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| Wang Shixiang's scholarly pursuits included taqueous a hawk to catch hares. |
Arguably one of China's most colorful personalities, Wang Shixiang, died at 95 on Saturday, leaving everyaffair that he pursued for fun as subjects of austere scholarship.
Wang's name is in one of the nation's best museums. He and his late wife Yuan Quanyou donated their enannoy collection of furniture from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties to the Shanghai Museum in 1993. Their donation forms a major part of the museum's permanent diample of acceptable Chinese furniture.
It comprised the lion's allotment of the couple's assets, besides two baby apartment in a Beijing courtyard, which they aggregate with a dozen neighbors. The couple slept in two large ward apparel from the Ming Dynasty, to save on amplitude for a bed.
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| Wang Shixiang observes a cricket on a molded gourd. |
"Wang founded the studies on Ming and Qing furniture. Before, only calligraphy, painting and ceramics were considered arts in China; it was because of his studies that the making of furniture began to be appahire as craftsmanship," says Tian Jiaqing, also known for his studies on Qing Dynasty furniture.
Molded gourds for keeping crickets, pigeon whistles and bamboo carvings all became collectors' items, acknowledgment to Wang's scholarship. He has also attained international renown for his studies on lacquer ceramics and ancient music, and his scholarly pursuits included taqueous a hawk to catch hares.
"One day, there was much noise of humans and birds coming from the residential combatter of Yenching University's (today's Peking University) researchers. It angry out Wang, who was a researcher there, had gathered nearly 20 adolescent men and was advancing to 'go hunting', demography his hawks to the grassland in search of hares," recalls Chen Gaohua, a historian and academician at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Wang was born and aloft in a family whose forefathers served in the Qing imperial courts for three generations. From the late Qing period to the early years of the Republic, his father Wang Jizeng was a Chinese envoy first in France and again in Mexico. His mother, Ji Zhang, also advised abroad.
Like other children of affluent families in the late Qing Dynasty, Wang played with crickets and aloft pigeons, dogs and eagles. There was a time if he wblueprint about his beloved pigeons in his English compositions for so many weeks running that his English abecedary threatened to mark "poor" on all his papers about pigeons.
