He was originally a Chinese, donating 183 cultural relics to the United States free of charge, but charged a sky-high fee to the motherland
China has a history of five thousand years, during this time there have been many cultural works that are now regarded as national treasures, the British and French coalition forces in 1860 to beijing, they set a fire in the Yuanmingyuan, many of the treasures in it have been robbed, because of the loss of the ledger, so we can not determine the number of treasures lost, there is a collector in the folk collection of a lot of cultural relics, he also has a different attitude when facing China and the United States.
Born in Shanghai in 1918, many of the collections in the home of Weng Wange came from his ancestor Weng Tonggong, who educated the two generations of emperors of Tongzhi and Guangxu in the Qing Dynasty, and the only thing he liked to do was to collect things, because the convenience of his official position was also his own interest, so when Weng Wange arrived, there were many collections in the family.
When Ongwango was two years old, he received the inheritance of the family's collection, and when he grew up, he devoted himself to the collection, Ongwango gave up the master's degree in mechanical and electrical engineering in 1940 and chose to go to the University of Wisconsin to continue his oil painting studies, and Ongwango brought the collection to the United States in 1948.
The combined value of all the collections of the Weng family is very high, many of which are the works of literary artists, of course, the painting "Ten Thousand Miles of the Yangtze River" is also counted in it, this painting will make people feel that the entire Yangtze River is presented in front of their eyes, this painting was bought by Weng Wange in the market in 1875 with four hundred and two silver, and then he loved it very much.
On his 100th birthday in 2018, Weng Wange donated one hundred and eighty-three cultural relics to an art museum in Boston, USA, including the painting mentioned above, and he has always been very willing to show Chinese culture to the world or communicate with other countries.
But some people will question this, because he has previously sold five hundred and forty-two volumes of very precious ancient books of the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties to the library in Shanghai, or sold them for a high price of four and a half million, and many people will wonder why the previous one hundred and eighty-three pieces of cultural relics were donated to the United States and this time they were sold. He said that because he felt that the museum had the strength to collect them well, but there were still many people who disapproved of his approach, no matter what others said, the final decision was in his hands.