National Museum of China

This guide to the National Museum of China in Beijing traces a bronze vessel unearthed by a young farmer named Wu Peiwen in a village near Anyang in 1939, and the makeshift hiding place he built for it under his own stable to keep it from Japanese search parties. It follows the vessel through the end of the war, a gift for Chiang Kai-shek's sixtieth birthday, and the chaos of the 1949 civil war that left it behind in Nanjing. Stand close to the case and look for the traces of that stable floor still visible on the bronze.