Yan
Hong-sen (顏鴻森)
has a high-profile day job, and a hobby that has made him the subject
of several newspaper and magazine articles. Yan is a university chair
professor in mechanical engineering and executive vice president of
National Cheng Kung University
in Tainan City. Outside academic circles, he is best known for
building up a remarkable collection of household objects that few
people pay much attention to: Locks, specifically ancient Chinese
padlocks.
Yan,
who was born in 1951, was in the news again recently when he decided
to donate the bulk of his collection to the National Science and Technology Museum
in Kaohsiung City. On November 8, the museum will inaugurate a
special exhibition of Yan’s locks. These items will then be
displayed in other cities before taking up a permanent place in the
Power and Machines Exhibition Hall on the NSTM’s second floor.
In September, some of Yan’s
locks were displayed at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur - the first time any of them were exhibited overseas.
Yan had to politely refuse previous requests to send locks to museums
and other places outside the ROC; as an individual without the
backing of a major institution, he lacked the time and administrative
resources to handle shipping, insurance and other issues.
Between 1986 and 2007, Yan acquired
more than 700 locks; media reports describing his collection as
numbering more than 900 are simply inaccurate, he says. Although it
is not a huge number, the collection is rich in different types and
shapes. Some are the only ones of their kind remaining in the world.
The oldest is around 2,000 years old, but the majority dates from the
Qing dynasty or early 20th century. Not all are being consigned to
the museum this year. The 150 currently exhibited in NCKU Museum will
stay where they are until November 2014, then head south to
Kaohsiung. Yan says he is keeping another 20 at home so he has
something to show friends and visitors. However, those will also
eventually go to the NSTM.
Yan is confident the NSTM will have
one of the world’s great public collections of locks, such as the
Locks and Fastenings Gallery of Science Museum in London and
Germany’s Deutsches Schloss und Beschlagemuseum at Velbert. Yan has
visited both, naturally.
Yan’s
desire to collect came long before he knew what kind of thing he
would concentrate on. He first pondered the possibility of building a
collection in 1977, while studying at the University of Kentucky. His
supervisor, Dr. D. C. Tao (陶德昌),
had an interest in antique European furniture and let Yan to take a
close look at the collection he had built. But such items were way
beyond Yan's modest means, so he did nothing to turn his dream into
reality.
A couple of years later, Yan’s
interest in building a collection was rekindled when his doctoral
supervisor at Purdue University, the late Professor Allen S. Hall
Jr., showed him the 100-plus weighing scales he had accumulated. It
was then that Yan realized: “To be a collector, it isn't necessary
to be a millionaire. You just have to identify a good topic.”
By May 1980, Yan had decided that
his future collection would have to be mechanical in nature, to fit
in with his engineering background, and related to Chinese culture.
Moreover, the items should be neither too large, too expensive, nor
commonly collected. But years were to pass before Yan's “Eureka!”
moment. One day in November 1986, killing time at a vendor’s stall
near Taipei Main Railway Station at the end of a business trip, he
found a traditional Chinese lock at least 50 years old. Immediately
grasping that padlocks met all of his criteria, he purchased the
piece.
By mid-1996, Yan had around 350
locks. Few collectors let their children play with the items they so
painstakingly located and acquired, but the NCKU executive
vice-president says: “For a kid, playing with a lock is like doing
a puzzle. I'm not sure what my children learned by playing with the
locks, but they did treat them as unusual toys which other kids
didn't have.”
After being appointed the founding
director of NCKU Museum in November 2007, Yan stopped collecting so
as to avoid any possible conflict of interest. No one has ever sought
to buy his collection; this, Yan says, is because he has always made
it clear that he had no interest in selling his locks, and would
donate them when the time and offer were right.
Yan, who feels his main achievement
is preserving locks so they can be better understood by future
researchers, says: “The real value of a collector isn’t just
acquiring, but also researching, finding something new and sharing
it.”
For some years, Yan planned to
establish his own lock museum. A dozen years ago, he bought a plot of
land in what was then Tainan County (now merged with Tainan City) for
that purpose. But eventually he concluded a major museum would make a
better home for his locks, and began letting it be known that he was
willing to give away his entire collection if an institution could
meet these conditions: That the locks be researched; and that they be
on public display. Yan likens the hunt for a permanent home for his
locks to, “making sure your daughter finds a good husband.”
Yan
and the NSTM have a long relationship; he served as the museum’s
director-general from 2002 to 2004. However, several years elapsed
between Yan announcing that he wished to donate his locks to a
museum, and agreement being reached with the NSTM. It was in January
2011 that Chen Shiunn-shyang (陳訓祥)
- formerly Yan’s deputy at the NSTM and now incumbent
director-general - told Yan that one of the museum’s curator
positions was about to fall vacant, and that he was willing to
appoint a lock specialist to the post if Yan were to commit his
collection to the NSTM. Yan readily agreed, and comments: “To have
one curator specializing almost full-time in one field is rare in
Taiwan’s museums. Most curators have to cover several areas.”
Before
Yan began writing papers about his hobby, almost nothing had been
published on the subject of ancient Chinese locks. A second edition
of his bilingual book The
Beauty of Ancient Chinese Locks
was published in 2003 by the Ancient Chinese Machinery Cultural
Foundation, an organization Yan established with others who share his
passion. In one of the book’s many fascinating sections, Yan
explains that the keyhole of a lock is often an indication of the
original owner's social status: “The shape of the Chinese character
一 [yī]
was used by civilians, 士
[shì]
was used by the intellectual class, and 吉
[jí]
was used by nobles and high-rank officials.”
For some of the locks Yan acquired,
simply having the right key does not guarantee quick access. The
keyhole may be disguised, or the key and hole so oddly shaped as to
create a 3D puzzle.
Yan found locks made of iron,
bronze, copper, cupronickel and brass, and even silver. Locks of
humble origin are usually wooden rectangles, while those crafted for
nobles after Tang dynasty often bear fine engravings and are shaped
like musical instruments or animals. Fish-shaped locks were
especially popular, Yan explains, because fish sleep with their eyes
open, and so were traditionally regarded as symbols of vigilance.
Traditional Chinese combination locks do not use numerals like the
combination mechanisms on modern suitcases, but rather Chinese
characters.
The locks Yan spent years finding
will no longer be in his possession, but he expects they will
continue to play a major role in his life. He has no intention of
ceasing to research, write and lecture about locks, saying
emphatically: “This will always be my hobby!”
This article was written for Culture.Tw, a government-sponsored website. I was paid for it very soon after sending it in, but the website wasn't updated for some months and the piece didn't appear until late December. To see the online version, go here. The photos were taken by Sam Li and provided by Yan Hong-sen.
3 comments:
I Like It
These locks are old type of locks and its repairing is costly.Now in the market various kind of new locks are avail for the better security which can be easily installed to your home by the Locksmith. So i must say try the new security locks as they can avail to you at low price and its repairing is also very cheap.
Those locks are not available now a days.I am seeing such locks for the first time.May be some locksmiths are working from years might have those locks like but in now days those locks have no value.
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