Guardian of the past

SHORT AND CONFIDENT, Ma Chengyuan is the Machiavelli or Mr Fixit of the Shanghai Museum; a man who found a trick to triumph in every crisis.

When Red Guards arrived to storm the museum, he made his own staff put on Red Guard armbands to fool the invaders into thinking it was already occupied.

When his own staff turned radical and tortured him by dropping him on to the marble floors of the storeroom, Ma confessed to nothing.

His greatest achievement, however, was the grand reopening of the museum in 1996. Ma had to employ many ruses to get it built.

Now hailed as the country's first world-class museum, it sits opposite the colossal people's government building, shaped like some vast Shang dynasty bronze. Shanghai was East Asia's great antiques bazaar both before and after 1949. As the fortunes of war and revolution forced the rich and powerful to sell their collections of art, a great concentration of China's cultural heritage accumulated there. Ma and his colleagues had the pleasure of picking out the best and creating a permanent home for this collection.

More than any of Shanghai's new public buildings, the Shanghai Museum seems to have been willed into existence by one individual. Ma toured abroad raising more than $78 million from rich or cultured donors, especially among the Shanghai diaspora, to build the $542 million showcase. Those who had fled to Hong Kong were particularly generous.

The Min Chiu Society, the territory's exclusive club of collectors; Tsui Tsin-tong, the Kadoories, Joseph Hotung, Quincy Chuang and Sir Quo-wei Lee, contributed $20 million. Ten of the museum's 14 galleries commemorate Hong Kong benefactors: the Woo Po-shing Gallery of Chinese Bronze; the T T Tsui Gallery of Chinese Ceramics; the Run Run Shaw Gallery of Chinese Painting; the Joseph E Hotung Gallery of Chinese Jades; the Chuangs' Gallery of Classical Furniture; and the Kadoorie Gallery of Chinese Minority Nationalities Art.