When French President Jacques Chirac was organising his visit to Shanghai in October, he insisted on a meeting with Ma Chengyuan, the founder of the city's museum and a friend of the president, a connoisseur of Asian art.
But the meeting never happened because Ma, 77, died suddenly on September 25. Official newspapers reported the event but gave no cause of death. More than 100 people attended his funeral on October 9, and tributes poured in from home and overseas to a man who saved thousands of art treasures from destruction by the Red Guards and set up the mainland's most modern art museum.
'I called him that morning,' said Zhang Anqi, 72, a school classmate of Ma who worked with him at the museum for seven years until 1984, and then moved to Beijing, where she worked as a senior editor at the People's Publishing Company. 'He was very calm and lucid,' Ms Zhang said. 'He told me to look after myself.'
Friends said that Ma had carefully prepared his departure, having invited his daughter, who lives in Australia, to spend two weeks with him before she returned on September 22. Ma suffered from afflictions of old age - high blood pressure and a weak kidney - but followed to the letter the instructions of his doctor, taking every day the medicine he prescribed and eating a spartan diet of meat, vegetables and soup. He led a disciplined life, doing research at the museum or in his study at home, and was a man of a few words.
Ma was a strong personality and made enemies. His wife, Chen Zhiwu, declined to speak of her husband's last days.
Ms Zhang said that Ma was among the cream of her generation. 'We have lost a genius and a great teacher who loved cultural objects,' she said.