On September 8, 1945, Ding Zhenglong bid farewell to his family and went with his friends Luo Dazhao and Wang Xuewu to visit his old teacher in Changchun. Japan had just surrendered, ending World War Two, and many peddlers in Changchun were selling antiques and art treasures that had been taken from the palace of the puppet emperor in Manchuria. Ding Zhenglong bought many paintings and works of calligraphy.

Not long after, Ding Zhenglong's wife, Sun Manxia, received word that her husband had been killed and his body found by the railroad tracks near Yingkou. Luo Dazhao, the friend and who had accompanied her husband on the trip, said Ding Zhenglong had been killed by Russian soldiers. But late one night, a worker from the coal mine came secretly and told Sun a different story.

When she thought carefully about all she had heard, Sun realized that there were many questionable points in Luo Dazhao's statement. After talking to a number of people, she concluded that Luo had murdered her husband. The very night that Ding Zhenglong had purchased all those art treasures, the greedy Luo had decided he wanted them for himself. He murdered his friend on September 20 and took the paintings and calligraphy.

Sun Manxia formally accused Luo Dazhao and in the face of the evidence she presented, he could not deny his crime. Sun had avenged her husband and recovered the stolen treasures.

In the 1960s, Sun Manxia began to fear that she could not protect the fragile old artworks. If they were destroyed, she would feel guilty before the spirit of her husband and before the nation. She decided to find a better home for them.

And so the thousand-year-old treasures finally made their way back to Beijing, where Rongbaozhai donated them to the Forbidden City.

  Efforts to develop woodblock printing

Woodblock printing techniques have been around for more than a thousand years, but letter paper decorated with woodblock-printed poems or pictures did not come into use until the late Qing Dynasty.

Translator Lin Qinnan invented the use of woodblock prints on letter paper, and before long the famed painters Qi Baishi and Zhang Daqian followed his lead with images of their own. Under such talented hands, decorative letter paper represented the top skill in woodblock printing as well as painting genres typical of the period.

Page:

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9