China has ratcheted up pressure for imperial treasures to be repatriated, condemning overseas auctions of its relics and demanding they come home.
China is particularly eager to get back a series of bronze animal heads looted in 1860 by British and French soldiers when they burned down the Qing emperors’ summer palace in Beijing.
China’s drive to recover the heads has alarmed Western museums and auction houses, who are also sparring with Greece and other nations over the return of historic art treasures.
A March auction of two heads from the estate of fashion icon Yves Saint Laurent was disrupted after the winning Chinese bidder refused to pay for them, on patriotic grounds.
“These cultural relics should be returned to China,” Chinese Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva Liu Zhenmin (劉振民) told a meeting on Monday on the return of cultural property to countries of origin.
“We believe that such auctions run counter to the underlying spirit of relevant international treaties and UN resolutions, and are serious infringements of China’s cultural rights and interests,” he said.
Chinese art, whether ancient or more contemporary, has fetched record prices at international auctions in recent years, and at times defying the global economic downturn.
But Xinhua news agency quoted Liu as saying that illicit appropriation of, and trafficking in, cultural property is a “sacrilege” to history and civilization.
“While enjoying broad consensus of the international community, protecting cultural heritage and promoting the restitution of cultural property to the countries of origin are inalienable and fundamental cultural rights of the people of countries of origin, as well as cultural responsibilities incumbent on all governments,” Liu said.
Chinese art authorities are planning to catalogue Chinese pieces currently housed in overseas institutions, Chinese media reported earlier this year.
Many of the historic temples, treasures and art in China were lost to war and to the wanton destruction of the Cultural Revolution, when many Chinese academics were also jailed, beaten or killed.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
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