Posted on 02/27/2009 12:02:51 PM PST by mojito
Beijing swiftly moved to punish auction house Christie's with tightened customs rules Thursday after its protests failed to stop the sale of two imperial bronze sculptures taken from China nearly 150 years ago.
The move signals China's resolve in its campaign to rescue pieces of its cultural heritage now scattered around the world - but the impact of the new rules on the auction house, if any, was not clear.
The disputed 18th century fountainheads - heads of a rat and a rabbit - were sold to an unidentified telephone bidder or bidders Wednesday for 28 million euros ($36 million) as part of an auction of art works owned by the late French designer Yves Saint Laurent.
China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage condemned the sale of the two bronzes and said it would affect Christie's interests in the country, ordering tighter inspections of all cultural relics that the auction house seeks to bring in or out of mainland China....
The sculptures disappeared from the Old Summer Palace on the outskirts of Beijing when French and British forces sacked and burned it at the close of the second Opium War in 1860. Chinese view the devastation of the palace, the country residence of emperors which was full of art treasures, as a national humiliation.
The palace bronzes are part of a dozen animal heads from the Chinese zodiac that formed an elaborate water clock fountain designed by Jesuit missionaries. The 12 heads marked time by spouting water.
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.excite.com ...
I cannot blame them for their anger.
They sorta should have thought about their “cultural relics” during their Cultural Revolution, when their paramilitary army of teenage twits destroyed thousands of priceless cultural relics.
> I cannot blame them for their anger.
I laugh in their face. The ChiComs did more damage to their cultural relics during the Cultural Revolution than any foreign power ever did.
They’re jolly lucky the British thought to steal these two relics: they would have been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.
Those ChiComs have some nerve.
Yeah, having your palaces burned is like that...
HA, a couple of Chinese Billionaires prolly picked them up.
The country that occupies Tibet is bitching over some antiques?
As opposed to Chinese piracy of foreign nations' cultural heritage and copyrights.
Isn’t this the same government that has flooded over archeological sites to build a power generating dam?
National insults from more than one human lifetime ago are a waste of time. If they were that important to em, they could have bid like everyone else. Whats next, indians laying claim to every arrowhead?
Ok, but suppose you have a camera that shows your brother coming in and stealing your tv, do you call the police ? No. Suppose the Katrina beer man comes in and steals beer from your frig. Do you call the police ? Yes.
Furthermore if you know anything about the opium war, this is a giant stain on the civilized western world. England was making a ton of money exporting opium to china. China tried to stop it. England along with the US and other western powers overwhelmed china and forced the importion of opium. England also acquired the lease to Hong Kong in the process.
On art theft, I think there’s a legal time limit of some odd number of years, like 60 years?
As for the Opium wars, it’s no stain on me, or on any modern nation. That makes as much sense as blaming Bayer for nazi gas chambers. And maybe ill care about Chinese feelings when they arent a communist, despotic, mass murder prison with forced abortion.
This silliness is like the Chinese protesting Japan when their prime minister went to that Japanese war memorial shrine. The Chinese went nuts. I guess only THEY can rape Nanking. If they showed respect to their heritage, maybe others would too. Most of these antiquities would have been lost forever if it wasnt for western collectors. Ditto for Egypt.
What a bunch of twits this commies are.
The Chinese are fed a steady diet of one-sided history about the Opium Wars.
The French and British burned the Palace in retaliation for the Chinese atrocity of agreeing to accept an ambassador, then taking him and his staff prisoner and torturing them to death. They took a dim view of such things at the time.
The suggested alternative was to burn Peking, which would have ruined the livelihoods of millions and cost many thousands of lives.
I'd think commies would approve of choosing to retaliate against the property of an Emperor rather than against common people.
Correction. The British envoy, although taken prisoner under a flag of truce and tortured, was not murdered.
Other prisoners taken under flag of truce were tortured to death in extravagant ways, which led to the decision to retaliate against the Emperor’s property.
Enormously greater loss of art has taken place repeatedly in Chinese history, from the Taiping rebellion to the Cultural Revolution, not to mention in earlier civil wars and invasions, but those weren’t by western powers, so nobody cares.
The Chicoms have a cultivated a sense of grievance and outraged indignation to the point that it's indistinguishable from opportunism.
They are learning how to play the “victim” card. I can’t wait for them to learn how to play the “race” card.
The Chinese will never be any good at the race card which implies an assumption of victimhood and inferiority.
The Chinese have taken for granted for three or four thousand years that they are superior to all other peoples. Their victimization in thd 19th and 20th centuries was just some horrible mistake.
The Chinese race card, when played, is more likely to have a whiff of ubermensch to it.
> Furthermore if you know anything about the opium war, this is a giant stain on the civilized western world.
At the time it was a necessary function of Empire, for both Britain and France, as they had interests in China / Indochina.
> England was making a ton of money exporting opium to china. China tried to stop it. England along with the US and other western powers overwhelmed china and forced the importion of opium. England also acquired the lease to Hong Kong in the process.
Sounds good to me. It is always a mistake to review history through revisionist eyes with modern walues and mores.
Moreover, the ChiComs are not the Chinese of the day: they are brutal, bloody conquerors. If antiquities should be released to anybody, it ought to be to the Taiwanese.
To the ChiComs, there really is only one thing to say; “Boo Hoo Sucks to You.”
Actually, the Chinese of the day were brutal, bloody conquerors. They had just wrapped up a century of military expeditions into Central, South and Southeast Asia. They don't generally talk about these things because to the Chinese mindset, it's not imperialism if the Chinese are doing it. Note that when the Chinese retook Nanking at the end of the Taiping Rebellion around the same time, they massacred its inhabitants to the last man, woman and child. What the Western Powers did during the sack of Peking is mild compared to China's bestial behavior - they chose to destroy physical structures rather than people, where the Chinese slaughtered people and left the physical structures intact.
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