Huan Hsu - The Porcelain Thief

“Well, no, it was on Huangshan, but—”

“Ah, that’s what I thought,” Speaker Hu said, sitting back. “That would not happen in Shanghai.” He indicated that the subject had reached its conclusion.

Speaker Hu turned to me. “So, Mr. Hsu, what are you researching?” he asked.

I tried to think of the most unimpeachable subject I could. “My family history,” I said. “And, um, porcelain.” I readied myself for an interrogation.

Speaker Hu smiled. “What a great topic!” he said. “Porcelain is one of China’s most famous inventions. The history is so long and rich, you’re sure to find a lot of worthwhile material.”

The venture capitalist spoke. “You know, I’m something of a writer myself,” he said. He had just finished writing a book about the history of Shanghai’s textile industry and presented Richard with a signed copy. Everyone acted impressed. “It’s just a vanity project,” he said, waving his hands. “I’m not a professional. But I thought it was important that someone write about their history before it’s forgotten.”

“If you’re interested in porcelain, then you must have been to Jingdezhen,” Speaker Hu said.

“No, not yet.”

“Oh, you must go there. It’s full of history. It was the capital of porcelain production for the world for centuries.”

Jingdezhen frequently came up whenever I mentioned my family’s porcelain. About ninety miles east of my grandmother’s hometown, Jingdezhen was an entire city that had since ancient times been devoted to manufacturing porcelain, everything from daily wares for civilians to the exquisite imperial pieces destined for the Forbidden City, including that red Qianlong chrysanthemum plate in the Seattle Art Museum. Nearly all the porcelain exported to the West during the Ming and Qing dynasties originated in Jingdezhen, as did most of my great-great-grandfather’s collection. One of my grandmother’s relatives—I remained confused about which one—had supposedly worked in Jingdezhen during the late Qing, early Republican period and brought cases of fine porcelain with him every time he returned home. I’d heard that even now Jingdezhen remained awash with porcelain, its markets overflowing with antiques real and fake, its streetlights encased in blue and white porcelain, and its earth inundated with ancient ceramic shards that anyone could take. I imagined it as a kind of ceramic El Dorado, with streets paved with porcelain, where I might understand why porcelain was so important to the Chinese history and culture that I could trace my roots to, and why my great-great-grandfather went to such great lengths to protect his collection.

I was so surprised by Speaker Hu’s encouragement that I didn’t think to explain why I was researching porcelain, or my desire to try and find my great-great-grandfather’s collection. I sat in a relieved daze until I noticed one of the daughters at the table trying to get my attention.

“I think I might be able to help you,” Bonny said. She had done her graduate thesis on the history of Jews in Shanghai and was putting together a documentary film about it. “Two of my tutors”—she used the British term—“at university here were from Jingdezhen. I’ll put you in contact with them.”

I exchanged information with Bonny while Richard beamed like a proud parent. Contrary to my expectations, these party cadres didn’t seem suspicious or sinister at all, and I felt silly for having been so paranoid. My reporter friends were right: the government wasn’t going to care about me wandering around China looking for my family’s porcelain. That was even more of a shock than when I learned that for all of Mao Zedong’s deification in China, everyone agreed that exactly 30 percent of what he had done was wrong. I began to believe that I might be able to find my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain. I just had to get my family to cooperate.

MY POOR GRASP OF MY FAMILY ROOTS AND THE CHINESE language paled in comparison to my cultural illiteracy. I didn’t know the difference between a Mongolian and a Manchurian, ancestries that my father’s side of the family claimed, or between the Ming and Qing dynasties (the last two Chinese dynasties, which ruled from 1368 to 1912), or Chiang Kai-shek and Jiang Zemin, whose Chinese pronunciations sounded nothing like their English transliterations. Though my parents often mentioned that I shared a birthday with Sun Yat-sen, I had no idea who he was, or why my parents and their friends from Taiwan always discussed the Kuomintang with such stridency at dinner parties, until I encountered them in a high school history book.

By the time I got to China, I sought to become more informed. But those “five thousand years of history” that modern Chinese loved to boast about remained for me as impenetrable as it was long. I knew that China defied easy explanation, and I had a general idea of its primacy in world history—the Chinese had a claim to several of the most important scientific and technological inventions in recent human existence—but these glories glinted like stars in a constellation I couldn’t decipher. Even the basic primers on Chinese history that I got from a teacher at the SMIC school left me cross-eyed with confusion.

So instead of trying to take the whole of Chinese history in one gulp, I picked at its edges until a thread separated—my family. Then I pinched it between my fingertips and started pulling.

MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER Liu Feng Shu was born in the Yangtze River town of Xingang, in the Jiujiang countryside, in 1867, the Ding —or fourth, according to the Chinese sexagenary cycle—year of the Qing dynasty emperor Tongzhi’s impotent reign. Gone were the days of wealth and territorial expansion. The Opium Wars had bankrupted and humiliated the country, civil order was undermined by a corrupt and antiquated bureaucracy, and the reckless rule of Empress Cixi had alerted the Chinese to the shortcomings of their culture and left them in the mood for rebellion. Despite the turmoil, the imperial examination system remained in place, a thirteen-hundred-year-old tradition that rewarded those who passed the grueling three-day test with positions in the government—possibly even inside the Forbidden City—regardless of family wealth or pedigree. The test was open to all, and even in the Qings’ waning days, becoming a scholar-bureaucrat secured one’s social and financial standing, so Liu’s father, a laborer, put everything he could spare toward his sons’ schooling at a local sishu, or private academy.

The network of sishus, heterogeneous, unregulated, and run by scholarly tutors in rural and urban areas alike, provided the bulk of primary education in China, imparting basic knowledge and Confucian morality. For most, a sishu offered the opportunity to encounter Chinese classics and achieve rudimentary literacy. For the few who could afford to study beyond the basic primers—parents paid tuition in cash or in kind—they were the first step toward possibly passing the imperial civil service examinations.

After ten years of study, Liu traveled to the county seat of Jiujiang for the annual county-level examination, carrying a basket with a water container, a chamber pot, his bedding, food, an inkstone, ink, and writing brushes. Guards patrolled the walled examination compound, in which hundreds of wooden huts—one per test taker—were set out in rows, and they searched each of the hopefuls for hidden papers before allowing them into their cells, furnished only with two boards that could be fashioned into a bed or desk and chair. There were no age or retake limits for prospective candidates, who ranged from precocious teenagers to stubborn elderly men. After the exam was distributed, a cannon sounded, and Liu started writing: eight-part essays on ancient texts, poems in rhymed verse, and opinions on past and present government policies. For three days, the only interruptions came from the proctors stopping in to mark and authenticate his progress with red stamps.