A few years ago, Nancy Berliner got a phone call from Harvard University, her alma mater, asking if she would be on a panel discussing career paths.
"You really don't want me," Berliner jokingly told them. "I didn't have a career path."
She is smiling as she tells that story, but there is some truth to it. Berliner has followed a winding road to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem.
When she was young, the Brookline native dreamed of becoming an architect like her father. She studied visual and environmental arts at Harvard and, right out of college, worked on a project renovating a stable.
She also dabbled with documentary filmmaking.
She even worked for CBS News in the early 1980s in its Hong Kong bureau, translating nightly newscasts of the trial of the Gang of Four, notorious Communist Party leaders.
It was, in truth, multiple paths and interests that led Berliner to where she is now — PEM's curator of Chinese art and the person behind the heralded exhibit "The Emperor's Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City," scheduled to open Sept. 14.
The exhibit is a coup for the PEM, and the first stop on a tour that also goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
This will be the first public viewing of paintings, architectural elements, furniture and other priceless objects from the private garden of the Qianlong emperor (1736-96), one of China's wealthiest and most powerful rulers.
These objects have been sealed away, covered in dust, inside the secluded garden complex since 1924, when the last emperor left the Forbidden City, the home of Chinese emperors for nearly 500 years.
They will be seen here first, in large part, because of Berliner. For the last several years, she has worked as an adviser to the World Monuments Fund, a New York-based nonprofit working with China's Palace Museum on a $25 million restoration of the Qianlong garden, a 2-acre enclave within the Forbidden City.
Since coming on board in 2005, Berliner has made so many trips — more than a dozen — to Beijing and the Forbidden City that she laughs when asked how many times she has been there.
"I don't keep count," she said with a shake of her head and a smile.
Berliner became an adviser to the World Monuments Fund largely because of her work on Yin Yu Tang, the Chinese house that has become the centerpiece of the PEM's collection, drawing thousands of visitors a year.
Berliner discovered Yin Yu Tang — if it's possible to "discover" a 200-year-old house — while visiting China in 1996. Once inside the house, she unexpectedly met members of the family that had lived there for eight generations. They were deciding what to do with the building and asked Berliner, who speaks fluent Chinese, if she was interested.
The 16-bedroom house was dismantled, crated, shipped across the ocean and re-erected as part of the PEM's 2003 expansion.
When the World Monuments Fund brought a team from China's Palace Museum to the PEM, they were so impressed with the installation of Yin Yu Tang that they asked Berliner to help with their immense undertaking. The garden renovation began in 2001 and isn't scheduled to be completed until 2019.
"I was thrilled," she said.
In some ways, Berliner really has followed a straight path to the PEM. She has been passionately interested in architecture, art and even China since she was a freshman in college.
"I had intended to become an architect," she said, "but I needed a fourth course my freshman year. A woman across the hall said, 'You should take Chinese history. It's supposed to be a great course.'"
The course, which students dubbed "rice paddies," changed her life. She went on to study Mandarin in Taiwan, enroll in The Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, teach Chinese art and language at colleges, work on a PBS film series on Chinese history, and curate an exhibition on Chinese furniture at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
All these years later, she still remembers a moment in that freshman class that was her own personal epiphany: watching a professor write Chinese characters on the blackboard.
"I was so impressed," she said, "I decided I really wanted to know how to do that."
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