Magic carpet ride

Magic carpet ride
时间： 2008年09月01日 16:40 作者： 来源：中国日报网站
Patterns of bats, butterflies, clouds and flowers on a carpet of the mid-Qing Dynasty from Liu Qujiang's collection.
Antique carpet expert Liu Qujiang got the shock of his life when he had the huge soiled old carpets stacked outside his warehouse cleaned.
An antique carpet dealer himself, Liu had acquired them from other dealers who were about to discard the 20 or so carpets. They were so big that he had to leave them outside, exposed to the elements.
When Liu retired from the import-export business in 2002, he had them cleaned. Each carpet - some 3.5 m long - took ten workers nearly a month to wash.
What emerged from the grime - patterns of bats, butterflies, books and flowers - was dazzling, and Liu realized that these had been mid-Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) imperial carpets belonging to the royal family.
This discovery further fueled Liu's dream to open a museum of antique Chinese carpets.
"We have lost the culture of antique Chinese carpets. I want to call people's attention to this," the 66- year-old Hebei native explains.
It is a bit strange to see the president of Zheng Tai Carpets Import & Export Company wearing a pair of slippers when welcoming visitors. But it stands to reason, as it is easier to remove slippers when he steps onto his antique carpets.
He even encourages his visitors to sit on the hundred-year-old antiques to feel their quality.
The world's best carpets are Chinese, Persian and Turkish. What upsets Liu the most is that foreigners seem to appreciate antique Chinese carpets more than the Chinese people themselves. For example, Liu says, when he visited friends in Italy, he was surprised to see antique Chinese carpets in their homes. What's more, he says, many of the developed countries he visited - the United States, England, France and Japan - have collections of Chinese antique carpets in their museums, while one hardly sees an antique carpet in a Chinese museum.
"It is good to see that nowadays Chinese collectors have raised the awareness of collecting antique carpets, but the problem is that they are rare in China now, as most of them have already been exported," Liu says.
Liu didn't have the opportunity to plumb the world of antique Chinese carpets until he became the deputy manager of the Tianjin Agricultural Products Import & Export Corporation in 1976. Prior to that, he had been a Peking Opera performer, a soldier and a policeman.
According to Liu, hand-made carpets were an important product to earn foreign exchange during China's planned economy. Carpets were made mainly in Hebei, Shandong, Gansu provinces and the city of Tianjin.
Besides exporting handmade carpets, some foreign clients began to ask Liu for antique carpets from Beijing. Liu says the capital city is a unique source of antique carpets due to its historical and political background. The royal family was the biggest consumer of carpets, which covered almost every inch of the imperial palace. Tapestries were widely used in the wedding ceremony of Emperor Guang Xu during the late Qing Dynasty.
The aristocracy also used carpets, many of which were tributes from the other provinces.
When helping his clients collect carpets, Liu insisted that some more valuable pieces should be kept in China, so the father of two bought them himself.
Antique Chinese carpets are highly prized because of their excellent workmanship and natural vegetable dyes, Liu says. Modern machine-made carpets are no competition.
In making a carpet for the royal family, the wool was selected from sheep grazing above 3,000 meters in the Helan Mountain Range in northwest China. Because of the hostile climate, the sheep was bred to have strong and lustrous wool.
Natural plants were widely used for dying. The red color came from zanghonghua, a Tibetan crocus, while the blue was from banlangen, a Chinese herb.
"It's not just a splendid piece of craftsmanship, it's truly a piece of art," Liu says. "When I see a beautiful antique carpet, all of my worries are swept away, and I find joy and peace."
The oldest carpet in Liu's collection - which has a pattern of lotus flowers and branches - dates back to the Yuan Dynasty (1206-1368). Liu has declined several offers of more than one million yuan ($145,985) from his overseas customers.
"I have developed a better understanding of history via antique carpets. Opening a museum is a way to share the experience with more people, " he says.