Treasure Hunting

Museums in the US, France and the UK are being asked to admit Chinese researchers to document treasures stolen during the 19th century.

China is promising it all stops with a look – that the museums won’t be asked to return some 1.5 million treasures, which China says were looted in 1860, following the Second Opium War. (The war pitted the British and French – and at times, the US -- against China’s Qing dynasty.)

Of particular interest to the Chinese is the British Museum collection, as it contains items taken when the British burned and looted the Old Summer Palace -- still a sore spot for China.

"We don't really know how many relics have been plundered since the catalogue of the treasures stored in the garden was burned during the catastrophe," the palace's current director Chen Mingjie told the China Daily newspaper. "But based on our rough calculations, about 1.5 million relics are housed in more than 2,000 museums in 47 countries."

In recent years China has become increasingly interested in its missing treasures. In March, a Chinese collector sabotaged the auctioning of two bronze heads taken from the Old Summer Palace by winning the bidding (agreeing to pay nearly $23 million for each), but then refusing to pay. The Chinese government also condemned the sale itself, which featured bronzes belonging to Yves Saint Laurent that had once adorned a fountain in China.

Chen said the purpose of the relic-hunting and cataloguing wasn’t to have the items return, but rather only for information gathering – though clearly he’s doing some goodwill hunting as well.

He told the China Daily: "We have clarified that this is an attempt to document rather than to seek a return of those relics even though we do hope some previously unknown relics might surface and some might be returned to our country during our tracing effort."

Work has already begun at the Library of Congress and the Harvard University Library, where Professor Guo Daiheng of Beijing’s Tsinghua University is studying 100 old photographs taken after the looting.

James Hevia, a professor of international history at the University of Chicago who specializes in looted artifacts from 1860-1900, told the UK’s The Telegraph he wished the Chinese well and that they seemed to have realistic expectations.

He said: "I think they are probably under no illusions about getting much of this stuff back, as these kinds of claims touch not just Chinese items, but items in museums taken from many other countries."

Let the cataloguing begin.

Photo courtesy dbaron via Flickr.