Adam Brookes, Mei Zhang

In 1933, as Japanese armies ravaged China, a small band of Chinese museum curators in Peking packed the imperial art collections of the Forbidden City for evacuation to safety.

For sixteen years, these devoted curators shepherded twenty thousand cases of irreplaceable art through war-torn China. The cases traveled by steamship and train, truck and bamboo raft. They journeyed thousands of miles up vast rivers and over mountain ranges, through bombing and famine, across the unimaginable destruction of China’s second world war.

Overseeing this extraordinary effort of conservation was Professor Ma Heng, a reticent, unassuming scholar of ancient inscriptions. Professor Ma’s decades-long commitment to preserving the imperial art collections of China brought him, at the end of his life, only fear and humiliation.

In Fragile Cargo, Adam Brookes brings us – for the first time in English – the story of Ma Heng, the wartime curators of Peking, and their invaluable cargo.