A biography told with objects

In the last couple of years, the National Palace Museum has had mixed success with its special exhibitions. They have been of uneven quality, and its most recent, which featured minor works by Salvador Dali, was quite frankly a disappointment. But now with Emperor Chien Lung's Cultural Enterprise, the museum is on home ground, and as an exercise in bringing a historical figure to life, the exhibit, featuring around 200 items, is an absolute success.

Much of the exhibition is drawn from the Palace Museum's own collection, probably one of the greatest concentrations of Ching imperial objets d'art in the world. This has been supplemented by loans from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, which have provided a number of paintings that help greatly to round out the portrait of the Chien Lung Emperor.

Chien Lung (乾隆), who came to rule the Chinese empire in 1736 and held power for 60 years, was one of the most remarkable of China's emperors, and despite his relatively recent date, has already become a figure enmeshed in legend. That he was a remarkable man is evident even from the most cursory inspection of his life, combining as he did a deep respect for tradition along with a profound belief in his own ability to shape history. He lived at a time when China reached a high point in its development that preceded a long and painful descent into decadence and humiliation. While this high point of the Ching empire cannot rival the efflorescence of the Han and Tang empires, the fact that it was the last age of imperial Chinese greatness gives it a special luster that is tinged with the pathos of what was to come.

One of the best things about this exhibition is that it centers around one man, albeit one in a very remarkable position. Within the huge complexity of the Ching empire, which ruled China for almost 400 years, it is the human center that gives the exhibition focus. It is also this that makes the exhibition approachable, even if the character who emerges from even a detailed perusal of the show, is one that the modern sensibility might have considerable difficulty coming to grips with.

Then again, Chien Lung's positive addiction to collecting and cataloging artifacts from the past and from distant countries -- he was a curator of one of the greatest collections of manuscripts, paintings and artifacts the world has ever known, after all -- has a modern feel to it. This is especially true of his great enterprises in collecting Chinese literature through the ages, compiling the Complete Collection of Four Treasuries, an attempt at creating a definitive edition of 3,000 years of Chinese literature, a work that covers 16 million pages of manuscript, taking 3,800 people nearly 10 years to complete. With his commitment to preserving history, it would not be difficult to imagine him being excited about CD-ROMs or DVDs, and in this enterprise, he seems incredibly close to our own world.

His love of the exotic is also something that brings him close to us. He adored jade carvings from Hindustan, and as emperor, had the power to gear his own workshops to create similar objects. He also collected artists, like the Italian painter Giuseppe Castiglione, who painted many works, especially of animals, which create a fascinating mixture of Western realism and Chinese colored ink painting. The cosmopolitanism that these paintings reflect are one of the era's marks of glory and a celebration of self-confidence that China was soon to lose to xenophobia and self-indulgence.