In 1709, a world-famous royal back garden was established, which is the Yuanmingyuan. Located in the northwestern suburbs of Beijing, the Yuanmingyuan is a huge garden, a huge garden composed of many small gardens, full of vegetation, surrounded by spring water, and cool in summer. Therefore, the imperial family of the Qing Dynasty would go to the Yuanmingyuan to escape the summer heat every summer, and the emperor would also move to the Yuanmingyuan to live and handle government affairs in the Yuanmingyuan, which was like the second Forbidden City. But in 1860, the British and French troops invaded the Yuanmingyuan, the tongzhi emperor at that time wanted to restore the Yuanmingyuan, but the Qing government could not come up with the money needed to repair the Yuanmingyuan, and soon after, many thieves invaded the Yuanmingyuan and dealt a final devastating blow to the Yuanmingyuan, and the Yuanmingyuan became a ruin forever.
The Yuanmingyuan suffered a devastating blow, and archaeologists discovered a British shipwreck in the South China Sea
When the Yuanmingyuan was plundered by these invaders, countless treasures were transported day and night without listening, and these invaders took their "booty" to the ships returning to China, leaving a ruin and then flying away. These invaders who took away the cultural relics of the Yuanmingyuan did not all bring the cultural relics back safely, and there were many ships, and some ships suffered shipwrecks. The climate at sea is very unpredictable, so it is very common for ships to be shipwrecked.
I thought that these sunken ships would sleep on the bottom of the sea forever, but not long ago, when Chinese archaeologists were conducting underwater archaeology in the South China Sea, they found a shipwreck. This shipwreck is loaded with weapons, so it may be a warship, through the salvage of this shipwreck, archaeologists have found that this shipwreck is a ship during the invasion of China by the Eight-Nation Alliance, and the cultural relics on board are also Chinese cultural relics, that is to say, the cultural relics on this ship are most likely cultural relics in the Yuanmingyuan. From the ship's nautical diaries and some relics left behind, it can be found that this is indeed a British ship, and the artifacts on the ship have also been identified as cultural relics in the Yuanmingyuan.
The British learned of the shipwreck and demanded the return of the artifacts
Although this ship is a British ship, the cultural relics on the ship are Chinese cultural relics, and Chinese archaeologists believe that this ship has only a lot of research value, but the value of this ship is far less than the cultural relics on the ship. When the British media learned of the incident, they began to report on the sunken British warship and demanded that China return the ship to them. When the British came to our country to plunder, did they ever think about returning our cultural relics? Today, there are tens of thousands of Chinese artifacts in the British Museum alone, most of which they looted from the Yuanmingyuan.
Not only do they not return them, they also sell these cultural relics at high prices and sell them out. In 2018, the British Canterbury Auction House auctioned off a cultural relic, the bronze tiger lock, which was lost from the Yuanmingyuan, and this cultural relic is recorded in the Treasure Record of the Qing Dynasty. But the artifact was auctioned off and sold for £410,000, or more than 3.6 million yuan. The bronze tiger lock is not yet the most expensive Yuanmingyuan cultural relic, the most expensive cultural relics in the Yuanmingyuan cultural relics auctioned, is the Qianlong Light Yellow Yangcai Icing on the Cake Long-necked Gourd Bottle, this gourd piece sold for HK$252 million at sotheby's auction in Hong Kong.
The auctioneer was a British collector whose family had many treasures from the Old Summer Palace, something their family themselves admitted, but they never thought of returning the relics to China. In 2013, a French collector took the initiative to buy the rat head and rabbit head of the Yuanmingyuan and donated these two cultural relics to China free of charge. They were not aggressors, but they felt guilty about China, but their country did not think so. These countries that have invaded China have no intention of returning China's cultural relics, so why should they demand that China return the cultural relics they have robbed?