Stream of Beauty

Last July the British cruiser Suffolk was warped to a berth in Portsmouth harbor. While nervous Chinese gentlemen hovered anxiously around, a gang of Royal Marines slowly carried ashore 93 brass-trimmed steel trunks. In those trunks were 21,000 separate pieces of imperial Manchu treasure which, lent by the Nanking Government, were leaving China for the first time in history. To help assemble them, the great Orientalist and retired importer George Eumorfopoulos sold his own collection and hurried to the East (TIME, Jan. 28). All 21.000 were unpacked and spread out last week in the Royal Academy's sedate Burlington House, along with other Chinese treasures from collections in the U. S., France, Holland, Sweden, Germany, Japan, Turkey, Austria, Egypt, the City of Danzig.

Year ago, when the exhibition was first projected, sly Quo Taichi, Chinese Minister to London, pulled wires to have the Earl of Lytton made chairman of the committee. British museum authorities forgot that he was the same Lord Lytton who sponsored the 1932 League of Nations report condemning the Japanese rape of Manchuria (TIME, Oct. 10, 1932). Though a whole commission went to Japan seeking Chinese treasures for the London show, Japan at first churlishly refused to send a single pot. Well satisfied, the Chinese Government not only lent the Manchu treasures but sent a corps of light-fingered experts to pack and unpack them, to set them up in Burlington House against roll upon roll of special canvas backgrounds. King George and Queen Mary did not attend last week's special preview but onetime Queen Victoria of Spain, the Crown Prince of Sweden, Margot Asquith, Lady Astor, Ramsay MacDonald, Gordon Selfridge and Mrs. Stanley Baldwin were all there together. Enthused the Daily Mail:

"Never before on this planet of ours has there been so thorough a survey of Chinese art."

Added the Daily Telegraph: "The exhibits have been gathered from 35 centuries of artistry, sweeping the visitor on a stream of beauty that is never slackening."

Ever since the historic Flemish exhibition of 1929 the Royal Academy's international loan exhibitions have drawn increasing crowds to London. Well aware that they had a good thing were British railroads which last week announced that persons wishing to go to London, see the Chinese show and return the same day could get a round-trip ticket for the price of a single fare. Oldest objects shown were some bronze vessels and oracle bones, of the Shang and Yin Dynasty (about 1766-1122 B.C.) ; latest, 18th Century ware. Among the headliners: P: A 38-ft. landscape scroll called Ten Thousand Miles of the Yangtze, painted by Hsia Kuei in the early 13th Century. So famed is this painting in China that a Shanghai cinema has been written round it. P: Two paintings, not only of the Ch'ien Lung reign but by that Manchu Medici, Emperor Ch'ien Lung himself (1736-96). P: A portrait of the world's great conqueror, Genghis Khan, seated among the ladies of his court. As the artist was considered unworthy to view the emperor's consorts, a court lady picked suitable features from over a thousand sample eyes, noses, mouths, to help the artist get a proper likeness. P: An elliptical narcissus pot of the famed Chi-Ch'ing or "blue of the sky after rain" color, a porcelain tint so rare that many occidental collectors believed until recently that it never existed. P: A Buddhist stone carving of the 6th Century, rarest of Chinese antiques, lent by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller. P: A 17th Century cloisonne enamel elephant with what looked like an oil lamp on its back, lent by Queen Mary. P: A little jade man on his hands & knees who once served as an Emperor's pillow, now belongs to the beautiful Lady Louis Mountbatten.

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