A Cup of Light Read Online Free Page B
ferry? Trucks? For this amount of money I can do it. Curse danger out of my path. I can.
And he blinked the morning sun away from him as he moved down the street, into the busy center of the town, and closer and closer to the longed-for, cigarette-stained darkness of the Perfect Garden Teahouse, just a few blocks ahead.
Lia sat on her heels before a pair of
doucai
Yongzheng bowls, decorated in brilliant enamel with the Eight Daoist Immortals among swirling clouds. She picked up one and cradled it. She understood the glaze through the glassy resistance it gave her fingers. To her, the clarity of this finish was what the word
refinement
meant. Just holding the pot, she was lighter and higher, a little more evolved.
She put down the bowls and typed. Now again she came to the need for a linkup, some suggestive proof of origins, a tie-in to the web of art history. This time she didnât need to go into her memory world. She knew already. There was a similar pair of bowls, executed and ornamented like these, in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Beijing.
She picked up the next one. It was a blue-and-white dragon dish from the Xuande period. So fantastic. Waves of disbelief churned through her as she looked at it. How could an assortment this big, with this much cream, just materialize? Where had it been?
The blue-and-white dish was fine, gorgeous in fact, of the quality that might have been owned by the aristocratic classes as well as the emperor. She had seen a lot of these in this first crate. Yet she had seen a few undeniable masterpieces too. Imperial pieces. This was the thing experts like her most dreamed of finding, pots commissioned by the emperor.
Because these pots were the most perfect, the most truly priceless. They literally could not be improved upon. During the thousand years of imperial production in Jingdezhen, overseers had judged all the creations of the artists at the emperorâs kilns. Works deemed utterly perfect were sent to the capital for the Son of Heaven. Others, whether imperfect, overruns, or simply too experimental, were destroyed, some achingly beautiful but still destroyed, and always in the same ritual fashionâwith a metal rod rammed down on them and the shards thrown in the pit.
The artist had to go back, each time, and try again. Because if the next pot crossed the invisible line and was perfect, it would be borne as exquisite treasure to the Son of Heaven. And it would become immortal.
By modern times, the emperorâs holdings had become, if not the largest, arguably the greatest art collection in selective terms the world had ever known. Continuously built for eleven centuries, it stayed in the Palace as dynasties came and went. Each new emperor inherited the art; many added to it. Despite losses, much remained intact. Jades, scroll paintings, bronzes, porcelains, calligraphy . . . more than a million masterpieces had accumulated by the dawn of the twentieth century. This treasure was not moved out of the Forbidden City until 1931, and then only when the Japanese occupation of Manchuria extended to within a few hundred kilometers of the capital.
Could this group have come from the Palace holdings? She sat back and scanned the rows of crates. It was outrageous, unthinkable. She had to be rational. Yet one thing was sure: Wherever they came from, the pots were stunningly valuable. They were worthâshe saw the numbers take dizzy shape in her headâmore than one hundred million dollars. That was more than she could even imagine someone paying, so she pushed it aside and went on working.
âYou heard what I said,â she repeated to Dr. Zheng. âThere are eight hundred of them. Roughly. More or less.â
âThatâs not possible,â he said for the third time.
She could feel herself smiling. âLook, Iâve checked two of the crates. Twenty pots each. Twenty drop-dead pots. And there are forty crates total, same size.â She
And he blinked the morning sun away from him as he moved down the street, into the busy center of the town, and closer and closer to the longed-for, cigarette-stained darkness of the Perfect Garden Teahouse, just a few blocks ahead.
Lia sat on her heels before a pair of
doucai
Yongzheng bowls, decorated in brilliant enamel with the Eight Daoist Immortals among swirling clouds. She picked up one and cradled it. She understood the glaze through the glassy resistance it gave her fingers. To her, the clarity of this finish was what the word
refinement
meant. Just holding the pot, she was lighter and higher, a little more evolved.
She put down the bowls and typed. Now again she came to the need for a linkup, some suggestive proof of origins, a tie-in to the web of art history. This time she didnât need to go into her memory world. She knew already. There was a similar pair of bowls, executed and ornamented like these, in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Beijing.
She picked up the next one. It was a blue-and-white dragon dish from the Xuande period. So fantastic. Waves of disbelief churned through her as she looked at it. How could an assortment this big, with this much cream, just materialize? Where had it been?
The blue-and-white dish was fine, gorgeous in fact, of the quality that might have been owned by the aristocratic classes as well as the emperor. She had seen a lot of these in this first crate. Yet she had seen a few undeniable masterpieces too. Imperial pieces. This was the thing experts like her most dreamed of finding, pots commissioned by the emperor.
Because these pots were the most perfect, the most truly priceless. They literally could not be improved upon. During the thousand years of imperial production in Jingdezhen, overseers had judged all the creations of the artists at the emperorâs kilns. Works deemed utterly perfect were sent to the capital for the Son of Heaven. Others, whether imperfect, overruns, or simply too experimental, were destroyed, some achingly beautiful but still destroyed, and always in the same ritual fashionâwith a metal rod rammed down on them and the shards thrown in the pit.
The artist had to go back, each time, and try again. Because if the next pot crossed the invisible line and was perfect, it would be borne as exquisite treasure to the Son of Heaven. And it would become immortal.
By modern times, the emperorâs holdings had become, if not the largest, arguably the greatest art collection in selective terms the world had ever known. Continuously built for eleven centuries, it stayed in the Palace as dynasties came and went. Each new emperor inherited the art; many added to it. Despite losses, much remained intact. Jades, scroll paintings, bronzes, porcelains, calligraphy . . . more than a million masterpieces had accumulated by the dawn of the twentieth century. This treasure was not moved out of the Forbidden City until 1931, and then only when the Japanese occupation of Manchuria extended to within a few hundred kilometers of the capital.
Could this group have come from the Palace holdings? She sat back and scanned the rows of crates. It was outrageous, unthinkable. She had to be rational. Yet one thing was sure: Wherever they came from, the pots were stunningly valuable. They were worthâshe saw the numbers take dizzy shape in her headâmore than one hundred million dollars. That was more than she could even imagine someone paying, so she pushed it aside and went on working.
âYou heard what I said,â she repeated to Dr. Zheng. âThere are eight hundred of them. Roughly. More or less.â
âThatâs not possible,â he said for the third time.
She could feel herself smiling. âLook, Iâve checked two of the crates. Twenty pots each. Twenty drop-dead pots. And there are forty crates total, same size.â She
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