WAN-GO WENG smuggled his family’s art collection out of China before the communists took over. He and his family now seek a museum to care for it. (Photograph by Wiqan Ang.)

Most of the Weng family wealth has hung on their walls for a century and a half. Many of the several hundred Chinese Imperial paintings and scrolls that now belong to Wan-go Weng would fetch $1 million or more on the market. But as some of the finest art and calligraphy anywhere—most come from the Ming and Qing dynasties, although some go as far back as the Song period—the collection is priceless as long as it is in the hands of a devoted steward. Weng has been that steward since he smuggled the entire collection out of China in 1948 on the eve of the communist revolution. The question of how to preserve it has long preoccupied him.

He has given or sold pieces to three major U.S. museums, all of which would presumably love to inherit the collection. He and his children have yet to make that decision, but it will be the main topic of a family meeting they plan to hold later this year. This spring, Weng put the collection on public view in a large-scale exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts titled "Through Six Generations: The Weng Collection of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy," which ran in the spring. He also began writing an autobiography and a multivolume study of the entire collection, hoping to leave a permanent record of the Weng family and their treasures.

Weng has determined that the only way to preserve the historical importance of the collection is to hand it over to the care of institutions. He and his wife, Virginia, who died in 2003, gave a number of pieces to their children, Ssu, a retired epidemiologist, and Hugo, a sound editor, gifting the art to move it out of their estate. Both children store their family treasures at Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Neither can take on the whole collection, because they would likely have to sell most of it to pay the estate taxes. Weng’s opinion of the death tax is a colorful one: "I always told my Chinese friends, if you want to be American, be prepared psychologically. You’re going to pay tax, even if you live on the moon. I like to pay as little tax as possible because I already paid—I don’t know how much in my life—a tremendous amount of money to Uncle Sam."

This particular aspect of American culture was certainly not something his ancestors ever expected. A paternal uncle with no children adopted Weng, a common custom in China at the time. That made him direct heir to the fine art and books handed down from his ancestor, Weng Tonghe (1830–1904), a high-ranking government official. As a boy, Weng grew up studying Chinese poetry and literature with tutors. When Japanese troops descended on his university, his anxious parents begged him to flee the country, which he did. He went on to study engineering at Purdue University. After graduating, he worked as an engineer for only three months; instead he gravitated to the arts. He drew cartoons for $16 a week, and during World War II made films for the State Department, which was where he met his future wife. Virginia Dzung was a Bryn Mawr graduate from a Zhejiang family of diplomats and bankers.

In 1948, Weng, by then ensconced as a filmmaker and translator in New York, made a return trip to China with Virginia and Ssu, then a toddler. The civil war between the communist army of Mao Zedong and the nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek was raging, and the communists were winning, creating a very dangerous environment for anyone with aristocratic lineage and valuable ancestral possessions. Weng packed the entire art and book collection into multiple trunks and booked a ticket on the last Northwest Airlines flight that would leave Shanghai for 30 years. The trunks would not fit on the plane, so Weng entrusted them to a freight forwarder who happened to be a white Russian who had escaped from the Soviet Union years before.

"Sometimes a person needs luck more than anything else," Weng says. "At a time like that, you don’t have much choice; you just have to trust someone." Luck was with him, as he later received a call from U.S. Customs telling him to come claim a shipment.

Having the collection safely back in his possession changed his life. Weng devoted himself to learning all he could about Chinese art. He studied the New York Public Library’s extensive collection of books on the subject. He wrote art history books, one of which received the China Book Prize, the country’s top publishing award, and edited eight volumes of his ancestor Weng Tonghe’s papers.

Only on very rare occasions has Weng sold pieces. He bought 22 acres in rural New Hampshire in 1978 and built a home with proceeds from the sale of a Ming-period painting. In 2000, he sold his ancestors’ books to the Shanghai Library for $4.5 million. He felt that the book collection should return to China so that scholars could make use of it. He also reclaimed ownership of his ancestral home and donated it to the Changshu municipal government. The home, where the courtyards date back to the Ming period, was named a provincial cultural monument, and its main hall, Caiyitang, a national cultural property. All of this follows Weng’s desire to keep his family history alive. He is adamant about not selling his art piece by piece to private collectors, especially the best works.

"The major items, which we consider as part of the heritage, should go into the right places," Weng says. "That is very important to me, because we are only temporary keepers. You have no right to let it be spoiled or lost and so forth . . . it is hard to give it up, but then you have to be very realistic."

Elizabeth Harris is a staff writer for Worth.

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