Memory of art objects lost through military plunder and forced sales is keener in China than the West. But the aborted auction of two bronze statues in Paris, in February 2009, reminds us all of this persistent issue. In this short piece, I will review the recent odyssey of the questionable bronzes to embed the failed sale in a political context. The repatriation of plundered art is a symbolic issue, with deep emotional resonance. China's economic ascent comes as the international arts establishment is in disarray, forcing Beijing to consider how important the return of plundered art should be within China's broader global ambitions.
The Yves Saint-Laurent Auction Controversy
In 2009 the art collection of the Yves Saint-Laurent, the late French fashion designer, was sold in a Paris auction.Footnote 1 China protested the inclusion of two statues, which it regards as national treasures plundered by French imperialists. These were bronze heads of a rabbit and a rat, originally part of a set of twelve fountains made up of animals in the Chinese zodiac, which had been built for the Beijing Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness) for the Qianlong emperor.
Chinese lawyers sought to block the sale in a French court, as Chinese officials demanded that the pieces be returned. Sino-French relations were already troubled by disagreements about the Dalai Lama. Pierre Bergé, Saint-Laurent's partner and seller of the massive art collection, sarcastically offered to donate the two statues to China, in exchange for human rights reforms and Tibetan freedom. When the sale went ahead, China announced sanctions against the auction house, Christie's.Footnote 2
Some hoped that a Chinese buyer would emerge with a patriotic donation. Instead, a Chinese bidder scuttled the auction with an insincere high offer of US$40 million. Cai Mingchao, a Xiamen art dealer, insisted that “I shall not pay the money. I did the bidding just to stop the auction, and I did it on behalf of the whole Chinese people.”Footnote 3 Cai claimed that he acted without the knowledge of the Chinese government, which apparently feared that the heads were about to fall into the hands of a foreign collector. Cai was an unpaid advisor to the National Treasures Fund, affiliated with the Ministry of Culture.Footnote 4 Adding to the confusion was a rumour that Cai's fake offer undermined a real bid from a London-based Chinese business executive who had intended to donate the statues to China.Footnote 5 The statues were withdrawn from sale, and Christie's, perhaps hoping to erase memory of this awkward moment, blocks images of the controversial statues.
Ambiguous National Treasures
The Qing dynasty Yangming Yuan featured many architectural delights modelled upon the tastes of the sophisticated lower Yangzi region.Footnote 6 The cosmopolitan Qianlong emperor added several European-style buildings to this garden, under the supervision of the Italian Jesuit artist, Giuseppe Castiglione (well-known in China as “Lang Shining”).Footnote 7 Castiglione's zodiac fountain stood before a palace modelled on Versailles, in an early mix of Chinese and Western content and style.
This mixed aesthetic background would seem to make the statues an odd choice for Beijing to identify as national treasures. Indeed, some have suggested the heads are not really Chinese, and might better be regarded as 18th-century lawn ornaments. Pursuing these ambiguous objects may be a distraction from recovering important pieces of Chinese art. But the bronzes have one compelling claim to our attention – they were indisputably plundered.Footnote 8
In October 1860, French and British troops destroyed the Yuanming Yuan to punish Chinese delay in settling the Second Opium War. They put wooden structures to the torch, demolished many stone structures, and seized as much loot as they could carry. According to Captain Charles (“Chinese”) Gordon, later famous as imperialism's martyred general in Sudan, “[y]ou can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one's heart sore to burn them; in fact, these palaces were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully.”Footnote 9
This particular plunder was rich in cultural associations. It was in the Yuanming Yuan in 1793 that the British emissary, George Macartney, caused a crisis when he refused to kowtow to the Qianlong emperor.Footnote 10 And the leader of the British forces was the Eighth Earl of Elgin, son of the notorious plunderer of the Parthenon Marbles (known in London as the Elgin Marbles).Footnote 11 That the lead looter was a second-generation cultural criminal is never prominent in China's discourse, but must make the politics of repatriation more piquant.
As cultural property, the loot from the Yuanming Yuan is awash in symbolism. European usurpation of the emperor's treasures and destruction of his palaces denoted a low in relations which forced the Chinese to confront their defeat and humiliation. Looting the emperor's personal belongings heightened the injury to China's sovereignty, and gives the repatriation of this art a political motivation beyond their aesthetic value.Footnote 12
The failed Paris auction of 2009 was the second round of controversy over the zodiac statues in the past decade: in 2000, heads of the monkey, tiger and ox were auctioned in Hong Kong, also over the protests of the Chinese government. China signalled clearly that it regarded holding the auction on Chinese territory as an insult. Then, however, the People's Liberation Army rescued the animals by offering the highest bid through the Poly group, China's leading arms-export company. The heads have since been displayed in Beijing's Poly Museum, and shown triumphantly around the nation. China purchased the boar rather quietly in 2003, and in 2007 Macao casino magnate Stanley Ho bought the horse and gave it the nation. Four pieces are missing, which fuels interest in the rabbit and rat.
The International Art World in Disarray
Not many years ago Western collectors, dealers and museums maintained a smooth and chilly front on any question of how they came to own objects apparently stolen from China, Egypt, Peru, Mexico, Italy, Greece or other archeologically rich (and typically financially poor) nations. Some art historians have been remarkably decorous in characterizing their provenance. Typical is the following description of a sixth–eighth-century copy of Gu Kaizhi's fourth-century Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies (Nüshi zhen tu), held by the British Museum:
In private hands from the early Ming dynasty (1368–1644) to the middle of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the scroll was then received like a prodigal child into the collection of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95). Around the end of the nineteenth century, it came into the possession of a British officer named Captain Clarence Johnson, who took it to the British Museum for appraisal in 1903. It was immediately bought, for £25, and has since been held there in trust for the British nation, as the museum's charter demands.Footnote 13
How did the painting from the Imperial collection “come into” the possession of Captain Johnson? Note the smooth passive, as if Captain Johnson had not been in China to suppress the 1900 Boxer Uprising, a moment in which large numbers of Chinese collections were looted, sometimes by force, sometimes by sale at ridiculous prices.Footnote 14 Note also the phrase “held there in trust for the British nation, as the museum's charter demands.”
In the past, such turns of phrase passed without notice, contributing to a great wall separating looted art from its former owners. But today they sound increasingly bizarre. Why should the British Museum's charter demand that a stolen Chinese painting be held in trust for the British people?
The global art institutions are presently in disarray. This has weakened the united Western front of aesthetics against claims from plundered nations. Little of this disarray has to do with China, although the fact that it is happening as China is in economic and political ascent renders the Chinese claims more interesting.
The claims of private collectors, museum officials and art dealers began to weaken under the shame of art stolen by Germany from Jewish collectors. While many claims remain unsatisfied, the scandal of prominent cultural institutions asserting their “ownership” of art seized from victims on their way to death camps shook popular willingness to accept art world claims at face value.Footnote 15
Another blow has been a series of prosecutions against smuggling by dishonest dealers and museum officials. Frederick Schultz was head of the New York-based National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental, and Primitive Art. His voice for protecting the status quo in the international art trade was silenced by a 2002 conviction for smuggling Egyptian antiquities, with a 33-month sentence. More important was the Italian government's decision to prosecute Getty Museum Curator Marion True.Footnote 16 When a prosperous Western nation acts against art theft, it strengthens the confidence of other claimants. And while Alfred Taubman, head of Sotheby's, went to prison for cheating his customers, not smuggling, his conviction further underscored the extent of criminality in the once proud fine arts world.Footnote 17
China had long pressed the United States, a major destination for smuggled art objects, to limit the import of Chinese antiquities in order to combat tomb-robbing. In contrast to archaeologists, who fear the loss of crucial information when an object is secretly plundered from its context, leading dealers, collectors and museum officials dismissed China's demands as foolishly counter-productive, likely to contribute to black markets in stolen antiquities.
Thus a somewhat surprising coda to the Bush administration was a US deal with China.Footnote 18 The new agreement bars US imports of antiquities made before the end of the Tang dynasty, in AD 907, and of all monumental sculpture or wall art that is at least 250 years old. The agreement was applauded by archaeologists as a deterrent to tomb robbing, but deplored by many dealers and museum officials.
Among the most aggressive voices rejecting China's claims is James Cuno, Director of Chicago's Art Institute. He is understandably defensive about the nexus of private collectors, dealers, and donation-based tax write-offs which support the big modern museums of the West. His learned and sophisticated polemic kicks dust into the air to avoid seriously engaging the issue of repatriation. Cuno argues that the real conflict is not between museums and archaeologists, but between art lovers and nation-states, which he accuses of wanting only to mobilize art to strengthen their often despotic regimes. Cuno signals his nostalgia for a simpler era in which the native peoples were less restless by titling a chapter, “The Chinese Question,”Footnote 19 echoing the era of the Eighth Earl of Elgin. Cuno reminds us (correctly but with little relevance) that China ill-treats its ethnic minorities, and that the Poly Museum is founded on dubious money (one imagines that museum directors might not want to pursue this angle too vigorously). He raises the unfounded fear that China and other nations want to empty out the Art Institute and British Museum, rather than to receive some acknowledgement of past injustice and return of the key works of art.
Art Repatriation and China's Broader Cultural Ambitions
Was Cai Mingchao, who submitted the fake bid in the Paris auction, a patriot who challenged the injustice of plundered national treasures? Or was he a fool who damaged China's reputation during a dignified cultural transaction? Chinese responses may vary according to how important they believe repatriation of plundered art is relative to other, perhaps more complex, national cultural ambitions.
China will certainly continue to demand the return of plundered art. Indeed, the 2000 zodiac heads controversy led to the establishment of a state office for this purpose.Footnote 20 But China's concern with other questions of cultural diplomacy makes an absolutist position unlikely. For example, at the end of the Second World War, a large but unknown number of Chinese art objects ended up in Japan. China wants some of them back, but it also has a complex cultural diplomacy with Japan; so any future negotiations may resemble the protracted bargaining between Russia and Germany over the return of objects looted by the Red Army in 1945. Taiwan presents another complex relationship; the National Palace Museum sits in Taipei, full of treasures which maintain a cultural bond to the mainland, but whose disposition might conceivably one day be negotiated for some degree of autonomy.Footnote 21
China's claim to be a world civilization does not only rest on antiquities from its glorious past. The repatriation of art objects may look a little different if we broaden the question to include other arts. China faces very different problems with modern literature, where the issue is how to get good translations of Chinese works in the hands of foreign readers, rather than recovering novels to China. For film, China worries about protecting its industry against Hollywood competition, as well as finding export markets for its own product. For contemporary paintings, China is happy to see new artists finding markets in America and Europe.
The question of returning elite art also distracts attention from the less glamorous realities of China's participation in the global cultural economy. In our times, China has become one of the world's greatest exporter of art through the low-cost production of garden gnomes, lawn flamingos, and motel oil paintings to Western consumers. This facet of China's place in the international cultural economy is both profitable and unglamorous, in contrast to the high-toned visions of Beijing's drive to recapture lost Chinese art. The repatriation of plundered objects is only a part of a complex cultural policy linking China to the world.
