250,000 WORKS OF ART
IMPENDING WAR AND CULTURAL ANNIHILATION
16 CHAOTIC YEARS
15,000 MILEs

all under the quiet leadership of a courageous curator.

introducing adam brookes’ first work of narrative non-fiction

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Book synopsis

The Meridian Gate, southern entrance to the Forbidden City, in the late 1930s. Photo by Michael Lindsay.

The Forbidden City’s Gate of Supreme Harmony c.1938

Sorting papers in the Forbidden City.

Palace Museum staff pack objects in wooden cases prior to evacuation from the Forbidden City, 1932.

Cases await evacuation from Peking, 1933.

Cases awaiting evacuation in the Forbidden City, 1933

A truck on the Northern Route is pushed up a hill.

Boatmen poll a truck loaded with the imperial collections across a river.

Trucks loaded with the imperial collections cross a river on a ferry.

British sailors load a case aboard HMS Suffolk for the journey to London, 1935

Cases after arrival in Taiwan. Note the complex labeling system.

Porters load a case for the voyage to London, 1935

It is the spring of 1933, and through the quiet courtyards and palaces of Peking’s Forbidden City course rumours of war.

Japanese aircraft drone overhead. Japanese troops and tanks are only hours away. All-out war between China and Japan is inevitable, and the scholarly, bespectacled curators of the Forbidden City are faced with a terrible question: when war comes, what is to be done to protect the vast imperial art collections in their charge?

The collections contain a million pieces of art, among them irreplaceable artefacts like the Stone Drums of Qin, adorned with 2,500 year-old inscriptions of crucial cultural importance, exquisite paintings on silk a thousand years old, and vanishingly rare Ming porcelain glazed in gorgeous copper red. The collections carry China’s deepest and most ancient memories; they trace the course of a civilization.

For sixteen terrifying years, under the quiet leadership of museum director Ma Heng, the curators would go on to transport the imperial art collections thousands of miles across China - up rivers of white water, across mountain ranges and through burning cities. In their search for safety the curators and their fragile, invaluable cargo journeyed through the maelstrom of violence, chaos and starvation that was China's Second World War.

Told for the first time in English and playing out across a vast historical canvas, this is the exhilarating story of a small group of men and women who, when faced with war's onslaught on civilisation, chose to resist.

from the author

“Fragile Cargo is my attempt to shed light on a vast and little understood story - that of China’s Second World War. Japan’s slow-motion invasion of China in the 1930s was a world-historic event, and set in train a war of utter barbarity and stunning scale. Yet China’s war is almost entirely absent from today’s English language depictions of the Second World War.

At the time, many Chinese people came to fear that their country and their culture faced complete destruction. The curators who packed, evacuated and conserved the imperial art collections to protect them from the Japanese invasion acted with extraordinary commitment and bravery.

Their story, and particularly that of their leader Ma Heng, is my attempt to recover a little of the lived experience of those who endured China’s war, and to bring it to an audience that has largely forgotten the scale and import of those events.”

— Adam Brookes

Praise for Fragile Cargo

“In ‘Fragile Cargo,’ the former BBC reporter Adam Brookes meticulously re-creates a 16-year-long odyssey that in drama and wonder far outstrips ‘The Monuments Men’ (the 2009 book, later a movie, about Allied efforts to save European artifacts from the Nazis). ‘Fragile Cargo’ is a story of bravery and ingenuity, and equally of the critical role cultural heritage plays in forming and maintaining national identity....’Fragile Cargo’ is a fascinating and inspiring story of triumph and the tragedy of war.”

— The Wall Street Journal