Emblem of Wealth

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Ancient China Treasure
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Stone slab with twelve small seal characters.
Qin Dynasty (221 - 206 B.C
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Symbolizing heaven, such disks were ritual
objects - this particular disk is a symbol of
weath, military power, and religious
authority Neolithic Period (3300 - 2200 B.C.)
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Chinese jade and steatite plaques. 4th-3rd
century BCE
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Square Bronze Hu (wine/water storeage vessel)
(770 - 476 B.C.)
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about 500-450 B.C.
Lidded Ritual Food Cauldron (Ding) with
Interlaced Dragons
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Bronze Cowrie Container
Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C. - A.D. 8)
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A gold ornament featuring a horse head with
antlers
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Bronze Gui of Shi You
Western Zhou Dynasty (1046 - 771 B.C.)
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Gilt Bronze Shakyamuni Buddha and Stand
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Bronze Bell
Eastern Zhou Dynasty, Warring States Period (475
- 221 B.C.)
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Bronze Age Pi Xie
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IIncense Burner - Tang Dynasty
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Twelve
Chinese Zodiac - Tang Dynasty
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AMBLEM of WEALTH Generating Wealth Abundance
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Click here for Full I ssue of Fidelio Volum
e 6 , Num ber 2 , Sum m er 1 9 9 7 EXHIBITS
Treasures from China Relate Five-Thousand Year
History
C
to the history of Chinas culture, to the dif-
ferent philosophical currents that emerged,
and to technological achieve- ments, inventions,
and discoveries among them, for example, the
glorious invention of paper. In these five
thousand years, there were conflicts between
Confucianism, Legalism, Taoism, and Buddhism,
and great peri- ods of cultural renaissance, such
as that of the Twelfth- century A.D. Confucian
Renaissance under the Sung Dynasty. This enor-
mous history, which would require many years
of study to begin to compre- hend, could be at
least appreciated though the exhibit
Splendors of Imperial China Treasures from
the National Palace Museum, Taipei, which
completed a year-long U.S. tour in April at the
Nation- al Gallery of Art in Wash- ington, D.C.,
after appear- ing in New York, Chicago, and San
Francisco. Two-thirds of the nearly 450 rare
objects in the exhibition, many clas- sified as
national treasures, have never before been
shown in the U.S. On only three previous
occasions have masterpieces from the National
Palace Muse- um travelled to the West to London
in 1935-1936, to the United States in
1961-1962, and again in 1991-1992, where they
were included in the National Gallerys
famous
hinese culture has been in continu-
ous, uninterrupted existence for
National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic
of China
more than five thousand years, making it unique
the oldest civilization in the world. In these
five thousand years, the rise and fall of
dynasties was closely linked
Wang Meng, Forest Chamber Grotto at Chü-chü
(after 1365).
covery of the Americas. Organized
chronologically, the objects in the show
presented the great artistic traditions of
Chinese civilization over millennia, from the
Neolithic period through the Eighteenth century
A.D. Beginning with a room dedicated to the
Neolithic and Bronze Ages, the exhibi- tion
progressed into the later dynasties, the Tang
(A.D. 618-907), Sung (960- 1279), Yüan
(1272-1368), Ming (1368- 1644), and Ching
(1644-1911). This orga- nization, which allowed
the viewer to compare the advances (or, in some
cases, declines) not only of the levels of
techno- logical achievement (e.g., in the produc-
tion of porcelain and the development of the
glazes, or in the pictorial techniques used to
represent space), but also of world outlook,
depending upon which philo- sophical current was
favored by the rul- ing imperial strata. Such a
change leaps out, for example, when comparing
paint- ings from the Imperial Painting Acade- my
created under the Sung Dynasty, with ones
produced during the subse- quent Yüan, after the
Mongols invaded and occupied China, and the
Confucian Renaissance was destroyed by the expan-
sion of Taoist influence.
National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic
of China
Circa 1492 exhibition commemorating the dis-
Fan Kuan (c.980-1050), Travelling Amid Streams
and Mountains.
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1 9 9 7 Schiller I nstitute, I nc. All
Rights Reserved. Reproduction in w hole or
in part w ithout perm ission strictly
prohibited.
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Government Promotion of the Arts During the Sung
Dynasty, painting was organized under the
auspices of a cen- tralized Imperial Painting
Academy, and painters were recruited by the new
government from all parts of the Empire to
serve the needs of the imperi- al court. Over
time, the traditions repre- sented by this group
of artists became what is known today as the Sung
acade- mic manner, the culmination of cen-
turies of achievement in mastering a
naturalistic, closely descriptive and con-
vincing portrayal of the physical world, in the
words of Maxwell K. Hearn, author of the
catalogue The Splendors of Imperial China. Under
the Emperor Hui-tsung (1101-1125), himself an
accomplished painter and calligrapher, the arts
were developed to the point where they
became the example for all succeeding academies.
Aside from landscape paint- ing, Hui-tsungs
academicians special- ized in religious figures,
historical nar- ratives, genre painting, flowers,
birds, and animals, all keenly observed and
meticulously rendered. Many of the paintings from
this peri- od remind a Western viewer of draw-
ings and watercolors on the same sub- jects by
later, great Western masters, such as Albrecht
Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci. One of the most
beautiful examples is the hanging scroll Winter
Play SEE front cover, this issue, attrib- uted
to Su Han-chen (c.1130-60s), a preeminent
painter of children at the
Southern Sung court. This painting is part of a
set of hanging scrolls that prob- ably showed
children in each of the four seasons. The
portrayal of a young girl and her slightly
younger playmate, is a strong indication that
children of both sexes were prized in the
imperial world. The children are depicted at
play, bat- tling a pretend-dragon kitten,
using, as their weapon, a banner adorned with a
peacock feather. The Imperial Painting Academy
was closed during the reign of the first Yüan
emperor, Khubilai Khan (1215-1294), the grandson
of Genghis Khan. Pictorial representation became
introspective, and realistic representation as a
product of the observation of nature practically
disappeared. The sense of aerial (atmos- pheric)
perspective achieved by the Sung painters, where
the white spaces are not empty, but full of
space, was lost. Compare, for example, such
examples of Sung artistry as Travelling Amid
Streams and Mountains of Fan Kuan (c.980-1050),
with the Yüan artist Wang Mengs (c.1308-1385)
Forest Chamber Grotto at Chü-chü, where the
painter abandons all suggestion of spatial
reces- sion, and confronts the viewer with a
densely textured wall of rock and water . . .
creating a vision of an enclosed and sequestered
environment that lies out- side of the real
world. East and West Unified A substantial
portion of the treasures of the National Museum
derive from the
imperial collections of the Ching Dynasty
(1644-1911). It was during the Ching Dynasty,
established when the Manchus over- threw the Ming
in 1644, that the Jesuit missionaries, whose
first arrival in China had been Matteo Ricci in
1581, fully established themselves at the impe-
rial court. The relations between the Jesuits and
the first emperors of the Ching Dynasty were
such, that Jesuits shared responsibility for the
education of the prince, along with his classical
Confucian tutors. This prince would later become
the famous emperor Kang Hsi, under whom the
collaboration between East and West achieved
its highest level, a collaboration organized, on
its European side, by the great Ger- man
philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz. The science of
Europes Golden Renais- sance, coupled with
Chinas tradition of the Twelfth-century
Confucian Renais- sance of the philosopher
Chu Hsi, engendered an era of extraordinary sci-
entific and technological advance. Under Kang
Hsi, official art workshops were reestablished in
the capital and in regional centers. The Imperial
Kiln Complex in Ching-te-chuen was rebuilt, and
became a renewed center of porce- lain
production. One of the exhibits finest examples
of East-West collaboration, is the silk
handscroll One Hundred Horses, fin- ished in
1728, which gave birth to a new style by merging
the best pictorial tech- niques of Europe and
China. It was painted by Giuseppe Castiglione,
a Jesuit missionary, who arrived in China at the
age of twenty-seven. After several years of work
at a glazing workshop, Castiglione took the
Chinese name of Lang Shih-ning. Upon seeing
One Hundred Horses for the first time, the
Emperor Chien-lung named Cas- tiglione
principal court painter. Both this handscroll,
and another one by Cas- tiglione entitled
Assembled Blessings, are made in the
traditional technique of Chinese painting in ink
and mineral col- ors on silk, and the themes are
also tra- ditionally Chinese, but both have
a three-dimensional quality accomplished by the
subtle use of the Western tech- nique of
chiaroscuro, and Renaissance- developed
perspective.
National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic
of China
Lang Shih-ning (Giuseppe Castiglione), One
Hundred Horses (detail) (1728).
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Minimum and Maximum in Brushwork Almost all the
pieces in paper or silk, and also some of the
bronzes, were accompanied by calligraphic
poems, a crucial aspect of Chinese painting to be
understood by the West. Confucian teachings
considered writing to be the moral act of a man
who fulfilled his responsibilities to society as
a whole past, present, and futureas it was
embodied in the person of the emperor, in his own
family, or in a specific clan. Writing was also a
prerequisite for the individual to be considered
one of the literati (wen-ren), since, among other
things, the need to memorize the com- position of
thousands of calligraphic characters and their
meanings, required many years of study. Lifelong
dedication and practice were necessary to be able
to write skillfully. Each calligraphic character
is a com- position in itself, sometimes requiring
as many as twenty-four brushstrokes. Aside
from being part of the group of characters, each
is an individual entity with intrinsic value.
Chinese calligraphy has passed through many
stages in its development to the present. Five
masterpieces of calligraphy and painting on silk
and paper from the Tang (618-907) and Sung
(960-1279) Dynasties were displayed, including
Poems Written at Huang-chou on the Cold Food
Festival, a handscroll by the
Left Su Shih, Poems Written at Huang-chou on
the Cold Food Festival (detail) (1082). Below
Wen Tung, Bamboo (detail) (c.1070).
National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic
of China
National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic
of China
most famous poet and callig- rapher, Su Shih
(1037-1101), and Bamboo, by Wen Tung
(1018-1079), an early example of a subject that
con- tinues to be a Chinese fa- vorite. The
identity of the artistic idea in these two
works, one painting, the other calligraphy,
is evident. Many beautiful examples of cal-
ligraphy from later periods were exhib- ited,
including ones by Shen Chou, patriarch of the
literati in Soochow dur- ing the Ming
Dynasty. Shen Chous sixteen ink and color works
on paper, entitled Drawings from Life (1494),
are a group of cal-
play at the museum, so it was again
possible to compare watercolors by Dürer with
these extraordinary Chi- nese paintings. Concernin
g a civilization, five thou- sand years of
continuous existence speak for themselves.
Splendors of Imperial China, and the
catalogue volumes issued to commemorate it,
should gener- ate a true sense of admiration
and respect for a culture and civilization lit-
tle known in the West, but from which there is a
great deal to be learned. Ana María Mendoza
ligraphic paintings,
where the essential char- acteristics and forms
of the subject are represent- ed with a
minimum of brushstrokes, but with total
freedom. When the National Gallery exhibit- ed
some of these draw- ings in the Circa 1492 show
in 1992, the public was able to compare
them with drawings and watercolors from the
Italian Renaissance. This time, an exhibition
of works on paper entitled Six Artists, Six
Cen- turies, was also on dis-
Two catalogue volumes have been pub- lished to
commemorate the exhibit. The full catalogue,
Possessing the Past Trea- sures from the
National Palace Museum, Taipei, by Wen C. Fong
and James C.Y. Wyatt, is 648 pages long, and is
priced at 85. Splendors of Imperial China
Trea- sures from the National Palace Museum,
Taipei, by Maxwell K. Hearn, is a beau- tiful,
shorter (144 page) report of the exhib- it,
priced at 35. Both volumes are pub- lished by
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y. and the
National Palace Muse- um, Taipei, and may be
available in local libraries.
National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic
of China
Shen Chou, one of sixteen drawings from Drawings
from Life (detail) (1494).
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Rival Museums Retrace Route of
Chinas Imperial Treasures
Courtesy of Zhuang Ling A photograph showing the
difficulties the imperial treasures sometimes
encountered on the road to their hiding place By
DAVID BARBOZA Published July 6, 2010 CHONGQING,
China On a sweltering morning last month, a
white-haired guide trudged up a muddy path,
leading a group of scholars toward a bamboo grove
on the outskirts of this western Chinese city.
The site, he said, was where a large portion of
Chinas imperial treasures were once hidden
inside several big wooden sheds.
Slide Show The Imperial Treasure Route, Then and
Now
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Courtesy of Zhuang Ling Members of the palace
museum staff who helped move the artifacts to
Chongqing. They were stored right about here,
Hu Changjian, a local museum official, said of
the artifacts, an unparalleled collection of more
than a million objects from the Forbidden City in
Beijing, including fine paintings, calligraphy,
jade and porcelain dating back centuries. He
added, We think they dug caves in the hills
behind us to store some of the treasures. Photog
raphers and documentary filmmakers traveling with
the group of scholars recorded the scene, as the
scholars, clutching notepads, scampered up a hill
in search of caves. The scholars, from mainland
China and Taiwan, were taking part in an
extraordinary two-week research project,
retracing the routes taken by the imperial
treasures in the 1930s and 1940s, when they were
being safeguarded from the ravages of civil war
and Japanese aggression, not to mention floods,
bandits and warlords. The project is
extraordinary because it was organized by rival
museums, the Palace Museum of Beijing and
theNational Palace Museum in Taiwan, each of
which claims to be the rightful home of the
artifacts. The original Palace Museum in Beijing
was split in two its staff as well as its
collection in 1949, when the Nationalist
government fell to the Communists and retreated
to the island of Taiwan with thousands of
supporters and a huge cargo of museum
pieces. For decades there has been debate about
ownership of the divided treasures. But in recent
years the two museums have begun to collaborate
on exhibitions in a stunning show of cross-Strait
cooperation. On the scholars journey this
summer, the talk was not of unification but of
shared history and of a common desire to
understand the remarkable events that both
preserved the treasures and eventually led to
their division. We had a rough idea of how
things happened, but we didnt know the details,
said Li Wenru, deputy director at the Palace
Museum in Beijing. But we knew it was a miracle
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that in wartime over a million treasures were
moved 10,000 kilometers, on roads, in water, by
air, and nothing was lost. The museum staff
members who protected the artifacts on that
16-year odyssey, hiding them in bunkers, caves,
temples, warehouses and even private homes, have
all died. But some of their children were invited
to participate in this years trip. Zhuang Ling,
72, says his father, who had been a cataloger of
the collection, was one of the staff members
charged with guarding the imperial treasures. He
recalls living and traveling with them as a
child, in the mountains outside Chongqing. When
the weather was good, theyd bring the paintings,
calligraphy and books outside to give them some
fresh air because it was too humid inside, he
said. I could even see some of the landscape
paintings. The collection was put together by
emperors, mostly in the centuries between the
Song dynasty (960-1276) and the brief reign of Pu
Yi, Chinas last emperor, at the end of the Qing
dynasty (1644-1911). After the Qing fell, the
imperial family kept the treasures. (In 1913 the
family offered to sell them to the American
industrialist and collector J. P. Morgan for 4
million Morgan died shortly after his staff
received the telegrams.) In 1924 the state
expelled the imperial family from the Forbidden
City, declared the collection national property
and made it the foundation of a new Palace
Museum. But after Japan invaded north China in
1931 and threatened to move toward Beijing, the
government, fearing the artifacts might be
destroyed or carted off to Japan, shipped them,
in more than 19,000 wooden crates, south to
Nanjing, the new capital, in early 1933. Then,
just days before the Japanese destroyed Nanjing
in 1937, they were divided into three groups and
sent into hiding along three separate routes.
Some of the most valuable objects ended up here
in Chongqing, the wartime capital. Last month
this humid, mountainous city was the seventh stop
for the Chinese and Taiwanese scholars. They
crowded into a rusted bank vault where some of
the artifacts had been stored (it now houses
sewing machines) visited the old central
library, which had exhibited some of the
treasures during the war and trekked up to a
warehouse that had been deemed safe for the
treasures, they were told, because it was
adjacent to a Buddhist temple and so unlikely to
be attacked by Japanese forces. Mr. Hu, the
Chongqing guide, added new details to the record,
even as he confessed to having discovered only
three of the four storage rooms at the warehouse
site. Minutes later Mr. Li, from the Beijing
museum, followed a railroad track up a hill and
discovered what appeared to be the fourth
warehouse space.
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After Japan surrendered in 1945, the treasures
returned to Nanjing. But the journey was not
over. Civil war between the Nationalist
government and the Communists, which had begun in
the 1920s and abated during the Japanese
occupation, resumed. In 1948, with the Communists
routing government forces in the north, Chiang
Kai-shek, head of the Nationalists, ordered the
most valuable treasures shipped to Taiwan, along
with much of the nations gold supply. The
majority of the paintings from the imperial
collection moved to Taiwan, said Alfreda Murck,
an authority on Chinese art at the Palace Museum
in Beijing, though only about 20 percent of the
collection made its way there. They chose very
well, she added. Chiangs decision divided more
than just the collection. Liang Jinsheng, 62,
said his father and grandfather helped protect
the treasures in the 1930s and 40s. But after
the war, Mr. Liangs brother and grandfather
accompanied some of the treasures to Taiwan while
Mr. Liangs father stayed behind in China,
following another part of the collection back to
Beijing. This trip made me realize how much my
parents generation did, said Mr. Liang, who
catalogs artifacts at the Beijing museum and is a
fifth-generation staff member there. In Taiwan
the treasures were stored in a cave for years,
out of fear that the Communists might invade or
bomb the island only in 1965 did the National
Palace Museum of Taipei open. In Beijing,
meanwhile, the Palace Museum had few visitors in
the 1950s and 60s. But the treasures had
enormous symbolic value in both places. David
Shambaugh, who with Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott
wrote The Odyssey of Chinas Imperial Art
Treasures, said Chinese leaders had long viewed
them as a means of validating their power, even
under Communism. During the Cultural Revolution,
when Red Guards tried to destroy anything
associated with tradition, Mao ordered the museum
protected. Every successive regime used the
collection to legitimize themselves with elites,
said Professor Shambaugh, a China scholar at
George Washington University. Mao and the
Communists saw themselves as the inheritors of
5,000 years of history. There has been no
dialogue between the two museums about whether
the treasures should be unified in one location,
officials of both institutions say. And in
Chongqing and elsewhere on the trip, the subject
of ownership was carefully avoided. Theres only
one palace museum, said Mr. Li of the Beijing
museum, in that the two are one. And Chu
Huiliang of Taipei said, Both sides dont talk
about this issue because were not the ones who
can resolve it.
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The museum officials insisted that it wasnt
important where the treasures were kept, only
that they were preserved. The two museums are
teaming up for a joint exhibition in Beijing
later this year, about their travels following
the route of the imperial treasures. And in July
2011 they plan to hold a joint exhibition in
Taipei, joining two parts of an ancient painting
from the Yuan dynasty that was divided when the
Nationalists fled. Still, for the moment, the
Taipei museum has no plans to send any of its
objects to Beijing, and is unlikely to do so
until the Beijing government formally agrees that
it will not seize artifacts lent by Taiwan. As
hopeful as the new cooperation is, museum
officials on both sides acknowledge, it has its
limits With Compliments the New York Times
Amblem of Wealth
Puyi was last remembered in the Movie The
Last Emperor directed by Bernardo
Bertolucci , which grossed over USD 43,984,230
in Box office . During the course before he
was evicted from the imperial palace ,the Last
Emperor of China, described how his last few
loyalties and eunuchs would settle their
severance pensions on their own by
smuggling invaluable artifacts collected by his
ancestors of the Qing dynasty for sale.
Although many have been stolen , lost but
yet there are glimpse of hope as truly ,not
all are lost , as a massive 696,000 of these
artifacts had actually been moved to Taiwan
secretly just after the Cultural Revolution
period in China In 2011 ,while the media were
busy reporting on the lucky mystical powers of
the Tibetan Dragon Sutra which had been
released for public viewing in year 2011 in
Taiwan , not many has remembered why and how
did such a huge collection of artifacts had
landed in Taiwan . The "Dragon's Sutras, Tibetan
language edition" was once housed in the Buddha
Hall of the Cining Palace inside the Forbidden
City. Buddhists believe that someone who has the
chance to read the entire compilation would be
blessed for seven generations of good luck
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People were amazed and fancied only about how
former President Chen Shui-bian took his last
opportunity to have his private viewing of the
magical artifact shortly before he left his
Taiwan presidency office in 2008, no one seems to
wonder why a copy of the sutra in now in China ,
with another portion in China . How and why were
all the artifacts moved to Taiwan ? Does the
museum has similar other artifacts with such
Lucky Mystical Powers ! While Presidents are
given quality time with original copies, and
people with millions to spare can have the next
second best thing, the majority of the people
are pretty much kept from it. Is there another
Mythical products that equalize to provide such
blessing Are there other artifacts or ancient
mystic symbols which has such similar
capacity as the Dragon sutra collection Can
similar Prosperity symbols actually help you
inbuilding wealth and bless the user with se
vengeneration of good luck also . Which could
be the other Ancient Mystic symbols that
eve ry individual can be blessed to engage
with ? Can prosperity symbols actually help you
in building Wealth with Abundance ? Unlocking
Wealth Luck Potential The most important luck
that all working individual concern themselves
with each and every day is of course WEALTH
LUCK . Since Ancient times ,there have been
several myths and rituals for creating wealth
over the centuries and one of them is by the
empowering of Mystic symbols and objects to
attract wealth and manifesting abundance MONEY
TROUBLES? LACK OF SUCCESS? Will you be one of
those who turns your Life around with this
ancient China 220 BC Mystic Symbol which
attracts Wealth Success Today we will explore
on the subject of some ancient symbols from
China which is hardly known in the West. This is
a very ancient technique of welcoming wealth
and success from the orient which has been tried
and tested there for hundreds of years. Many
tycoons in the Pacific Rim reputedly swear byit
and many professional executives from
S outh Asian economies are said to carry one
with themor have them at home . For years this
Mystic Symbol has provided this amazing luck
and wealthattraction mystic to orientals in
an astoun dinglysimple wealth creation technique
but behind thatsimple exterior lies an ancient
belief which iscomplex and fully accords with
old ancient China teaching since 220 B.C.
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Ancient China Mystic 220 B.C Bestows Wealth with
Abundance Find Out China's Well Kept
Historiographic Tradition to Attracting Wealth
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All Pictures of Ancient China Treasure compiled
from WikiMedia Common