Feature: Lady Lever's Chinese treasures win star billing in 2.8 mln-pound art gallery facelift

Hidden treasures of one of Britain's most important collections of Chinese fine art are to be given pride of place in a refurbishment project at a gallery built by a soap magnate in memory of his wife.

Work has started at the Lady Lever Art Gallery near Liverpool on a 2.8 million pound (about 4.23 million U.S. dollars) project to restore galleries to their glory days of the 1920s. Nearly half of the funding has come from Britain's Heritage Lottery Fund.

The gallery is a centerpiece in an entire village created by industrialist and philanthropist William Hesketh Lever to ensure his soap factory workers enjoyed decent housing.

Today, Port Sunlight village, which faces Liverpool on the southern bank of the River Mersey, is an international tourist destination.

One of Lever's biggest export markets was China, with the company's Sunlight brand soap popular across Asia. In addition to professional life, Lever had a particular fascination for Chinese art, particularly porcelain.

Lever's Chinese collection consists primarily of 17th to 18th century porcelain (Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong periods) with smaller collections of reverse paintings on glass, cloisonne, jade and other hardstones, snuff bottles and earlier ceramics of the Han, Tang and Song dynasties, with some items dating back more than 2,200 years.

Dr. Yupin Chung from the University of Glasgow spent three years researching and cataloguing each item at the Lady Lever Art Gallery.

She told Xinhua: "I was delighted and amazed when I realised the scale of what is one of the most important collections of Chinese art in the UK. It was also one of the largest private collections anywhere in the world, consisting of more than 1,000 items. I am delighted this new project will enable many more of these works to go on show at Lady Lever Gallery."

Architects and curators tasked with designing the newly revamped galleries invited members of the local Chinese community to visit.

Lever eventually became Lord Leverhulme. His wife, Lady Elizabeth Leverhulme, died in 1913, and Lord Leverhulme had the gallery built in her memory. It was opened in 1922 by Princess Beatrice, the youngest daughter of Queen Victoria.

It is a significant surviving example of late Victorian and Edwardian tastes and remains the only major public urban gallery in Britain built by its founder to house his own collection.

The gallery now forms part of the state-owned National Museums Liverpool (NML) collection.

A spokesman for NML said: "We are taking the South End galleries back to Lord Leverhulme's original vision, restoring the rooms to their former glory and making our world class objects more accessible to all. The updated galleries will open in 2016, but the rest of the gallery remains open, with lots to see and explore until then."

Director of art galleries at NML, Sandra Penketh, said: "This year marks the centenary of the laying of the gallery's foundation stone, so it is especially fitting that 100 years since it began we can continue Lever's vision for the gallery to inspire a love and understanding of art."

Today, the company Lord Leverhulme founded in 1886 lives on as Unilever, employing around 174,000 worldwide and with an annual turnover of around 59 billion dollars.

Despite its global reach, Unilever's registered office remains at Port Sunlight, just a few meters from the Lady Lever Art Gallery. Endit