The Karlbeck Syndicate 1930-1934

History of archaeology, not merely archaeology itself, has become and important subject in contemporary scholarship. The Karlbeck Syndicate was a Western collector's group that operated in the 1930s and focussed on the collecting and studying of early Chinese art. This study provides a contextual understanding how Chinese collections were formed in the first decades of the Twentieth Century. The syndicate is named after Orvar Karlbeck (1879-1967), a Swedish collector and railroad engineer. The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm played a vital role in the foundation of the syndicate, creating an unprecedented arrangement where a group of museums and private collectors were approached in order to join the purchasing expeditions by Karlbeck.Members to this syndicate included the British Museum, the Louvre, the Berlin State Museum, as well as, HRH Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden and the British ethnologist Charles Gabriel Seligman. At the time China's Bronze Age was a popular collecting and study subject. This study examines the intellectual and institutional framing of the Bronze Age collections.