The revolutions of 20th-century Chinese history have presented intellectuals with a persistent problem: what to do with Chinese tradition. From May Fourth iconoclasts to Red Guards to reform-era critics of Chinese culture, making revolution has often included a rejection of the past. Yet these revolutions – and the governments they brought to power – also derived legitimacy by representing antiquity and historical continuity. The Chinese Communist Party, like its Nationalist predecessor, incorporated antiquity into its revolution by protecting and preserving cultural relics, or wenwu 文物. From its inception, the state promulgated regulations, built museums, designated historic sites and established systems for collection, creating a cultural bureaucracy that nationalized China's wenwu.Footnote ¹ But the fate of wenwu in Maoist China was not always secure, and the Attack on the Four Olds, a repudiation of old culture launched in the early years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), threatened to destroy cultural relics as excrescences on the revolution.

The problem of defining antiquity for revolution has precedents. In the case of revolutionary France, the abbé Henri Grégoire first coined the term “vandalism” in 1794 to defend the monuments of the ancien régime. Grégoire framed the preservation of monuments in the language of republican nationalism, creating a rhetoric which reinscribed monuments with revolution.Footnote ² In the same period museums were used to recontextualize culture, placing sculpture and paintings in chronological order and casting sacred objects as art.Footnote ³ As in the French case, the Russian Revolution began with a period of iconoclasm that was swiftly stemmed by the Bolshevik authorities. Within the first year of revolution, the provisional government established a system for protecting cultural objects for the masses. In this way, Richard Stites has argued, Bolshevik iconoclasm “turned out to be the iconoclasm of disarming, demythologizing, and antiquarianism,” following Lenin in building socialist culture out of the culture of past and present.Footnote ⁴

It is the image of Red Guard iconoclasm that remains in present-day understanding of the Cultural Revolution, and this period is seen as one of the most critical threats to Chinese culture in the 20th century.Footnote ⁵ A narrative of chaotic destruction is documented in both Chinese and Western scholarship, and in popular memoirs.Footnote ⁶ Several recent works, however, have challenged this view. Studying cultural practice during the Cultural Revolution, Paul Clark argues that the creativity and popularization of these arts – including opera, ballet, film and others – are part of the 20th-century narrative of modernizing culture in China.Footnote ⁷ In addition to cultural construction there was also cultural defence. Dahpon Ho's path-breaking study of preservation during the Four Olds campaign has shown that such attempts were central and local; using the example of the Confucius Temple complex, he also demonstrates that local resistance could be organized and bottom-up.Footnote ⁸ I attempt to contribute to this scholarship by offering a case study of Shanghai as a centre of art collection, by emphasizing the institutional role in preservationFootnote ⁹ and highlighting the complexity of the bureaucratic response.Footnote ¹⁰

This article, based on archival documents of the Shanghai Bureau of Culture, traces the reinvention of the cultural bureaucracy over the years 1966–68 and the subsequent shift in the language of preservation. It argues that during the Cultural Revolution, there was an institutionalized and ideologically legitimated movement to protect historic sites and cultural objects. During the Attack on the Four Olds, cultural officials were faced with a number of dilemmas. How could they protect the objects under their care without defying the revolution? How could they evaluate the direction of a political campaign and situate their work within the movement? What risks could they take at the local level and what had to wait for more powerful patronage?

This study begins with the Attack on the Four Olds in Shanghai in the summer of 1966. It shows that in 1966 the activities of Shanghai Museum officials and the Shanghai Cultural Relics Commission, Shanghai shi wenwu guanli weiyuanhui 上海市文物管理委员会, were mostly reactive, intervening to collect objects confiscated during house searches and salvaging wenwu from historic sites. It then examines a series of meetings in Beijing, convened by Qi Benyu 戚本禹 of the Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG) with members of Beijing cultural institutions such as the Palace Museum and the Beijing Library. It traces the April 1967 establishment of the Shanghai Municipal Small Group for Sorting Cultural Relics and Books, Shanghai shi chachao wenwu tushu qingli xiaozu 上海市查抄文物图书清理小组, to these meetings, using unpublished ephemera and the records of the Bureau of Culture to show that the CCRG created a space for local action that was then institutionalized by the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. Finally, it focuses on how the Wenwu Small Group wrote about its activities and how its self-construction changed over time. By late summer 1967 the Wenwu Small Group began to date its activities to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, defending cultural relics in the name of revolution and claiming that preservation was a mission of the Cultural Revolution all along. The Shanghai cultural officials, through their work and their writing about it, had an answer to the problem of antiquity in revolution: without historic continuity, there could be no new culture.

The Attack on the Four Olds and the Shanghai Cultural Relics Commission

The Cultural Revolution was simultaneously an attack on political enemies believed to be undermining the revolution and a call for China's young people to make revolution. For these young people, or Red Guards, making revolution included attacking the so-called Four Olds: old thinking, old culture, old customs and old habits. Believing that they were fulfilling Chairman Mao's directive, Red Guards set about ransacking personal collections and destroying historic sites and temples. By late August 1966 the Attack on the Four Olds had spread from Beijing all over the country.Footnote ¹¹ As the movement broke out in Shanghai, Red Guards streamed through the streets from dawn until the middle of the night, proclaiming themselves the critics of the old world and the builders of the new.Footnote ¹²

But despite the assertiveness of Red Guard claims and the violence of their actions, the Attack on the Four Olds was ill-defined. What exactly constituted the Four Olds, and what did it mean to attack them? As Wang Nianyi has argued, though the phrase Four Olds can be traced to central speeches and documents, the distinction between “old” and “new” was never made clear.Footnote ¹³ A manifesto by Red Guards in Beijing demonstrates how the Attack on the Four Olds could be open-ended. This statement listed “100 ways for destroying the old and establishing the new,” explaining that Red Guards must “raise high the great red banner of Mao Zedong Thought, open savage fire on the ‘Four Olds,’ and smash to bits imperialist, revisionist, and bourgeois goods and all things not in accord with Chairman Mao's thought.”Footnote ¹⁴ However, there is only one clear instruction on cultural relics in this manifesto: bookshops for classical books were ordered out of business. The manifesto declared, “all bookstores and libraries must be internally purified and must clear away all poisonous weeds; do not permit these goods of the bourgeois ideology to be poured into our youth ever again.”Footnote ¹⁵ Throughout, both the proper means for smashing the Four Olds and the correct attitude towards them remained vague.

Framed in this way, the Attack on the Four Olds gave rein to two possibilities. On the one hand, it could be interpreted as licence to total destruction. On the other, the lack of clear instruction suggested an opportunity to museum officials: they could collect cultural relics and preserve them in order to mount proper criticism. As Red Guards invaded the homes of Shanghai's well-to-do, searching for evidence of counterrevolution and remnants of the Four Olds, the meaning of “attack” determined the fate of the “olds.”Footnote ¹⁶ Recently published biographies of collectors, as well as interviews conducted in the reform period, show that officials from the Shanghai Museum sometimes intervened in the house searches.Footnote ¹⁷ In several examples, collectors telephoned the Shanghai Museum in the middle of a search, urging the staff to rush over with trucks and take the art objects back to the museum.Footnote ¹⁸

The archival record of the Shanghai Bureau of Culture reflects both the widespread damage to cultural relics and the political uncertainty in which the cultural officials operated. At the outset of the Cultural Revolution, the Bureau of Culture and the Cultural Relics Commission were still entrusted with wenwu units (wenwu baohu danwei 文物保护单位), and answered to the Shanghai Municipal Government.Footnote ¹⁹ In October 1966, the Shanghai Cultural Relics Commission inspected its wenwu units, which included graves, guildhalls, temples, a cathedral and historic houses.Footnote ²⁰ The purpose of the Commission's report to the People's Committee was to describe the state of damage to the city's 36 wenwu units and to request that their status as protected sites be revoked. The report treated the liquidation of the wenwu units as an ordinary bureaucratic matter, only once explaining that the change would accord with the “current great attack on the Four Olds and great establishment of the Four News in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”Footnote ²¹ Removing the wenwu unit label, the Commission transferred responsibility for the sites to lower levels of the municipal hierarchy, although some sites were not even transferred because they had been completely destroyed, gaodiao 搞掉, by Red Guards and their accompanying “revolutionary masses.”

While the Commission's report reflected the damaged state of the wenwu units in autumn 1966, and while its impassive language and withdrawal of responsibility indicates at once political extremity and exigency, a number of other suggestions reveal that there was a salvage operation at work. Four places, a temple, a guildhall and two pagodas in the suburbs, were determined to have “definite historical value,” and the Commission directed its members to take photographs and make surveys and maps if any of the buildings were later to be removed, reconstructed or demolished.Footnote ²² The Commission also recommended that some artifacts, including temple deities, Confucius tablets and grave markers, be removed and stored. And further, it stressed that if any construction or agricultural development was to take place in the vicinity of historic graves, it retained the right to co-ordinate excavation.Footnote ²³ Throughout, the report revealed that officials of the Cultural Relics Commission had been quietly engaging in damage control, actively selecting those “moveable” parts of the historic sites, taking them down and storing them elsewhere. Even the photography and surveys served the purposes of preservation, allowing buildings to remain a subject of study and allowing for the possibility of later restoration and rebuilding.

Yet the Commission's response to the Attack on the Four Olds remained a reactive programme of salvage and damage control. Much of the destruction was neither pre-empted nor prevented: all the images of the gods in the City God Temple were smashed, at the Chenxiang Pavilion all the Buddhas were destroyed, the Jing'an Temple lost all its cultural relics, the thousands of volumes of scripture at the Longhua Temple were burned, and the Xujiahui Cathedral's steeples were damaged and its interior torched.Footnote ²⁴ Whether designated wenwu units or not, Shanghai's historic sites were at the mercy of Red Guards. The cultural officials needed powerful patronage. It would not be until early 1967 that sanction from central authorities would grant them an ideological and institutional space in which to manoeuvre.

Reconstituting Cultural Authority at the Centre and the Localities

On 1 December 1966, Qi Benyu, a junior member of the Central Cultural Revolution Group, made a speech at the Palace Museum. Qi Benyu went to the Palace Museum as a CCRG member, but also as someone who was by background an intellectual and – as a later meeting revealed – someone standing in for those in the CCRG who wished to safeguard cultural relics.Footnote ²⁵ His revolutionary credentials made it possible for him to go to the Palace Museum, where he suggested to its officials that the Palace be converted into a site for inculcating class consciousness. He proposed a “Revolutionary Palace Museum,” which would not destroy its collection but instead protect cultural relics as the people's property and use the imperial collection for class education.Footnote ²⁶

About two months later, Qi Benyu convened a second meeting, this time with a large group of cultural officials assembled from Beijing libraries, cultural relic and archaeology work units, and museums.Footnote ²⁷ The transcript of this meeting of 27 January reveals a number of things about wenwu in Beijing in early 1967. First, it shows that ordinary people were pre-empting Red Guards, destroying their own collections or selling them for scrap.Footnote ²⁸ Second, it reveals that Beijing cultural institutions – like their Shanghai counterparts – were both acutely aware of the destruction of cultural relics and fearful to intervene. And finally, it suggests that Qi Benyu, representing others in the CCRG, was willing to provide political cover for the project of preservation.Footnote ²⁹

Qi opened his speech by invoking his comrades Chen Boda 陈伯达and Kang Sheng 康生. They were concerned, he stated, about the confiscated books being sold for scrap paper. He stressed that rare editions had to be preserved, and that the work of cultural relic management needed to be appropriately understood. He called on his audience to discuss the current situation.

An official from the China Bookstore (Zhongguo shudian 中国书店), which dealt in secondhand publications, spoke first. “The China Bookstore currently doesn't accept books.”

“Why?” demanded Qi.

“There are some schools who think that old books no longer have any use. The Institute for Architectural Science (Jianshu kexue yanjiuyan 建筑科学研究院) is completely stacked with books; we've carried over several cartloads. Residents are burning their calligraphy and painting.”

“Why?” asked Qi.

A representative from the New China Bookstore (Xinhua shudian 新华书店) echoed his colleague: “Old books are no longer being sold … At the local level they've also said that in the counties many books are being burned; during the Attack on the Four Olds in August, the number of books burned was especially large.” Other institutes chimed in to explain how books were being recycled for paper, that an important collection was designated for pulp, that the Beijing Library had sorted through its stacks and sent books to the paper plant, and that neither individuals nor institutions were willing to buy up these potentially dangerous books.

Qi Benyu was indignant. “I myself will buy them! There are some that are necessary for reading … You rebel groups also don't approve of burning books, [so] you can write a proposal, ‘Don't burn string-bound books,’ what about that? … When those in the humanities need to read these books, they can be made into internal publications!” He explained, “The proletariat needs to carry out struggle with [the books] and you also need these things as [objects of] criticism.”

Throughout his dialogue with the cultural work units, Qi Benyu's remarks jumped back and forth between practical measures and ideological justifications. He ordered cultural work units to take in old books. Paying a small amount for books, he asserted, should be permitted. The books could be maintained on site, managed by proletarian revolutionary factions, and if they required more storage space Qi suggested that they use the Beijing Confucius Temple. The paper factories, he continued, should have a meeting with the Institutes of History, the Bureau of Cultural Relics (Wenwu ju 文物局), the Beijing Library, the China Bookstore, and the library at the Academy of Sciences. Factory workers had to be trained to retrieve old books from scrap paper.

Qi Benyu returned several times to the idea of writing a proposal. While confirming the rightness of the Attack on the Four Olds, he stressed that burning books was not a solution. Although the Qin Emperor had burned books, the people in antiquity had not understood proper critique. “Real proletarians” would understand that only through criticism could problems be resolved. Qi explained that the fact that “the broad masses do not have to read these old things is a great liberation. But a small number of people have to read these things, those who research history can read them. This is in order to make criticism, in order to develop Marxism, Leninism and science.” At the end of the meeting Qi ordered the cultural institutes to make reports on the state of cultural preservation, and to confer with Red Guards. They should write a proposal, organize and protect cultural relics, search for objects confiscated by Red Guards, and ensure that these objects be turned over to the state. No matter what faction they belonged to, Qi stressed, all cultural institutions had to adhere to three principles: separate out books, protect and manage cultural relics, and do not destroy.Footnote ³⁰

Two weeks later, a wall flyer appeared on the streets in Shanghai. Signed by the “revolutionary factions” of Beijing's cultural institutions, the manifesto printed on the flyer made the argument that in order to establish China's new culture, Red Guards and proletarian revolutionaries had to protect and preserve the objects of China's ancient culture. The authors asserted that this project was both in line with Chairman Mao's teachings and appropriate to the new stage of the Cultural Revolution, announcing that:

Though this flyer appeared to be a bottom-up proposal from the Beijing cultural institutions, other factors make it evident that it was the directions of Qi Benyu — and by extension the CCRG – that made it possible. First, a number of the signatories were present at the January meeting.Footnote ³² Second, the authors followed many of Qi Benyu's instructions, both in the practical measures for preservation, and in their invocation of Red Guard activities and their revolutionary rhetoric. Third, in the context of the re-radicalizing of the Cultural Revolution after the February Countercurrent, the cultural institutions would have had ever more need for CCRG support.Footnote ³³ And finally, we know from the archive that the proposals in the document were backed by other suggestions that were sent through official channels of power at the same time. On the day the flyer was sent out, the Chinese Academy of Sciences sent a telegram to the Shanghai Bureau of Culture to request reports on cultural relics.Footnote ³⁴ A few days later, the CCRG issued a directive to the Ministry of Culture and the Bureau of Cultural Relics, notifying all subordinates to identify and protect metal Buddhas or other cultural relics that had been sent to metal smelting plants.Footnote ³⁵ So the cultural institutions in Beijing did meet and organize as Qi suggested, and the proposal on the flyer thus represents a turning point in the protection of cultural relics in the Cultural Revolution.

It is worth analysing the proposal that was posted in Shanghai, which was at once self-declaration, ideological lesson and manifesto. The proposal was a carefully crafted text, beginning with a Mao Zedong quotation from “New Democracy” which was already familiar to museum and cultural workers: “China's long period of feudal society created a magnificent ancient culture.” It was necessary to understand the development of ancient culture, distinguishing its feudal from its democratic nature, in order to “develop new democratic culture.”Footnote ³⁶ The proposal praised the accomplishments of the Cultural Revolution and confirmed the rightness of the Red Guards’ Attack on the Four Olds. Within the Cultural Bureaus, the authors affirmed, “capitalist revolutionary academics” had “carried out a dictatorship over the proletariat, giving a big green light to the classical books and periodicals, emphatically admiring them, using them to propagate the old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting classes, resisting the spread of Mao Zedong Thought and preparing for a restoration of the capitalist system.”Footnote ³⁷ But there was a correct way to attack the Four Olds and one could not burn books. Instead, one had to assimilate the excellence of the “ancient people's culture” while rejecting the bad influences of the Four Olds. In order to do this, Red Guards should “strengthen the protection for antiquated books and periodicals, paintings and calligraphy, and historical documents.”

The cultural institutions then proposed a series of practical measures for cultural protection. Purchasing bureaus for books and documents in first and second-tier cities should resume buying, in order to take such books out of circulation. Libraries, cultural palaces, offices, organizations and schools all over China should “temporarily seal up for safekeeping” the objects of their collection, and forbid their haphazard disposal. Likewise, any paper mill that might receive such materials should also seal them up, take care of them and allow the revolutionary rebel factions in the cultural bureaus to assist. Finally, private collections were not to be destroyed; “relevant bureaus should welcome and take in individual sales and donations.” The authors of the proposal called upon Red Guards for assistance in this revolutionary project.Footnote ³⁸

If the proposal of the cultural institutions is compared to the CCRG directive, also issued in mid-February 1967, there is a contrast in language and content. The proposal was both ideological and practical; the CCRG gave no ideological justification for the preservation of metal Buddhas. Originating at the centre of power, perhaps the source of authority was revolutionary enough. But when they are read together it can be seen how they were linked, and how the movement to preserve culture was both bottom-up and top-down. While the cultural institutions did not make their case independently, the patronage of the CCRG did not negate the agency of officials at Beijing or in Shanghai. Through both the signals and the directives from the centre, cultural authorities in Shanghai were granted a space to mobilize in their own local place.

Rewriting History: The Reports of the Wenwu Small Group

In April 1967, the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee established an ad hoc team of cultural workers from various institutions, the Shanghai Municipal Small Group for Sorting Cultural Relics and Books (Wenwu Small Group). The establishment of the Wenwu Small Group was facilitated by CCRG encouragement of “revolutionary cadres.”Footnote ³⁹ Its members came from 12 different work units, including the municipal Bureau of Culture and the Commission for Cultural Relics.Footnote ⁴⁰ It was divided into four teams, a wenwu and books receiving group, a group for the organization and management of these collected wenwu, a group for the rescue of metal objects and books, and a group of personnel who travelled to inspect the surrounding counties of Shanghai.Footnote ⁴¹ The reports that the Wenwu Small Group made during 1967 describe the state of cultural relics in the aftermath of the Attack on the Four Olds, and show how local officials attempted to deal with them.

Their first report, from the end of May 1967, documented the team's visits to over 70 work units, to understand and evaluate how these units, in both the municipality and the countryside, were dealing with confiscated wenwu. Within the city, over 100 workers collected and began to sort confiscated objects. The items were temporarily stored at the Jade Buddha Temple; books were channelled through cultural relic stores and sent onward to the Shanghai Library.Footnote ⁴² Going to the countryside, the Wenwu Small Group visited ten counties over six days, assessing local management of wenwu and books seized by Red Guards. The team found that each of the ten counties and even some of the communes had small groups for confiscated property, but reported that “the average worker in charge of management doesn't understand the professional work of wenwu and books … in some of the counties, the books and calligraphy were burned, the ceramics were broken and the metals were sold.”Footnote ⁴³ They found many cases of neglect and some of destruction; they remarked with chagrin that those responsible for Longhua Temple had incorrectly “used ‘Four Olds’ as a principle to deal with things,” burning all the books and scriptures at the temple.Footnote ⁴⁴ But in other cases, the Wenwu Small Group found more organization. Perhaps in response to the directives of the Bureau of Culture, the Songjiang County Museum had collected over 40,000 volumes of books and 3,000 pieces of painting and calligraphy.Footnote ⁴⁵ To improve local management, the Wenwu Small Group suggested that each county be assigned a supervisor from the Bureau of Culture and Education, that workers centralize confiscated wenwu and books in each county seat, and that local officials choose several artifacts from among those wenwu to show their workers how to recognize and salvage an object as a cultural relic.

In the weeks that the Wenwu Small Group was organizing logistics and gathering information, the Central Committee issued its own statement on protecting cultural relics and books on 14 May.Footnote ⁴⁶ The language of the Central Committee's statement was familiar. It praised the Cultural Revolution and its rupture with the Four Olds, but stressed that preserving the “cultural quintessence created by the labouring people throughout history” was needed for building new culture. The Central Committee reiterated ideas that cultural workers would have already heard: protecting revolutionary sites was a way to propagate Mao Zedong thought, ancient sites were to be transformed into places of class education, and books were to be saved as negative teaching materials and objects of criticism. The administrative measures that the Central Committee proposed were also redundant and are not enumerated here. Overall, the Central Committee's suggestions were repetitive and late, a rubber stamp for activities that were several months in the making. The documents from February 1967 onwards show that it was on the basis of directives from the CCRG that the Wenwu Small Group was formed. But perhaps this high-level veneer was politically desirable, because in June 1967 the Central Committee's name appeared in conjunction with the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee on yet another wall flyer explaining the protection of cultural relics to the public.

This June 1967 flyer looks much the same as the proposal from the Beijing cultural officials of February 1967. The text was prefaced by the same Mao Zedong quotation. But apart from this obligatory heading, the document, issued on 19 June 1967 by the Political Propaganda Group of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, had no other ideological argument. It explained that the Wenwu Small Group had been formed following the spirit of the Central Committee directive (no mention of ex post facto), and that it was led by the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. The text explained the institutional function of the Wenwu Small Group and called on both work units and Red Guards to help it identify confiscated objects.Footnote ⁴⁷ The flyer was straightforward, legitimating the Wenwu Small Group as a product of both central and local, Party and Revolutionary Committee action. What is more remarkable about the flyer is that, in contrast with the February proposal, there were no arguments for why the protection of cultural relics was important. With the exception of the Mao quotation as a header, it was a bureaucratic authorization of an already accepted doctrine rather than a revolutionary call to arms.

This change does indeed reflect the local political climate of the first half of 1967. While the authors of the February proposal had to justify their ideas to the public, by June the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee was firmly in control of Shanghai, and their approval of the Wenwu Small Group made its work both acceptable and officially “revolutionary.” But the shift, I would argue, was more than a transfer of bureaucratic power. Rather, by mid-1967 protecting cultural relics was ideologically legitimated, so much so that the Wenwu Small Group began to rewrite its institutional history, casting its revolutionary project as one which began with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution.Footnote ⁴⁸

Before turning to the content and language of these reports from August and November 1967, it is worth exploring a significant discrepancy in the Wenwu Small Group's construction of itself. Each of its reports began with a brief institutional history. In May 1967, it stated that it was established in April. From the archival record, there is no reason to doubt this.Footnote ⁴⁹ But by October 1967 it claimed its work began in August 1966, laying claim to any and all activities related to cultural preservation since the Cultural Revolution began. This temporal conflation changes our reading of the documents in two ways. First, it complicates understanding of the chronology of preservation efforts. If the work the reports describe began when the Wenwu Small Group was founded in April, then there was a shift in the cultural bureaucracy goals, from salvage and sorting to the targeted collection of objects still in the possession of private collectors. Alternatively, if the work they describe truly began in August 1966, then officials accompanied Red Guards from the outbreak of the Attack on the Four Olds. Of course, one possibility does not exclude the other, which leads to a second way of interpreting the historical fiction of the reports: the legitimation of the Wenwu Small Group and its mission allowed cultural officials to represent early efforts as purposeful and directed objectives of the Cultural Revolution itself.

Supported by central and local legitimacy, the Wenwu Small Group's rhetoric was more sophisticated and sure-footed than that of the Beijing cultural institutions earlier in the year. It also used Mao quotations, this time extracted from his report to the Sixth Plenum of the Central Committee in 1938:

Mao's quotation was a defence of history and its “precious treasures” (zhengui pin 珍贵品), and his words were used by the authors of the report to take their revolutionary project one step further. Rather than explain the collecting and preserving of objects scattered by Red Guards, Red Guard searches and struggle sessions were glorified as cultural preservation for the masses:

This ideological interpretation made it appear that preserving cultural things was the goal of the Cultural Revolution in the first place. The problem was not what to destroy – wenwu and books were sacrosanct – it was who owned them. This shift made it necessary to predate preservation to August 1966, ignore the Attack on the Four Olds and cast preservation as a revolutionary act that the Chairman himself had directed.

Collapsing the salvage operations from 1966 and the institutionalized collecting from 1967, the Wenwu Small Group reported that it had received items from over 600 work units in Shanghai. Between August 1966 and September 1967, it received 280,000 pieces of wenwu and 360,000 volumes of books. From the scrap metal plants they retrieved more than 8,000 jin of bronze objects and handicrafts and from the scrap paper mills over 4,000 jin of books.Footnote ⁵² The objects were described by category: revolutionary wenwu, historical wenwu and books. Paying special attention to the rare, the Wenwu Small Group compiled an index and a set of photographs of the most valuable wenwu and books.Footnote ⁵³ Of historical wenwu, there were Shang and Zhou bronzes, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing ceramics, books, seals, currency, and modern handicrafts. The authors highlighted particular objects, stressing those artifacts or books that were not even in state collections. At times they took on the tone of a connoisseur, describing the colour and firing of a certain Song ceramic and concluding that it could “reflect that in our country, as early as the Song dynasty, the ceramic technique had already reached a relatively high level.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Even foreign-language books were catalogued for their ideological and scientific value, and could be simultaneously “criminal testimony” to imperialist invasion and “important materials for the research of the artistic creativity of the ancient working masses.”Footnote ⁵⁵ All objects were collected, catalogued and pressed into service of nation and revolution.

It remains unclear exactly how all of these objects were collected. When was the division between ad hoc and organized collecting? The numbers indicate that much acquisition happened after the autumn of 1967; the number of books, for example, jumped from 360,000 volumes in September 1967 to 5,470,000 by the end of 1968.Footnote ⁵⁶ But this estimate speaks to the number of objects processed rather than the number confiscated.

Another aspect of collection remains unclear. The Wenwu Small Group repeatedly referred to having help from the masses. From the June flyer describing its activities and by its own account, it was actively publicizing its work and endeavouring to “mobilize the masses, trust the masses and rely on the masses.” In large measure this seems to have referred to propaganda, distributing leaflets and holding meetings on the importance of wenwu.Footnote ⁵⁷ By extension this meant that the Wenwu Small Group was sometimes tipped off to the location of hidden cultural relics, and in the report the authors were certain to give “the masses” due credit. In one example at the Shanghai Rubber Research Institute, they wrote:

And yet another group figured mysteriously in the process: the cultural workers themselves. For it seemed that they were providing specialists and specialized knowledge in order to target certain collectors and collections. As the Wenwu Small Group explained:

If one takes the report at face value, it appears that Red Guards received help from cultural officials. It was information from these experts, the Wenwu Small Group claimed, that helped the revolutionary masses of the Shanghai Flour Factory confiscate a Qin dynasty scale from a collector called Gong Xuren. And it was also the knowledge of the specialists – together with Mao Zedong Thought – that revealed to Red Guards that book collector and “capitalist” Qin Qing was hiding his rare books of rubbings behind a case draped with Mao's picture.Footnote ⁶⁰ But by now we know not to take the Wenwu Small Group at face value, and recent biographies have shown that these house searches – and the role of Red Guard, collector and official – were far more complicated than confiscation.Footnote ⁶¹

The actual position of the cultural officials in the summer of 1966, as the archival record has shown, was tenuous. Even if there was some level of co-ordination by “revolutionary factions” at that time, a cultural official was taking a considerable risk to protect wenwu. It was only after central authority legitimated local action that the organized work of the Wenwu Small Group could begin. But once it did, the Wenwu Small Group laid claim to all efforts at cultural preservation, situating their institutional origins at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Cultural preservation could be institutionalized (through the Wenwu Small Group) and legitimized (through the ways in which it was perceived) because of the ideological turn that made it revolutionary. As the Wenwu Small Group concluded in November of 1967, the work of protecting wenwu “includes protecting state property from damage, includes the protection of the cultural quintessence created by the historical working masses, and includes the critical inheritance of the exemplary heritage of the Chinese nation. The question of how to build a new proletarian culture is [how to] carry forward the revolutionary cause and forge ahead into the future.”Footnote ⁶²

In the end, the Wenwu Small Group never made it to the latter steps. It collected wenwu, but how these relics of old culture would create new culture was left unexplained. Whether the wenwu and books were thought to have evil influence or whether they were thought to contain cultural quintessence, they were safely put away. Critical rectification was saved for a later date. As one of the early directives to the Shanghai smelting plants explained, wenwu should be held until the movement was over.Footnote ⁶³ In the words of Shen Zhiyu 沈之瑜, a contemporary museum official who was asked by his daughter about the use of ancient things, “I believe history is always progressive; a period of regression is only temporary.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Underlying Shen's properly Marxist comment was a belief in the endurance of the Chinese tradition; perhaps it was this belief that spurred the cultural bureaucracy to save the culture they had originally been charged with safeguarding.