Second Tier Cities, First Tier Treasures

The Museum of Liaoning’s Western Zhou Wine Vessel

by Ernie Diaz

Someday, and that day may never come, but then again it just might, you’ll find yourself in a far-flung Chinese province, in a grand funk. For the market street has been shopped, the local specialties sampled and digested, the pedestrian street strolled, and the TV incomprehensible. And then you’ll be ready, ready to visit the museum, to see the prizes of long-forgotten times when that city was no second-tier contender, but a realm of pride and glory. That’s the beauty of China. Unlike your Sanduskies and Reginas, every sizeable city has lived through a hundred incarnations, and has the treasures to prove it.

The Shenyang Palace was built in 1625, just as the Manchus were launching their triumphant China tour. Sprawling over 60,000 square meters, 100 buildings and 500 rooms, the palace was meant to show one and all that these new rulers from the north were not just another clan of horse-mounted toughs. Now it’s a museum, and features this jade seal bearing the title of the Taizong emperor. But it reads “Wendi” – royals in China get a new name in China after they die.

Shijiazhuang. The name gives seasoned China expats a shiver. For the city sits in the shadows, three hours’ outside Beijing’s bright lights, its third-tier status all the more shameful by contrast. But there’s plenty for locals to be proud of at the Museum of Hebei Province, like this gilded palace lantern, dating all the way back to the Western Han dynasty, the fluorescent bulb a tacky substitute 1900 years in the future.

Indeed, light was a sacred subject, as in the civilizing light of the Han dynasty. Nanjing, not Shanghai, holds the longest reign as the locus of the Yangtze’s lower reaches. Nanjing museum’s bronze ox-lamp, exquisite in its silver filigreed delicacy, is the kind of relic that places the Eastern Han dynasty on par with any glorious realm of antiquity.

1600 years before the Eastern Han, however, indoor lighting was a luxury. Filling the belly was a full-time occupation in China (how little times change). The upper crust made a high-class pursuit of it, as witnessed in this ornate rice-steamer, sitting nary-a-grain full in Jiangxi’s Provincial Museum. You wouldn’t put this on the counter next to the toaster; the thing weighs close to eighty kilos.

Then again, food was just as serious a subject to the Eastern Han. Even the nobility felt the need not just for their daily bread but for an afterlife’s-worth. Henan’s capital, Zhengzhou, is a breadbasket nowadays, but two thousand years ago it was ever only a flood away from bark soup. Whoever commissioned this seven-story pottery granary for his tomb wanted to arrive in the great beyond ready for anything, including feeding a host of hungry ghosts.

Kings have politics to occupy them, marquis have parties. The Marquis de Sade, you wouldn’t want to party with. A soiree with the Warring States’ Marqis of Zeng, on the other hand, was always a classy affair. Witness his wine vessel and serving tray, a jade extravaganza glooming away in the Museum of Hubei Province.

But many nobles liked their two-fisted drinking, Chinese Viking style. This drinking horn is made of agate, though, and inlaid with gold. It’s from the Tang dynasty, when even barbarian hangovers came in spiffy accoutrements, especially in Xi’an, then Changan, the most sophisticated city to ever grace the celestial empire.

Ask the proudest Lanzhou-dweller to boast about his city, and he’ll stutter something about noodles. Most of its culture fell off the back off camels on the Silk Road. But somewhere in the mists of time, while his wife was probably stretching out a wad of worm-goo, a prehistoric Gansu craftsmen was turning out this vase.

Today, Ningxia makes Gansu look like Shanghai. In the bowels of Yinchuan’s Museum of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, though, rest a massive pair of stone doors. No, they didn’t open easily, and weren’t meant to: they guarded a tomb. True, Ghiberti did a more ornate job of the doors at the Duomo, but these are a good twenty-five hundred years older. And hey, you’re lucky to find doors on a bathroom stall in Yinchuan.

Forget the wet bar and revolving water bed: this bronze table would fairly complete a bachelor pad. The Three Kingdoms era was a rough and ready era, even in fair Yunnan. It helped to be reminded that life could spring on you unawares like a hungry lion, even at the dinner table.

Now Tibet has to be one of the toughest places on earth to simply get by in, but the Tibetans have long had enough Buddha in their hearts not to let it affect the themes in their handiwork. By the Qing dynasty, devotees were crafting statues of Amitabha, Lord of Infinite Light, giving his consort Pandaravasini a little sugar.

During the Ming dynasty real Han Chinese ruled, and therefore the time is considered more refined than the subsequent Qing. But “refined” isn’t the first word that comes to mind when viewing a bronze qilin. Guess what purpose the gruesome this artifact, now at the Museum of Anhui, served. Go ahead. Give up? It was a perfume container. Better, perhaps, as an extra-heavy beer jug. The qilin is called a Kirin by the Japanese, after all.

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3. China’s Top Ten Most Livable Cities
4. An Overview: Official Flowers of Chinese Cities
5. China’s Top Ten Cities

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