After all the initial preparations, John was ready to go to Hollywood to shoot his first film, only before he could do so, he had to make a trip to upstate New York.

There is a 1,500-acre Morgan estate in upstate New York, with an underground vault under the estate, and the vault is full of art collected by the Morgan family for five generations and the capital of the family's rise.

Over the years, John has become more subservient and elegant in the Morgan family, and likes to put some art in the place where he lives to improve his style. So before he went to Hollywood, he had to go to the Morgan Manor vault in upstate to pick up some art and take it with him.

When people think of the Morgan family's artworks, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library in New York will definitely come to mind.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is the largest art museum in the United States, and it is one of the four major museums in the world, along with the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, France, and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

It is also a museum founded by individual donations, from the creation, fundraising, collection of collections to the day-to-day operation and maintenance of businessmen, financiers, artists and thinkers.

Among them was the first patriarch of the Morgan family, J.P. Morgan, who became chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's board of directors after pushing the U.S. Congress to pass the Penn-Aldridge Tax Act, which gave the Metropolitan Museum of Art 351 boxes of art purchased abroad for exhibition.

The most precious artwork he handed over to the Metropolitan Museum was the only painting in the museum's collection, the Altarpiece of Colonna, by the Renaissance Three Gerafel III, which he bought for 2 million francs and became the most expensive artwork in the world at that time.

The Morgan Library was donated by the second patriarch of the Morgan family to J.P. Morgan's residence in Manhattan, New York, after his death.

All the books and artworks contained in it were placed in the room at that time. The first movable type printed Bible set with gemstones, the European rare book with gilded leaf, Beethoven's autographed musical scores, these precious works of art and the magnificent Morgan Library are not only visually shocking, but also heartfelt.

But it would be a mistake to say that the artworks in these two places are the heritage of the Morgan family.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library make up only one percent of the Morgan family's art collection. Not to mention the total collection of five generations of the Morgan family, even the collection of the first generation of patriarch JP Morgan can be breathtaking.

J.P. Morgan was a collector, and a wealthy collector, who had $3 billion in 1912, an astronomical amount of hundreds of billions of dollars in today's dollars.

Therefore, he generally collects artworks as "sweeping", sweeping from country to country, just like the later generations of Chinese aunts who went abroad to sweep goods.

From early writers' manuscripts, printed books, medieval jewelry, paintings, helmets, weapons, porcelain, sculptures, ornaments...... All of them were the objects of his sweep. In a letter to his sister, he wrote: "I have almost collected Greek antiques, and now my interest has turned to Egyptian antiques. It can be seen how he swept the goods.

And the collector did not hesitate to get the Penn Aldridge Tax Act passed by the U.S. Congress in order to make the art he bought abroad tax-free in the United States.

It is his madness about art that has made this Wall Street "overlord" still recognized as the "No. 1 collector" in history by the American collecting community.

Therefore, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library do not represent the Morgan family's heritage, and the only place that can truly represent the Morgan family's heritage is upstate New York.

Upstate and Long Island were both in the same state, but they were so far away that it took John four hours to reach Morgan Manor in Upstate.

This is the largest estate of the Morgan family, hidden in a remote mountainous area in the upper state, and in official records, this Morgan estate does not exist, and there is no trace of it even on the map of the United States.

The estate covers an area of 1,500 acres and has a 2.3-square-kilometre lake, which was named Swan Lake by the Morgan family because of the swans playing on the water.

The lake was John's favorite place, and as a child he could spend the whole day in a boat.

John stepped out of the car, looked at the familiar buildings in front of him, and recalled the bits and pieces of his childhood here, where he spoke for the first time, walked for the first time, changed his teeth for the first time, and learned Western etiquette for the first time.

After John's grandfather died, the estate was only moved back in the spring and summer, and in the fall and winter at the Morgan estate on Long Island.

There is an 80,000-square-meter anti-nuclear vault 30 meters underground in the entire estate, which can withstand the direct attack of a small nuclear bomb. The vault contains five generations of precious art collected by the Morgan family, as well as a large amount of gold jewelry, which can be said to be the capital of the Morgan family's comeback.

John took the elevator all the way to the door of the vault at a depth of 30 meters underground, and the entire vault was specially designed with two doors to prevent theft.

The first door is a bulletproof gate weighing 300 tons, and even a thief will not want to open it in any way, this door can only be opened with two sets of motors, and the switch of the motor is designed in the duty room of the secret service in the vault.

The Morgan Manor Secret Service is no less staffed than the White House, and these Secret Service personnel are all rigorously trained and sent on secret missions to protect the main members of the Morgan family.

And just in case, 5 km from the Morgan estate on the island, there is a mechanized infantry regiment of the US Army, armed with the most advanced MIM-104 anti-aircraft missiles.

The second door of the vault is an anti-theft door to prevent burglars, and this door has only one key, which is in Mrs. Morgan's hand, so John asked Mrs. Morgan for the key early before he came.

After informing the Secret Service to open the first door to the 200-ton vault, John and his party walked directly through the vault survival area to the second gate.

The entire underground vault is divided into two parts, the front part is the survival area against nuclear bombs, this area can accommodate 200 hundred people for 60 days.

The second part is the collection area where gold jewellery and art are kept, and where the Morgan family is truly rooted.

John took the key out of his pocket and opened the second door to the vault, and the first thing that caught his eye when the door opened was the neatly stacked gold and boxes of various jewels.

John had no interest in gold jewellery and went straight through the hard currency area to the art section, where a large number of antiques were stored.

The entire vault's art storage area contains 208,7613 sets of precious artworks, all of which are stored in wooden boxes with detailed information on the contents of the storage.

The most fundamental reason for the Morgan family to buy these works of art was to preserve the property, not to display it, so there was no one to manage the artworks. But when the door is closed, the whole area is in a vacuum, and it is difficult for these stored artworks to be oxidized, which can be regarded as a kind of protection.

But John has a strong contempt for this barbaric way of treating art, and art should be treated in an artistic way, and he wonders if he can find a few conservation experts from Harvard to sort out these works of art in the future, as for now he is busy making movies and has no time to deal with these works of art.

John only planned to pick up a few smaller paintings when he went to Los Angeles this time for convenience, so as soon as he entered the art section, he walked all the way towards the oil painting storage area.

It didn't take long for John to arrive at the oil painting storage area, follow the information on the wooden box to find his favorite oil paintings, and after two hours of searching, he finally selected five oil paintings and three stamps as works of art to take to Hollywood.

(What exactly did John take from the Morgan vault? What precious works of art were in the Morgan vault?, I won't reveal it first, but I'll talk more about it later.) ）