“You want fish fossils, no problem. But bird fossils? That would be difficult.” The vendor at the Shenyang antique market looked nervously over his shoulder. “The authorities are very strict about bird and dinosaur fossils. I do not want to lose my licence.”
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Big money fuels illegal trade in rare fossils
Correspondent in Liaoning
08 November 2009
“You want fish fossils, no problem. But bird fossils? That would be difficult.” The vendor at the Shenyang antique market looked nervously over his shoulder. “The authorities are very strict about bird and dinosaur fossils. I do not want to lose my licence.”
The market offers an astonishing variety of China’s past - bronzes, jade, polished stone, minerals, statues of Mao Zedong, Confucius, the Buddha, badges of the Kuomintang and Communist armies, fake stamps of the Republic of China and Qing dynasty - but not the fossils from western Liaoning that fetch thousands of dollars from collectors in the United States, Japan and Europe.
You can try a market opposite the city’s Imperial Palace, which the Manchu rulers built before they conquered China and founded the Qing dynasty in 1644. One shop sells fish and insect fossils, with the highest price of 180,000 yuan (HK$204,000) for a large chambered nautilus, about 400 million years old.
“My uncle made a fortune selling fossils abroad until they changed the law in 2004 to make all of them the property of the state,” said manager Wang Hong. “Now it is tough, unless you smuggle. A dinosaur egg in the United States can fetch over US$400,000.”
You do not, however, have to travel to Liaoning for fossils - they are available right here in Hong Kong. Antique shops in Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, sell dinosaur eggs and bird and fish fossils. At the Hung Wan Hong antique shop, for example, a nest of eight dinosaur eggs from Liaoning was selling for HK$12,000.
If you are looking for a specific item, some dealers offer to have it smuggled into the city - for the right price, or course. There is no guarantee the items are genuine, and a buyer who wants it checked has to bear the cost of the laboratory tests.
The western region of Liaoning province - of which Shenyang is capital - is one of the principal sources of fossils in the world. From the 1980s, farmers found remains belonging to over 20 biological categories, including the earliest bird in the world with a beak.
During the 1990s, many remarkable fossils were discovered in western Liaoning, close to the city of Chaoyang. Some of the finds revolutionised our ideas of dinosaurs and shed new light on the origin of birds. One area of the city, Ancient Street, has a flourishing trade in rare fossils, with more than 50 vendors.
The fossils of China are a treasure trove, in terms of science, money and national culture. In March, the Ministry of Land Resources and the legislative office of the State Council published a new law which aims to better protect the country’s plant and animal fossils and curb fossil smuggling. It invited public comments and suggestions - setting off an intense debate over who should own, control and manage these treasures.
The draft law puts great power in the hands of provincial officials of the ministry and the museums approved by them - too much power in the eyes of many scientists, who believe that the law may foster the rampant trade in fossils because these officials will seek to profit from selling them.
Zhou Zhonghe, executive director of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology at Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the law should be revised. “The national research institutes and universities should have more freedom to excavate fossil sites and carry out appropriate research in co-operation with overseas partners.”
Scientists argue that most officials and museums do not have the expertise to make accurate judgments about the excavation and management of fossils and may abuse their power; they may demand exorbitant sums from scientists who want to carry out legitimate excavation and take money for dealers acting for wealthy buyers. They propose a panel of palaeontologists to regulate collection on a national level and prefer to see the power centralised in the ministry, rather than in the hands of local and provincial officials.
The foreign scientific community is watching the debate closely. “The current situation is problematic because local jurisdictions with rightful interests but only a vague understanding of the scientific value of fossils can unilaterally stop legitimate scientific exploration,” said James Clark, a palaeontologist at George Washington University in Washington. “Fossils require an institution with staff educated in curation and preservation. Few places in China have those facilities.”
In a major speech last December, Zhang Bo, deputy director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, painted a bleak picture of the legal and administrative system for protecting China’s culture.
“Since 2002, the legal environment has improved but there remains much to do. The legal and regulatory system remains incomplete, the issue of ownership unclear, the quality and efficiency of our staff needs to be improved. There is a gap between the funds available and the demands for cultural preservation ... cultural relics are not secure enough. Local governments pursue profits, harm cultural relics and occupy cultural sites. Some ancient tombs are destroyed and original cultural sites damaged ... the outlook is not optimistic.”
Shenyang’s largest museum, the Liaoning Provincial Museum, has only a small collection of fossils on display, part of the skull, ribs, arm and feet of the Jinniushan man, a major find made in Yingkou, in southern Liaoning, in 1984. Dated 280,000 years ago, they are part of the transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens.
“In the 1950s, people had little awareness of fossils and threw them away,” said a museum official. “Now people are much more aware. According to the law, fossils dug out of the ground belong to the state but this is not enforced.”
In July 2007, Shenyang began construction of a dedicated fossil museum that will house 8,000 pieces. The museum is a joint project between the city’s Normal University and the Ministry of Land Resources.
On the streets, people are little concerned with such legal niceties. “The best period was the time from the late 1980s onwards when farmers in west Liaoning started to find the fossils,” said Liang Hongjun, a retired factory worker whose hometown is Chaoyang.
“There was no proper management in those days. Farmers dug up the fossils and could sell them for whatever they could get. Prices were not so high, several hundred for a single piece,” he said. “Then Beijing gradually introduced restrictions, announcing in 2004 that all fossils in the ground belonged to the government. After that, farmers and dealers became more secretive.”
One major driver in the market is demand by foreign collectors and investors. “There is an enormous market for fossils,” said Donald Gibbs, a retired professor of Chinese at University of California at Davis. “There are collections, fairs and exhibitions. It is the sense of history, of owning something so old. Some people put the fossils on their mantelpiece to show to others. Other people keep them like stamps, showing to other collectors and special friends and enjoying the knowledge that they have something which other people do not.”
“The smuggling of them is a big business,” he said in Hong Kong, on one of his frequent visits to China. “China is one major source.” In the United States, you can also buy fossils on e-Bay and on dealer websites.
The smuggling is a highly sophisticated operation, because of the sums of money involved and the demand from wealthy and influential buyers. The demand has also produced a large trade in fake fossils, which do not run the risk of being confiscated by the customs of China or the importing country. Those in the trade say that the fakes have a high standard and sometimes fool even experienced palaeontologists.
The export of fossils has also raised the issue of who are the rightful owners, as with art treasures taken from China over the last 150 years. In 2006, the United Nations cultural agency, Unesco, estimated a total of 1.64 million such objects in nearly 50 countries, most of them in museums.
Beijing argues that the fossils, like the art treasures, belong in China. It has had limited success in obtaining the return of fossils smuggled abroad.
In January last year, the Australian government handed to the Chinese ambassador in Canberra 750kg of illegally imported dinosaur, mammal and reptile fossils seized over the previous two years. In September, the US government gave the Chinese embassy in Washington bones of a saber-toothed cat and eggs of several dinosaurs, dating from 100 million years ago.
That same month, The Washington Post reported that a private collector, Massachusetts ophthalmologist Henry Kriegstein, planned to give University of Chicago a raptorex fossil, which lived 125 million years ago in north China. He bought it from a private dealer at a fossil show in Tucson, Arizona; the dealer had bought it in Japan. Scientists consider it a very important find. The fossil will later be sent to a museum in Inner Mongolia. But the ophthalmologist will get something for his money - the find will be named Raptorex kriegsteini.
Additional reporting by Austin Chiu
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