The ancients often said that ''playthings lose their minds''", but in the Republic of China period, there was such a strange person, who not only loved to play and could play, but also did academic work while playing.' He is the great collector Wang Shixiang.
Wang Shixiang,also spelled Chang'an, was born in 1914 in Beijing to the father of a family of eunuchs, Wang Jizeng, who worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His mother, Jin Zhang, studied in the United States and is also a famous painter. The superior living conditions and strong artistic atmosphere have cultivated his love for traditional culture and art. Like many aristocratic children who grew up in Beijing's hutongs, he liked to set up eagles and rabbits, dogs and pigeons. The pigeons he raised, which to fly, were obedient; the eagle was fierce and must survive the eagle. Wang Shixiang stayed up with the eagle, did not take a nap for six or seven nights, and finally tamed the eagle; Wang Shixiang also loved to fight crickets. Crickets like to hide in the wet place, so he went alone in the middle of the night to catch the graves; the leisurely life of his youth made him unforgettable.
In 1934, Wang Shixiang studied at Yenching University and followed his father's orders to choose medicine. However, Wang Shixiang's nature obviously did not adapt to the boring medical course, and after two years of preparatory studies, he failed in mathematical, physical and chemical subjects. There was no way, so I had to transfer to the Department of Chinese Literature. This time, Wang Shixiang was very good, and with the influence of family learning, the homework he had to deal with was simply comfortable. Therefore, he spent a lot of time playing, and said in the "Yanyuan Scenery Strategy": 'Give Yanjing four years, do not fear frost and snow, do not shelter from wind and rain, do not distinguish between day and night, every time people do not swim, people do not arrive at the time, the period has a heart, self-satisfaction. ''
For Wang Shixiang's life, 1939 was his most painful year. In this year, the unfortunate death of his loving mother, coupled with the turmoil of the times, is a day of misfortune. His elderly and sick father still encouraged him not to be consumed by the changes in the outside world, and the 27-year-old Wang Shixiang regretted that he had wasted a lot of time, and he was determined to study hard at the Graduate School of Yenching University. Finally, in 1941, he completed the "Research on Chinese Painting Theory".
Just as he was preparing to make a big splash in academia, the Pacific War broke out, and Yenching University, a university with close ties to the United States, was forced to close. Wang Shixiang had to leave his beloved Sijiu City, cross the Japanese army's layers of blockade lines, through Henan and Shaanxi, all the way to the rear of Sichuan, and finally became Liang Sicheng's assistant researcher. When it comes to those famous temples and ancient temples, ancient monuments and cultural relics, they are often fascinated; but when they think of the successive years of military disasters, they can't help but have all kinds of worries in their hearts: How many cultural relics can be spared?
In August 1945, after Japan announced its surrender, Wang Shixiang could not wait to ask Hang Liwu, then director of the Wartime Cultural Relics Loss Committee, to go to the Pingjin area to recover the lost cultural relics. In December of that year, Wang Shixiang officially began his work. In order to track down the lost national treasure, he set his sights on the Japanese who had not yet had time to leave. With his knowledge of the city of Beijing, he visited antique dealers everywhere, and also set up banquets in Zhongshan Park, during which he knew the great righteousness of the country and the nation on the one hand, and promised economic benefits on the other hand, and asked them to actively provide clues to prevent the outflow of national treasures. This work can be said to be fruitful, and countless bronzes, porcelain, calligraphy and painting treasures were soon recovered.
However, more cultural relics have already crossed the ocean and gone to Japan. In order to recover more national treasures, he traveled east to Japan in December 1946 and began the search for cultural relics. In March of the following year, he returned home with 107 boxes of rare books. This time, Wang Shixiang made a great contribution to suobao in the east.
In March 1947, Wang Shixiang became the head of the Antiquities Section of the Palace Museum. In the face of the palace of "spider silk full of beams", Wang Shixiang proposed the eight-character policy of clarifying the family background and strengthening the custody, and while sorting out the cultural relics of the Forbidden City with colleagues, he also enriched some of the recovered cultural relics to the Forbidden City for display.
Wang Shixiang was friends with the collector Mr. Zhang Boju, and when he learned that he had been fascinated by the Ping Fu Ti for a long time, he allowed him to take the note home to study. Overjoyed, Wang Shixiang was afraid that the cultural relics would be lost a little, so he bought a small camphor wooden box and laid a flat with white cotton cloth to place the secondary post. Every time you observe, you must choose to wash your hands on a clear day, put on white gloves, move the wooden box to the south window, lay white felt in a bright and unsinked place, calmly hold your breath and then carefully unfold the writing. In the following month, he studied the texture, size, mounting, introduction, signature, article, paragraph knowledge, seal, predecessor inscription, etc. of this post, and wrote the article "Western Jin Dynasty Land Machine Flat Post Circulation Examination Strategy".
Wang Shixiang had a wide range of hobbies in his life, including crickets, pigeons, eagles, badgers, throwing, cooking, fire painting, lacquerware, fanzai, bamboo carving, music, Ming-style furniture, and everything. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s, many people in Beijing were selling Ming and Qing dynasty furniture in the cheap sellers, Wang Shixiang saw it, bought it and went home, and often went to the nearby villages and counties in Hebei to buy it, while collecting and researching, and slowly became an expert.
In 2009, the big player died at the age of 95. Lin Yutang said, "'Life is as fast as fun'" "Wang Shixiang can live so long, it must be related to his playing with everything and having a real interest in his heart."