A treasure comes home

• Source: Global Times
• [10:01 July 26 2010]
• Comments

The Wooden Archway on display at the Tushanwan Museum. Photo: Cai Xianmin

By Huang Xi

Some distance from the huge crowds at the Expo Park, the newly opened Tushanwan Museum in Xuhui district is displaying more than 1,000 art-works that have never been seen in public before, including some exhibits that were shown at Expos early in the last century. In popular terms this exhibition is a hit, with thousands queuing to see the Made in Tushanwan collection.

The works were originally made at Tushanwan in the early 1900s by a German friar and hundreds of orphans he looked after and taught.

In 1864 the Tushanwan Orphanage was established by the Catholic Church in Xujiahui, a downtown area in today's Xuhui district. It cared for local orphans in a grand stately building which stood out in Shanghai at that time.

Orphanage academy

The most famous part of the orphanage was its arts and crafts academy which later generations realized as a cradle to introducing Western art into China.

To give the orphans a chance to earn a living when they grew up, they were taught arts and crafts. The scheme was hugely successful with many of the young artists and craftsmen turning professional and producing a huge number of high-quality artworks.

The orphanage's workshop became famous through the city and neighboring Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. And several foreign art forms were introduced so that the artists produced oil paintings, ink paintings, sculptures, woodcarvings, furniture, photographs and prints.

Many Chinese artists, such as Ren Bonian, Liu Haisu, Zhou Xiang, Zhang Chongren and Xu Beihong, were inspired by the Western paintings at Tushanwan.

They introduced a Western essence into haipai ink painting, a school of ink painting centered in Shanghai, taking the traditional Chinese form to a new and international level.

Xu Beihong once said: "Xujiahui has contributed a lot to the communication of East and Western art, and Tushanwan's painting workshop initiated the development of Western painting in China."

Some of the works at the Made in Tushanwan exhibition have appeared in four World Expos: The Model of Xujiahui Architecture in the Paris Expo of 1900, The Table Screen of Our Lady of China and God and Son in the St. Louis Expo of 1904, Woodcarvings in the Liege Expo in 1905, and Pailou (The Wooden Archway) at three World Expos - the Panama Pacific International Expo in 1915, the Chicago Expo in 1933 and the New York Expo in 1939.

Pailou - a typical ornamental gateway for a prestigious building in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) - is the centerpiece of the exhibition.

Standing just inside the museum, this finely engraved, four-post wooden archway is 5.8 meters high and 5.2 meters wide. Visitors are obviously struck when they stand in front of this work with intricately carved wooden dragons on the eaves and 10 stern lions sitting around the doorposts like guards.

The carvings adapted several stories from the famous ancient novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms including Three Visits to the Thatched Cottage, To Borrow Arrows with Thatched Boats or Three Heroes Fought Jointly against Lü Bu, illustrating the most famous wartime story in the Three Kingdoms period (220-280).

"The carvings on the archway convey the civilization of the Chinese people and show traditional myths from the country," said a foreign missionary when he first saw the archway over 100 years ago.

The tortuous life

The archway arrived back home in Shanghai last July, after wandering abroad from country to country over the past century. It had returned to where it had been created but was seriously damaged. A third of its ornaments had been lost, it was damaged and the teak wood of the main section was discolored.

"Some of the 10 lions that hold drums, three of the doorsills and part of the pedestal were missing when it was delivered to Shanghai. The eaves were also broken," said Xu Haojie, Deputy Director of the Culture Bureau of Xuhui district.

The dilapidated parts were piled in the store rooms of an old building (the site of the original Tushanwan orphanage which has now been renovated and turned into today's museum); they were evidence of a miserable life in the past century after the glorious showings at three Expos.

It had been bought by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, more than 10 years after the 1915 Panama Expo where it had been admired by millions of visitors from all over the world.

After the New York Expo bad luck struck the work: it was passed on to several different collectors and the treasure was cut into sections.

It had a change of fortune in 1985 when a European architect bought it, took it to Europe and began some repair work. After more travel it had a second lucky break thanks to the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, and came home last year. Then began the painstaking repairs which took over seven months and cost more than 1.8 million yuan ($265,681).

The story of Tushanwan

The rapid development of the city in the past two decades has eliminated many traditions like Tushanwan from the memories of Shanghainese. This exhibition displays many other works from the orphanage workshop, most donated by private collectors and local residents whose families had lived in the neighborhood.

As well as painting, woodcarvings were another specialty of Tushanwan and many Catholic churches in north China ordered these and exported then to some Asian countries in the 19th century.

"The quality and design of Tushanwan products are as good as any in the West," said one Germany banker after visiting the orphanage in 1886.

Opening hours: 9 am to 4:30 pm daily,

(closed on Monday)

Address: 55 Puhuitang Road 蒲汇塘路55号

Admission: 20 yuan

Call 5424-9688 for details