In 1860, one of China’s greatest modern artists, Wu Changshi, then seventeen, fled to the mountains of Zhejiang province to escape the ravages of the Taiping Civil War. He returned two-and-a-half years later to find that his fiancée had been buried under an osmanthus tree.
Wu’s pining for his lost love coloured the rest of his life, manifesting in his poems and art. “Your former life was the moon,” he carved on a seal almost forty years after her death. Selections of the artist’s work, along with those of his peers, were on display at the British Museum this summer, as part of its expansive exhibition on the Qing dynasty, China’s Hidden Century.
The Qing dynasty, China’s last imperial regime toppled by the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, has long been associated with decline. Although the Manchus, an ethnic minority from the northeast, rose to rule China in the seventeenth century through their military might, the last century of their reign was marred by humiliating losses to foreign powers—among them the ceding of Hong Kong to the British and the notorious sacking of the Summer Palace near Beijing by Anglo-French forces in the mid-1800s.
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- Tags: Hong Kong, Issue 33, Rhoda Kwan