UK gallery shedding light on Chinese culture's past and present

Important donations

Many of the exhibits at the gallery come from people who traveled between Manchester and China in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Other items have been acquired specifically for the gallery, including a dragon robe and Chinese display cabinet.

The blue robe was originally made for a prince at the end of the Qing Dynasty and, during the 1911 Revolution in China, he lost his life, according to Sitch. He says a missionary is thought to have bought it and brought it back to the UK, and the missionary's descendant donated the item to the museum.

The display cabinet tells the folk love story of Niulang, a cowherd, and Zhinyu, a weaver, who were separated by the Milky Way in space and could only meet once a year across a bridge created by magpies during the Qixi Festival or Chinese Valentine's Day, which falls on the seventh day of the seventh month of the Chinese calendar.

A closer look at the cabinet reveals small carved wooden models of Niulang and Zhinyu, with the cowherd plowing with an ox and the weaver sitting at a spinning wheel.

And the gallery has many donations from the local community, including a life-size acupuncture model.

"It's important to us that we show a selection of some of the finest Chinese objects, not just from our own collection but from collections across the city altogether," says Sitch.

The bronze acupuncture model was donated by Professor Tang Shulan, who runs a traditional Chinese medicine practice in Manchester.

Standing in a case themed on TCM, along with an 18th- or 19th-century Chinese meridian map collected in China by a Manchester surgeon called Thomas Bellot (1806-57), visitors can see the little holes in the model that show where acupuncture learners would practice in the treatment of different ailments with needles.

The display is aimed at increasing people's knowledge of healthy lifestyles and longevity.

In a case near the far end of the gallery is one of the collection's most unusual pieces — an honorific umbrella, which is a symbol of honor and appreciation.

The item was probably inspired by a custom from the Qing Dynasty in which local people presented an umbrella to a local official who was about to retire, to express their gratitude to him, according to research by Sitch and Zong Fang, the gallery's research assistant.

The umbrella on display was given to Lieutenant Thomas Walsh, at the end of World War I, by members of the Chinese Labour Corps, who worked in northern France helping Britain and France in the war with Germany and allies. Walsh gave the umbrella to Manchester Museum on Jan 20, 1920.

Walsh, who was from the English county of Lancashire and who had studied Mandarin at the University of Manchester, served on the Western Front with the 119th Company of the Chinese Labour Corps. Because of his knowledge of the Chinese language, it is likely he was able to form a good working relationship with Chinese people and understand their needs in the difficult and dangerous situations presented by the war, explains Sitch.

Very few of the umbrellas were presented to British or allied officers and the fact that Walsh was given one suggests he was held in very high regard.

"This is a symbol of their appreciation. And this was something that Walsh was very proud of, to the end of his life," Sitch says. "And he was so proud of it, he wanted to give it to a museum so it will be preserved for the future. And we are very grateful to him that he did."

Because of the research, Sitch says the gallery contacted a member of Walsh's family, who provided the museum with photos of his great uncle and some of the Chinese members of the Chinese Labour Corps.