For those who might wonder how good it must be to be king and absolute ruler of a great and powerful empire, the Field Museum is offering up a sumptuous answer starting Friday when it opens its major exhibit of the year, “Splendors of China’s Forbidden City.”
Few men have ever lived like Qianlong, who became emperor of China at age 25 in 1736. He was a tall, handsome, athletic, artistic and intellectual man and ruled with principled benevolence for the next 60 years.
He was rewarded with the best of everything that a society of 300 million people could produce: the biggest, handsomest gems; the most beautifully woven garments; the most skillfully crafted furniture, ceramics, weaponry; the greatest works of art.
Most of his more than 40 wives were chosen by periodically bringing the nation’s most beautiful teenage girls to the royal court for his perusal.
For its exhibit, the Field Museum has borrowed 422 objects from China’s national museum that were owned and used by Qianlong (pronounced cheeyen-loong) and his wives.
Most of the objects, many regarded among China’s greatest national treasures, have never before left the moated, fortified Forbidden City, the vast, old royal compound now a heavily guarded repository for nearly a million artifacts from 3,000 years of Chinese history.
The items were selected more than a year ago by the Field’s husband-and-wife Asian archeology team, Bennet Bronson and Chuimei Ho.
“The exhibition features objects that Qianlong or his immediate family are believed to have personally used, collected or commanded to be made,” Ho said.
The exhibit, which runs through Sept. 12, sets out to describe life in China at the zenith of the Manchu Dynasty as well as to tell Qianlong’s dramatic life story and those of his many wives, some of whom he detested, some he simply ignored, and a few he deeply loved.
“He was the fourth-born son of his father,” said Bronson, “but he so clearly impressed his emperor grandfather and his father with his intelligence and exceptional abilities at a young age that very early on he was chosen to be the emperor when his father passed away.”
As soon as he assumed the throne, Qianlong reorganized the government into an efficient and, for China, relatively uncorrupt bureaucracy that allowed him to reduce taxes and increase government services for all his subjects.
His highly polished, graceful desk and his personal writing implements furnish a re-created imperial office.
Qianlong’s political astuteness can be seen in an array of religious objects in the exhibit that he commissioned, some gem-encrusted gold and silver masterpieces. He celebrated the many forms of belief his people adhered to, from Buddhism, Confucianism and Shamanism to Islam and Christianity.
A writer who penned 46,000 poems and thousands of essays, Qianlong’s love of art is evident in nearly every object in the exhibit, among them a 4-foot high, 1-ton jade boulder sculpted to portray a 70th birthday party for a venerated poet in the year 845 on a mountainside.
The everyday lives of the emperor, his wives and children are seen in exquisitely bright silken robes so well preserved they look freshly tailored. A banquet table is laid out with his solid gold cutlery, forks and spoons. Delicate dishware tells the story of how his consorts were ranked, with certain colors assigned to each level.
The beginning of the exhibit is dominated by two striking portraits, one of Qianlong at the time of his inauguration, the other of Xiaoxian (pronounced sheeyoo-sheeyen), his beautiful first empress, whom he married eight years before his inauguration, when he was 17 and she was 15.
Though she died young, she was the love of his life. As an old man, 50 years after her death, he wrote a poem about visiting her tomb, some lines of which reveal his continuing grief:
“I wanted to drive past without stopping/ But pretending is no good either/ … What joy is longevity for me [alone]?”
Another wife whom he promoted to empress at his mother’s urging after Xiaoxian’s death had such a bitter falling out with him that he cut off all contact with her and, after her early death, buried her not as an empress, but as a second-rate consort.
One favorite wife was Rong Fei, a Muslim woman of reputed stunning beauty who came to him at age 27 after being captured by Chinese soldiers in a military campaign that left her husband dead.
Qianlong was thrilled when he learned of Rong Fei’s prowess as a hunter and equestrian, unheard of among Chinese women. He married her as a low-level consort but was so mesmerized that he soon began promoting her through the ranks.
One of the remarkable scroll paintings in the exhibit shows Qianlong shooting a stag while in full gallop on horseback, with a beautiful woman presumed to be Rong Fei stretching to hand him another arrow from her own horse.
The Field is charging a separate fee for the exhibit in addition to general admission, totaling $17 for adults, $14 for students and seniors and $8 for children.
