Page 15 - Bonhams Roy David's Collection Nov 2014 London

Presumably, Cixi had received the piece as a disregarded gift
herself and had ‘passed it on’. Another well-known gift by the
Empress Dowager was the Yongle blue and white grapevine
charger presented by her to Sir Robert Hart of the Imperial
Marine Service, on his retirement, which was sold as lot 83
for $220,000 in the Morrill Sale at Doyle’s in New York, 16
September 2003. In their sale on 12 May 2011 Bonhams had
(lot 397) a vase given to an English engineer who apparently
was with the convoy of 47 trains used by the Empress Cixi
on her railway journey to the Shishan Ling Tombs (the Ming
tombs) in April 1903 for which he received a gold medal and ‘a
valuable [not Imperially marked] vase from the Palace at Jehol,
where her royal porcelain was kept in store’.
4. The Regent for Pu Yi, his father Prince Chun,
is known to have presided over events too expensive to
be met from the Government subsidy, and to have sold
treasures to pay bills and line pockets. These pieces would
have gone to local dealers and via them much could also have
found its way to the West. Johnston also records that the
Republican government clearly knew that works of art from
the Palace were sold to make good the ever-increasing deficits
in the Imperial accounts, partly because of the government’s
failure to fulfil its obligations in the matter of the annual subsidy proceeds of the secret sale of the treasures of art bestowed
to Pu Yi payable under the abdication agreement. In The New
York Times for 2 December 1912 there was a report suggesting
that the whole of the Imperial Collections which included
‘the finest specimens of every form of Chinese porcelain and
ceramics’ were to be sold in London.
5. Pu Yi himself, with his brother Pujie (d.1994), as
Reginald Johnston records and the Emperor also in his
autobiography, systematically removed [thousands of]
valuables (thought largely, but by no means only, to have
been books and calligraphy) concealed in their clothes
over a significant period of time and C.P. Fitzgerald states
that ‘Sir Reginald… acted for Pu Yi as an intermediary in
conveying from the Palace to the Hong Kong Bank (British)
the most rare and priceless pieces of Sung porcelain in
the imperial collection. These were later sold to meet the
financial needs of the imperial family and some, if not all, are
now in the Percival David collection in London. William J.
Oudendyk KCMG, Netherlands Minister in China, recorded that
Pu Chieh came to him on 23 February 1923 ‘bringing in his car
a great number of big and small attaché cases which, he said,
contained part of the Emperor’s private fortune … A few days
afterwards one of his uncles, Prince Tsai T’ao, called on me.
He thanked me warmly for my willingness to help the Emperor
… He took all the attaché-cases with the Emperor’s fortune
in them away with him. I afterwards heard that they were
fortunately not taken back to the Forbidden City, and that they
were thus saved from confiscation.’
6. The looting of princely collections by their own
staff. Johnston suggests that few if any of the Manchu princes
(he excepts only one) ‘knew the extent of their own property or
even where it was situated … The money required was always
forthcoming, and the prince neither asked nor expected to be
told where it came from.’
7. Chinese officials, princes, aristocrats, gentry,
scholars and collectors selling their own art treasures,
including early wares and the whole raft of non-Imperial
but superb-quality pieces, as they increasingly became
impoverished and at times when the political situation
forced them to flee to safer areas including Hong Kong.
Professor Sayce wrote of when he was in Peking in 1912:
‘the Chinese were very nervous and were selling off their old
treasures for nominal sums’, and he ‘entered with relish into
the game, buying a ‘wonderful harvest’ of porcelain and Sung
pictures’, “it is an opportunity”, he remarked, “which will never
recur”. Yamanaka openly sold part of Prince Kong’s treasures
at auction in America in 1913. Johnston wrote that the earlier
‘revolution hastened the impoverishment of the Manchu
princes, and some of them, when I came to know them in
1919, had long ceased to be rich men … and lived partly on the
upon them or their ancestors by the court. Consideration of
‘face’ made it impossible for them to hold public auctions of
their treasures. The prices they obtained were in most cases
ridiculously low… Of another prince … Once one of the
wealthiest men in China,’ he says, ‘is now poor … He lives in
Tientsin … and when [he] is in need of money, he sends word
to his steward to raise the required amount by selling some of
the jade, porcelain, jewellery, pictures or other valuables (mostly
gifts from the imperial collections) which still remain in his k’u –
the family treasury…’ The stewards invariably sold as much as
they chose and sent as little money to the prince as possible,
thereby necessitating further raids on the family’s possessions.
Rich refugees fled south with their possessions at the time of
the Communist takeover in China in 1949.
8. Western officials collecting while in China and
taking their prizes (looted and purchased) back home. One
of the most outrageous culprits of this kind was the American
diplomat Henry Goldsmith Squiers (1859-1911), who left Peking
in 1901 ‘with what was reported to be several railway cars filled
with Chinese art’. Among others were Hippisley, Hirth, Alcock,
Johnston, Wright-Bruce, Labouchere and Mitford.
The establishment of treaty ports (agreed in the 1842 Treaty
of Nanjing at the end of the First Opium War, 1840-1842)
created new opportunities for British collectors in China itself.
After 1843 there was a change in the British presence in
China, which up to that point had consisted of temporary and
mobile populations of traders and sailors involved in the trade