On April 6, buyers in Hong Kong will have their first opportunity to buy the calligraphy of the most famous quisling in China during the last century.
Sotheby's is auctioning two works by Wang Jingwei , the Kuomintang vice-president who defected to Japan in 1938 and set up a puppet Government of National Salvation in Nanjing in 1940. Highly educated and a close associate of Sun Yat-sen, he considered himself and not Chiang Kai-shek as Sun's true successor.
For the last 60 years, Wang has been despised by both Communists and Nationalists as a national traitor. When Chiang returned to Nanjing after the end of the second world war, he destroyed Wang's tomb and burned his body.
For decades, Wang's poems and calligraphy were soiled goods. Those who possessed them kept them out of public view and few wanted to collect them. A first auction of his calligraphy was held in Shanghai in 1993 and 1994 - there were few buyers and the top price did not exceed 220,000 yuan.
But with the explosion of private wealth and weakening of ideology on the mainland, they have become investment items, as eligible as antiques, jade, coins, traditional paintings and apartments in Mid-Levels or Manhattan. At an auction last year in Beijing, a piece of calligraphy by Wang sold at auction for 112,000 yuan (HK$127,300), from a starting price of 50,000.
'Wang Jingwei was a big traitor but also had major literary talent,' said Cheung Chiu-kwan, head of the Chinese paintings department at Sotheby's. 'His calligraphy has its own distinctive style. The value of his art should not be obscured by his bad reputation.