Of course there were the twenty-one hundred crates that were well known to have been left behind in Nanjing-twenty-one hundred crates with some twenty-six thousand pieces of imperial porcelain. As everyone knew, they remained in deep storage in Nanjing while still, to this day, museum officials from Nanjing and Beijing feuded over who would get them. No one had ever seen them, except for a few curators who weren’t talking. Aside from those crates, she had never heard a definitive story about any part of the collection being lost or separated along the way.
The art had started out on trains. Five trains, thirty-nine sealed cars each. The Japanese occupation of Manchuria had reached all the way down to Liaoning Province, perilously close to Peking. They could sweep in at any time. And so in a single night, in the fall of 1931, all the art was carried out of the Forbidden City and taken away.
She went inside, to her most private door. In deep memory she wanted to see this. She plucked out her hearing aids, rested her head against the train seat, and locked her vision through the glass. Out there were blurring, hurtling banks of green, dissolving. Inside her mind were the gates to the examination yard, great red gates with brass joins. They opened and she walked through.
Liu Weijin, one of the bureaucrats in charge of the Forbidden City in 1931, knew the end was near. They’d been updating inventories and packing boxes for months already, and the advance of the enemy had been as inexorable as lava flow. Now all Manchuria was Japanese.
They couldn’t take all the art out to safety. They could only take the best of it. They worked fast: open the padded silk boxes, check the contents, add to the list, prioritize-staying, or going?-stack them to one side or another. The best workers were those who swiped like lightning with their brushes, methodical, unemotional, who could comb the dusty piles without stopping to gaze at the glory they held in their hands. If they stopped to look, to feel, they could not do it. They could not keep up the pace.
They wrote: a pale celadon vase, crackleware, ring-handled, mark and period from the Southern Song. A pair of mille-fleur wine cups, Qing, mark and period Qianlong. A hanging scroll painting of men crossing a bridge beneath steep mountains, signed by Tai Chin.
And then the word came. No one had known exactly when it would happen. Now it was here. In an instant, in a single turn of the head, they would have to flee. Today.
Liu Weijin put the phone down and turned to his colleague Tan Hui. “They are at the edge of Liaoning.” It was only a few hundred li away. The orders went out like fire over dry grass. Crating and loading sped to a frenzy.
Now Liu needed soldiers. It was two miles from the Forbidden City to the train station. He could not transport the collection without armed guard. He knew the streets were awash in refugees, people trying to get out, walking, spilling on either side of the puttering string of motorized vehicles, stepping around the iron-wheeled rickshas, the bicycle-pumped carts, the mules pulling entire families heaped up with children and servants and possessions. Liu needed men-a lot of them. He dialed General Tong.
“General Tong, sir,” he said breathlessly. “It is Liu Weijin-“
“Mr. Liu! You have received our message! Everything must be moved tonight.”
“Yes.” Liu said a silent prayer. “General. We need troops.”
“Impossible,” Tong said.
“The art must be guarded.”
“The capital must be guarded,” the General corrected him. “I cannot spare troops.”
Liu swallowed. Most residents, of course, had no choice but to either flee or go inside, lock their doors, and wait for the inevitable. “Sir,” he said, “please listen.”
The General lapsed into reluctant silence.
“No matter what happens, we can get the art out. This is cultural patrimony. This above all we should protect.”
On the crackly phone he heard a long breath. Liu knew his words had flown home.
“All right.” General Tong’s words all but collapsed Liu’s heart with relief. “You’ll have troops.”
So Nationalist soldiers arrived in trucks an hour later and dismounted amid the loading of wheeled carts and the harnessing of mules. Their rifles swung against their khaki puttees as they stepped in and out of the decrepit Palace buildings, across courtyards with roots and tufts of grass heaving up the ancient marble paving stones, listening to the strange bounce of their voices off the timeless stone walls and the whistle of wind on marble, trading cigarettes, laughing. Most had never been inside the Forbidden City before. Most were young. Some seemed like children.
In front of the soldiers, the laborers swarmed the line. They heaved the crates into the big iron-wheeled wooden carts, stacked them like tall, fat coffins, shouting, strapping the cargo down, pulling tight the ropes.
Finally they were ready to move. They had closed the streets running south from the Forbidden City, and they’d closed Jung Hsien Hutong east, all the way from the main corner where the Guomindang Party Headquarters faced the Supreme Court to the station. Thousands of recruits with smart brown straps of leather across their chests lined up shoulder to shoulder along the entire route. They made a human wall two li long.
When the first mule creaked and clopped through this uniformed human tunnel, dragging the first cart, Liu Weijin walked beside it. This was his cart, his most beloved things, and he meant to stay beside it all the way and make sure it reached its destination. In here were his treasured Chenghua chicken cups, his favorite painting, Fan Kuan’s “Travelers by a Mountain Stream,” his favorite Qin bronzes and Yuan Dynasty carvings in white jade.
The mules set a slow, steady rhythm with their hooves against the broad flat stones, the spindly metal wheels creaked, and everything else held its breath in unnatural silence. The people had been ordered inside and away; those in the buildings on either side of Jung Hsien had been told to extinguish all lights. The only glow was from the torches carried by the mule drivers.
But the people were there. All the windows, all the cracks and crannies and peepholes, all the upper floors with their built-out, ornate porches-these were alive with eyes. Liu could feel the avid faces in the shadows, feel the gasping, riveted human energy. Whole clans pressed against windows to watch the emperor’s treasures pass beneath. It was unheard of, it tore heaven and earth apart. Some people unrolled plain white banners from upper floors to signify mourning.
This will be a new Chinese world now, Liu thought. He looked behind him at the caravan of carts stretching away into the darkness pinpointed by the flaming brands, the rolling mule-drawn line he knew would rumble all through the night. Soon they would be Japanese subjects.
In a strange way he felt resignation. When the collection was loaded and had pulled out, he planned to melt away into the city, and from that moment on he’d put everything he had into surviving. He was lucky to have no family. Preservation would be his only goal.
And then they were there, rolling into the dark cavernous hall of P'ing Han Station with its soaring metal struts up under the distant roof, and the soldiers now shouted orders, directing, moving crates on the trains. Five full trains to load. Thirty-nine cars each. And as he watched his cart, his crates, his own personal points of light loaded into the first car, on the first train, he let himself exhale. And then mute, held up by equal parts grief and wonder, he stood witness through all the hours it took the collection to arrive. Nineteen thousand, five hundred fifty-seven crates. One at a time. All night long.