On September 8, 1920, Ivan Skušek Jr. and his wife Tsuneko Kondo Kawase (left), together with her two children, arrived at Ljubljana.

Ivan Skušek had served as a commissioner to the sea in the Austro-Hungarian navy and had been on board of the vessel Kaiserin Elisabeth on a mission to China when World War 1 broke out. The Kaiserin Elisabeth sunk in the battle of Tsingtao, at the beginning of the war, as the Japanese army attacked the German colony. The Austro-Hungarians were either taken to Japan as POWs or were practically stranded in China. In 1917, when China officially declared war to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian detachment was imprisoned and they were officially released only in 1920. A few months later, the Skušeks embarked on a ship in Shanghai for a passage to Marseille – leaving China for a post-WW1 Slovenia which was unfamiliar not only to the Japanese woman. A month later several dozens of boxes filled with all kinds of Chinese art objects followed via a different route. The circumstances under which Ivan Skušek could acquire such a mass of Chinese art are not yet completely clear. Most of the pieces were from the Qing Dynasty of the Manchu emperors, the last dynasty of China. At the time of acquisition (ca. 1915-1920), the majority of the objects were not yet antiquities in the classical sense, as they had been produced during the final phase of the Qing period just a few decades earlier. Still, a few pieces, especially the religious objects such as several metal works depicting Buddhist Tantric deities, are datable to the early Qing Dynasty.