Art: Yehonala’s Loot

“I nearly dropped my spectacles,” said 62-year-old Hugh Alexander Matier. Browsing through the Seattle Art Museum’s far eastern collection, scholarly amateur Orientalist Matier stopped short before a piece of heavily carved jade, five inches square. Looking at its two imperial dragons, its authentic yellow tassels and its archaic characters, he was suddenly certain that he had found the long lost Imperial Seal of China’s Hsien Feng.

The dissolute Emperor, who often complained of its excessive weight (10 Ibs.), used the Imperial Seal to authenticate all official documents. Like the engraving on currency, its elaborate background carving was designed to prevent counterfeit.

When the old Emperor died in 1862, so the story goes, his favorite concubine Yehonala sent a eunuch to the imperial death-chamber to steal the seal. Her rivals had won the dying Emperor’s signature to papers granting them regency over the infant heir, but without the seal’s imprint the documents were invalid. The ambitious Yehonala, better known as the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, seized the Manchu throne for herself. For 47 years she made and broke emperors at her will.* It was China’s last glittering, decadent blaze of imperial glory.

In San Francisco last week Gump’s, the art dealers who sold the seal to Seattle’s Museum in 1935, had forgotten where they acquired it. But if it is truly the lost seal (as Chinese Consul Kiang Yi-seng and the Museum’s Director, Dr. Richard E. Fuller, believe it to be because of the references to Hsien Feng deciphered from its characters), chances are that it came to the U.S. some time after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. During that chaotic period hoodlums and allied soldiers had ample opportunity to plunder the fabulous riches of Tzu Hsi’s Imperial Palaces at Peking.

*Her last choice, a two-year-old infant, is now Henry Pu Yi, Emperor of Japan’s puppet state of Manchukuo.