Some of China’s most priceless national treasures, housed in Beijing’s sprawling royal palace complex, the Forbidden City, will come to Chicago in 2004 for an unprecedented Field Museum exhibition on the sumptuous life of a Chinese emperor.
After two years of quiet negotiations, officials from the Field and the Chinese government late last month signed an agreement allowing the Field to borrow 500 artifacts to mount the exhibit, “Splendors of China’s Forbidden City: The Glorious Reign of Emperor Qianlong.”
Getting the artifacts to the United States is a coup that should make the Field the envy of the museum world.
“The extraordinary range of objects that the Field Museum has gathered from the Palace Museum in Beijing is really unprecedented,” said Elinor Pearlstein, associate curator for Chinese art at the Art Institute. “It’s an extraordinary accomplishment for the Field.”
The American Museum of Natural History already has snapped up rights to bring the Forbidden City treasures to New York after its Chicago run, and other museums are in line to book it.
None of the objects in the exhibition has ever been to the U.S. About half of them have never been outside the walls of the Forbidden City.
Few Americans know the story of Emperor Qianlong (pronounced chin-lew-ung), but he is beloved in China. Tall, strong, handsome and athletic, he was a Manchurian, an ethnic minority whose family seized control in China in 1644, establishing the Manchu dynasty that reigned until the early 20th Century.
Born in 1711, Qianlong ruled for nearly 60 years, from 1736 to 1795, the greatest years of the dynasty, managing the richest empire in the world in its time with the aid of an enormous state bureaucracy and an army of spies. He died in 1799.
When it opens at the Field on March 12, 2004, the exhibition will re-create several key rooms of the 8,886 rooms at the emperor’s disposal in the Forbidden City complex, including an imperial throne room, a palace banquet room, the emperor’s office, his personal Buddhist shrine and a typical bedroom of one of his 40 wives.
Personal items
The rooms are filled with rich silk and satin costumes and Imperial dragon robes, accessories and jewelry. Other artifacts include a 6-foot-high Buddhist shrine, called a stupa, made entirely of gold that the emperor gave as a birthday present to his mother, whom he doted on. Banquet tables will be filled with priceless ceramic dishes and serving wares.
An archer and hunter of great renown, Qianlong’s bows and arrows are in the exhibition, along with arrays of weapons and armor used by his warriors to keep peace in an empire covering more territory than modern China.
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The royal office displays his administrative tools, accoutrements and elegant imperial seals Qianlong used to run the mammoth Chinese bureaucracy that had evolved for 2,000 years before he came to power.
Among his personal items in the show are quills and inkwells filled with the red ink he used to scrawl notes like, “Is this man telling the truth?” onto memos before firing them back to subordinates in the provinces.
Under his stewardship, marked by lowered taxes and increased support for arts and literature, China flourished. Chinese peasants probably were better fed and housed in his time than their European counterparts, and were well off enough to send their children to public and private schools.
European paintings
Among the most startling objects featured in the exhibit are several brilliantly colored and detailed European paintings of Qianlong and his court made by a Jesuit missionary priest, Rev. Giuseppe Castiglione.
The emperor was anxious that his face be remembered after he died and realized that Chinese artists, trained in a stylized classical mode, could not capture a recognizable likeness.
He and his predecessors had long relied on Jesuit missionaries from Europe as advisers in diplomacy and in technical fields, like astronomy and mathematics. So Qianlong asked the Jesuits to send him a good portraitist.
Although the faces of the emperor and the men of the court in Castiglione’s paintings are realistically represented, the women in his paintings have a generic sameness to their faces.
“We think that Castiglione was never allowed to see the women in the palace to paint them from life,” said Chuimei Ho, adjunct curator for Asian anthropology at the Field.
Ho and her husband, Ben Bronson, the Field’s curator for Asian archeology, are making the lives of women in the imperial court a key theme in the exhibit.
When he was 17, Qianlong married a 15-year-old girl, Xiao Xian (pronounced shou-see-en), who would become empress when he took the throne eight years later.
“We know he was deeply in love with Xiao Xian,” said Ho, but that did not deter him from following the custom of taking other “minor” wives.
Every few years, the imperial household would ask high-ranking families throughout the realm to submit names and descriptions of daughters 13 to 16 years old to form a bridal pool.
“It was glamorous, but perhaps not very happy life for the emperor’s wives,” Ho said. “Once they went to the palace, they were never allowed to leave again, were never allowed to own anything personal, and their families weren’t allowed to visit them.”
There were eight ranks of wives, the “First Wife” being the empress. Lesser-ranking wives could rise by bearing sons for the emperor, so competition was fierce to be chosen for a night in the emperor’s bedroom.
Activities were recorded
Phalanxes of scribes in the royal household noted every detail of the emperor’s activities, said Bronson, “from the food he had for lunch, to any illness he might have had, the people he saw, his executive decisions, his bowel movements and his choice of women each night.”
Xiao Xian died when she was 35. The emperor was so heartbroken that he wrote poetry about her for the rest of his life.
He waited several years before naming his second wife as empress, a woman he despised after an unknown falling out. When she died mysteriously, he never bothered to name another empress, though he was still in his 40s.
He did, however, demonstrate great affection for one of his minor wives, a Muslim woman from western China whom Qianlong chose for political convenience. He was very fond of her, and Castiglione painted them together in a dramatic hunting scene on horseback.
His marriages produced 17 sons and 10 daughters, but many of them died as children. When he voluntarily retired in 1795, he named his 15th-born son as new emperor.
After the fall of the empire to nationalist rebels in 1912, the Forbidden City became a public museum. For 600 years it had barred all but royals and designated servants and government administrators from entering.
It sits in the center of Beijing, behind 32-foot-high walls that form an immense rectangle 3,150 feet by 2,460 feet. Behind the walls are hundreds of buildings that once were palaces, government offices, religious shrines and storehouses. Now run as the Palace Museum, the Forbidden City houses nearly 1 million artifacts.
In June 2000, Ho, Bronson and Sophia Siskel, the museum’s exhibits chief, were in China on other business when Siskel decided it was time to propose Ho’s idea for a Chicago exhibit to the Palace Museum.
“We didn’t know what to expect,” said Siskel, “but the Chinese were wonderfully receptive to the idea. They are interested in increasing international knowledge about China.”