China hunts for its art treasures in US museums

[bhchao]

Here was an article today on hunting for Chinese artifacts that were looted from the Summer Palace: China Hunts for Art Treasures in U.S. Museums

The article says that the hunt for treasures at US museums could be more of a symbolic show with the intent to arouse patriotic sentiment at home and yielding few concrete results; rather than a genuine scholarly action to seek out the majority of artifacts that reside outside of museums, such as in private collections.

...Emboldened by newfound wealth, China has been on a noisy campaign to reclaim relics that disappeared during its so-called century of humiliation, the period between 1842 and 1945 when foreign powers subjugated China through military incursions and onerous treaties.

Stoked by populist sentiment but carefully managed by the Communist Party, the drive to reclaim lost cultural property has so far been halting. While officials privately acknowledge there is scant legal basis for repatriation, their public statements suggest that they would use lawsuits, diplomatic pressure and shame to bring 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 palace grounds; the sale was met with outrage in China. In the end, a Chinese collector sabotaged the auction by calling in the highest bids — $18 million for each head — then refusing to pay....

...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 catalogs 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 plowed under for development.

What’s more, said Wu Zuolai, a professor at the China Academy of Art, the obsession with Yuanmingyuan ignores the plunder of older sites that are more artistically significant. “Chinese history did not start with the Qing Dynasty,” he said. “This treasure hunting trip is just a political show. The media portray it as patriotic, but it’s just spreading hate.”

This discussion board has some interesting perspectives from posters regarding the article: http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/world/asia/17china.html#postComment

Many posters commented that what the British and French troops plundered from the Summer Palace paled to what the Red Guards did to Chinese artifacts and historic sites during the Cultural Revolution.

Although some of those comments sounded paternalistic, I have to agree with the truth of those statements. The Red Guards did a lot of permanent damage to China's cultural treasures and would have done even more without Zhou Enlai's intervention, who closed the gates of the Forbidden City and saved the Mogao caves in Dunhuang.

Still there was damage committed by insiders in China, most notably by 康生. He happened to be an art connoisseur and extorted artifacts from the museum in Beijing without returning them.

Edited December 18, 2009 at 03:49 AM by bhchao

[xianhua]

A few years ago I was host to a Chinese student for the weekend. At the top of her destination wish list was the British Museum - so we headed there for the day. The visit was quite awkward as it felt like every time we walked past one of the Chinese exhibits the “so beautiful, it should be in China” exclamations were aimed at me personally. Anyway, as a result, I spent a little bit of time researching the situation and wrote to the British Museum so I could gain more knowledge surrounding the predicament for the next time a person brought up the subject.

The response from the British Museum was along the lines of: the Chinese authorities currently have no restitution claims against the Museum, and that’s that. Perhaps the above planned trips are the first steps in this trail? This begs questions such as how much evidence will the British Museum require to uphold a restitution claim given the artefacts may have changed hands several times down the centuries?

Maybe the Chinese authorities will repeat the action taken by the Greeks in building a new museum to house the repatriated items (the Elgin Marbles in the Greek case). The Restituted Chinese Relics Museum maybe.

[jbradfor]

The visit was quite awkward as it felt like every time we walked past one of the Chinese exhibits the “so beautiful, it should be in China” exclamations were aimed at me personally.

Responding with "Good thing they're not, or else they'd probably have been destroyed" was probably not a good answer. [seriously, you're a better person than I am if you could hold back after the third time she said that.]

Repatriating art is a complex issue. On one hand, one can probably assume that pretty much every ancient art piece outside the country of origin was "illegally" removed. OTOH, having all the art from a given country only in that country would lead to rather boring museums. Not to mention the concern with "putting all your eggs in one basket" when it comes to governments going crazy and trying to destroy all "improper" art.

[gato]

Yeah, the focus should be on protecting the historical architecture within China. Much is being destroyed due to blind development and suburbanization.

[roddy]

The Restituted Chinese Relics Museum maybe.

the focus should be on protecting the historical architecture within China. [

Given some of the atrocities we've seen in Beijing lately, I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to knock down a few square kilometers of functioning hutongs to build a flagship museum to house it all.