But in 1987 he worked for Sotheby’s and he received a very interesting phone call from a couple looking to have a pair of antiquities valued. Lark Mason is a specialist in Chinese works of art and president of the Appraisers Association of America. No one paid them any special attention and they went missing in the chaos, presumably lost forever. Sometime during the looting, the bronze fountainheads were torn from their bodies, but at that point, they were just twelve of those 1.5 million pieces. Photo by Honeyhuyue (CC BY SA 3.0) The Heads Emerge Ironically, one of the few structures that survived from this resplendent Chinese palace was the stone facade of the European section where the bronze zodiacs had once stood - baroque remnants of an homage to Western architecture. ![]() The complex was so large that it took three full days to burn down. Once everything of value was collected, the soldiers set fire to Yuanming Yuan. “By some estimates, maybe one point five million pieces were there - and all of that was taken,” says Frederik Green, Associate Professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. “Looty” the Pekingese dog stolen from Yuanming Yuan. Even the emperor’s pet Pekinese dog was stolen from the palace and gifted to Queen Victoria, and renamed “Looty” in the process. ![]() There are even accounts of soldiers using rare manuscripts from the library to light their pipes. They spent days grabbing everything of value, and whatever they couldn’t carry they destroyed. When soldiers arrived at the palace, a frenzy of looting took place. Towards the end of the second Opium War in 1860, Qing officials captured and killed a British and French delegation in response, Western forces advanced toward Yuanming Yuan. French and British forces loot and destroy Yuanming Yuan. Yuanming Yuan may have symbolized imperial grandeur, but its story would be defined by tragedy. It was his “home away from home” (his primary residence at the Forbidden City) yet roughly the size of Central Park, made up of hundreds of pavilions and packed with all sorts of spectacular art and architecture. Yuanming Yuan was an immense garden complex first constructed in the 1700s for the imperial family of the emperor of the Qing dynasty. “The translation of Yuanming Yuan is often given as ‘the garden of perfect brightness’,” explains Patricia Yu, who studies the history of art at UC Berkeley. The animal fountain was a hybrid of European and Chinese design built by Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione for a European-themed garden within a much larger and more extravagant Chinese palace complex called Yuanming Yuan. These fountain heads would spout water out of a different animal’s mouth for two hours a day every day to signify the passing time. The bronze heads were originally part of a fountain featuring the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac. ![]() These bronze heads have become arguably the most prominent symbols of a growing concern around the repatriation of Chinese artifacts - these antiquities are highly sought after not for their artistic value, but rather the story they tell and meaning they hold for the government of China. By stopping the sale, Cai was signaling to the world that China wanted its stolen heritage back. ![]() The animal heads had been looted from China during one of the worst incidents of cultural vandalism the country has ever seen. In fact, Cai had purposefully sabotaged the sale of the heads as an “act of patriotism” for China.Īs it turns out, the rabbit and rat bronzes weren’t just decorative works of art destined to sit under a dusty glass case in some private collection. But when it came time to pay the bill, Cai had a surprise: he would not pay up. The rat and the rabbit bronzes sold for fourteen million euros each to the same bidder-an art collector and dealer named Cai Mingchao. On the third and final day of the auction, the bronze heads went up for sale one at a time. Two of the most anticipated items of the event were a pair of bronze animal heads from China-one of a rabbit and one of a rat, each dating back to the 18th Century Qing dynasty.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |