In Toronto, the Gateway to Ancient China

The Wallstreet Journal, August 13, 2013 by Lee Lawrence

Royal Ontario Museum

The tomb of Gen. Zu Dashou, a highlight of the Gallery of Chinese Architecture at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Ask Torontonians what they most associate with the Royal Ontario Museum—or the ROM, as they call it—and they will likely point to dinosaurs, totem poles, mummies or bats. Ask the same question of Asian-art scholars anywhere in North America, and chances are they will refer you straightaway to the Chinese collection.

A cornerstone of the ROM since its opening in 1914, the Chinese holdings total more than 30,000 objects, of which some 3,300 are on display. At the core are purchases by Bishop William C. White, a Canadian missionary with an eye for antiquities. From 1908 until his return from China in 1934, he bought for the ROM, then became the first curator of its Far Eastern division, selling some of his personal collection to the museum. Equally crucial were purchases made from 1918 onward by George Crofts, a fur trader and collector who discovered the ROM serendipitously.

As senior curator Chen Shen notes, the ROM may not have masterpiece examples from every place and time, but its Chinese collection is impressively comprehensive. Interested in Tang funerary figurines, specifically of women holding purses? Or looking for rare depictions of four-clawed dragons? Do what Dorothy Wong of the University of Virginia did when researching a book on Chinese steles. Remember the ROM. "It's a treasure house," she says.

As part of its 2003-08 overhaul and expansion, the museum spent approximately C$8.8 million ($8.5 million) to create a 20,000-square-foot space to showcase this trove. In one section, Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) murals fill three walls with Buddhist and Taoist imagery, while nearby the focus is on third- to 19th-century religious and secular statues and other objects. A third section adopts an open-storage approach, shelves brimming with vessels, figurines, reliefs and bronzeware spanning 7,000 years.

Together, these areas invite us to appreciate artworks as stand-alone objects—the sturdy grace of a 6-foot-tall wood statue of Guanyin from the 12th century, the verve of a female polo player in a Tang dynasty (618-907) figurine, or the rhythmic geometrics of a 6,000-year-old painted pot from northwest China. As we step into the Gallery of Chinese Architecture, however, we embark on a new experience altogether.

At first, the gallery feels slightly disorienting. Light pours from a skylight four stories above, adding to the spaciousness of a display that falls somewhere between museum and faux tourist site. Some sculptural works and architectural elements are exhibited in cases, others are assembled into structures. The genius is that, in this unusual presentation, each informs the other. The array of Han (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) through Qing (1644-1911) roof tiles and architectural fragments, for example, has a greater impact thanks to the replica of a palace facade from the Forbidden City, authentic in every detail, from its traditional wood joinery to its adorned tile roof. The facade also helps us better imagine the original scale of the buildings—temples, houses, watchtower—whose miniature versions on display were made to accompany the deceased in the afterlife.

Just as compelling are the tombs, whose juxtaposition with the facade drives home a salient characteristic of Chinese architecture. Structures for the living, Ms. Wong explains, "are traditionally made of perishable materials—thatch, wood, ceramic tiles. Only city walls were made of pounded earth and stone." By contrast, the Chinese have historically favored permanent materials such as stone and hard-baked clay to house their dead. Even the burial models are made of earthenware, yielding invaluable information about stylistic preferences, lifestyles, sometimes even construction techniques long after the wood originals have perished.

There are also enough examples to show that tomb styles differed according to region, time and taste. In a small chamber from a second-century tomb complex in Shanxi province, shallow reliefs on sandstone show processions and hunts in silhouette—you have to imagine them once painted in red and black. These are very different from the hunting scenes on earthenware slabs that formed the wall of a tomb dated 206 B.C.-A.D. 24 in neighboring Henan province. Here, the artisans created compositions by pressing stamps into the wet clay: lively horses, riders, birds, boars and deer. In one, the deer have tiny arrows piercing their backs, while in the companion slab, where there are no hunters, you can see the trace of a finger trying to rub the arrows out.

One Han fragment shows a warrior running along the back of a sinuous dragon. Famous in Chinese art as auspicious symbols, dragons acquired particular meaning in tombs because, as Mr. Shen explains, "only they can travel between the underworld, the human world and the heavenly world." Far from battling the dragon, the warrior is hitching a ride.

As ethnic Chinese, the Han and their burial practices became a reference point for later dynasties. This helps explains the resistance to the Buddhist practice of cremation even as people embraced the religion itself. It also explains the pair of 17th-century camels and larger-than-life officials we find ourselves walking between. Their placement evokes the Han-inspired "spirit path" that guided the funeral procession (of which there is a terra cotta miniature in a wall case) to the tomb. Here, the truncated path leads to the replicated burial mound of Gen. Zu Dashou, who died in 1656.

In 1921, Crofts shipped the tomb reliefs and statuary to the ROM, where they are displayed not as isolated artworks but as a reconstructed ensemble, inviting visitors to enter the burial compound as mourners once did. We walk through a gate between reliefs of qilin, mythical animals with leonine bodies, horns, dragonlike heads and skin bristling with scales. As they did in the Han, the mythical animals signal our passage from the secular to the sacred. On the other side, the reliefs both on the gateway and the mound itself depict the heavenly world—frolicking deer, swooping birds, playful monkeys and, in between scenes of Taoist immortals enjoying eternity, the familiar sinuous figures of dragons.

Ms. Lawrence is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.