Fragile Cargo

Adam Brookes Chatto & Windus £25 ★★★★★

In 1933, the first of some quarter of a million items from China’s priceless Imperial art collection finally left Peking by train. Comprising silk paintings, rare Ming porcelain (pictured, right), precious manuscripts and the Stone Drums of Qin, ten vast granite cylinders bearing the oldest inscriptions in Chinese, they wouldn’t return for 16 years.

In the meantime they had been transported more than 15,000 miles by rail, truck, boat and pack horse to escape the Japanese occupation of the country’s former capital. Their evacuation had long been expected, given the clash of warlords, invaders and foreign concessionholders that made China so unstable in the early 20th Century.

Some temporary relief came after the abdication of the last Qing dynasty emperor

Puyi in 1912, which allowed a group of enlightened young museum officials to make a detailed inventory of the collections. Despite Chiang Kai-shek’s republican government emerging in Nanjing in 1923, Japan’s encroachment from its occupation of Manchuria remained an ever-present threat. As Japanese warplanes loomed over the Forbidden City, the art had to move. Brookes’s focus is the arduous journey these collections took across war-torn China, many artefacts ending in caves in the far west.

But accounts of trucks being packed and transported can drag, particularly when the custodians were generally just dutiful professionals. More fascinating is Brookes’s use of this material to explore not only the subtleties of Chinese art but the country’s progress, from the rituals of the Imperial court to the stark Communist takeover in 1949.

Brookes, a former BBC journalist, has written spy thrillers. Here he marries a reporter’s grasp of detail with a novelist’s narrative flair to bring clarity and readability to a complicated period of China’s troubled history.