Chun Lan, heroine of Red Flag, the novel by Liang Bin. Huang Zhou illustrated his cousin's w ork. She has her life's one true love, and her one great regret.

"Lying on his deathbed he begged me to take over the care of the museum after he was gone," says Zheng Wenhui. .

"'Don't let it all fall apart,' he told me. It is to my real shame I promised I would, but then afterwards, I didn't. Instead, I handed over the running to others."

Zheng turned her attention to writing a biography after Huang Zhou died in 1997.
"I have let him down," says Huang Zhou's widow, who now eyes an uncertain future for New China's first private gallery, the Yan Huang Art Museum in Asian Games Village.

Waiting for his last kidney to fail in a Zhujiang Hospital bed in Guangzhou, Huang might have looked back on his life's work with a certain sense of satisfaction.

His grandiose landscapes hang high in the Great Hall of the People and decorate the austere halls of famous and forgotten world leaders.

But Huang, born of a peasant family in Liangjiazhuang, Yixian County, Hebei, is better known for his donkeys.

A China Radio International reporter once asked him why in 1985.

Huang had pragmatic reasons too.

"The donkey is a beautiful animal," said Huang.

"I love them because I spent a lot of time in the northwest and I saw a lot. In the country, every home has a donkey.

"A donkey is cheap. A peasant can afford one. It works hard and it's easy to raise. The lao baixing have a saying: Horse is gold, ox is silver, donkey is iron.

"The horse is noble. An ox sometimes has to eat some man-made food. A donkey can go and live anywhere -- mountain or plateau. It can eat any grass, and endure cold. So it is lovely. As a painter, the more I paint, the more I love it."

"I wanted to practice my painting by drawing my most familiar things. Painting donkeys was not always my purpose, just a means.

"As I did so many donkey paintings, people thought I could only do donkeys and I specialized in that. So when they asked me to do a painting for them, they asked for a donkey and wouldn't accept anything else."

While donkeys and dancing girls might raise a smile, Huang probably reserved greatest satisfaction for his 1986 brainchild, the quasi-independent Yan Huang Art Museum.

Huang first raised the idea of building a private art museum in 1986, out of concern that the government was doing a poor job protecting antiques.

An exhibition by Huang in Singapore was very well received, and overseas Chinese offered to donate money after they heard he wanted to build a private museum. He got the same reaction later on in Europe. The same year, Liao Hui, then Director of the Hong Kong Office of the State Council, gave Huang's painting Pursuing the Girl to Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing. Li promised to donate 1 million HK dollars to support him building a Huang Zhou private museum.

Then Chen Xitong and Zhang Baifa, then mayor and deputy mayor of Beijing, promised to give Huang land to build it in a park. Actually what they had in mind was conversion of some dusty, deserted rooms. Huang had bigger ideas. He acquired a plot in the new Asian Games Village.

After he raised the money, donors suggested naming it the Huang Zhou Painting Museum. But again, Huang had other ideas. He wanted a real fine art museum, not just for him, but for all Chinese.