In November 1951, a department of Oriental art was established at the National Gallery, shortly thereafter headed by the Indologist Lubor Hájek. Over the following decades, his collections managed to gather over ten thousand objects of Asian art and present them at dozens of temporary exhibitions. The unusually engaging publication One Hundred Years of One Tree is dedicated to Lubor Hájek on the occasion of his posthumous hundredth birthday. It details the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Asian art collections before World War II and brings closer the moments of the establishment of the Oriental department of the National Gallery in the early 1950s. It shows the sources from which the collections of the Oriental department drew and presents the personalities who contributed to its inception. It narrates the poignant story of two long-term exhibitions of Chinese art at the Troja Castle and in Benešov nad Ploučnicí and, almost in a detective manner, maps the circumstances of the fire at the Benešov castle in 1969, which destroyed part of the Asian collections. The concluding passages of the book portray the knowledgeable expert Lubor Hájek as a lover and connoisseur of Asian art, to whom the collections of the former Oriental department owe much of their form and content. Thus, the publication...
