In Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, there is a special collection of ordnance royal museum, it mainly displays cold weapons of various eras, exhibits include: war, competition, hunting, knightly competition, Leeds Royal Ordnance Museum contains a total of 75,000 weapons, full of historical sense.
Hailed as the "head of a hundred soldiers" by the Leeds Royal Ordnance Museum, there is a Chinese exhibit called the "Yongle Sword", which according to the museum revealed was acquired from an auction for 100,000 pounds in 1991, which is said to have been stolen from China during the Eight-Power Alliance.
In 1420, the 18th year of Ming Yongle, the Palace of Beijing was about to be built, Ming Chengzu announced that the capital would be Beijing, in order to stabilize the rear, he also sent eunuchs to the Western Regions, when the land of East India was invaded by the Numa Napuer in the west, and Ming Chengzu also rewarded gold coins in order to regulate.
Seeing the war in the western region, in order to consolidate the border relations, Ming Chengzu built a sword, the animal carved by the sword grid is the Buddhist beast "Qiong", that is, the lion, in Tibetan culture, "Qiong" is the demon who controls the snow mountain range, although it is a demon, but also the guardian of the snowy plateau.
Yongle sword is 90 cm long, weighs 1.3 kg, the sword body has a sword ridge in the middle to increase the strength of the sword, the sword sheath is also equipped with relief flower surface, the pattern is staggered, which also fully reflects the sword casting technology in China at that time, but after several generations, the Yongle sword has long been lost to the people.
In modern times, the Western powers coveted China's treasures and markets, launched attacks under various pretexts, and in the spring of 1900, the Boxer Rebellion became the fuse of the Eight-Power Alliance's war, and Cixi issued an edict declaring war on various countries, and Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, austria-Hungary, and Italy transferred troops into Beijing in the name of "protecting the embassy".
The eight countries have different purposes, Russia covets the northeast, the United States wants to open up the market, but wherever the coalition forces go, burning and looting, even the famous American writer Mark Twain has written an article exposing: In a place in Qiu County, Hebei Province, the American Christian missionary Mei Ziming killed 680 innocent Chinese peasants under the slogan of "using human heads to meet human heads" as a slogan.
The "Yuanmingyuan", known as the Garden of Ten Thousand Gardens, was plundered again after the British and French allied forces, and eventually became a ruin, and even the French literary hero Hugo wrote an article attacking that these two raids were not only the destruction of a generation of Yuanmingyuan, but also a witness to the barbaric acts of the West.
In these two raids, the lost cultural relics are roughly estimated to be 1.5 million pieces, the Yongle Sword is only one of them, with the establishment of New China, China also attaches importance to the protection of cultural relics, has been committed to recovering overseas cultural relics, but the West is also a sky-high price, so that our country is also beyond reach.
The Ming Yongle Sword has offered a high price of 1 billion, in fact, this is not a price problem, but the United Kingdom has never intended to return these cultural relics, and has collected more than 20,000 Pieces of Chinese cultural relics in the British Museum, and has also opened a Chinese Pavilion, Dunhuang Murals, and Countless Cultural Relics of the Yuanmingyuan.
The "Yongle Sword" snatched by the Eight-Power Alliance was estimated by experts to be worth 1 billion, but the British shouted: Do not sell