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      Fig. 33 Painting table in a typical Qianlong style with carved dragons and longevity symbols, zitan, eighteenth century. Possibly made in a Beijing city workshop but crafted by a Guangdong woodworker. The condition is excellent, indicating that the piece was once owned by a very wealthy or royal family over a long period of time. Photo courtesy Andy Hei.

      As the Manchurian epoch came to an end in 1911, the era of the devoted craftsman wound down. The unstable political situation that followed the exile of Sun Yat Sen, the Japanese invasion and World War II all combined to stifle artisans. There were some pockets of innovative design. In Shanghai, the Art Deco scene was alive and well, and in Canton workshops churned out export furniture (Fig. 31).

      As the quality of Chinese handicraft diminished, international appreciation of the classical forms grew. During the 1930s and 1940s, Westerners living in Beijing, who were influenced by Bauhaus styles, started researching and collecting classical Ming furniture. The most influential of these was Gustav Ecke who was hired, in 1923, as a professor of European philosophy at Amoy University in Fujian province. Inspired by collector Deng Yizhe, Ecke’s own passion grew and in 1930, after moving from Beijing to teach at Furen University, he began to collect. Ecke directed his gaze to Ming-dynasty huanghuali hardwood pieces, such as a testered bedstead and the high-standing coffer table his wife still owns. Ming furniture was not widely collected at the time, and even scholars who obtained pieces showed little interest in researching furniture. Ecke and friends like Laurence Sickman traveled around looking for attractive pieces. At one point, Ecke and his wife Tseng Yuhe, a painter and art historian, owned well over thirty pieces of Ming, as well as many pieces of export furniture from the early Qing.

      In the 1940s, Ecke disassembled his collection of furniture to make precise measurements and drawings with the help of Yang Yao, and published a paper called “Chinese Domestic Furniture.” During the Cultural Revolution, the measurements and drawings were kept under the bed of Chen Zengbi, a student of Yang Yao, a renowned academic. Their work was eventually published as a book and today remains an important reference for authentication (Fig. 34).

      Before the Communists seized power in 1949, much of the furniture owned by foreigners was shipped out. Gustav Ecke was not so lucky. “The university gave us one year’s salary and told us we had to make our own way out,” says his wife Tseng. “We couldn’t pack everything.” Their priority was forty-five crates of books. “We had the finest library on Chinese art.” After shipping out the books, there was no money left to ship out the furniture. Instead, they “deposited” one-third of their collection with the British Embassy, one-third with the American embassy and one-third with Yang Yao.

      In 1949 they settled in Hawaii where Ecke taught Asian art. Eventually, the couple received a letter from Lionel Lamb, a former British attaché in China, to say that Ecke’s abandoned furniture was still in the embassy, and that he could ship it out with his own possessions if Ecke sold them to him. Later, Ecke bought back nine pieces of furniture and had them shipped from Switzerland. Two more pieces eventually found their way back to Ecke, but most of it was simply stolen, and has since made its way into collections around the world. “If I was greedy, I could go and claim them as mine,” says Tseng.

      Ecke’s contemporaries, academics like Laurence Sickman (who collected for the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas city) and George Kates, managed to get out a lot of their furniture. Part of Kates’ collection was given to the Brooklyn Museum, and the rest was sold in 1955.

      For decades, as Communist China remained closed, “the conventional wisdom was that there was no more furniture left in China except what was saved by the expats,” says collector Robert Piccus. He soon learned otherwise. This erroneous assumption was based on the fact that until the 1980s the only objects coming out of China were small scholarly objects. The original Beijing antique shops—Rong Xing Xiang, Yunbao Zhai and Lu Ban Guan—were closed, and very little was coming out of state-operated agencies. As Piccus later surmised, “At the time it seemed a mystery as to why it was possible to buy huanghuali brush pots in considerable quantity but not furniture.” The answer was simple. There was still plenty of furniture squirreled away in China, it was just too difficult to get it out of the country. The Chinese government stopped issuing export licenses between 1951 and 1971, and even when some trade did resume there were tremendous hurdles in physically transporting furniture across the country. As a result, some types of furniture, including the horseshoe-back reclining armchair, were not represented in any major institutional collection prior to 1980. China’s new economic policy in the late 1970s, and the work of local scholar Wang Shixiang, changed that perception. The resumption of trade to the outside world was like the bursting of a dam. Secret caches began flooding out—first Ming furniture made of tieli wood, followed by huanghuali. As the economic policy kicked into gear, “the border became a sieve for antiquities,” says Piccus. The first pieces to surface on Hong Kong’s famous antiques strip, “Cat Street,” were old tieli pieces from the south. Piccus recalls paying HK$8,000 for a tieli side table in 1982. To his surprise and amazement, great huanghuali and zitan specimens followed (Fig. 37).

      At first, only a handful of dealers and collectors knew the worth of these pieces, but the market was further stimulated when Wang’s seminal book, Classic Chinese Furniture, was published in 1986. The book, together with Wang’s personal collection, lent legitimacy to the notion that the old Chinese furniture within the country was indeed valuable. It also served as the ultimate reference guide.

      The first wave of buyers sourced items from the government-run storehouses. Hong Kong-based Hei Hung Lu ventured into China on buying trips as early as 1972, but was only able to acquire furniture starting 1976. For the next decade, he bought mostly Qing-dynasty pieces from two enormous warehouses: the Peking Arts & Crafts Importing and Exporting Company and the China National Arts & Crafts Import and Export Company in Beijing.

      In the early 1980s, Hannah Chiang and his mother started buying furniture from second-hand shops in Guangzhou, such as Rong Wah, which sold secondhand furniture. The store came under the authority of the Cultural Relics Bureau. Chiang would buy from these shops, but had to arrange an export license through the state-run Guangdong Antique Shop for a service fee. Initially, he bought black-wood furniture—all that the shops had in stock. Later the stores were able to source from “runners,” people who would travel to remote

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