In the early 1930’s, an all-out war between China and Japan was about to break out. To protect the vast imperial art collections that contained a million pieces of art—exquisite paintings on silk, vanishingly rare Ming porcelain, and the extraordinary Stone Drums of Qin, which were adorned with 2,500-year-old inscriptions of crucial cultural significance, the curators transported the imperial art collections thousands of miles across China—up rivers of white water, across mountain ranges, and through burning cities.