Chinese culture: all fired up

  ©Palace Museum

I don’t know why I waited until the last possible week to see the exhibition 'Son of Heaven,' part of the Europalia China extravaganza that has been happening in Brussels during the last few months, but I did. Then again, I did go and see it twice that week!

My delayed visit may have had something to do with the fact that there were so many cultural offerings during the Europalia China festival that there was almost too much choice. And of course that time-old trap of saying to myself: ‘Oh it’s on for months, I’ll have plenty of time to see it’.

An added impetus to see it in January though was that I had just come back from a two-week orchestral tour to China, my first trip to the country, and was all fired up about everything to do with Chinese culture.

“Son of Heaven,” whose title refers to China’s rulers, didn’t disappoint. The exhibits included portraits of emperors on silk wall hangings, bronze ritual vessels, a jade shroud, and silk dragon robes once worn by the rulers. There were even a couple of terracotta warriors – admittedly not quite as impressive as the (almost) complete terracotta army I had seen in their Chinese home of Xi’an just a few weeks earlier, but you could view the ones in Brussels much closer up and could more easily see traces of their original colours.

The Brussels exhibition covered 5,000 years of Chinese culture and so was just a taster of the country’s imperial wealth during that time. Nonetheless the exhibits, many of which were on display for the first time outside of China, were simply exquisite. I couldn’t resist going back a second time, and if I hadn’t left it so late I may well have gone back again.