that they could find, the ceramics research center in Jingdezhen received an unusual order. The order, given in a secret document numbered 7501, was to produce a set of fine porcelain expressly for Mao. In almost identical fashion to the despotic emperors whom Mao’s revolution had intended to snuff out, the best kilns in Jingdezhen were conscripted to fire thousands of pieces, accommodating requirements such as using lead-free glaze and the bowls needing to have covers, because the Chairman often ate in a different place from where the food was served. The craftsmen worked under military guard and the threat of imprisonment—or worse—if they failed. The pieces were decorated with plum and peach blossoms and, in a classic example of pointless Chinese one-upmanship, fired at 1,400 degrees Celsius, rather than the 1,300 degrees at which imperial porcelain was fired.

  Mao’s advisers picked the best, assembling two 138-piece sets of tea ware, brush holders and cleaners, ashtrays (Mao was a chain smoker, a fact that people often gave to explain why so many Chinese also smoked), and tableware. The rest were put into storage—in violation of the order to destroy the remainders—and given as gifts to institute employees during the Lunar New Year.

  After Mao died, the wares remained something of a Jingdezhen secret. But during the late 1980s or early 1990s—no one could tell me for sure—a Singaporean collector caught wind of the items and spent a year scouring the city for pieces. He cleared out the JCI’s storerooms and went door to door asking institute employees for their collections. After he had made off with the Mao ware, he boasted that he had all the Chairman’s old porcelain. That angered enough of the nascent Chinese middle class that a group of them descended on Jingdezhen and made it their patriotic duty to discover what the Singaporean might have overlooked. Domestic collections formed, and efforts began to repatriate 7501 wares that had gone overseas.

  I asked Zhang if he ever felt uncomfortable, collecting pieces from a time during which so many people suffered.

  “Not at all,” he said. “I don’t think about it in political terms. Look, I suffered during the Cultural Revolution, too. But it wasn’t all chaos. There was also a lot of kuaile”—contentedness. “These pieces remind me of my youth. To me, Mao, the Cultural Revolution, it was all just part of history. I long ago stopped thinking about whether or not it was good or bad.”

  In 1996 the first major auction of Mao ware was held in Beijing, where eighty-nine pieces—all leftovers—sold for nearly nine million RMB. A government trading company purchased all but one of the pieces, spending seven times the estimated value to beat out rival bidders. A real estate entrepreneur won the remaining lot, a lidded bowl, and only to “make mischief” because he thought it was unfair for the quasi–government entity to hoard everything when so many people had come out for the auction. And with the market came the counterfeiters; I had met one man in Jingdezhen whose parents had worked at the 7501 research center and who now ran a workshop in the Sculpture Factory churning out reproductions.

  MY GRANDMOTHER’S LEAVES never made it back to their roots. She was buried on a freezing winter day in a cemetery for overseas Chinese near Suzhou, on a hill cleared of orange trees, overlooking a lake. During the funeral the pastor spent about thirty minutes yammering about his personal conversion story, nothing to do with my grandmother’s life, while I fantasized about pushing him down the hill. On the gravestone, where my grandmother’s descendants’ names were carved, according to Chinese tradition, they wrote the characters of my name wrong.

  I MOVED BACK INTO THE LIVING QUARTERS AND BEGAN transcribing the recordings I had made of my grandmother, cringing at how much my poor Chinese had limited our conversations on the early tapes. I often caught myself pausing to write down follow-up questions and lamented my fluency having come too late. To replenish my coffers, I found a job teaching academic English in a college-prep program for wealthy Chinese students.

  UNABLE TO TRAVEL FAR, I decided to pay a visit to Ginling College in Nanjing, a short train ride from Shanghai. I’d heard that alumnae in their seventies and eighties held monthly meetings and thought I might find some of my grandmother’s classmates. Hemmed in by mountains and by the Yangtze, topography limiting its sprawl, Nanjing was known until the Ming dynasty as Jinling, or “Gold Hill,” referring to the mountain guarding its backside, though the �
�hill” can also mean “mound,” “tomb,” or “mausoleum,” as the Chinese preferred to bury their dead on elevated locations and above ground. The classical name Jinling is still very much in use by literati and advertisers alike, adorning the signs of businesses seeking to exploit nostalgia or invoke the triumphs of imperial China. There are few Western equivalents to this interchangeability, though referring to the modern-day region of Laconia as “Sparta” might come close.

  Nanjing is one of the oldest cities in China, having served as the capital of Chinese dynasties going back nearly two thousand years, including the Kuomintang during the Republican era, and with Hangzhou and Suzhou it formed the Jiangnan cluster of municipalities with a long history of industry, culture, and education. The founding emperor of the Ming dynasty had ordered the encirclement of the city with more than twenty miles of muscular ramparts, fifty feet high, forty feet wide at their base, and about half that width at their crenellated tops. The walls took twenty years to complete and required hundreds of millions of bricks that were produced in five provinces and inscribed with the names of the local quality-control officials. I had become so inured to the destruction of Chinese antiquity, and consequently sensitive to any vestiges of it, that I assumed the gray walls, collared with green trees and seeping vines, were too well-preserved to have been the originals, but they were.

  From the train station, I took the subway into town, by coincidence emerging near John Rabe’s former home, a European-style villa with gray bricks and white windows. Rabe was a German businessman who worked for Siemens in China from 1910 to 1938. As the Japanese invasion of Nanjing became imminent in the winter of 1937, most Westerners fled the city. The two dozen or so who remained, including a Ginling College professor, organized the Nanjing Safety Zone, a trapezoidal area in the northwestern part of the city about the size of New York’s Central Park and encompassing foreign embassies, church organizations, and schools, where Chinese citizens who weren’t able to evacuate could seek refuge during the war. Rabe, a member of the Nazi Party, was elected the head of the Safety Zone committee, with the hope that his Nazi credentials would carry weight with the Japanese.

  Chiang Kai-shek refused to surrender the capital but fled for Chongqing while tasking a rival general to defend Nanjing. This perceived abandonment of his countrymen earned Chiang the lasting enmity of mainland Chinese. For the overwhelmed defenders, military tactics quickly gave way to a frenzy of self-preservation. Fleeing Chinese soldiers stripped off their uniforms and left them in the street, along with weapons, backpacks, helmets, even shoes—anything that might identify them as noncivilians.

  For six weeks following Nanjing’s capitulation, Japanese soldiers terrorized the city, burning, looting, and committing atrocities in what became known as the Rape of Nanking. Chinese prisoners of war and civilians alike—including women and children—were machine-gunned into mass graves, beheaded, bayoneted, or buried alive. Civilians were shot for the slightest indication of resistance or just because they, as Rabe wrote, “simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Japanese soldiers raped girls as young as eight years old and women as old as seventy, many of whom died after repeated assaults. Those who survived were often penetrated with bottles, sticks, and bayonets before being summarily executed. Even pregnant women were targeted and stabbed in their stomachs afterward. Japanese troops forced families to commit incest, sons raping mothers and fathers raping daughters, before killing them all. The total number of casualties remains heavily disputed, with estimates ranging from a few hundred (as some Japanese claim) to 300,000 (the figure most often cited by the Chinese).

  The twenty-two Westerners on the Safety Zone committee—missionaries, businessmen, or doctors armed with only their occidental features and a moral authority—worked around the clock to protect the refugees of Nanjing; sometimes they were literally the only thing between a civilian and certain rape or death. Despite their heroic efforts, they were too outnumbered to stop all the incursions by Japanese soldiers, who regularly flouted the rules and broke into the camps. Inside the Safety Zone they stole food and clothing, carried off civilians to execute, and “raped until they were satisfied,” as an American surgeon serving at a hospital in the Safety Zone wrote to his family. Often a frantic civilian would find Rabe to report a rape in progress, and the two of them would rush to the scene, where Rabe chased away the Japanese soldiers, sometimes physically lifting the rapist off his victim. The Safety Zone was credited with having saved more than 200,000 Chinese from slaughter. Ironically, the item that Rabe relied upon most to stop the genocide was his swastika armband.

  I headed to the Nanjing Normal University campus, a large research institution that still went by its former moniker of a teachers’ college and that had subsumed Ginling College. I entered at the university’s main gate, a narrow, angular arch of blue tiles, behind which slivers of historic buildings—the corner of a curved tile roof here, a splash of red column there—peeked from behind stands of tall, old trees. Nanjing Normal University is a popular destination for studying Chinese, and groups of foreigners—Americans, Europeans, even Japanese—strolled the wooded campus. In my search for the alumnae building, I passed a memorial for Minnie Vautrin, the longtime Ginling professor who’d helped designate Ginling as part of the international safe zone and stayed in Nanjing while the rest of the school evacuated. In addition to feeding, clothing, and sheltering the refugees, Vautrin ran from one entrance to another, chasing off Japanese intruders.

  At the three-story alumnae house, the front door was locked, so I entered through a side door and came upon thirty elderly women on plastic chairs in a conference room. A younger woman asked what I wanted. I explained that I was the grandson of an alumna and had heard about the monthly meetings and hoped to find some of my grandmother’s classmates. “Oh, well, let me introduce you to Wang Laoshi,” the woman said. “She organizes these meetings.”

  Wang Laoshi was a small, energetic woman in her seventies dressed in a floral print tunic, gray pants, and white walking shoes. They had just wrapped up the morning meeting, she said, and were about to break for lunch. Wang Laoshi insisted that I join them, so I followed their slow migration up the hill to the campus hotel. Recent graduates of the reconstituted Ginling College, a constituent, and still female-only, school of Nanjing Normal University, had set up a few tables in the hotel’s dining room. “These meetings don’t happen elsewhere, and we don’t know how much longer we will have them,” Wang Laoshi said. “We’re all getting old.”

  Lunch consisted of light fare such as tofu and wood ear mushrooms, steamed fish, and buns, and the alumnae spent most of the time imploring me to eat more, piling food and rice into my bowl. “Eat up!” Wang Laoshi said. “We’re all grannies here. We can’t finish all this food.”

  Most of the women who showed up at the alumnae gatherings had graduated after the Communist takeover in 1949; in 1951 Ginling was merged with Nanjing University. Wang Laoshi recognized my grandmother’s name—she had contributed money toward the construction of a new building on campus—but had never met her. “We don’t have anyone her age here,” she said. “None of those classmates can come out anymore, those who are left. But I remember your uncle Richard. Your grandmother told him to come to Ginling to recruit graduates for his new company, and he came here one year and hired a bunch of them.”

  After lunch most of the group made their way back to the alumnae house to “rest” before heading home. Wang explained that the second floor was given over to residences for visiting alumnae, and on the third were rooms for visiting students or alumnae of Wellesley College, with which the new Ginling had a relationship. Students of Ginling’s original sister school, Smith College, had rooms on campus elsewhere. Much of the first floor of the building displayed Ginling’s history, with a special focus on former college president Wu Yifang. Born into a family of declining scholar-officials in 1893 in Hubei, Wu was educated at mission schools in the Jiangnan region and was part of Ginling’s i
naugural class of 1919. She went on to earn a doctorate in entomology at the University of Michigan and returned to China in 1928 to become Ginling’s first Chinese president and was a beloved figure to its alumnae. It was through the continued efforts of Wu, who never married and endured the Cultural Revolution (Wang would only say that she “suffered”), that Ginling College was reopened in 1987, two years after her death, as China’s only women’s college.

  Wang introduced me to the rest of the women in the alumnae house, sitting placidly with straight backs and hands in their laps. They nodded and murmured approval over my interest in Ginling. One of the women asked if I could fix the ringer on her mobile phone. Eager to help, I fiddled with the phone for a long while, despite not being able to read the Chinese on her screen. One by one the women got up to leave, offering a chorus of polite excuses: We can’t help, we’re too young, we don’t know anything, we’re no use, we have nothing to say, you don’t want to waste your time talking to us. Except for Wang Laoshi and me, only one woman remained, a shy woman named Chen Laoshi, who graduated the same year as Wang. They decided to take me for a walk around the old campus.

  Although the historic campus appeared as if it had always been there, it wasn’t even a hundred years old. Ginling College was founded in 1913, and its original campus constructed in 1916, on twenty-seven acres of rice and wheat fields and hills dotted with graves that a conglomerate of mission boards purchased piecemeal from the various owners. For most of the period of Western activity in China, foreigners constructed buildings in their native styles, importing the necessary materials to create faithful reproductions of European structures. Chinese architecture was regarded as “rotten” and backward, concerns about feng shui were dismissed as superstition, and objections that the erection of Western-style buildings all over China insulted the Chinese fell on deaf ears. Those magnificent Gothic, neoclassical, and art deco structures that I loved in Shanghai were seen as monuments not of integrity, efficiency, and modernity, as I saw them, but of oppression.