The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures is a master narrative of the political life of art objects in China, from early Shang-dynasty bronze vessels to the “remnant collections” of the last Qing emperor now belonging to the National Palace Museum in Taiwan and the Palace Museum in Beijing. While much of what Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott and David Shambaugh have to say about the relationship between art and authority is familiar, the study is the first to present an extended account in English of the travails of creating, compiling, and protecting a national patrimony in tumultuous twentieth-century China.

The book, in other words, tells the story of a gradual but seamless development of imperial collections from the first dynasty through the last, mapping the subsequent dispersal and rescue of the Qing court collection against international military incursions, diplomatic fracas, and civil war. It is organized into six chapters and an epilogue. The first two chapters provide anecdotal accounts of the function of particular objects as emblems of the court’s legitimacy and strength throughout the history of the imperium (roughly 1500 BCE–1911 CE). What was valued at court changed over time. The authors observe, for instance, that “as the older symbols of magico-religious power, such as the stylized monsters on ancestral vessels, lost their importance, they were replaced by austere and didactic portraits of literati scholars, worthy officials, and past rulers. These in turn were supplanted by intricate designs and scenes of hunting and feasting that conveyed the richness of court life” (11).

The last four chapters form the more substantive part of the book, usefully incorporating interviews with curators and scholars who played critical roles in overseeing and defining the national patrimony during and after its division into the two national museum collections. The third and fourth chapters focus on the emergent public nature of the imperial collection. During the first fifteen years or so of the Republic (established 1912), the collection was uneasily perceived to be the property of the state and also of the deposed emperor Pu Yi. He had the authority, for example, to order an inventory of the Palace of Eternal Happiness in June 1923, which frightened palace eunuchs who had been pilfering for years into burning it to the ground to cover their depredations. (The authors note on page 62 that “by dawn only 387 objects had been salvaged out of 6,643 originally inventoried.”) From the 1930s onward, the collection assumed a more stable position in the public imaginary even as its physical safety grew ever more precarious. The authors vividly describe the challenge of protecting the collection from looting, destruction, and enemy capture in wartime. Scholars who work in the field may find themselves cringing upon learning, for instance, that in 1944 Japanese troops “plundered the Palace Museum of 54 bronze vats, 4 bronze cannons, and 91 bronze lampstands” to melt down for arms (88; most were returned intact at the end of the war). Chapter 5, “Relocating and Rebuilding the Palace Museum on Taiwan,” details the international diplomatic uses to which the Nationalist government in Taiwan put the objects they brought with them in retreat from the Communist forces in 1948–49, and a few of the ways that the museum plans to embody Taiwanese culture in the future. And finally, the sixth chapter, “The Gugong in Beijing: National Treasure and Political Object,” presents the museum collection against the backdrop of the 1949 revolution, the efforts of the Red Guards to destroy traces of the feudal past, ping-pong diplomacy, and renovation of the galleries in preparation for the 2008 Olympics.

David Shambaugh, who revised and edited the draft manuscript by his late aunt Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott, is a political scientist, and his own bias toward things political is neatly interwoven into her story. In the epilogue he writes of a hope that perhaps one day “the two Palace Museums will have direct exchanges and exhibitions, thus serving as a cultural bridge to some form of political union,” concluding that “it would be a refreshing instance in the imperial collection’s history of politics serving art rather than vice versa” (147).

As with any narrative that is looking to ease the reader’s way through three thousand years of history and draw connections between past and present, this one suffers from simplification. In order to create continuity, a “singular Chinese civilization” is appealed to (9). This schematic has been widely critiqued in a variety of disciplines over the past twenty years, but it is worth noting that within the context of describing museum fora it evokes most prominently the publications of the Society for Preservation of National Learning (Guoxue baocunhui) in early twentieth-century China (not discussed in the book). Negotiating global socio-cultural systems of representation that mark the “nation” was paramount for the society, and it was one of the first organizations to register sensitivity to questions of owning and displaying a national art. Among other things, creation of the myth of an ancient, shared Han art heritage provided a cultural identity for members of the society distinct from that of the reigning Manchu. The society’s rhetoric was powerful and lasting (even Mao borrowed from it). In the current study, lingering traces of the political sentiment of the society filter into and distort the arc of the story, if not the conclusions we as readers are to take away from it, beginning with an observation in the forward that “remarkable is the fact that the Qing imperial collection, of unparalleled richness and variety, would have been assembled by the Qing emperors, who were Manchus rather than Chinese, and who controlled China for less than three centuries” (vii).

The status of the objects under study as “art treasures,” too, is problematic. The authors dismiss the “aesthetic craftsmanship” of the object (1) and its art-historical correlative, formalism, in favor of a history in which the objects are manipulated, sometimes cherished or hoarded, but rarely take on visual form and become visible. If an object can be called an art treasure, in other words, it is because it categorically means something about all collectors who possess it; the more concrete sense of the word—how an object itself shapes the designation of “art” or “treasure” or both, the experiential aspect of it, and the messiness of its multiple valences and meanings—does not figure into the book’s plot. What the individual object signifies, in other words, is reduced to its function of completing imperial, then national, collections.

The nature of the odyssey on which these objects embarked deserves some comment. From 1933 to 1947, a period bracketing the second Sino-Japanese war, parts of the collection traveled over 75,000 kilometers, at times just hours ahead of the Japanese army. No place, ultimately, could serve as safe haven, though in the end, not a single crate of “art treasures” was lost to wartime destruction. Likewise, when the Nationalists fled with the crates to Taiwan, the five-day passage was threatened by rough seas. Harrowing as this physical odyssey is, however, at some point the book becomes an odyssey of memory as well. The book consistently raises the specter of loss and destruction——and of forgetting. In many ways it is the story of the late Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott and her passion for and dedication to learning about Chinese art that she herself collected. It also is the story of the curators, a now venerated generation who, in forming the museums, shaped the field of Chinese art history. Curiously enough, it turns out the fact that Na Chih-liang had to wear heavy socks in the bitter winter cold while taking inventory in the Forbidden City does matter (70).

David Shambaugh has taken pains not to superimpose his own voice over that of his aunt. It would have strengthened the book no end to pay the same care to the voices of those both she and he interviewed. After all, as he rightly points out, it is their perspective and knowledge of the collection(s) that makes the book distinctive, adding immeasurably to a bibliography of sources (including Gernet’s survey textbook and popular histories) which date, for the most part, to 1996 (when the draft manuscript was completed) and earlier.

In Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes remarks that the study of Japan affords him “the possibility of difference, of a mutation, of a revolution in the propriety of symbolic systems” (Richard Howard, trans., New York: Hill and Wang, 1982, 3–4). What the Shambaughs offer is a story of a symbolic system that has a resolute sense of its own unchanging propriety. The task remains now for art historians and other scholars to analyze the ways in which it faltered and mutated, complicating history and meaning of the political symbols that are also the national art collections of China and Taiwan.