Featured Qianlong collection

These items belong to a private collection in Shanghai they include Qianlong’s chair all of the shelving and display cases and the jade, turquoise and ceramics are associated with the emperor.

the ladies are our good friend in one picture sitting in the emperors chair and looking at white jade carvings, my daughter and my wife in another picture enjoying this collection, shared here for your pleasure, please enjoy these items in this collection.

 

Splendid collection! Your wife and daughter are naturally beautiful!

 

Thank you, It’s antique eye candy… and I don’t know gifts, decorations around the forbidden city things someone at the time collected but interesting to see

 

Although it does look kinda like about a thousand other gift shops in China, lol.

 

Gorgeous collection, thank you, Desert.
And I'd love a chance to go through your wife's wardrobe. Don't worry, that will never happen, so her wardrobe is safe.

Yes I remember visiting similar shops in Hongkong way back when. Still, beautiful and always a delight to see.

 

Some beautiful items and that antler chair is very interesting and impressive. Thanks for showing us.

 

Stunning collection. Lovely ladies too .

 

Nice collection. Does anyone use the billiard/pool table to play pool, or just to photograph pretty things?

 

I don’t know much about antique furniture but never thought there would be antler furniture in an 18th century Chinese palace?

 

I’ll bet it’s used for both… I’ve played at a few friends homes and they are all a lot better than me at billiards/pool and ping pong too my wife can beat me so bad I can’t score one point if she wants.

 

And I forgot to mention my wife could give Vegas shopping tours… she is a professional, lol.

 

Unfortunately I don’t know much either. But I agree it’s very interesting and a surprising

 

I also know nothing of these treasures, but wow! So much beauty across the board! Thank you so much!!

 

Neither would I. And I'm not sure it would be to Qianlong's refined and exquisite taste.
There are many portraits of Qianlong, and they usually have him sitting on his famous golden dragon throne, befitting an emperor:

In his younger years:


Later on in life:


But we won't let that get in the way of a good story.

 

Ha ha, I don’t know but I’d kinda guess like the rest of us he had more than one chair, lol. But ya who knows although the white jade is the good stuff and I think some of these are solid not gilt.
The backstory is I’m told his family were farmers who owned large parcels of land the Chinese government wanted and paid them some huge amount of money for.

 

Very likely. Here in Europe antler furniture is a rural thing, for hunting lodges and the like. Maybe Qianlong had a hunting lodge, or more than one?

Could be. Some of those pieces look like the solid gold statues Indonesian kings and sultans had. As far as I know the sultan of Yogyakarta and the susuhunan of Surakarta still have them, maybe a few others too.

 

Antler furniture here was a Thing in areas where hunting was a way of life. It's out of style now mostly, but old pieces turn up. Deer, elk etc shed their antlers yearly, and people make them into other things without hurting the animals. The solid gold statues...Elon Musk may have a few (wouldn't put a solid gold bed past him!) but other than that probably not.

 

The white jade is worth more than solid gold statues by a factor of 10…

 

From an exhibition at the forbidden city,


“As part of efforts to display more cultural relics in the Palace Museum in Beijing, the public will soon have access to Nandaku, or "the Grand Southern Warehouse", as a permanent exhibition hall for royal furniture from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the museum's director, Shan Jixiang, has announced.

The Palace Museum, also known as the Forbidden City, was China's palace from 1420 to the fall of the monarchy in 1911, and Nandaku was the biggest warehouse in the palace during the imperial years.

According to Shan, around 6,200 pieces of furniture had become scattered in more than 80 halls all over the Forbidden City.

Some were covered with thick dust, he said on Friday. "We decided to give them more respect by giving a specific exhibition for them."

A chair made of deer antlers used by the Qianlong Emperor is among the first rotated artifacts for the upcoming exhibition opening, together with dozens of other exquisite thrones, which were shown during a media visit on Friday.

"The mixture of exhibition hall and warehouse together is unprecedented in our museum," said Wang Ge, the exhibition curator in charge of the project. "This plan will provide opportunities for more furniture to be seen by the public."

He said Nandaku will eventually house more than 2,000 pieces of furniture. Exhibits will be rotated, and about 300 pieces can be seen by visitors during one trip.

Because many of the furniture pieces are large, few have had the opportunity to be moved out of the museum and exhibited elsewhere before, and there was not enough room in the Forbidden City to show them to more people.

A recent survey of the inventory found that 1.86 million artifacts are now housed in the Palace Museum. But Shan says only 2 percent of this huge collection can be displayed at any one time. He said the figure is expected to reach 8 percent by 2020.

Only about 30 percent of the museum's 720,000squaremeter area was opened to the public in 2002, but now 80 percent is open. The Palace Museum received 16 million visits in 2017.

Shan now wants more room within the Forbidden City to be used for exhibition of cultural relics.

As many as 13 other institutions used to have offices in the Forbidden City, but now only four are there. Shan said on Friday that the four will move out by 2020.

"We are still making plans with cultural relic administrations on how to use these new spaces," he said.”