We are about to enter the Emperor's Private Paradise,
come in and take a look.
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Nancy, how do you get this exhibit over here?
Well, I've been working with the Palace Museum in Beijing
which is the Forbidden City and which is
a place where the emperors have been living for 500 years until the Revolution
and I suggested to them that we do this exhibition,
they thought it was a great idea.
So, what's this picture here?
This is a portrait of the Qianlong Emperor
and the Qianlong Emperor reigned from 1736 to 1796, he reigned for sixty years.
And this is an image of him in his older years,
you can see that he looks not young anymore
and he's wearing his official imperial robes,
bright yellow covered with dragons.
And did he rule the Forbidden City at that time?
He, not only ruled the Forbidden City,
he ruled all of China at that time period for sixty years.
Over here is actually one of the Qianlong Emperor's thrones,
he sat in that throne and it was a throne that was
in a building, a four story high building
in the top floor of the building.
It was one of the highest buildings in the whole Forbidden City
and it was from there that he could look over the whole Forbidden City.
These are ceramics and they were all made
during the Qianlong Emperor's reign period.
He was a very serious collector and patron of the arts
and so he had many, many artworks done for him to his specific requests.
The Qianlong Emperor not only commissioned many paintings
and many pieces of porcelain,
he also commissioned a lot of buildings and gardens
and what he would do is he would say to his ministers
and his servants I want a garden that looks like this and that,
he would describe it all, then they would go and they would make a model,
a three dimensional model for him to look at and approve,
and so that is one of the models for a garden he designed.
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What kind of pen that they use for this?
They actually didn't use a pen, they used a brush which,
probably a brush made out of some kind of animal hair
and they used gold, gold and lacquer.
And it was three different kinds of gold.
If you look carefully there's a pink gold, a yellow gold, and a white gold.
How do they preserve it?
Well, this... there's an interesting story behind this object
and in fact all the objects in this exhibition.
All of these objects were in the Qianlong Garden
in these twenty seven buildings and they
never came out of the space in all the years that they were in there
and the spaces have never been restored or
brought to life again and so they've just been sitting there locked up
for years and years and years getting dirtier and dustier
and some pieces are falling apart.
But they decided a few years ago to restore all these spaces
and that was a collaboration between the Forbidden City
and an American group called World Monuments Fund.
When they took all the pieces out they discovered this,
they had no idea that this was here
because what had been showing on the outside was the other side.
Remember we saw the images of the Buddhist people.
This side was against the wall and when they took this out,
they suddenly noticed that the backside was covered
with these beautiful gold paintings and they were in perfect shape
because they had never been exposed to air and never been exposed to light.
So, in fact these objects didn't need any conservation or cleaning up.
And continuing is... what kind of clock is this?
This is actually an European clock, this is not a Chinese clock
but the Qianlong Emperor was fascinated by European clocks
and also some of European aesthetics and European culture.
The Europeans knew that he loved these clocks
and so they would give him presents of clocks.
This is one of the presents that they gave him,
it's probably from France or Germany
and it's a stunning work and when it's working
and the dial is going around, when it hits an hour...
You see that little man in there?
Yeah.
He bangs the bell and these flowers go twirling around.
They never had mechanical clocks like this in China
before this time so he was very excited about these
and he even had the Europeans
create a clock workshop within the Forbidden City.
Why did the Europeans give the Emperor clocks?
The Europeans were fascinated with China
and they were very interested in doing trade with China
so they were trying to charm the Emperor into
allowing them to have trade, it didn't really go very far
because the Emperor was not really interested in
trading or having diplomatic relations with the Europeans.
The Emperor was an incredibly learned man,
he was very highly trained
in Chinese Confucion Classic Literature
and the history of Chinese Law.
He was also a poet, he wrote 42,000 poems in his lifetime,
that's a lot of poems, he loved art, he collected art,
but he also thought of himself as a military man
and he tried and worked very hard to expand the size of
China by sending out military campaigns and
he expanded the borders of China to almost
twice of what they originally were.
Chinese art is so rich and there are
thousands of years of art, things have been changing
over all of these centuries so it's always stimulating, interesting and exciting.
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