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Saturday 24 October 2009
Summer Palace on trail of looted relics
Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, or Yuanmingyuan, has embarked on a global hunt for relics looted from the site nearly 150 years ago by British and French troops.
Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, or Yuanmingyuan, has embarked on a global hunt for relics looted from the site nearly 150 years ago by British and French troops.
A team of specialists would target museums and libraries in the United States, Europe and Japan, including the British Museum, the Palace of Fontainebleau in France and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Chen Mingjie, head of administration at the Old Summer Palace park in north Beijing, told the Beijing News.
Chen estimated that 1.5 million items lost from the park were in 2,000 collections in 47 countries. However, he admitted the authorities had no idea how many relics had been plundered because the catalogue of the treasures stored in the garden was burned when British and French troops torched the palace after looting it.
The destruction of the royal park during the second opium war in 1860 is viewed as one of China’s greatest humiliations.
Liu Yang , who will lead the survey team, said repatriation itself was not on their agenda.
“To be realistic, where could we keep the items even if they are returned?” he said. “The Old Summer Palace Park doesn’t even have a modern museum.”
Liu said they had been planning the global survey for two years and had already done a lot of research on the museums and libraries that hold items from the palace and archives related to it. The team will leave for the United States next month, and hopes to finish the survey by the middle of next year.
He said they aimed to get as much documentation as possible about the relics, including copies of photos of the palace taken shortly after it was pillaged. Documentation for the sake of further research on the palace was much more important than the relics themselves.
He said that, personally, he was not in favour of seeking the return of stolen items since they might not be preserved properly once repatriated.
Liu said it would be wrong for people to think that it was better to have relics returned and ruined than to leave them somewhere else.
For one thing, Liu said, it was difficult to trace the origin of items back to the Old Summer Palace because of the lack of documentation. And if claims to ownership of a relic were lodged, people could always make counterclaims.
Wang Daocheng , deputy director of the Yuanmingyuan Society of China, said the best that could be hoped for was that the survey team could establish the exact number of relics lost from the palace.
“As to the repatriation of the items, that will be a very complicated process,” he said.
China has ratified two major cultural conventions in the past two decades. In 1989, it agreed to the 1970 Unesco Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, and in 1997 ratified the 1995 Unidroit Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects.
Amid rising nationalism fuelled by the country’s growing economic clout, there has been a renewed interest in the lost relics and calls for the repatriation of looted items.
Diplomatic requests for looted items have had little success over the years. The Ministry of Culture set up a lost cultural relics recovery programme in 2002. It aims to secure the repatriation, without strings attached, of looted Chinese artefacts in overseas collections.
The Poly Art Museum - a subsidiary of the Poly Group Corp, a state-backed enterprise that has close ties with the People’s Liberation Army - was praised for buying three bronze animal heads for more than HK$31 million in 2000. The heads - of an ox, a tiger and a monkey - were part of a set of 12 Chinese zodiac sculptures installed as fountainheads on a water clock in the gardens of the Old Summer Palace.
Casino magnate Stanley Ho Hung-sun acquired two more heads from the same clock in 2003 and 2007, paying more than HK$6 million for a pig head and HK$69 million for a horse head. His donations of the heads to the Poly Museum has fuelled the campaign to repatriate more looted relics.
Two more of the heads from the water clock - those of the rabbit and the rat - were part of the estate of the late French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. When they were put up for auction in February, a Fujian collector, Cai Mingchao, placed the winning bids. However, when it emerged he had no intention of paying up, auction house Christie’s froze the sale and they remain in the possession of Saint Laurent’s heir Pierre Berge. This triggered a national outcry against Christie’s and many hailed Cai a patriotic hero, but the collector was also criticised for defaulting on the bid and harming the reputation of Chinese collectors.
Some observers say the mainland has little legal claim in international courts on the Saint Laurent bronzes because they were taken more than a century ago. The two conventions allow for only a 50-year statute of limitations on stolen items.
2 comments:
Summer Palace on trail of looted relics
Raymond Li in Beijing
20 October 2009
Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, or Yuanmingyuan, has embarked on a global hunt for relics looted from the site nearly 150 years ago by British and French troops.
A team of specialists would target museums and libraries in the United States, Europe and Japan, including the British Museum, the Palace of Fontainebleau in France and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Chen Mingjie, head of administration at the Old Summer Palace park in north Beijing, told the Beijing News.
Chen estimated that 1.5 million items lost from the park were in 2,000 collections in 47 countries. However, he admitted the authorities had no idea how many relics had been plundered because the catalogue of the treasures stored in the garden was burned when British and French troops torched the palace after looting it.
The destruction of the royal park during the second opium war in 1860 is viewed as one of China’s greatest humiliations.
Liu Yang , who will lead the survey team, said repatriation itself was not on their agenda.
“To be realistic, where could we keep the items even if they are returned?” he said. “The Old Summer Palace Park doesn’t even have a modern museum.”
Liu said they had been planning the global survey for two years and had already done a lot of research on the museums and libraries that hold items from the palace and archives related to it. The team will leave for the United States next month, and hopes to finish the survey by the middle of next year.
He said they aimed to get as much documentation as possible about the relics, including copies of photos of the palace taken shortly after it was pillaged. Documentation for the sake of further research on the palace was much more important than the relics themselves.
He said that, personally, he was not in favour of seeking the return of stolen items since they might not be preserved properly once repatriated.
Liu said it would be wrong for people to think that it was better to have relics returned and ruined than to leave them somewhere else.
For one thing, Liu said, it was difficult to trace the origin of items back to the Old Summer Palace because of the lack of documentation. And if claims to ownership of a relic were lodged, people could always make counterclaims.
Wang Daocheng , deputy director of the Yuanmingyuan Society of China, said the best that could be hoped for was that the survey team could establish the exact number of relics lost from the palace.
“As to the repatriation of the items, that will be a very complicated process,” he said.
China has ratified two major cultural conventions in the past two decades. In 1989, it agreed to the 1970 Unesco Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, and in 1997 ratified the 1995 Unidroit Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects.
Amid rising nationalism fuelled by the country’s growing economic clout, there has been a renewed interest in the lost relics and calls for the repatriation of looted items.
Diplomatic requests for looted items have had little success over the years. The Ministry of Culture set up a lost cultural relics recovery programme in 2002. It aims to secure the repatriation, without strings attached, of looted Chinese artefacts in overseas collections.
The Poly Art Museum - a subsidiary of the Poly Group Corp, a state-backed enterprise that has close ties with the People’s Liberation Army - was praised for buying three bronze animal heads for more than HK$31 million in 2000. The heads - of an ox, a tiger and a monkey - were part of a set of 12 Chinese zodiac sculptures installed as fountainheads on a water clock in the gardens of the Old Summer Palace.
Casino magnate Stanley Ho Hung-sun acquired two more heads from the same clock in 2003 and 2007, paying more than HK$6 million for a pig head and HK$69 million for a horse head. His donations of the heads to the Poly Museum has fuelled the campaign to repatriate more looted relics.
Two more of the heads from the water clock - those of the rabbit and the rat - were part of the estate of the late French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. When they were put up for auction in February, a Fujian collector, Cai Mingchao, placed the winning bids. However, when it emerged he had no intention of paying up, auction house Christie’s froze the sale and they remain in the possession of Saint Laurent’s heir Pierre Berge. This triggered a national outcry against Christie’s and many hailed Cai a patriotic hero, but the collector was also criticised for defaulting on the bid and harming the reputation of Chinese collectors.
Some observers say the mainland has little legal claim in international courts on the Saint Laurent bronzes because they were taken more than a century ago. The two conventions allow for only a 50-year statute of limitations on stolen items.
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