Speculation on the Earliest Surviving Chinese Rugs

مارس 28, 2020

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The Forbidden City was not similarly sacked until 1900, after the Boxer Rebellion was crushed, and armies from six foreign powers – Britain, France, Russian, Japan, Germany, and the United States – arrived in Beijing on August 14. These soldiers proceeded to pillage the city until they carried away everything perceived to be of value. As O’Connor describes the scene, “Looting quickly became the sole preoccupation of the allied garrisons and palaces, homes, and government buildings of the conquered city.” This included also the Forbidden City, whose “sacred imperial precincts were looted as thoroughly as the Mongol Market.” (O’Connor, p.287) August Simpson, in a letter providing an eyewitness account described, lumbering military trains going back to Tientsin, laden with countless chests of loot. Every place of importance, indeed, had been picked clean as a bone. Now that the road is well open, dozens of amateurs, too, from the ends of the earth have been pouring in to buy up everything they can.

Lest it be imaged that the imperial household had been able to hide away the most treasured items before the sack of Beijing, one must recall that the Empress herself had not recognized the threat until a few days before the fall of the city and had been compelled herself to leave at the last minute disguised as a peasant. Eyewitness accounts make it clear that the vast palace was systematically pillaged, with great train loads of booty being carried away to find their ultimate destination in the antiques markets of Europe and America. Under the chaotic circumstances described, it would seem virtually impossible to determine, after the event, just which artifacts came from the Imperial City at that time an which from the thousands of private homes also looted.

The Empress returned nearly a year later and re-established an imperial household with what could be salvaged from other sources, but even this reconstituted treasury was again removed from the Forbidden City in February of 1933, and almost all of it came to reside in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. In all, 242,542 items were crated and taken from one location to another ahead of the Japanese advance, and this odyssey is recounted by the Nationalists’ retired Minister of Education, who bore much responsibility for the removal. It too six trains and five months to carry all of these treasures from Beijing, an, eventually, thousands of crates were carried to Taiwan on three cargo ships.

While the size of the Imperial art collection of the Qing emperors must have been astonishing, it is difficult to imagine – with the looking of 1860, the vastly more extensive looting of 1900, an the efficient removal of every item before the Japanese advance in 1933 – that there could have been left in Beijing of the imperial treasures that filled the Forbidden City in 1850. No wonder almost all of the rooms of the palace, which I methodically surveyed in 1978, were completely empty of artifacts.

An yet on continues to hear of objects on the art market that can confidently be trace to the Forbidden City, where, I was told by the custodians in 1978, there were no inventories of pre-1900 materials. The problem thus becomes on of the determining the provenance of looted objects, a difficult job at best. I eagerly await publication of the documentation that demonstrates these rugs are from the Imperial Palace.

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