Chinese and Western restorers are working together for the first time, writes Clifford Coonanin Beijing
SHARDS OF exquisitely carved white jade and pieces of inner bamboo carvings littered the floor of the Qianlong Emperor's favourite studio in the Forbidden City in Beijing when the restorers arrived to start the huge project of rescuing the abandoned building in 1999.
Juanqinzhai, the "Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service", is a miniature two-storey palace, built in the late 18th century by the most artistic of Chinese rulers, the Qianlong Emperor, as an eyrie to while away his retirement hours, but the years had not been kind to this construction and for years it had been used as a storage space.
There was thick dust on the exquisitely carved surfaces and the double-embroidered tapestries had torn. The last emperor, Pu Yi, shuttered the building in 1924 before he was ejected from the Forbidden City, and it lay effectively abandoned for decades until the Palace Museum in Beijing and the World Monuments Fund began the tricky process of restoring the interior.
This is the first time the Chinese have collaborated with Western experts on such an elaborate interior project, and millions of dollars later, the two groups unveiled the results in Beijing yesterday.
The emperor, who ruled China from 1736 until 1795 during the Qing dynasty, died before Juanqinzhai's completion but it was finished exactly as he wanted it, a mini-palace within a palace containing a private theatre - seating for one.
The Communists have long been ambiguous about the Forbidden City, a network of palaces and temples that celebrates imperial power.
Chairman Mao Zedong would have happily done away with it to make way for a motorway if he had had the money, while it took the personal intervention of premier Zhou Enlai to stop Red Guards tearing it down during the Cultural Revolution. In recent years it has been largely renovated and opened to the masses, who visit in their millions every year.
"A woodworker came in and picked up all the pieces of jade and wood which had fallen down and had 35,000 plastic bags," says Nancy Berliner, curator of Chinese Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
She points to an inner bamboo carving of goats gambolling through trees beneath a double-embroidered screen.
"This is a magnificent piece unlike anything else in the whole palace. We want people to have a sense of what it would be like to come into the room prepared for the Qianlong emperor," Dr Berliner says. The studio is a testament to a period of prosperity and stability during the Qing dynasty, which ended in 1911, and Qianlong is considered one of China's most successful emperors.
Zheng Xinmiao, director of the Palace Museum, describes the interior as "the highest level of interior decoration of the time.
"This project is of tremendous importance and presents unique challenges," Mr Zheng says.
Restoration is being taken more seriously in China than it used to be - the government has money to spend on these kind of projects now, whereas before there was none.
The highlight of the Juanqinzhai restoration is the mural in the theatre, originally painted on silk wallpaper in trompe l'oeil style under the guidance of the Jesuit missionary and painter Giuseppe Castiglione, who lived in the Qing court and was artistic adviser to the Qianlong Emperor.
This combination of Chinese decorative art and European perspective is rare in China. Beijing is cold in the winter and the aim of the mural was to give the appearance of light and airiness, so it depicts a bamboo trellis covered with wisteria vines in full bloom, while magpies flit about. The walls show palaces and mountains. Restoring this wallpaper was a tricky job, involving a revolutionary technique of stripping the paper from behind.
"You can be sure that many blossoms was meant to mean many sons," says Henry Tzu Ng, executive vice-president of the World Monuments Fund. As he speaks, two musicians play the emperor's favourite music - the first public performance in this theatre in hundreds of years.
Only the best materials would do for the carved inner bamboo marquetry and white jade cartouches that decorate the Reception Hall.
These pieces had disintegrated badly and Bonnie Burnham, president of the World Monuments Fund, says one of the biggest challenges was finding traditional craftsmen and materials.
In one case, a bamboo expert was found in southern China, while the embroiderers who worked on the screens were the descendants in Suzhou of the original artisans, a sign of remarkable continuity through centuries of great change in China.