“Decorative metal and Buddhist plastic art of China and Japan from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century” is the title of a scientific catalogue of East Asian metal objects from the Tsarskoe Selo collection, developed and recently published by our Museum.

Authored by Marina Lebedinskaya, Tsarskoe Selo head specialist on publications, the catalogue includes items of great historical, artistic and memorial value, most of which are published for the first time.

These applied art objects of metal, mostly Chinese of the Qing Dynasty period (1644–1911), can be divided in three categories: (1) censers (incense burners) and candle holders shaped as animals with riders and as birds, (2) figures of Buddhist gods and saints, and (3) objects of cloisonné and painted enamel on copper and bronze. The collection adorned the Chinese Hall of the Catherine Palace since the late eighteenth century and was added with new items until 1861.

Also included are eight cloisonné objects from the Alexander Palace, which Nicholas II either brought from his trip to the East or received as diplomatic gifts. Those are two Chinese bronze incense boxes with carved jade covers from the emperor’s Office, two Japanese paired vases from the Portrait Hall, three censers from the Moorish Bathroom and one small Japanese vase from the Palisander Drawing Room of Empress Alexandra. The small vase was looted from the palace during the Nazi occupation and then returned to the Museum by a Munich couple, the descendants of German military servicemen. Most of the other artifacts survived thanks to evacuation in 1941.

Stored in our reserves, all these objects should be reinstalled in their original places after the reconstruction of the interiors in the Alexander Palace and the private rooms of Catherine the Great in the Zubov Wing of the Catherine Palace.

The catalogue is available at the Official Museum Shops in the Vestibule of the Catherine Palace and outside in the park.