Fragile Cargo

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The gripping true story of the intrepid curators who saved China's finest art from the ravages of the Sino-Japanese War and World War IISpring 1933. The quiet courtyards and palaces of Peking's Forbidden City are tense with fear and expectation. Japanese aircraft drone overhead, troops and tanks are only hours away. All-out war between China and Japan is coming, and the curators of the Forbidden City are faced with an impossible question: what is to be done to protect the vast imperial art collections in their charge?The magnificent 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 significance, exquisite paintings on silk, and vanishingly rare Ming porcelain. These objects carry China's deepest and most ancient memories - memories from the dawn of its civilization.For sixteen terrifying, chaotic years, under the quiet leadership of museum director Ma Heng, the curators transported works of art 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, terror and starvation that was China's Second World War. Told for the first time in English and playing out across an epically vast canvas, this is the story of a small group of men and women who, when faced with war's onslaught on civilisation, chose to resist.