Ma Chengyuan, 77, Protected Relics During Cultural Revolution in China
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Ma Chengyuan, former president of the renowned Shanghai Museum who saved priceless artifacts from marauding Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, died September 25, the official Xinhua News Agency said. He was 77.
Ma joined the museum soon after its founding in 1952 and helped select items for its original collection of about 13,000 ancient Chinese bronze works, porcelain, paintings, jade, calligraphy, furniture, and other artifacts. He published more than 80 books and academic papers on the bronzes.
The collection enjoyed official protection until the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when teenage Red Guards inspired by Mao Zedong’s call for the destruction of all remnants of pre-revolutionary China rampaged through the homes of Shanghai collectors. Ma slept in his office to take phone calls from desperate collectors and dispatched museum staff to protect and catalogue artifacts.
Anticipating the Red Guards’ arrival at the museum, Ma ordered staff to disguise themselves as Red Guards and paint revolutionary slogans over glass display cases.
“When Red Guards arrived, we told them we were busy making revolution ourselves,” he said in a 2001 interview with the South China Morning Post.
However, as fighting broke out between different guard factions, Ma was seized by museum staff and imprisoned in a storage room. He was tortured by being repeatedly dropped on the museum’s marble floor to make him confess to having sold museum property for personal gain. He never confessed, and was later sent to a labor camp for Shanghai officials.
Ma returned to Shanghai in 1972 to organize an exhibition to tour the United States following former president Richard Nixon’s visit to China.
In 1985, he was appointed director of the museum and in the early 1990s began soliciting funds and government approval for a building to transfer the collection from its rooms in a derelict former bank building.
Awarded a patch of land on the city’s former race course in the center of town, Ma was told he would have to come up with the construction funds himself. Much of the money eventually came from wealthy Hong Kong collectors, many of whom had sold their collections to the museum before fleeing in the years after the 1949 communist takeover.
