The Chinese Collections, Royal Ontario Museum

A Canadian bishop and an English fur trader were responsible for bringing out of China over eight thousand artifacts during China's civil unrest in the 1920s and 1930s. If left, many would have been damaged and destroyed by waring warlords. Today they form the basis of the Royal Ontario Museum's Chinese Collections exhibited in its East Asian galleries in Toronto: The Bishop White Gallery, the Ming Tomb Gallery and the recently opened exhibition of Later Imperial China.

The Bishop White Galleries are named after William Charles White (1873-1960), a native of Toronto and the first Anglican Bishop to be stationed in Henan Provence (1901-31) who was active in getting many artifacts out of the country during the civil war period. Bishop White had learned that a warlord was marching on a town, where there was a marvellous fresco of great size. The monks had been warned that the soldiers would destroy the painting. The only way to save it was to take the picture down piece by piece, each piece being four inches thick, eighty pieces in all. The monks sold the painting to White to keep from starving.