How do you feel when you marvel at the long-standing, delicate and precious cultural relics, and then learn that they are not in any museum in China, but scattered in many museums and collection institutions overseas? I could only be speechless and silent, and my mood was a little complicated.
The Song facsimile of "Luo Shen Fu Tu" and "Pounding Practice Map", Yan Liben's "Emperor of the Past Dynasties" in the Tang Dynasty, and Xia Gui's "Twelve Views of Mountains and Rivers" in the Southern Song Dynasty......
Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes' "Disguised Diagram of the Sutra of Retribution", "Blazing Light Buddha and Five Stars", "Bodhisattva Standing Statue Flag" ......
Bronze artifacts such as the Shang Dynasty's tiger cannibal block, owl zun, bronze squirt, the Western Zhou Dynasty's Chengwang Fangding, cattle jewelry four-eared Gui, animal face pattern ......
Terracotta figurines from the Northern and Southern Dynasties and Tang Dynasty, porcelain from the Song and Yuan dynasties, and painted porcelain from the Ming and Qing dynasties......
Open this two-volume "Essence of Chinese Cultural Relics in Overseas Collections", 448 groups of exquisite cultural relics are of various types, making people dizzy, including calligraphy and painting, bronzes, ceramics, jade, Buddha statues, gold and silver and other 9 categories.
But guess where are all these artifacts now?
They are located at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Freer Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Jimei Museum in France, the Asian Art Museum in Berlin, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada...... That's right, it's all in "someone else's house", not our own.
We can now see their true faces in this set of books, which are thousands of precious negatives that have been treasured for half a century by the collector Mr. Weng Wangeyou in dozens of museums around the world, and are also rare records of Chinese cultural relics and art scattered abroad.
Looking back on the experience of these literary dispersals, it can only make people sigh.
The main time is concentrated in the stormy late Qing Dynasty, some of them were left overseas when they were in the middle of troubled times, some were artificially bought and sold or gifted, and some were directly plundered and defrauded. Western explorers such as Stein plundered Dunhuang on a large scale, and even the murals and statues were directly pried down and carried away.
Over the long years, these artifacts have been displaced, eventually leaving their homeland and going to overseas museums, collections or collectors, and have been separated from us ever since, and we can only see them in the air to this day.
The profundity of China's 5,000-year-old history and civilization has been fully reflected in these cultural relics, which have also amazed those foreigners who have never seen it, and given them the shock of "100 million points" from the ancient oriental countries. Even if we look at it ourselves, we are equally shocked by the artistic achievements of our ancestors.
We don't yet know when these Chinese treasures will be returned to the motherland. The regrets of the past cannot be remedied, and I only hope that we can remember them when we are far away from our homeland. No matter where we see them in the world, we can proudly introduce them to others: this is our Chinese cultural relics!
Others come to steal when we are weak, but they will not allow this to happen again. They may return home one day in the future, and even if they fail to come back, it is also a historical proof of our glorious Chinese civilization, which cannot be erased.
Thanks to Mr. Weng and Hou Lang, these photos of cultural relics were taken, carefully selected and edited into this set of books, and written by professionals from archaeological and art academic institutions, telling the background and history of these cultural relics, creative techniques, artistic characteristics and values, circulation process and current location.
The two large volumes are printed in full color, and the covers of the upper and lower volumes are Qiu Ying's "Golden Valley Garden" and "Peach and Plum Garden" respectively (now in Kyoto, Japan).
It is also beautifully framed with a letter set, which is also taken from Qiu Ying's painting "Farewell to Xunyang" (now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in the United States). It can be said to be a set of overseas cultural relics with collectible value.