Ma Chengyuan, the former president of Shanghai's renowned art museum, has died at age 77, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

An authority on ancient Chinese bronzes who saved priceless artifacts from marauding Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution Ma died September 25. No cause of death was given, according to Xinhua.

Ma joined the Shanghai Art Museum soon after its founding in 1952 and helped select items for its original collection of about 13,000 ancient Chinese bronze works, porcelain, paintings, jade, calligraphy, furniture and other artifacts.

The collection enjoyed official protection until the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when teenage Red Guards inspired by Mao Zedong's call for the destruction of all remnants of pre-revolutionary China rampaged through the homes of Shanghai collectors. Ma slept in his office to take phone calls from desperate collectors and dispatched museum staff to protect and catalogue artifacts.

Anticipating the Red Guards' arrival at the museum, Ma ordered staff to disguise as Red Guards themselves and paint revolutionary slogans over glass display cases. "When Red Guards arrived, we told them we were busy making revolution ourselves," he said in a 2001 interview with the Hong Kong newspaper the South China Morning Post.

However, as fighting broke out between different guard factions, Ma was seized by museum staff and imprisoned in a storage room. He was tortured by being repeatedly dropped on the museum's marble floor to make him confess to having sold museum property for personal gain. He never confessed, and was later sent to a labor camp for Shanghai officials.

Ma returned to Shanghai in 1972 to organize an exhibition to tour the United States following former president Richard Nixon's visit to China.

In 1985, he was appointed director of the museum and in the early 1990s began soliciting funds and government approval for a building to transfer the collection from its rooms in a derelict former bank building.

Awarded a patch of land on the city's former race course in the center of town, Ma was told he would have to come up with the construction funds himself. Much of the money eventually came from wealthy Hong Kong collectors, many of whom had sold their collections to the museum before fleeing in the years after the 1949 communist takeover.

The museum, built roughly in the image of an ancient bronze jug, was opened to acclaim in 1996 and now possesses a collection of more than 200,000 objects, only about 1 percent of which are ever on display.

He published more than 80 books and academic papers on the bronzes.