More than 30 ancient gold ornaments went on show in a Chinese museum this week after Paris quietly insisted that a billionaire collector and France’s top antique dealer return them on the grounds they were stolen.
The move came 15 years after the two men donated the works to a Paris museum following an intervention by then-French president Jacques Chirac, an admirer of Asian art.
Christian Deydier, a dealer and recognized expert in Chinese antiquities, told reporters that the French government had “dropped its trousers” in its eagerness to return the treasures and curry favor with Beijing.
Photo: AFP
“It’s France’s heritage which is suffering,” he said, denouncing what he called an improper legal process and “an export on the sly.”
The 32 pieces from Dabaozi in Gansu Province have been dated to about the 8th century BC and have undergone a tortuous journey through the murky trails of the Asian antiquities trade and international diplomacy.
They include 28 golden plaques, but the star works are four large profiles of birds of prey, which would have been part of ceremonial riding tackle or decorated a dignitary’s coffin in the Zhou Dynasty.
Deydier bought the four profiles in the 1990s from the widow of a Taiwanese antique dealer, from whom he had earlier also purchased the 28 plaques.
Chirac learned of the four ornaments’ existence and fell under their spell, but they were too expensive for the French public purse. So he persuaded his billionaire friend Francois Pinault, the owner of luxury and clothing group Kering, to buy the quartet for 1 million euros (US$1.1 million) and donate them to the Musee Guimet, France’s national collection of Asian arts. At the same time, Deydier gave it his plaques.
Controversy over the pieces’ provenance broke out in the mid-2000s, when dealer Bernard Gomez said that they had been illegally removed from China, but an official investigation reached no conclusion.
In 2010, Chinese authorities informed France that the pieces could have been pillaged from an archeological site and a joint Franco-Chinese expert panel was set up last year to investigate, French Minister of Culture Fleur Pellerin told the French parliament.
“An array of consistent indicators led to the conclusion that the Chinese request for restitution was justified,” she said.
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