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Tuesday, 26 January 2010
Chinese quest to regain treasures
A delegation of Chinese cultural experts has swept through American institutions over the past two weeks, in an unfruitful search for historical treasures plundered by Western troops in the mid-19th century from Beijing.
A team of cultural experts is combing Western museums to find plundered antiquities
New York Times 18 December 2009
NEW YORK: A delegation of Chinese cultural experts has swept through American institutions over the past two weeks, in an unfruitful search for historical treasures plundered by Western troops in the mid-19th century from Beijing.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was one of the team’s stops where the members surveyed the displays closely and an accompanying crew from China’s national broadcaster CCTV filmed the items.
Whenever the group came to a collection of jade pieces, it would request documentation to show that the pieces had been acquired legally.
But the tension always faded with no eureka discovery, and the Chinese pronounced themselves satisfied, smiled for a group photo and drove away.
‘That wasn’t so bad after all,’ said Mr. James Watt, the head of the museum’s department of Asian art.
Last month, Chinese media reports said a team from the Yuanming Garden management office in Beijing, crew for the National Treasures programme from CCTV and Tsinghua University experts set off for the United States to search for data and material concerning Chinese relics that originated from the Yuanming Garden.
The aim of the eight-member team is said to build up a data bank for the so-called ‘Yuanming-yuan’ relics, said the Beijing Youth Daily then.
But the quest, fuelled by national pride, has been quixotic, provoking fear at institutions overseas but in the end amounting to little more than a public relations show aimed at audiences back home.
‘China is like an adolescent who took too many steroids,’ Professor Liu Kang, an expert on Chinese studies at Duke University, said. ‘It has suddenly become big, but it finds it hard to coordinate and control its body. To the West, it can look like a monster.’
Epitomising China’s fall from greatness during the tail end of the Qing Dynasty (AD1644 - AD1911) was the destruction and plunder of the Old Summer Palace, or Yuanming Garden, in Beijing in 1860 by invading English and French troops.
‘The wound is still open and hurts every time you probe it,’ said Mr. Liu Yang, a Beijing lawyer and a driving force in the movement to regain stolen antiquities. ‘It reminds people what may come when we are too weak.’
While Chinese officials privately acknowledge there is scant legal basis for repatriation, their public statements suggest they would use lawsuits, diplomatic pressure and shame to take home looted objects - not unlike Italy, Greece and Egypt, which have sought, with some success, to recover antiquities in European and American museums.
The relics quest intensified this year after Christie’s in Paris auctioned a pair of bronze animal heads that had been part of a fountain on the grounds of Yuanming Garden. The sale was met with outrage in China.
A Chinese collector sabotaged the auction by calling in the highest bids - US$18 million (S$25 million) for each head - then refusing to pay.
In the wake of that row, the scouting tour sponsored by a Chinese liquor company became a spectacle in Chinese news. More visits will follow next year to various sites in England, France and Japan
The art experts whom the group met along the way offered consistent advice: the lion’s share of palace relics are in private hands, including those of collectors in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China.
‘The best thing would be to look through the catalogues of Sotheby’s and Christie’s,’ said Mr. Watt of the Metropolitan Museum.
Although the Chinese public broadly supports recovering such items, a few critics have suggested that the campaign merely distracts from the continued destruction of historic buildings and archaeological sites across the country.
A government survey released this month found that 23,600 registered relics had disappeared in recent years because of theft or illicit sales, while tens of thousands of culturally significant sites had been ploughed under for development.
1 comment:
A team of cultural experts is combing Western museums to find plundered antiquities
New York Times
18 December 2009
NEW YORK: A delegation of Chinese cultural experts has swept through American institutions over the past two weeks, in an unfruitful search for historical treasures plundered by Western troops in the mid-19th century from Beijing.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was one of the team’s stops where the members surveyed the displays closely and an accompanying crew from China’s national broadcaster CCTV filmed the items.
Whenever the group came to a collection of jade pieces, it would request documentation to show that the pieces had been acquired legally.
But the tension always faded with no eureka discovery, and the Chinese pronounced themselves satisfied, smiled for a group photo and drove away.
‘That wasn’t so bad after all,’ said Mr. James Watt, the head of the museum’s department of Asian art.
Last month, Chinese media reports said a team from the Yuanming Garden management office in Beijing, crew for the National Treasures programme from CCTV and Tsinghua University experts set off for the United States to search for data and material concerning Chinese relics that originated from the Yuanming Garden.
The aim of the eight-member team is said to build up a data bank for the so-called ‘Yuanming-yuan’ relics, said the Beijing Youth Daily then.
But the quest, fuelled by national pride, has been quixotic, provoking fear at institutions overseas but in the end amounting to little more than a public relations show aimed at audiences back home.
‘China is like an adolescent who took too many steroids,’ Professor Liu Kang, an expert on Chinese studies at Duke University, said. ‘It has suddenly become big, but it finds it hard to coordinate and control its body. To the West, it can look like a monster.’
Epitomising China’s fall from greatness during the tail end of the Qing Dynasty (AD1644 - AD1911) was the destruction and plunder of the Old Summer Palace, or Yuanming Garden, in Beijing in 1860 by invading English and French troops.
‘The wound is still open and hurts every time you probe it,’ said Mr. Liu Yang, a Beijing lawyer and a driving force in the movement to regain stolen antiquities. ‘It reminds people what may come when we are too weak.’
While Chinese officials privately acknowledge there is scant legal basis for repatriation, their public statements suggest they would use lawsuits, diplomatic pressure and shame to take home looted objects - not unlike Italy, Greece and Egypt, which have sought, with some success, to recover antiquities in European and American museums.
The relics quest intensified this year after Christie’s in Paris auctioned a pair of bronze animal heads that had been part of a fountain on the grounds of Yuanming Garden. The sale was met with outrage in China.
A Chinese collector sabotaged the auction by calling in the highest bids - US$18 million (S$25 million) for each head - then refusing to pay.
In the wake of that row, the scouting tour sponsored by a Chinese liquor company became a spectacle in Chinese news. More visits will follow next year to various sites in England, France and Japan
The art experts whom the group met along the way offered consistent advice: the lion’s share of palace relics are in private hands, including those of collectors in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China.
‘The best thing would be to look through the catalogues of Sotheby’s and Christie’s,’ said Mr. Watt of the Metropolitan Museum.
Although the Chinese public broadly supports recovering such items, a few critics have suggested that the campaign merely distracts from the continued destruction of historic buildings and archaeological sites across the country.
A government survey released this month found that 23,600 registered relics had disappeared in recent years because of theft or illicit sales, while tens of thousands of culturally significant sites had been ploughed under for development.
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