The Mysterious Trunk: A Puzzling Heritage


Who has not dreamed of discovering a treasure chest?

What child, even grown up, has never imagined to unearth a unique collection in the world?

In the winter of 2011, as I visited the south of France for a short stay in our family home, I remembered the wooden trunk that I had seen several times during my childhood. It was part of the charms that belonged to my great-grandfather, a famous soldier about whom I knew almost nothing, except for his face, whose picture sat in an imposing frame on the wall of our living room. On the first floor of our house there was a locked up room, which must have been an office in the past. There were various dusty items, a military suit, a Japanese screen, a saber and a replica of an aircraft carrier. The trunk sat in a corner, covered with a faded satin tablecloth. We used to open it only on rare occasions. When a guest of choice visited us, we did him the honors, religiously revealing the contents of the box, armed with a flashlight to underline some detail, to highlight the liveliness of the colors, the finesse of a face, the skill of the sculptor, to give some clumsy answer to the questions asked. Then we closed it again carefully, like a lid on his aura. The treasure returned to its protective darkness. Thus this trunk lived for more than seventy years, transmitted from generation to generation, between memory and obliviousness, half-hidden, half-shown.

What does it contain? Very precisely 109 figurines, carved by hand in charcoal wood, then painted and decorated. A work of extreme finesse. Their size, 8 to10 cm each. The contents of the trunk are distributed on three superimposed trays. Each contains thirty pieces, firmly attached to the board by a system of small cords attached to the base of the figurines. What they represent are whole facets of Shanghai society in its multiple occupations. The characters are notable, peasants, monks, peddlers or craftsmen, etc. Scenes from everyday life also showcase this great fresco: A father and his son are flying a kite. A mother, the umbrella in one hand, tenderly holds her son in the other. A dozen scenes of “Chinese torture” complete the picture. When we saw them, these scenes never failed to give us children a thrill of horror or guilty wonder. The displayed punishments can be symbolic. Cutting the infamous queue, a bamboo spanking. But they could also be cruel: hanging by the neck, punctured eyes, a body cut in two. One is inclined to think of the tortures inflicted during the Inquisition.

Many of these characters are easily identifiable. From mahjong players to the daoiste priest, from the plowman to the mandarin. But many figurines conceal more mystery. Certain professions, for example, appear completely alien to the contemporary Western observer, as are the thirty or so recorded inscriptions. Chinese ideograms or simple calligraphic exercise: impossible to say for a non-expert eye.

That winter, curiosity inspired me to learn more about the origin of the object. I knew that the trunk had been offered to my great-grandfather, Admiral Jules Le Bigot. He had been Commander-in-Chief of the Far East Naval Forces between 1937 and 1939. On the cover of the box, some clues were in evidence: a yellowed label, on which were printed on the upper left corner these few words:

“ORPHELINAT DE T’OU-SÈ-WÈ. ZI-KA-WEI – SHANGHAI “. On the right, a
hand-written date, “June 23, 1938”. Below, also by hand, “Admiral Le Bigot”.

These was a series of puzzles to explore and to solve. How had the link been established between this trunk and Admiral Le Bigot? What had been the destiny of this naval officer I had perceived until then as a remote grandfather, certainly a prestigious one, but whose great deeds were painfully superseding by the flow of oblivion. It was also necessary to try to decipher more systematically the contents of the trunk and to understand what it represented. I decided at first to bring the trunk back to Paris to study it. A happy intuition, because a few days later, violent rains fell on our family home and caused a significant water damage in the room where the figurines had stayed for decades. Perhaps this was a sign that I needed to preserve this historical legacy at all costs! I then contacted historians who could enlighten me on the why and how of this collection.

The meeting with Christian Henriot, a historian of contemporary China, came out of this project. We had a puzzle to rebuild with four hands. We now needed to investigate. At the diplomatic archives of Nantes, we found the diplomatic exchanges of the time, at the Service Historique des Armées, the career file of Admiral Le Bigot and the reports on the Sino-Japanese conflict, in the Shanghai press, the news on the mission of the admiral and the daily life of the war, at the Jesuit archives of Vanves, clues about the trunk and its contents, and finally, in the memories of sailors, personal anecdotes.


                                                                                               Ivan Macaux