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One-room Mao museum with 50,000 items for sale: See 75-year-old owner for details

 

There’s that age-old adage of buying when the market is down.

Right now, you probably can get a bonus of buying something of interest particularly low - a one-room museum in Chengdu stuffed with memorabilia honoring Mao Zedong, the late Communist leader who presided over the founding of the People’s Republic of China. 

Tom Herbert of the chengdon’t blog has the details.

Herbert notes that Wang Anting’s collection which is now estimated at 50,000 items – including plates, a slew of red badges with Mao’s profile, small busts and statues – started about 20 years ago.

You’ll have to verify all the items yourself. I think it would be fascinating to get Wang to comment on each piece that he has and how it entered his collection.

Apparently, Wang’s age is catching up with him and the museum, which is in a province known for its mapo tofu and off a sidestreet, is, well, on the free market in a sense.

As Herbert quotes Wang:

I’d be happy to let someone else have the museum – for the right price!…I don’t want to just give my collection away to children, they have no idea what Chairman Mao represents, and would just throw my badges away.  I need someone who can appreciate them and keep his memory alive.

And obviously, someone who wants to invest in a Mao museum.

If you’re thinking about starting a museum to honor Franklin D. Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy, the former U.S. presidents, those ideas have been taken.

Given the power of the Internet, you could probably operate the Mao museum thousands of miles away in your home city, if you live outside of China.

You could probably even employ one of those sophisticated free market devices in which you buy the museum and then lease it back to Wang and hire him to operate it.

Others also have been collecting Mao memorabilia over the years and the topic of quality control with Mao items has surfaced recently. There’s also a Mao library in his native Hunan province.

But a 75-year-old man who has been operating his own down-home museum and asks for donations from visitors adds some great color to those who follow Mao.

Much has been said over the decades about Mao. It looks like this forthcoming book – Was Mao Really a Monster? – will be a talker. It’s a scholarly response to the controversial tome, Mao: The Unknown Story.

Artists and fashion designers have used his image or name in numerous ways over the years, too.

If you like the famous Mao Jacket, Shanghai Tang is offering a nice suede one for $1,250.

 

 

The Asia Society last year had a 5.5-ton Mao Jacket sculpture installed in New York City on Park Avenue.

The group also held an exhibit looking at art and China’s revolution.

I like the fact that there are various types of maps that show the path Mao and his followers took on The Long March, the mountainous route that the Red Army used to escape from Nationalist forces in the 1930s.

All of this Mao talk reminds me that during one of my trips I bought a bunch of those heavy, industrial-strength red Mao cigarette lighters from China.

The outside had an image of him glued or attached to it.

You’d pop it open, flame it up and a glow of some sort of color would appear.

Then, the great part - in terms of history-turned-pop culture: The lighter would play, “The East is Red.”

When I was a travel writer, I had the opportunity to visit his school and hometown in Hunan province.

But when I went to a mountainous area in Jiangxi province, where Mao and his followers lived in caves, the historical moment struck me.

“This is it,” I recalled.

Yes, if you’re wondering, I forgot to note that Mao’s grandson is a major general in the People’s Liberation Army.

My thanks to Larry Johnson for letting me know about the museum.