Page 27 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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American collection of Chinese art, indeed, was shaped by a singular figure: Loo Ching-

Tsai. To write about C. T. Loo is to write a history of the exchange, study, and display of

Chinese art, and a history of numerous important individuals and institutions in an

eventful era. This research on Loo allows me to rediscover a large group of overlooked

materials, including many significant exchange and exhibition activities and a body of

Chinese art scholarship produced between the 1910s and the 1950s.

Loo was born into a scholarly family in 1880 in his ancestral village of Lou Chia-tu

(Lu jia du) outside the city of Hu-chou (Hu zhou) in Zhejiang, the coastal province south

of Shanghai. After schooling in Shanghai, Loo, at the age of twenty, went to Paris with

meager funds to enter foreign trade. In 1902 Loo met Zhang Jingjiang, the wealthy

commercial attaché to the Qing Minster in France. In the same year Loo and Zhang

established a private trading company, “Ton Ying”, for the sale of curios, tea, and silk

(Fuller 1958, 8). Part of the profit from their business helped finance the revolutionary

cause of Sun Yat-sen’s (Sun Zhongshan’s) Xinhai Revolution, which overthrew the

Manchu rule and ended the imperial history of China in 1911. Because of this connection

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to Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalists, Loo and Zhang were in a privileged position to

secure and export high quality antiquities, especially objects from the Qing imperial

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Zhang Jingjiang, the millionaire financier and patron of Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi),
held high positions in the Nationalist Government in the 1920s and 1930s. He was able to
obtain first-rate art works directly from the Imperial collection. “Zhang also oversaw the
beginning of the removal of more than half of the Imperial Collections to Shanghai in
1933 following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. It was during this period that many
imperial works of art found their way into Western collections…” (Chinese Art-
ReserchintoProvenance. “Ton-Ying & Co.”
http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/admn/php/carp/essay1.php?enum=1096638570)