On a freezing Tuesday this week, dozens of special guests from China's cultural, political and business elites gathered within the blood-red walls of the Forbidden City. They were there for the opening of the newly restored Hall of Rectitude, the center of Tibetan Buddhism during China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing.
After a fire in 1923, the hall and about a half-dozen surrounding buildings that comprise the Buddhist architectural complex lay in ruin for nearly a century in the northwestern corner of the 8,000-room former imperial palace.
After six years of restoration funded by the Hong Kong-based China Heritage Fund, the Zhong Zheng Dian, as it's known in Chinese, is back, rebuilt from the ground up, though it won't be open to the public for at least two years according to officials at the Forbidden City's Palace Museum, the Beijing News said (in Chinese).
The opening comes at a tense time in relations between the Beijing government and people in th e Tibet autonomous region. At least three more Tibetans burned themselves to death in protest of Chinese rule this week, according to a Web site run by Tibetan exiles.
This brings the number of self-immolations by Tibetans to about 90, according to overseas-based Tibet advocacy groups. Significantly, the protests are taking place outside the autonomous region in the Tibetan-populated homeland provinces of Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu, which were once relatively peaceful, said Robert Barnett, a scholar of Tibetan studies at Columbia University. This presents a “very dramatic issue for China and its strategies,†Mr. Barnett said.
The painful state of Sino-Tibetan relations wasn't mentioned at the event on Tuesday afternoon, where the guests included the China-born, naturalized American Nobel prize winner, Chen Ning Yang (Physics, 1957); a deputy foreign minister, Cui Tiankai; and Shan Jixiang, the recently appointed head of the Palace Museum, who has big plans fo r the institution.
Historically and religiously, the event was deeply significant.
Much of China's claim to Tibet rests on the close relationship that existed between Beijing and Lhasa during the reign of three Qing emperors - Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong - in the 17th and 18th centuries. Tibet's religious leader, the Dalai Lama, exercised great influence on the emperors during that time, in a patron-priest relationship.
Artistically, too, it's significant: the palace's large collection of Tibetan art and artifacts, including ritual worship objects, once again have a unified home in three galleries, as well as a small research space, the Research Center for Tibetan Buddhist Heritage.
“It's like a home-coming for the artifacts,†said Gerald Szeto, an architect at the Beijing-based firm of Mo Atelier Szeto, who did the interior design of the galleries. “For a hundred years the whole area was left fallow,†he said.
The Palace Museum says it has about 20,000 Tibetan Buddha statues in its collection dating from the 7th to the early 20th centuries, and over 1,000 tangkas, or religious paintings. Some were on display on Tuesday, including an intricate, highly-colored, 18th century, three-dimensional mandala of brass and enamel (above), and tangkas painted in gold.
“The art and ancient artifacts are very mysterious to the outside world because they've never been shown before,†Luo Wenhua, a curator and researcher of Tibetan and Buddhist art at the museum, said in a telephone interview.
“There are written records for almost every piece in the imperial collection, including where it is from, which year it was made, and the name of donors, its history and so on,†said Mr. Luo, who has in the past called for greater protection for Tibetan Buddhist history in the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai, here in Chinese.
“Some have very detailed information. This makes the pieces mor e precious, no matter what their artistic or academic value, because compared to other similar stuff in the rest of the world there are clear clues as to their identities,†he said.
“It supports the study of Buddhist culture in Tibet and Mongolia, and its influence in China.â€
