Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China's Forbidden City

"The elevator pitch for this book is The Monuments Men , the China side of the story. It’s about how people tried to preserve these precious works of art during wartime. It very much takes you into life within a fragmented and embattled China during World War Two. Any book that does that for a popular readership is important because in the English language world, there is still a tendency to forget just how central the battles fought in Asia were. There’s a default to just thinking about the European war, or about Japan and America and Pearl Harbor. So, I liked that about it. In addition, Brookes really makes some of the curators, who devoted themselves to going along with these works of art and hiding them in caves and other unlikely places, come to life as characters. There were very dramatic moments in the odysseys of the objects, and in describing them he draws on the diaries and in one case the poems of the curators to make them fleshed-out people. Adam is, by the way, somebody who just won’t stay in his lane. He first made his mark as a journalist, but then he left journalism to become a spy novelist and wrote a trio of really engaging spy novels. Now he’s moving into the realm of serious popular history. His new book is clearly written with the general reader in mind, but he does his research. He was a Chinese studies major as an undergrad at SOAS and it shows. I guess I can’t really pick on him, though, for going outside of his lane, because I move into the journalistic one plenty. In fact, we met when we were both tracking protests in 1999. I was in Beijing for a conference held to mark the 80th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement and he was covering China for the BBC when NATO bombs hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. There were then these protests outside the British and American embassies, partially supported by the government. We became friends, in part because we realized that we were in different professions but were asking a lot of the same questions and were curious about a lot of the same things as we watched the people on the streets yelling out “Down with American-Led NATO Hegemonism” and other catchy slogans like that that just roll off your tongue. One of the things about the story is that it resonates with and speaks to a lot of broad issues. Some of the treasures spirited out of Beijing when the Japanese invaded ended up back there but a lot of them ended up in Taiwan. You can think of it as a metaphor for the fact that in the middle of the century, people are moving across borders, but so are objects. Brookes also does something that I love to see popular histories do which is slip in in passing ideas that scholars feel passionate about but that never seem to percolate through to the general audience. For example, when he talks about treasures representing Chinese culture , he refers to them representing what the state decided to define as Chinese culture at a certain point . When he’s talking about the Qianlong emperor gathering together these wondrous pieces of art, he makes it clear that it wasn’t that for thousands of years, there was a clear notion that the objects that we now think of as quintessentially Chinese were quintessentially Chinese. A lot of what we know about, and think about, modern China really took shape with these actions that members of an originally Manchu ruling family did after they took power in 1644."