Book title: Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China’s Forbidden City
Format: Hybrid
Speaker: Adam Brookes
Date: Tuesday, 7 February 2023
Time: 5:30 PM – 6:45 PM PT
Organized by: Center for Asia Pacific Studies, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
You’re invited to join the University of San Francisco Center for Asia Pacific Studies for our first event of the spring semester featuring author Adam Brookes speaking about his new book Fragile Cargo: China’s Wartime Race to Save the Treasures of the Forbidden City.
In the early 1930s, as the Japanese military encroached on Chinese territory, curators at the Forbidden City in Peking crated up enormous numbers of art objects and texts for evacuation to safety. For sixteen years, the curators shepherded the finest works of the imperial collections, packed in twenty thousand wooden cases, many thousands of miles through war-torn China to protect them from air raids and plunder. Brookes will discuss this race to save the treasures of the Forbidden City and the challenges of uncovering stories from China’s Second World War.
Adam Brookes was for many years a reporter with BBC News, working as a correspondent in Indonesia, China, and the USA. He studied Chinese at SOAS, University of London, in the 1980s. He lives in Washington DC, where he writes fiction and non-fiction. Fragile Cargo will be published in the USA by Atria Books in February 2023.
Registration is required. If you would like to attend this event in-person, please register here.
Should you prefer to attend the online webinar, you may register here.
For more information, please visit the website here.
