In Seattle

When the Allied soldiers broke into Peking's Forbidden City in 1900, they found in that square mile of yellow-tiled palaces the greatest assemblage of treasure in the modern world, collected for over 250 years by the Manchu Emperors. Ever since the fall of the Empire in 1911 bits of that treasure have been dribbling away, though not quite as fast as certain dealers would like collectors to believe. Six months ago when the remnant was moved from Peiping to Shanghai in fear of Japanese invasion, it occupied over 4.000 packing cases, was valued at $20,000.000 (TIME. Feb. 20). Important bits of that treasure have reached the outside world.

Biggest leak was hollow cheeked Henry Pu Yi, onetime Boy Emperor of China, now chief Whatnot of Manchukuo. Of the portions of the treasure which he was able to carry away, large sections went to Japan, other pieces were sold to private dealers. Last week citizens of Seattle trooped into Volunteer Park to inspect the brand new Art Museum, gaze in admiration at many of these Manchu driblets. The $300.000 building was a gift of Mrs. Eugene Fuller and her son Dr. Richard E. Fuller. Director of the Institute and Professor of Geology at the University of Washington. Gem of the Fuller collection and chief treasure of the new museum in a consultation room brought intact from the old Peiping Palace of Henry Pu Yi. Here are tomb jades and T'ang idols, furniture, an Emperor's throne, porcelain and statuary -- possibly the finest private collection of oriental art in the U. S. Away from the Manchu driblets, the rest of the Seattle Art Institute's collection drops sharply in value. With little money to spend for paintings, Dr. Fuller showed his good sense by filling his galleries not with mediocre pictures but full-sized German color reproductions of famed European masterpieces, valued at from $10 to $25 apiece, most of them printed by the famous commercial litho graph family of Adolf Hitler's best friend, booming, excitable Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl of Munich.

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