ZHU DA (BADA SHANREN) (c. 1626 1705), ink on paper, hanging scroll, two birds on a rock,...

ZHU DA (BADA SHANREN) (c. 1626 1705), ink on paper, hanging scroll, two birds on a rock, 35.2 x 55.3cm

Provenance: With collectors seal of Ye Jingkui (1874-1949), Edward Osman Bruce Cowen, acquired ca. 1940s, thence by descent

Exhibited: Ashmoleum Museum, Oxford, 2016-2018

Edward Ted Cowen led a fascinating and extremely active life. He arrived in Tientsin in the late 1920s to live with his father who was the then editor of the North China Morning Post. He was invited by the great Jesuit philosopher Pere Teilhard de Chardin to accompany him on one of his treks into inner Mongolia but was prohibited from going by his father. Instead he became a cub reporter for the Far Eastern Times and after the death of his father, moved to Peking where he used his fluent Chinese as a buyer and manager for Henningsons, a well-known trader in furs and pig bristles, which necessitated long trips by camel to inner Mongolia.

In Peking he lived for some years in Wei Shan Tsui Lao T'ang, (Hall of Greatest Happiness and Goodness) in Prince Ch'ing's Palace within Ch'eng Wang and enjoyed an exuberant social life. He was a frequent dinner guest of Alexandria Munthe, mother of Alexander Grantham, (later to become Governor of HK), and counted amongst his friends Henri Vetch, publisher and bookseller working out The Grand Hotel and whom he met later in Hong Kong, and Alfie Koehn, whose Lotus Court Publications worked out of 23 Ta Pai Feng Hotung.

Throughout his time in China he acquired curios and built up an extraordinary collection of imperial costumes and embroideries which today forms the backbone of Hong Kong Museum of Arts collection of Chinese textiles. His collection of oracle bones were gifted to China via Prof. Chi Wenxin in 1982 and are recorded as the Cowen Collection by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His son, the present owner of this Zhu Da painting, well remembers his father describing how he bought a painting directly from Qi Baishi at his studio.

After surviving pneumonia in PUMC and with the advance of the Japanese restricting life in the capital, he was recruited to head-up the Reuters office in Shanghai as their only foreigner. In due course he was gaoled for nine months before being released as part of a prisoner exchange arranged by the IRC and the Swedish Govt. and sailed westward aboard the Kungsholm.

He spent his final decade living and working in Hong Kong and died there in 1974 aged sixty four.