ONE day in January 1949, an LST flying the red-and-blue ensign of Nationalist China pulled away from the dock at Nanking and headed down the muddy Yangtze, its tank deck crammed with a priceless cargo. Another heavily laden LST had already made its way safely across the East China Sea to Formosa. Later, a freighter was to complete the epic task of saving from Communist hands the art treasures assembled over the centuries, and collected in the Peking Palace Museum and Nanking's Central Museum.
Today the best of the old imperial collections reposes safely at Peikou, a rural hideaway in the central foothills of Formosa. There, stacked in three concrete warehouses and a large tunnel, are nearly 400,000 art objects—paintings, ancient bronzes, porcelains, gold plate, lacquer and jade. Many of the objects have been in packing cases since they were first hurriedly put away in 1934, when the Japanese armies approached Peking. Most have never been seen outside China. Now, with the opening of a small museum in Peikou, Chinese art lovers have their first chance in a generation to see the few treasures chosen for display. But the vast majority, including many here reproduced in color for the first time, remains locked away, the unseen legacy of one of the world's richest cultures.
Pleasure in Water. Had the ancient Chinese developed their writing with quill instead of brush, it is unlikely that the immense treasure of Chinese painting would have evolved as it did. But for well over 3,000 years, painting and calligraphy developed hand in hand, raising virtuoso brushwork to such disciplined levels that generations of Chinese artists created their masterpieces "on fine silk that permitted no erasures.
Such treasured paintings have been handed down from generation to generation, each collector adding his own red seal of ownership and often adding a poem of comment in his own hand. For the Chinese art lover, the pleasure of viewing a painting includes enjoying the calligraphy of the written words as an art in itself, deciphering the seals, analyzing the brushwork and drawing. But, essentially, each work reflects one great central theme. For well over a thousand years Chinese painters have been primarily concerned not with the works of man but with nature; their most triumphant subject has been landscape.
The worship of nature is as old as Chinese history. Confucius, the great precept-giver on manners and morals, said as early as 500 B.C.: "The wise find pleasure in water; the virtuous find pleasure in hills." Lao-tzu, an elder contemporary of Confucius, added another dimension, proclaiming that underlying nature was an all-pervading spiritual force, which he called Tao, and likened to water.
The effort to go beyond mere recording of nature to achieve an actual identification with it is the supreme ambition of
Chinese painters. For the great 5th century painter Hsieh Ho, this ability to capture ch'i, the quality of "spirit-resonance and life-movement," was the first principle of painting. The degree to which a painter succeeds in this aim is for Chinese the final criterion of his achievement.