China exhibits 5,000 years of cultural treasures
By admin on 2014-12-15

When television viewers around the world tuned in to the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics this month, they were presented with a carefully crafted tableau of Chinese history and culture.

The message was clear: China - a harmonious civilization that once made great contributions to the world - is back, stronger than ever, and ready to help make the world a better place.

China's emergence, of course, is a work in progress and its future achievements a matter of conjecture. But its past glory is indisputable, and museums across Beijing timed major exhibitions of cultural treasures to coincide with the Olympics and underscore the general message of its opening ceremony. Perhaps the most impressive of these is the Capital Museum's "Chinese Memory: Treasures of a 5000-Year Civilization," which runs until Oct. 7.

"Chinese culture has developed for 5,000 years without stopping," said Zhang Jie, a curator of the exhibition. "We want to introduce our culture to foreign guests, and the Olympics was an opportunity."

The Olympics, indeed, is perhaps the only occasion that could enable the gathering under one roof in China of 169 top-notch cultural relics from 55 museums around the nation. Chinese museums are not noted for cooperating with one another, and most of the relics are collection centerpieces. The Capital Museum, moreover, is a local institution, managed by the Beijing city government. So, despite its considerable ambition - the museum has five temporary exhibitions running concurrently, almost unheard of - it lacks the bureaucratic clout of an institution like the National Museum of China (which, not coincidentally, is closed for renovations until 2010). Without the Olympic incentive, it would have been virtually impossible for the Capital Museum to borrow so many priceless objects.

Beijing residents and visitors alike have flooded the exhibition, which through late August averaged 8,500 ticket-purchasing attendees a day, a huge number by local standards; since attendance is free if a booking is made three days in advance, the actual number of visitors is even higher.

"There aren't many opportunities to see so many relics together like this," Zhang said. "We thought we'd have some lines - but never like this."

Crowds are perhaps thickest around cultural touchstones that are widely familiar because of their appearance in Chinese history textbooks. Top among these are the three terra-cotta soldiers - including a standing general in armor and a squatting archer - and one war horse that were borrowed from the Terra Cotta Warriors and Soldiers Museum in Xian, where they still surround the unexcavated tomb of China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang.

"The terra-cotta soldiers are the most important pieces because the Qin Dynasty unified China," explained Zhang. "It also unified Chinese writing, which was so very important to the development of Chinese culture. But the dynasty was short - there were only two emperors - so the cultural relics are very few."

A T-shaped silk banner from the Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 25) is also generating interest because it comes from the well-known tomb excavation of Mawangdui, in Hunan.

"Everybody knows about Mawangdui," Zhang said. "But they haven't had an opportunity to see anything from there."

The site's fame derives primarily from the mummified corpse of the wife of the Marquis of Dai, the discovery of which electrified the nation in the 1970s. Lady Dai's body was so well preserved that scientists were able to conduct an autopsy and determine that her diet was overly rich in fat and sugar and she had probably died of a heart attack, just after eating melon seeds (found undigested in her stomach). The T-shaped banner, which lay on the innermost of her nested lacquered coffins, depicts heaven, earth and the underworld in colors that remain strikingly vivid.

Also included in the exhibition is an artifact from another famous excavation, the Sanxingdui sacrificial pits (circa 1300 to 1046 B.C.) in Sichuan. When the pits were unearthed in 1986, they shattered conceptions of early Chinese civilization because of the unique style of objects - like the enormous bronze head with huge ears and bulging eyes on display - and the advanced level of technology and mathematics required to produce them. (An exhibition devoted solely to objects from Sanxingdui and neighboring Jinsha is on display at the Poly Art Museum in Beijing until Saturday.)

Other highlights of the show include a burial suit made of 4,248 pieces of jade stitched together with gold thread, the oldest and best quality of five so far discovered; a gold sunbird ornament from the late Shang Dynasty (circa 1300 to 1046 B.C.) that was unearthed in 2001; and a bronze "money tree" from Mianyang, Sichuan, that dates to the Eastern Han Dynasty (A.D. 25 to 220). The money tree survived the tragic May 12 Sichuan earthquake that devastated Mianyang, and was brought to Beijing by curators who are still recovering from the disaster.

"Chinese Memory" is presented in chronological order, starting with "The Dawn," or the pre-21st century B.C. period - represented with such objects as an 8,000-year-old stone carved with a sun god - and ending with "The Last Heyday of Imperial China," or the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, in which porcelain and other decorative arts are dominant.

Introductory explanations for each section emphasize the importance of ritual and music in consolidating dynasties; this point is more subtly made in the choice of objects, which include a number of ancient musical instruments and carvings of musicians, but virtually nothing with military implications, other than the terra-cotta soldiers.

The importance of cultural exchanges with other nations is also stressed, with the explanation that the Han (206 B.C. to A.D. 220) and Tang (A.D. 618 to 907) dynasties "are considered archetypes of prosperous times" because of their "creativity" and absorption of "foreign cultures." Objects that illustrate such exchanges include a "Persian-style" gilded silver flagon (circa third to sixth century) and a glass bowl from what is now Iran, both unearthed in Ningxia.

The exhibition appears designed partly to underline the prevailing political orthodoxy displayed in the highly ritualistic Olympics opening ceremony, which included a huge set piece involving Chinese sailors bringing cultural treasures to overseas nations.

But it does its job well, presenting the physical evidence of thousands of years of magnificent creative and technological endeavor, nearly all unearthed over the past few decades.