Focus
Bringing China's treasures home
By Qin Zhongwei (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-11 10:45
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Concerted efforts are being made to catalog the whereabouts of the cultural relics that were looted from the Old Summer Palace
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 Bronze heads from the Old Summer Palace are seen on display at the Poly Art Museum in Beijing in March 2009. Wu Ning / For China Daily |
The lost treasures of Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace, the very words have the ring of myth. And yet, the treasures existed. The destruction and looting of the park by British and French troops in 1860, during the Second Opium War, was described at the time by the author Victor Hugo as: "Two robbers breaking into a museum, devastating, looting and burning, leaving laughing hand-in-hand with their bags full of treasures."
Is it any wonder then that people get angry whenever items that belonged to the park are auctioned by foreign firms, or that people demand the repatriation of artifacts housed in foreign museums? Especially as the ransacking of the park, by French and British forces in 1860 during the Second Opium War, is still regarded as a symbol of foreign aggression and humiliation in China.
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After the ransacking by French and British troops in 1860, the royal garden was looted a second time in 1900 when the Eight-Power Allied Forces invaded Beijing, then again a decade later during the warlord period and again during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, all of which inevitably worsened the situation and made tracing the treasures extremely difficult.
It is estimated that as many as 1.5 million cultural relics from the Old Summer Palace have been looted or lost over the years. There are artifacts from the Palace housed in more than 2,000 museums in 47 countries, with many of them in the British Museum and the Fontainebleau Art Museum in France, Chen said.
However, in the majority of cases nobody has a clear idea of exactly what happened to the pieces and where they are now, whether they are at home or abroad,
People have set their sights on overseas museums or institutions that are known to hold some of the items, but the situation at home is even more complicated.
As yet, there is still no official database of looted cultural relics according to Wang Daocheng, 76-year-old history professor at Renmin University of China.
"The project to build a database of the looted or stolen treasures in China, whether by organizations or individuals, hasn't been done yet," he said. "It is only recently since Christie's auctioned the relics from the park that the public has begun to pay attention to the overall situation of the lost treasures," said Wang.
While the number of treasures lost is hard to determine, the problem is compounded by the fact that there are quite a few relics, such as the two magnificent white marble columns on the campus of Peking University, which were originally from the Old Summer Palace but which are now commonly accepted as the property of their new home or their new masters, according to Wang.
In 2007, 10 relics were returned to the park as a donation. The returned treasures, including a pair of fish sculptures and eight white marble carvings, were scattered around Beijing, according Liu Yang, a member of the park's overseas search group, who also helped discover the lost fish sculptures.
So far, about 100 relics have been returned to the park through donation or some other way, said Chen.
When the eight-member overseas search group visited the US recently to try and build contacts with the museums there, the group was often advised that the lion's share of palace relics are in private hands, including those of collectors in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, and told to check the auction catalogues of Christie's or Sotheby's.
It is advice that is also applicable in China according to Liu, who says that some of the relics change hands through auction firms in China, although people pay very little attention to that.
For example, a Beijing auction firm auctioned a pair of imperial seals produced in the Jiaqing period, Qing Dynasty, last autumn, that were identified by experts as treasures from the park. Liu says it is hard to understand why there was no public anger at this and why the relevant authorities approved the auction.
Restoring the treasures of the Old Summer Palace to their rightful home will be no easy task and it is a task that will require dedication, patience and persistence.
