Hello everyone, I take the time out of my busy schedule today to bring you the following article, welcome to taste it together!
The French literary hero Victor Hugo once said that "even if buckingham Palace and the Louvre are combined, they are not as good as China's Old Summer Palace." The Yuanmingyuan is a large-scale imperial garden during the Qing Dynasty, which is the "Garden of Ten Thousand Gardens", bringing together various types of garden styles. It is "a model of all horticultural art".
But during the Second Opium War in 1860, this jewel of the world's garden art was burned down by greedy marauders. After the British and French troops entered Beijing, they directly attacked the Yuanmingyuan and carried out crazy looting and destruction. Gold and silver treasures, cultural treasures. If you can grab it, you will grab it, and if you can't grab it, you will smash it and burn it.
There are too many treasures in the Yuanmingyuan, but how many treasures have been robbed, because they burned down the furnishings and accounts of the Yuanmingyuan, so it can never be confirmed. But according to the Times at the time, they estimated that the total value of the property destroyed was more than six million pounds. After the founding of New China in 1949, the mainland made continuous efforts to recover the cultural relics lost overseas that year, and many patriotic collectors also tried to help the motherland acquire them. But among these collectors, Zhao Tailai is very special.
Zhao Tailai was the great-grandson of the famous diplomat Wu Tingfang, born in 1954. The family is also a prominent family in Dongguan, a medical family. But after the founding of New China, my parents lost their lives in the catastrophe of that year. Orphaned, Zhao Tailai had no choice but to go to Hong Kong to join his great aunt.
In 1979, her aunt took Zhao Tailai to one of her own properties in Hong Kong, opened the door, and Zhao Tailai was stunned by the scene inside the house. There's a whole podium floor, and it's all antiques. Beautiful and fascinating. The aunt told Zhao Tailai that these were only part of it, and also took out a small map to tell Zhao Tailai. On the outskirts of London, England, there is also a treasure hiding place.
The aunt said that these were all received one by one by the ancestor Ren Tingfang when she was in exile, and she never married for this batch of cultural relics. There are no children of his own, so this batch of property needs to be inherited by Zhao Tailai, but the wealth is not exposed, and Zhao Tailai must not leak a single bit to the outside.
In 1981, my aunt died of illness, and all the property before her death was handed over to Zhao Tailai to inherit. Zhao Tailai finished dealing with his aunt's affairs, went to London, England after grief, and found the property in his aunt's mouth according to the map. Before actually going in to find it, Zhao Tailai spent a long time to do psychological construction for himself.
But when he entered the cellar containing the antiquities, Zhao Tailai was still shocked. Calligraphy and painting, ceramics, jade and other rare treasures unfolded in front of his eyes one by one, which were all collected little by little by the time when his grandfather Ren Tingfang was serving abroad, And China's cultural relics.
For these cultural relics, Zhao Tailai stayed in Britain. It took him a full decade to go from a billionaire to a dedicated heritage cleaner. In order to prevent the leakage of wind and noise, he was killed. Zhao Tailai has been sorting out little by little in the cellar for more than ten years. Like ants moving, they move out one by one.
After Zhao Tailai sorted out the cultural relics in the cellar, he wanted to transport them back to China. In order to transport these cultural relics back to China, he sold 4 of his properties just to make up for the expensive freight. In his lifetime, he donated more than 50,000 cultural relics to the motherland, worth up to 800 million yuan, and there are 150 cultural relics of the third level or above in the country alone.
This also amazed the Chinese people around the world, and some people asked him why he was so "stupid". But zhao Tai said that this was not his personal thing. It was a national treasure, and he was only temporarily collecting. In September 2005, Zhao Tailai, together with Jin Yong and others, won the "World Outstanding Chinese Award". Thank you to this patriotic soldier.