Forbidden City's new park will open for free

The Forbidden City's new park in northern Beijing will open to the public for free upon completion. It is expected to draw 3 million visitors annually, according to Shan Jixiang, curator of the Forbidden City Museum.

The park, as an extended but separated compound of Beijing's most iconic attraction, is scheduled to cover a total area of approximately 500,000 square meters, complete with a restoration center of cultural relics, an exhibition center, a storehouse and an imperial garden.

In 2011, the number of visitors to the Forbidden City toppled 14 million, making it the only museum that receives over 10 million visitors in the world. In 2012, this number climbed to 15.3 million.

"The northern park will ease the overcrowding inside the Forbidden City itself," said Shan.

The planned imperial garden of the northern park will open to visitors as early as the end of 2014.

Shan also reassured there is no need to worry that there will be too many visitors due to the free admission, citing the park's large area.

"The northern park is very big, about half of 1 square kilometer. It is scheduled for completion in three to five years, or perhaps even more than that. An estimate of 3 million people will visit the park," he said. "The new park is big garden, dotted with historical sites. There won't be any overcrowding like in the Forbidden City. Instead, I am afraid visitors will be too few."

Source: china.org.cn by He Shan

Taipei's Palace Museum to expand

Source: Xinhua via  china.org.cn

Taipei's Palace Museum will expand its exhibition area to accommodate growing numbers of visitors, according to Taiwanese authorities in charge of economic construction.

The expanded exhibition hall, together with a cultural creativity center, will be built near the museum's current site, according to a plan passed on Tuesday.

The museum will put up 80 percent of the cost, estimated to be between 20 billion New Taiwan dollars (NTD; 686.3 million U.S. dollars) and 30 billion NTD.

The culture creativity center and the hall will be completed in 2016 and 2024, respectively, according to the plan.

The project is estimated to bring back 151 billion NTD in economic returns in 30 years, help create 6,500 jobs every year during the construction period and provide employment for 2,200 people annually after 2024, according to a spokesman.

Tourist numbers are expected to hit 4.4 million per year after 2016 and are set to double the current figure to hit 7 million per year by 2041.

Visitors have flocked to the museum since authorities in Taiwan lifted a ban on mainlanders traveling to the island in July 2008. Taipei's Palace Museum is considered a must-see destination on mainlanders' Taiwan trips.

The mainland is currently the biggest source of tourists to the island. More than 210,000 tourists from the Chinese mainland visited Taiwan in April, a record monthly high, an official with the island's tourism department said Tuesday.

In 2011, more than 1.78 million mainland residents visited Taiwan, a year-on-year increase of 9.4 percent, taking up nearly one third of the 6.08 million visitors the island received last year, according to Taiwan's tourism authorities.

Ci Xi's China

For 47 years from 1861 and 1908, she ruled China. Her power was envied, and in the seemingly unshakable tradition of male rule, the Empress Dowager Ci Xi of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) was legendary, variously described as a combination of ambition, beauty and cold-blooded cunning.

She was loved and hated, having succeeded in seizing and holding onto power while the Qing Dynasty entered its twilight years amid social tumult and turbulence against a changing world.

The public fascination with Ci Xi had been fuelled by various accounts of what she was and how she lived, some more lurid fiction than proven fact. But there is one thing that is concrete and undeniable - the Empress had good taste.

This aesthetic appreciation is reflected in her choice of porcelain, for daily use in court, and now a collection that will be a testimony of her good taste.

A long-awaited exhibition at Beijing's Capital Museum is aiming to do just that. About 100 pieces now on show are all from the capital's Forbidden City Museum, the royal palace and seat of power in China between 1420 and 1912.

The collection starts not with Ci Xi, but with her son, the Emperor Tongzhi, whose birth in 1856 first placed the 22-year-old royal concubine on the competitive path to becoming the country's most powerful person.

A collection of bowls, spoons and teacups launches the exhibition, specially commissioned for the grand wedding of the young emperor in 1872. True to the occasion, coral red and imperial yellow are extensively used, while auspicious icons of bats and magpies adorn the collection. To the Chinese, the homophonic representations of these creatures are supposed to usher in harmony and good fortune.

Another recurring motif is the gourd vine-and-butterfly, symbolizing productivity. With the line of succession already being threatened, this was a priority with the royal family. Unfortunately, historic evidence showed that the wish was not granted.

Tongzhi was the only male heir from his father, Emperor Xianfeng, and he himself died young at the tender age of 19, and left no children. The same fate befell his cousin and successor, Emperor Guangxu, Ci Xi's nephew by her twin sister.

After this first interlude, the rest of the exhibition is devoted to the Empress Dowager, fuelled mainly by her birthday celebrations, which necessitated the production of large amounts of porcelain, at a huge expense and often taxing a cash-strapped treasury.

On these occasions, Ci Xi gave way to her feminine impulses with abandon, opting for the riotous and previously rarely used deep purple and turquoise green while replacing the conventional landscape-and-character motifs with an exuberance of flowers.

Two types of flowers became the darlings of the dowager, says Zhao Congyue, porcelain expert from the Forbidden City Museum.

One was the orchid, which was the name Ci Xi was known by when she was younger, at home. The other was the lotus, sacred to Guanyin, or the Goddess of Mercy, who is often depicted as sitting on an open lotus bloom.

"As she grew older, Ci Xi started to imagine herself as the goddess," says Zhao, pointing to a black-and-white photograph hanging on the museum wall, in which the empress indulged herself in role play by getting up in the full regalia of the goddess.

"The fulfillment of this personal fantasy meant that lotus flowers had not only overtaken entire water surfaces in the royal gardens, but also found their way onto some of the finest china of the time," Zhao says.

The whole duration of Ci Xi's rule, spanning the nominal reign of both Emperor Tongzhi and Emperor Guangxu, coincided with the dramatic collapse of the Qing Dynasty, a process accelerated by her tyrannical, ineffectual and corrupt way of governance.

The inner upheaval and outer encroachment of that time came to be reflected in her own stories.

Source: By Zhao Xu ( China Daily)

Shaanxi Guanzhong Folk Art Museum

Photos of Shaanxi Guanzhong Folk Art Museum is taken on February 10, 2012. [Photo by Zhang Zixuan/China Daily]

Celebrating China's traditional writing system

(China Daily) China's traditional writing system can be better understood by visiting an ongoing exhibition at the National Museum of Classic Books.

China's traditional writing system has always generated interest not just among scholars from around the world but also the general public back home and expats in the country.

For those who are keen to have a glimpse of Chinese characters and their evolution, a newly opened exhibition at Beijing's National Museum of Classic Books may just be the right avenue.

Titled Our Characteristics: Inheritance of Words in Intangible Cultural Heritage, the exhibition will be held through Feb 1. The organizing museum is an affiliate of the National Library of China.

More than 300 pieces of written works, including ancient manuscripts, historical records of the development of Chinese writing and calligraphy by some 24 inheritors of cultural heritage nationwide are among the exhibits.

Calligraphers from the country's different ethnic groups have sought to project the beauty of their scripts.

"I learned manuscripts as a kid, but today, there are very few young people who are able to write them," says He Guoyao, 42, an intangible cultural heritage inheritor. The Dongba shaman priest from the Naxi ethnic group that comes from Yunnan province, presents his calligraphy at the exhibition by drawing the characters.

Ancient Dongba manuscripts are important references to perform traditional Naxi rituals, he says, adding that the characters are "crucial roots to prolong" their history.

Visitors to the exhibition can also witness other nation-level inheritors of intangible heritage showcasing skills such as making traditional Chinese writing tools, including brushes, rice paper and ink.

"This exhibition will give an overall view of Chinese characters' lineage since the time of their origin until this day and age," says Wang Fuzhou, the deputy director of the intangible cultural heritage department under the Ministry of Culture.

The exhibition, which is being jointly organized by the National Museum of Classic Books and his ministry, will also tour the country's provincial public libraries in the coming months.

"It (display) focuses on the application of the traditional writing system in modern Chinese society, which is in the hands of the intangible cultural inheritors," Wang says. "It's important for visitors to participate in writing to know the techniques better."

At least six public lectures that focus on the history of Chinese characters are also being held at the museum alongside the exhibition.

According to Li Honglin, the deputy director of National Library of China, the library began a project last year to categorize intangible cultural heritage that's related to Chinese characters via video recordings, interviews and the production of documentaries. About 30 intangible cultural heritage items have so far been included in the project.

The project is intended to promote public awareness of the many challenges that such heritage faces in modern times in China, according to Li.

"A database will be established on our library's website to better inform the public," he says.

Li says that the library also plans to cooperate with the Beijing subway network to enable passengers to view relevant documentaries and texts by scanning two-dimensional codes in carriages and subway stations.

IF YOU GO

Open hours: 9 am to 4:45 pm (closed on Mondays). Entry is free. National Museum of Classic Books, 33 Zhongguancun Nan Dajie (Avenue), Haidian district, Beijing.

Tel: 010-8854-5936.

For more information visit exhibition website at www.nlc.gov.cn/cmptest/wmdwz/(in Chinese only).

Source: China Daily

Ancient bronze wine vessel to come home

(China Daily) Hunan Provincial Museum will welcome home a 3,000-year-old Chinese bronze wine vessel on June 14.

A group of Chinese collectors struck a private deal for the sale of the vessel with auction house Christie's New York and donated it to the Hunan Provincial Museum, which has been the home for the vessel's lid since 1956.

"We attributed the return of (the vessel) to the joint efforts of various parties, the government, private collectors and private enterprises," said Chen Yuanping, head of the cultural relics bureau of Hunan province. "We're glad that we finally bought it back in the name of the Hunan Provincial Museum."

The bronze wine vessel, known as Min Fanglei, has been considered the "king" of its kind since its discovery in 1919 because it is "the biggest and finest ever found", said Fu Juliang, a researcher from the Hunan Provincial Museum who specializes in bronze.

The vessel, at a height of 63.6 cm, is massive, Fu said.

With powerful proportions and superb casting, the ritual bronze wine vessel represents a defining masterpiece, not only of Chinese art, but also within the context of global art history, Fu added.

The vessel got its name soon after its discovery based on the eight characters inscribed on its lid, Fu said.

"The eight-character inscription in ancient Chinese means that a man named Min Tianquan created this wine vessel for his father," Fu explained.

Discovered by local farmers in Taoyuan county, Hunan province, the vessel was bought by an antiques dealer in 1924. Since 1928, the vessel and its lid have been separated as the celebrated bronze vessel was bought and sold among various famous collectors worldwide.

The vessel regained international attention in 2001 when it was auctioned by Christie's New York and bought by a French collector for $9.246 million, which set a world record for any Asian work of art and remains the world auction record for any archaic Chinese bronze sold at auction, according to Christie's.

In November, Tan Guobin, a Hunan collector, found out that the vessel was listed again by Christie's for its 2014 spring auction, which was held on March 20.

Tan called for a joint effort to retrieve the vessel. Many collectors joined the campaign to get it back.

On March 17, a private transfer agreement was reached through Christie's.

The price, according to Chen of the cultural relics bureau, cannot be revealed due to a confidentiality agreement between the seller and the buyer, but Hunan TV said the sale price was $20 million.

A delegation of 17 local experts and collectors recently left Hunan for New York for the transfer. The group will fetch the vessel from Christie's on June 12 and return on June 14 to Changsha, the capital of Hunan, where the museum is located.

To honor the reunion of the bronze vessel and its long-separated lid, Hunan will host a celebration on June 25, Chen said.

Source: china daily via china.org

China's Ancient Sex Museum in Tongli

China's Ancient Sex Museum, once located in the Shanghai's booming streets, now has to move to Tongli Town in East China's Jiangsu Province due to a funding shortage. After a recent move from Shanghai, Tongli has now become the new center for the China Sex Museum.

Open-minded individuals can enjoy a stroll through the sculpture garden and see four indoor exhibitions about the history of sexuality, namely: "Sex in Primitive Society," "Marriage and Women," "Sex in Daily Life," and "Unusual Sex-ual Behavior."  A number of exhibits are worth a mention, including statue of a grandson and his grandfather, sporting an elongated, phallic head with a turtle resting on the tip

Source: china.org

On the Road to Paradise

The ancient imperial city of Chang'an (modern day Xi'an) reached its plenitude in the early eighth century, when it was the largest metropolis in the world and capital of the illustrious Tang dynasty (618-906). In the fertile Wei River valley in southern Shaanxi province, close to the narrow mountain passes that linked China to Eurasia and beyond, Chang'an was also the eastern terminus of the fabled Silk Road trading route. Its voluminous recorded history, poetry and affluent, heterogeneous population suggest how fully that fortuitous location would shape its cultural heritage.

Surprisingly, relatively few examples of Chang'an's visual arts were known for centuries. Since 1950, however, scores of royal tombs have been excavated, and the treasures unearthed have dramatically enriched our knowledge of the area's history, culture, politics and art. The eloquent wall paintings extracted from Tang-era tombs offer brilliant testimony to the consummate imperial authority, cosmopolitan court life and unrivaled material splendor that made the Tang dynasty, in the eyes of many, China's most glorious epoch.

The Shaanxi History Museum, an elegant Tang-style complex, opened in Xi'an in 1991 and houses, in its central building, thousands of recovered artifacts that offer visitors a veritable stroll through Chinese history. In a separate exhibition hall to the east, hundreds of Tang frescoes and related funereal relics, arranged chronologically, are accessed by descending into dimly lighted passages and darkened galleries that mirror the works' original subterranean settings. Those massive underground complexes, designed as walled palaces after Tang and earlier Han models, had provided not only parallel worlds for the dead to inhabit but expressed in their scale and elaborate decoration the political legitimacy, status, stability and even the court etiquette that Tang rulers sought to preserve in paradise. The tombs were also seen as passageways to the afterlife, shaped by prevailing attitudes toward death and the continuing life of the soul.

One of the earliest fresco cycles on view, dated to c.631 and extracted from a tomb discovered in 1973 of the valiant warrior Li Shou (577-630), ushers in a pictorial program that many later frescoes would follow. The vehement forward thrust of hunters on horseback chasing wild animals, taken from a mural on the outer corridor wall, at one time traced a processional path deep into the tomb. A martial scene befitting the deceased fighter and his embattled era, it establishes the subject of the hunt in the taut, "iron wire" style of the earliest Tang painters, a pictorial language that would become more fluid over time.

A western wall from the same complex yielded fragments of tributes to the fallen leader, including an imposing cavalcade of mounted honor guards and marching figures who lead a stately, riderless white horse. It is likely one of the dynasty's first paintings of the Transoxanian horses imported from Silk Road traders in central Asia, the magnificent breed that would captivate the imagination of Tang painters and sculptors.

A final fresco, extracted from the inner mortuary chamber, depicts female maidservants and musicians in static poses and forced perspectives, an early essay in another subject for which the dynasty's artists would become renowned. Within only decades—as seen in the subsequent series of graceful, life-size female attendants who once glided in single-file down the passageways of the tomb of Princess Fang Ling—the Tang ideal of female beauty would be perfected. Statuesque, self-possessed and disarmingly sensual, these elegantly dressed and coiffed figures epitomize the sophistication and prestige enjoyed by court women in an age of increasing peace and prosperity. They are painted in the equally elegant "silk-thread" style, marked by flatly applied color, sinuous, tapering lines and deft, naturalistic draftsmanship achieved with an extraordinary economy of means.

Not all Tang women, however, were models of courtly decorum. One of the museum's best preserved fresco series, excavated in 1971-72, was painted in the early eighth century in the mausoleum of Crown Prince Li Xian (d. 684), constructed to rectify the ruthless political machinations of Empress Wu Zetian, the only female ever to rule China in her own right. The second son of the empress by Emperor Gaozong, Li Xian fell out of favor, was exiled, and then forced, apparently by his mother's agents, to commit suicide. After the empress's death in 705, the prince's body was ordered exhumed from a commoner's grave by his brother, Emperor Zhongzong, and reinstated in a sumptuous setting. The new mausoleum measured more than six square acres and included watchtowers, a beautiful garden and a stately processional path that led to a burial mound. The walls and ceilings of the tomb's interior corridors were covered with illusionistic murals that, like the massive complex itself, were intended to rehabilitate the prince's royal status. Extraordinary sporting scenes, exquisite landscapes, architectural views and a procession of countless honorific figures allow us a vivid glimpse of Tang court life.

The scenes of the hunt on the tomb's outer wall feature fleet-footed, mounted horses in superbly modeled form, and lumbering, heavily laden camels—favored pack animals on the Silk Road—in spare, expansive landscapes. The opposing wall features the earliest known Chinese depiction of polo, an aristocratic pastime long valued as training for cavalrymen and probably imported from Persia. The accomplished player who turns in his saddle to hit a ball captures in microcosm the speed and grace of the game, and also the painter's skill.

But the most powerful evidence here of the Tang belief that the tomb could function as a transitional passage between this world and the next, and even as a sphere in which history itself could be rewritten, is found in the fragmentary scene of foreign dignitaries, whose exaggerated physiognomies and elaborate costumes have led scholars to tentatively suggest they include a Roman vassal (with a bald pate and distinctive aquiline nose), a Korean emissary in a pointed feathered hat, and behind, a Mongolian envoy dressed in the winter garb of the north. Painted in meticulous detail and with highly expressive faces, they frame the burial passage on either side, approach their Chinese hosts with attitudes of solemn deference, and suggest that not only the court but the world showed up to restore to the prince in death what he had lost in life.

Source: Wall Street Journal Mary Tompkins Lewis