Bring back lost cultural relics when the time is ripe
Nowadays, the circulation of art is no longer carried out by antique dealers, but by auction houses. There are two major Art auction companies in the world. One is Sotheby's, which was founded in 1744 and is one of the oldest auction houses in the world. In 1988, Sotheby's went public in New York and became the earliest auction company to go public. Another is Christie's, founded in London in 1766, which sold many important Chinese cultural relics.
A very famous auction in recent years was the auction of four Chinese bronzes from Fujita Art Museum by Christie's in 2017. Since the 1990s, Japan has experienced two financial crises, making it difficult for many museums to maintain their operations and adopting auctions. The four pieces of Chinese bronzes auctioned by Fujita Art Museum at this auction amounted to 900 million yuan.
On November 14, 1970, the sixteenth session of UNESCO passed the Convention on the Methods of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illegal Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property in Paris. As long as this convention is signed, it means that cultural relics imported after this date can be considered illegal. Therefore, auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's place special emphasis on the orderly circulation of auctioned cultural relics, ensuring that they are legal under Western legal frameworks.
The United States State Department also issued laws prohibiting the illegal import of Chinese cultural relics in 2008 and continued to sign them in 2013 and 2018. The governments of both China and the United States also signed memorandums of understanding on restricting the import of Chinese cultural relics the following year. I was personally fortunate to have participated in the research and signing of the contract in 2008. We repeatedly emphasized with the US State Department that if the United States prohibits the illegal import of Chinese cultural relics, it will have a significant inhibitory effect on the theft and circulation of Chinese cultural relics. Later practical results also proved this point. At that time, although American scholars were very supportive, museums and some wealthy individuals were unwilling, especially the latter, as many of their collections could not be converted into property.
There are different paths for the return of cultural relics. For example, Min fanglei, collected by Hunan Provincial Museum, has created auction records of Chinese cultural relics several times. In 2001, Min fanglei auctioned a huge price of 11.5 million US dollars (tax included) at Christie's in New York; In 2014, Min fanglei was recruited back by the Hunan Provincial Museum.
Another group of former Burke father bronzes, which appeared in the Tokyo auction market in March 2019, caused a stir in domestic public opinion in China, as these bronzes had never appeared before and were clearly recently smuggled out. In September of that year, our country pursued the return of this batch of bronze ware. Pursuing returns is completely different from purchasing returns. Our country has used diplomatic and legal means to provide a lot of hard evidence to prove that these cultural relics were smuggled out of China, causing the Japanese government to freeze the auction company's batch of cultural relics and then send someone to escort them back to China. This process is very difficult.
For us Chinese people, the Chinese bronze ware that has been circulating overseas has long received public attention due to our national sentiment and its high artistic value. At the same time, the research on overseas Chinese bronzes should also become an important research direction for Chinese scholars in the future. In the future, we must first protect our cultural relics and prevent them from being lost. Secondly, when the time is ripe, we should take the lost cultural relics home.
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