What We Go from China to See at the British Museum in London

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Lots and lots of priceless relics were looted and taken outside of China during that time. C.T. Liu, who we mentioned, was one of the biggest art dealers of the time. If you go to Guimei Museum in Paris today, you see him described as a great collector, someone who promoted Chinese art overseas, but to a lot of Chinese people, he was nothing more than a criminal who stole relics to order. A lot of those ended up in the British Museum.

From the Economist podcast on the solo Chinese traveler of today:

Joel Budd: And these guides were describing at great length the sort of context of the objects that they could see. It was a very sort of highly informed kind of tourism. Very studious. It was. And that was especially clear in a sold out exhibit that we went to see with famous Chinese painting.

What I did regret is that I wasn’t properly prepared, so I didn’t have my reading glasses with me. And it’s really a very, very dark room because the painting is so fragile. The people who had come to see it were seriously well-prepared. They had good equipment.

Jiehao Chen: Yeah digital cameras. Yeah

Well, luckily I did have my glasses with me and it’s a very beautiful painting. It’s an illustration of a poem written by a Jin dynasty official called Zhang Hua, and it was aimed at correcting the behavior of an empress. So it has all these different frames showing the proper way to dress and behave at court. What’s really interesting is that 40, 50 years ago, a lot of Chinese people would say, oh, this painting showed outdated feudal values that modern women should just do without. But, as we saw, it’s now really popular with visitors. I guess now enough time has passed for people to be able to appreciate traditional art without the baggage.