Paris - The Story Behind Pagoda Paris

Pagoda Paris is now a private gallery

Many of the apartment blocks in Paris were designed by Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann, who had a hand in gentrifying the city, building public works like water and sewers, train stations, and boulevards. The limestone apartment buildings are uniform in size and had standard layouts.

That makes this curious Chinese-style building near Parc Monceau stick out even more. 

The wooden gate and green tiled roof

Not only is it red in colour, but has a jade green tiled roof with mythical animals perched on top, and carved wooden window frames.

It's called Pagoda Paris and was the home and gallery of Chinese antiques dealer Ching Tsai Loo (1880-1957). The building was originally a townhouse and then Loo bought it in 1925 and had it refurbished.

It's now a private museum, and I contacted Pagoda Paris to see if we could arrange a time to visit, but were told it was closed for renovations.

While Loo is known for introducing western collectors to Chinese and Asian art, his reputation was later mired in controversy because of how he illegally obtained these items, some of which were considered state treasures.

Here's the quick bio: Loo is originally from Huzhou, 300km west of Shanghai. He was orphaned at the age of 10 and as a teenager went to Nanxun, where he worked for a successful merchant named Zhang Baoshan. Zhang's son, Zhang Renjie was appointed to the Chinese embassy in France and Loo followed him to Paris in 1902. Few Chinese were living there at the time.

Zhang's family had a Chinese goods import company, and he would obtain Chinese antiques to sell; he would later return to China and financially support Chiang Kai-shek.

Loo was a controversial collector and dealer

When Loo first arrived, he wore traditional Chinese robes and a queue, but soon transformed, wearing western clothes and short hair. He called himself Cheng Tsai Loo and opened his own antiques shop, and cultivated relationships with Caucasian sinologists.

The fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 led to weak supervision of antiquities which made it relatively easy for Loo to procure items. He developed a chain of middlemen who would help him find things he might buy, sourced from impoverished families, imperial tombs and monasteries. Loo soon developed a reputation for selling out China to Europeans and Americans for his own profit.

World War I stopped the flow of Chinese goods to Europe, but not to the United States, where collectors and museums were keen on Chinese art and antiques. Loo discovered Americans were interested in Chinese antiques when he went to New York and opened a gallery there in 1915. 

However, the boom ended with the stock market crash in 1929, but things began to ramp up again in 1941 as there were more experts in Chinese art and history. His clients included the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Freer Gallery, Fogg Museum, the Rockefellers, and Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical executive. 

He bought this building in 1925

But once the Communists took over China in 1949, Loo was cut off from his sources, and some of his associates were arrested, and his nephew, who was his agent in China, fled to Hong Kong. Eventually Loo had to liquidate his stock. He tried to salvage his integrity, by stating that if those objects were not removed from the country, they would have been destroyed. 

After Loo died at the age of 77 in 1957, Pagoda Paris fell into disrepair, and it wasn't until 2010 when a private French investor bought it and turned it into a gallery and events space. Loo was survived by his French wife and four daughters.