Careful hands encased in surgical gloves on Tuesday began unpacking more than 100 wooden cases that recently arrived at the Field Museum from China.
Curators are unpacking 422 artifacts from the Forbidden City Museum in Beijing, many of them among the rarest and most priceless objects ever displayed at the Field.
The artifacts constitute this year’s major exhibit for the Field, “Splendors of China’s Forbidden City: The Glorious Reign of Emperor Qianlong,” running from March 12 through Sept. 12.
The exhibition represents the largest number of objects the Chinese government has ever allowed to be borrowed from its storehouse of national treasures at the vast Forbidden City complex in the center of Beijing.
All of the artifacts in the exhibit once belonged to Emperor Qianlong (pronounced chin-lew-ung), one of the most beloved figures in Chinese history. The tall and handsome emperor ruled the Chinese empire for 60 years, from 1736 to 1796, at the zenith of the Manchu Dynasty.
The wealth and beauty that abounded in his reign, often compared to that of France’s Louis XIV’s, the builder of the Versailles palace, is evident in the Field exhibit.
A hint of the sumptuous display came out of the first two crates unpacked Tuesday, as curators assembled a large, solid gold, four-armed statue of a Tibetan Buddhist god of mercy, Guanyin. Qianlong commissioned artists to make the statue in 1746 for one of the 8,886 rooms in his Forbidden City palace complex.
“We keep the estimated value of these artifacts confidential for security reasons,” Robin Groesbeck, the Field’s exhibitions manager, said Tuesday as she watched curators gingerly put together components of the statue. “The Chinese have their own rating system for these things, and the objects we brought here for the exhibit are regarded as `Class One,’ which rates them as the highest possible cultural value.”
The statue, embellished with silver, gemstones and pearls, has writing inscribed in the four languages in which the multitalented Qianlong was fluent: Chinese, Manchu, Tibetan and Mongolian.
As they assembled the statue, which was shipped in several pieces, curators wearing surgical gloves discussed exactly how they were going to pick up and move each piece before actually touching it to avoid any surprises.
“When they are doing the installations in the display cases, we stop all other activity in the gallery so that the curatorial staff has absolute quiet and any space they need to do their work,” Groesbeck said. “They have to make sure each object is perfectly placed and seated in the display, so that it is stable and safe from vibration. Then we seal it up for the duration of the exhibition. Once it’s sealed, we don’t want to deal with it again.”
The surgical gloves ensure that no corrosive oils from fingers corrode the surface of the objects.
The second item installed Tuesday was seven-string Ming Dynasty zither that was already an antique by the time Qianlong became emperor. Qianlong, an accomplished musician, liked to play this particular zither.
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The 422 artifacts that came to Chicago were selected from hundreds of thousands of items housed in the Forbidden City, the old royal compound that sits behind 32-foot-high walls that form an immense rectangle 3,150 feet by 2,460 feet.
The compound’s palaces, temples and administrative buildings were the center of Chinese political power until the last emperor was dethroned in 1911.
Four years ago, Field officials began negotiating with Chinese authorities to bring some of the Forbidden City’s treasures to the United States for a major exhibition.
When the Chinese approved the idea, Field curators Ben Bronson and Chuimei Ho, who are married, traveled to Beijing several times to select objects for the exhibit, deciding to concentrate on taking a deep look at a single period of dynastic history.
They chose Qianlong’s reign because he was a colorful, long-lived figure whose daily life was carefully recorded by royal scribes, as well as in 40,000 poems he composed himself.
One of the major components of the exhibit is Qianlong’s throne room, which has survived intact in one of the Forbidden City palaces. It was dismantled for the Chicago exhibit.
The exhibit also re-creates a banquet room set out for dinner for Qianlong and two of his 40 wives, the color of their dishes revealing their standing in the hierarchy of royal marriages.
Another room re-creates the sitting room of another wife, featuring an 18th Century portrait of the young woman in the same room, so that objects that surround her in the painting are also part of the display.
Eight curators and registrars spent 2 1/2 weeks in January in Beijing helping their Chinese counterparts put the objects in custom-made cases, each object placed into its own, custom-shaped nest of foam padding
“Many of the things in the exhibit have never been on public display anywhere, including the Forbidden City,” said Francesca Pons, the Field’s project administrator for the exhibit. “It was fascinating to see the excitement of the Chinese curators while we were packing these things, because many of them had never seen these objects before, either.”