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world’s eyes to Chinese art. Madame Guo, wife of Guo Taiqi, Chinese foreign minister

to England during the 1930s, declared: “The International Exhibition of Chinese Art,

which opened in London on November 27, 1935, formed one of the most remarkable

collections of art treasures ever seen. It illustrated the culture of my country over a

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period of nearly 4,000 years.” John C. Ferguson, an American living in Beijing who
was also at the time an advisor to the Chinese organizing committee of the exhibition,

described the exhibition’s success in terms of its ability to attract “large crowds which

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filled the halls to overflowing.”

Clearly, scholars, experts, and government officials active in the 1930s

recognized immediately the importance of the London Exhibition. Recent scholarship

has echoed those reviews by remarking upon the exhibition’s significance in stimulating

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public and academic interest in Chinese art history. Yet, despite this event’s prominence
in the scholarly literature, few scholars have studied the exhibition’s discursive output.

As such, few if any recent scholarly articles mention the varying perspectives on art and

the exhibition from China-based commentators responding to the event. Instead, the

current scholarship relies upon London-based, English-language primary sources alone to

reconstruct the historical event. In doing so, these approaches obfuscate the exhibition’s

factual history and overlook the exhibition’s first and final instances of public display -

the Chinese government’s selection of objects was shown first in Shanghai in a pre-

exhibition between April 8, 1935 and May 5, 1935 and then, upon the objects’ safe return

to China, exhibited again in a post-exhibition at the Nanjing Mingzhilou Exhibition Hall

(Nanjing Mingzhilou kaoshi yuanیԯ׼қᅽϽ༊৫) for three weeks between June 1

and June 22, 1936. Given the sheer number of art objects on display on loan from