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The gripping true story of the intrepid curators who saved China''s art from the ravages of the Sino-Japanese War and WW2 In the spring of 1933, through the quiet courtyards and palaces of Peking''s Forbidden City, come rumours of war. Japanese aircraft drone overhead; troops and tanks are only hours away. All-out war between China and Japan is inevitable, and the scholarly, bespectacled curators of the Forbidden City are faced with an impossible question: what is to be done to protect the vast imperial art collections in their charge? The magnificent collections contain a million pieces of art, among them irreplaceable artefacts like the Stone Drums of Qin, adorned with 2,500 year-old inscriptions of crucial cultural significance, exquisite paintings on silk a thousand years old, and vanishingly rare Ming porcelain glazed in gorgeous copper-red. These objects carry China''s deepest and most ancient memories - memories from the dawn of its civilization. For sixteen terrifying, chaotic years, under the quiet leadership of museum director Ma Heng, the curators transported the imperial art collections thousands of miles across China - up rivers of white water, across mountain ranges and through burning cities. In their search for safety, the curators and their fragile, invaluable cargo journeyed through the maelstrom of violence, terror and starvation that was China''s Second World War. For the first time in English, this is the exhilarating story of Ma Heng, the imperial collections of China, the wartime curators of Peking and their super-human effort to conserve China''s greatest, most precious art. Playing out across an epically vast canvas - subtly revising our understanding of WWII and the origins of contemporary China along the way - this is a story of a small group of men and women who, when faced with war''s onslaught on civilisation, chose to resist.
