"One day, two robbers broke into the Yuanmingyuan, one looted and the other set fire. It seems that after victory, you can start stealing... Two winners, one stuffed with a fanny bag, which was visible, and the other filled with boxes. They walked back to Europe arm in arm and grinning. --Hugo
The Yuanmingyuan is a large-scale imperial garden of the Qing Dynasty, which was built in the 46th year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1707), the Kangxi Emperor rewarded the garden to the four brothers Yinchen, and inscribed the plaque "Yuanmingyuan", "Yuanming" is the Yongzheng Emperor's legal number, Yin Chan was the Yongzheng Emperor, and then expanded the Yuanmingyuan, adding the Zhengda Guangming Hall and the Qinzheng Hall as well as many duty rooms in the Cabinet, the Six Ministries, and the Military Aircraft Department.
Since then, successive emperors have expanded and repaired, during the Qianlong Emperor, the pattern of the Yuanmingyuan was basically formed, and the bronze statue of the head of the beast in the zodiac was part of the fountain outside the Haiyan Hall, which was cast in red bronze. The word "Haiyan" is taken from the meaning of "Heqing Haiyan, Guotai Min'an", and the bronze statue of the Zodiac is famous for telling the time with water, called "Hydraulic Clock".
Its design is presided over by the court Western painter Italian Lang Shining, the French Jiang Youren supervised, the court craftsman production, Lang Shining took into account the Chinese folk culture, so that the seated statue of the zodiac replaced the human sculpture commonly used in the design of Western fountains.
The bronze statue of the Zodiac also represents the strength of the country at that time; during the Jiaqing period, the Jiaqing Emperor preferred to remove the furnishings of the "Three Mountains" of Wanshou, Xiangshan and Yuquan, and also to repair the Three Gardens of the Yuanming Dynasty, but during the Xianfeng period, the Second Opium War broke out, and the gate of the country was forcibly opened by the Western powers.
This garden, which was praised by the French writer Hugo as "a model of ideals and art", was robbed and burned by the British and French armies, and a British second-class military officer named Helith became rich only by looting the Chinese Yuanmingyuan, enjoyed it for life, and even received the title of "Chinese James".
But nowadays, China's economy is developing rapidly, its national strength is becoming stronger and stronger, and its influence in the international community is also growing, and some cultural relics that have been lost overseas have slowly returned to China.
In 1985, an American antique dealer visited a private residence in California and accidentally found bronze statues of horse heads, ox heads, and tiger heads in the Yuanmingyuan, and the owner's family saw that he loved the three bronze statues and agreed to sell them for $1500 each.
However, only two or three years later, the bronze statue of the horse's head in the Yuanmingyuan appeared at the auction and was auctioned for $250,000.
In 2000, the bull head, the tiger head, and the monkey head appeared at the auctions of Christie's and Sotheby's in Hong Kong, which caused indignation from all walks of life in China, and they did not expect that what they had plundered from China would run to China to make money decades later.
In order to return these cultural relics to the motherland, China Poly Group Company resolutely participated in the auction, bidding for 7.745 million Hong Kong dollars for the head of the ox, 8.185 million Hong Kong dollars to win the head of the monkey, and the head of the tiger for 15.44475 million Hong Kong dollars.
It is worth mentioning that the bronze statue of Ma Shou appeared at the auction again in 2007, and the cultural relics lost overseas were auctioned miserably, which made China's cultural relics departments sad and called for the return of public welfare. The cultural relic was eventually auctioned by gambling king Ho Hung-sun for 69.1 million Hong Kong dollars and donated to the state.
As of November 2019, the head of the cow, the head of the monkey, the head of the tiger, the head of the pig, the head of the rat, the head of the rabbit, and the head of the horse have returned to China in different ways, and the "dragon head" has shown some wind in 2010, but at that time, the matter of the rabbit head and the rat head was bumped, so the dragon head auction was postponed to 2018.
A Chinese buyer auctioned the dragon's head for 24 million yuan at the Paris auction in France on December 17, 2018, and after this news, it once again caused a sensation in China, and many experts suggested: I hope to hand it over to the country free of charge.
But so far, there has been no further development of the "dragon head", and what the outside world can know is that the dragon head is currently well preserved, and it is still unknown when it will return.