In the Internet age, it’s hard to be shocked or surprised anymore. We’ve seen it all from a toddler smoking (and then kicking the habit) in Indonesia to a man in Florida who built a feline metropolis. But starting Sept. 14, one woman unveiled an awe-inspiring exhibit. Nancy Berliner, the curator of Chinese art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., has collected nearly 100 items from a Chinese garden that’s been on lockdown for centuries.
The Forbidden City is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, but no one has ever been allowed inside the Qianlong garden. Enter the Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City, which is the only exhibit of its kind in the world and is currently on display at the Peabody Essex Museum. Later, it will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (Feb. 3–May 1) and the Milwaukee Art Museum (June 11–Dec. 11).
What’s inside? Exquisite pieces of elaborately carved imperial furniture, thrones, clocks and shrines, numbering 90 pieces in all. The Peabody Essex Museum is expecting 85,000 visitors before the exhibit is packed up and shipped off to the Met. Berliner describes the Qianlong garden as a “mini-Forbidden City” inside the Forbidden City, sequestered from view. Without Berliner’s intervention and her connection to the Chinese authorities, these treasure might never have made it outside the palace gates.
It all started when Berliner was instrumental in bringing the only example of an 18th century Qing dynasty Chinese house (called the Yin Yu Tang) — timber by timber, stone by stone — to be reassembled and reinstalled in America as the centerpiece of an $150 million doubling expansion of the Peabody Essex in 2003.
“The family [who donated the house] thinks it is fate. They say it over and over again, this was meant to be,” said Berliner. “They were thrilled because they saw this as an opportunity to preserve the house and their history.”
Her success in that monumental feat was the impetus for her 2004 invitation to restore and preserve the Qianlong garden in the Forbidden City by Palace Museum officials after they traveled to Salem to see the installation of the Yin Yu Tang house. The following year, Berliner and a team of American and Chinese conservators and curators first entered the hidden Qianlong garden of the Forbidden City. Although meticulously and lavishly constructed with the most luxurious materials during the 18th century for the emperor of Qianlong, the buildings were closed and locked up tight when the last emperor left China in 1924. They remained stopped in time, collecting dust, hidden from the Chinese people until Berliner and a team from the World Monuments Fund arrived at the invitation of the Palace Museum in what is an ambitious $25 million project and partnership to conserve, restore and open the palace garden complex to the public, which will not be entirely completed until 2019.
“It’s an incredible privilege to be able to see these objects in their original spaces, watching them be conserved and brought back to life, and bringing them back to the American public to they can see and appreciate them,” Berliner told Tonic. “A lot of the spaces time had clearly taken their toll…. Some of the wallpaper was curling down, little pieces of bamboo or jade or silk kept falling to the ground. It looked like a space that somebody had closed the door and left for 80 years.”
In China, gardens are created as contemplative spaces of Buddhist shrines, bamboo groves, open air gazebos, carved thrones, magnificent artwork and rockeries which are piles of rocks intended to evoke a mountain range, and for the Qianlong emperor, this was the place where he would retreat from the affairs of state and meditate, write poetry, connect with nature and give deep thought to his role as caretaker of his people.
“We have this wonderful opportunity to walk through buildings and seeing objects sitting in the same place for 200 years, never conserved before since the buildings were built and some of the objects, many of the objects were so big they couldn’t be taken directly out of the rooms — they needed to be taken apart to be taken out of the buildings,” she said.
“The Qianlong Garden project is the centerpiece of our conservation work in China. World Monuments Fund is honored to be part of both the history and the future of this important site, and delighted to be working with the Peabody Essex Museum and bringing the Qianlong Garden to a public audience,” added Bonnie Burnham, President of World Monuments Fund.
“This is a very exciting, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our visitors to see the contents of this extraordinary Forbidden City complex before it opens to the public at large in 2019,” said Dan Monroe, executive director and CEO of the Peabody Essex Museum.
To schedule your visit to view the secret garden, click here.
Photos courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum.