Fragile cargo The World War II race to save the treasures of China's Forbidden City

Devoted archivists struggle to protect the Forbidden City's most precious art from destruction during WWII. Numbering more than a million items, the palace collections contained thousand-year-old paintings, delicate ivory carvings, and "mountains of imperial porcelain" as well as the Stone Drums of Qin, granite boulders bearing ancient inscriptions. But Japanese aggression in Manchuria and the increasing threat of bombers reaching Peking, compelled curators to pack everything up and transport it out. Safety was elusive and often temporary. The 16 years of war and revolution that followed would see the collection--20,000 wooden cases in total--hauled up mountains and shipped across oceans, secreted in caves and stuck on a sandbar. Brookes, who reported for the BBC in China and has written several spy thrillers, emphasizes the courage and persistence of museum director Ma Heng and his colleagues, who coordinated logistics and risked their lives but also had to figure out how to pay for the massive undertaking. Woven into his narrative are keen observations about China's tumultuous birth into modernity.

Journalist Brookes debuts with a novelistic account of Chinese curators' largely successful efforts to save priceless antiquities first from Japanese bombs during WWII and then from potential looters during Mao Zedong's Communist takeover. Led by Ma Heng, director of the Palace Museum in Beijing's (then Peking) Forbidden City, the curators packed and shipped nearly 17,000 cases of objects, including a 10th-century scroll depicting a river in winter and a mid-15th-century red porcelain ewer, deep into China's hinterlands, where they were stowed in caves, warehouses, and even a Buddhist temple. Many of the most valuable pieces ended up in Taiwan, while others were returned--after nearly 17 years--to the Forbidden City. Along the way, Brookes describes the objects in mesmerizing detail and vividly recounts the human toll of war. The most poignant portrait is of Ma Heng, who came under suspicion and endured a relentless program of "ideological transformation" in the 1950s. The Communist Party, Brookes writes, "took his devotion to the collections and turned it against him, hounding and humiliating him in his final days." Art lovers and WWII buffs will devour this riveting and bittersweet history. Photos. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Zoë Pagnamenta Agency. (Feb.)

Today, the vast treasures of the Chinese imperial art collections are divided between two museums in Taipei and Beijing. Former journalist Brookes tells the exciting story of how this came to be. For centuries, this was the private collection of Chinese emperors. When the last emperor was evicted from the Forbidden City in 1925, a museum was founded to take control of more than a million paintings, sculptures, pieces of porcelain, books, and other priceless items. As Japan threatened northern China in 1931, the museum administration decided to take on the daunting task of packing the items into more than 13,000 cases and relocating them to Nanjing. When the war reached that city in 1937, the collections were moved to Chongqing and other locations in western China. After the war ended 1945, the items were returned to Nanjing, but they became endangered again when the civil war between Nationalists and Communists resumed. By 1949, nearly 3,000 cases of the most valuable items in the collections were evacuated to Taiwan before Communist forces overtook the city. VERDICT Highly recommended for anyone interested in mid-20th century China in specific, or art history in general.--Joshua Wallace