The fascinating story behind the imperial robes in "Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty"

On January 1, 1912, the empress dowager of China signed the abdication papers that ended more than two thousand years of imperial rule—including the Qing Dynasty that encompassed her own family, so evocatively depicted in Mia’s current exhibition “Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty: Concept and Design by Robert Wilson.” China became a republic. And the last emperor—6-year-old Puyi—would spend the next couple of decades essentially under house arrest, among his relatives, his eunuchs, and his treasure in the inner court of the Forbidden City.

The trappings of imperial society were scrapped almost overnight. Out were men’s pigtails, women’s bound feet, and the gorgeous, highly codified silk robes worn by both sexes in the Forbidden City according to rank. Tossed aside in favor of Western suits and dresses. Abandoned, along with paintings, temple hangings, and thousands of other suddenly obsolete objects. And, eventually, put up for sale.
“The Manchu princes are selling their treasures,” reported one of the many “pickers” working in Peking (now Beijing) at the time, collectors with ties to museums in the United States. They were dilettantes or semi-serious scholars, expats caught up in the excitement of a society in flux. And they filled up steamer trunks as fast as the princes, eunuchs, and others left behind in the Forbidden City could empty the palace, and shipped them back to the States.
What didn’t come directly to American museums, however, in Boston, Denver, Kansas City, New York, and elsewhere, sometimes ended up in Chinatowns—especially in San Francisco. Which is where William Colby, a Bay Area attorney and conservationist who served as a director and secretary of the Sierra Club for decades, would wander the antique shops that lined Chinatown’s famous Grant Avenue in the 1920s. He bought a single imperial robe at first, and then hundreds more, until he had amassed one of the finest collections of Chinese robes in the world.

So many robes, in fact, that his collection “became a white elephant,” he told an interviewer, “a herd of white elephants as far as I was concerned.” He kept the robes in locked iron cases, secure in his office, and would drag them out from time to time for talks at women’s clubs and the like. Until he began to tire of their weight, and lost a good deal of his fortune during the Great Depression, and began to consider the value locked away in these trunks of silk. He went looking for a buyer.
He found one in Minneapolis. Mia’s acquisition of the Colby collection in 1942, on the advice of the prolific Asian art collector Alfred Pillsbury, heralded a new era of scholarship in Chinese art and antiquities. Alan Priest, who had been among the pickers in Peking in the 1920s, scouting for the Fogg museum at Harvard, was by then the curator of Far Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, and organized an initial show of the robes in Minneapolis in 1943. Naturally, he brought the robes to the Met, too, in 1945.

Priest wrote the catalogue for both shows, which supplied a baseline for the scholarship that would follow—it was criticized almost as soon as it was published for its heedless dating of the silks. Priest had been as well known in Peking for donning silk robes himself and organizing elaborate day trips of expats—via palanquins and donkeys—to incense-filled monasteries than his serious research. And it wasn’t until 1977, when Mia established its Asian Arts Department, that the robe collection was thoroughly studied and catalogued.
In 1991, Mia’s curator of Asian Art, Bob Jacobsen, curated the largest show yet of the museum’s Qing textile collection, and wrote a new catalogue—two volumes—that thoroughly described what he called one of China’s “great accomplishments and one of the world’s foremost artistic legacies.”