Art: The Dynasties Preserved

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One of the scare stories about China that circulated in the '60s, especially during the brief ride of the Red Guards, was that Maoism had flung out the past: 3,000 years of willow-pattern tranquillity overthrown, Confucius and Mencius consigned to the paper shredder, and the arts of the ancestral dynasties—Chou and Han, T'ang and Sung, Ming and Chi'ing—abandoned as relics of decadent feudalism, replaced by the cast-concrete colossus of Mao or the agitprop poster of beaming, eupeptic tractor drivers exceeding their norm in Szechwan province.

This, like so many of our ideas about China, was a myth. In fact, the Chinese seem to have taken Mao's apothegm, "Let the past serve the present," with a literalness that Western archaeologists—hampered as they are by the depredations of the antiquity market—might envy. Since about 1950, China's policy for exhuming and classifying its own past has been very coherent and systematic. Indeed, no Western country has produced a state-funded archaeology program to equal China's. For the Chinese, archaeology has a political significance that it lacks in the West.

Recent Finds. From this official attitude has come what must arguably be the most beautiful exhibition Europe has yet seen in the '70s: "Treasures of Chinese Art," a loan show of some 400 recent finds from the People's Republic, on view at the Petit Palais in Paris through the summer. Later it will travel to London and early next year to Toronto. It is the fruit of almost ten years' negotiation between the Chinese and French governments, begun by ex-Culture Minister André Malraux and finished in detail by a group of orientalists headed by Vadime Elisseeff, chief curator of the Musée Cernuschi in Paris. Encyclopedic in scope—the objects on display range from rudimentary quartz and flint scrapers used by Peking Man in 500,000 B.C. to the exquisite porcelains and silver toilet articles of the Yuan dynasty, which ended in A.D. 1368—it is intelligently mounted, with unobtrusive panels of photos, documents and information: an ideal teaching show, in fact. But unlike most didactic exhibitions, it is crammed with masterpieces of breathtaking authority.

The centerpiece is Princess Tu Wan's funeral shroud. Found in 1968 in a Han dynasty tomb in Man-Ch'eng, less than 100 miles from Peking, it has already become an object of legend—the Chinese counterpart (at least in Western eyes) to Tutankhamon's gold mask. This is partly due to its extraordinary substance and workmanship: a complete body-armor of 2,156 slips of green and mutton-fat jade, each no bigger than a matchbook cover, intricately sewn and bound together with gold wire. Its archaeological interest is unique: ancient Chinese texts mentioned jade burial armor as the special privilege of imperial blood, but Tu Wan's shroud—together with its twin, made for her husband, the Prince Liu Cheng—is the first such suit yet unearthed. But that aside, the shroud has an almost hallucinatory air: a green and glittering robot of semiprecious stone, assembled round a dummy. The blunt toes and plated wedge of a nose point at the roof, the eyeless head rests as though in a machine's sleep on its gilt bronze pillow.