The upheaval and displacement of national treasures bear witness to the history of suffering, and the great revival will surely allow these "children" to return home and gather, dance and sing, laugh and laugh, and regain their radiance!
The twelve bronze heads of the Yuanmingyuan are always worried about the hearts of the Chinese people.
In the last month of 2020, Ma Shou "took the lead" and successfully returned home! Became the first copper head to return to the Yuanmingyuan.
Heart-wrenchingly, there has been no news of the whereabouts of snake heads, sheep heads, chicken heads and dog heads.
Longshou is based on reliable information in the Taiwan region, but cannot be confirmed.
Every other copper head (including the horse head) - "rat head, cow head, tiger head, rabbit head, monkey head, pig head" has experienced all kinds of twists and turns, and even spent a lot of "road fees" to go home, at present, in different parts of the motherland.
As we all know, the bronze head of the Zodiac is an integral part of the Imperial Garden of the Qing Dynasty, known as the "Garden of Ten Thousand Gardens", the Haiyan Hall of the Yuanmingyuan.
During the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, in order to enrich and enrich the landscape architecture of the Yuanmingyuan, it was designed by the court Western painter Lang Shining, supervised by the Frenchman Jiang Youren, and the court craftsmen used red bronze casting human animal head sculptures as the sprinklers of the "hydraulic clock" in the fountain in front of the Haiyan Hall.
The heads of these beasts are red copper, the body is stone, hollow and connected to the water spray pipe, and every hour, the zodiac statue corresponding to the hour sprays water from the mouth. At noon, the twelve portraits of the twelve students are in the mouth of the fountain at the same time, which is a spectacle.
160 years ago, that is, in 1860, the British and French allies invaded Beijing, burned the Yuanmingyuan, and lost countless treasures, including the bronze statue of the beast's head, overseas.
Seven national treasures bronze heads on the bumpy road back home
Hundreds of millions of "road fees" to return home, cow heads, tiger heads, horse heads, monkey heads, pig heads
One of the most important ways to get home of a national treasure is to buy it for a fee or auction it.
After the twelve bronze heads were exiled overseas in 1860, the head of the ox and the head of the tiger appeared in the garden of a house in the United States as a decoration. In the 1980s, Taiwanese entrepreneur Tsai Chennan bought the two bronze heads at Sotheby's at an auction. In 2000, China Poly Group purchased the bull's head and tiger's head from Christie's Auction House in Hong Kong for HK$7.745 million and HK$15.44475 million respectively.
In addition to the above two bronze heads, in the 1980s, China Poly Group purchased monkey heads at Christie's auction house for HK$8.185 million.
In 1987, pig heads were purchased by a museum in the United States. In 2003, the famous entrepreneur Stanley Ho financed the acquisition and donated it to the collection of poly art museum. As for the amount of capital contribution, it is said to be less than HK$7 million.
At present, the head of the ox, the head of the tiger, the head of the monkey and the capital of the pig are stored in the Poly Art Museum in China.
In 2007, Ho again invested HK$69.1 million to purchase a bronze statue of a horse's head and donated it to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage for the national permanent collection. Later, in order to better implement the international consensus on the protection of cultural relics that have been lost and returned to their original places, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage reached a consensus with Mr. Ho Hongshen. In December 2020, the bronze statue of the horse head was officially returned to the Yuanmingyuan, becoming the first important cultural relics lost overseas to return to the Yuanmingyuan.
(It is worth mentioning that the noon horse head is the most unique of the twelve zodiac head beasts, because the time represented by the horse is noon, and when the horse's head sprays water, all the animals will spray water together, which may also indicate that all the copper heads will go home one after another).)
Twelve beast heads restored
The friendship from the Pino family in France donated Chinese rat heads and rabbit heads free of charge
The bronze head of the zodiac is exquisite in craftsmanship and exquisite in shape, which affects the hearts of countless Chinese people, and the result of this psychology being used to make a profit is that the auction price rises and soars.
This makes people angry!
Finally, at the 2009 "Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berger" auction held by Christie's Auction Company in France, the head of the rat and the head of the rabbit were both auctioned for 14 million euros. However, Cai Mingchao, a collection consultant of the China Rescue and Loss of Overseas Cultural Relics Special Fund as a buyer, said that he would not pay, and in the end, the two animals were auctioned first.
Afterwards, a series of brands such as luxury goods under the French Pino family were boycotted in China, and seeing that the situation was getting worse and worse, christie's majority shareholder, the French Pino family, took the two animal heads, and donated the rat head and rabbit head to China in 2013, which are currently in the National Museum of China.
In addition to Christie's, there are many auction houses such as Sotheby's, which sell all kinds of auction items
The heads of dragons, snakes, sheep, chickens and dogs
In 2009, Shenzhen Satellite TV reported that Taiwanese collector Wang Du said in an interview that the dragon head of the unaccounted for in the Yuanmingyuan was in Taiwan. In good shape in the 1980s, collectors had planned to auction dragon heads, but the turmoil over rat heads and rabbit heads led them to postpone the auction.
In 2018, the dragon head, which is suspected to be one of the twelve zodiac animal heads in the Yuanmingyuan, appeared at a small auction in Paris, France, and was finally purchased by a Chinese buyer for 24 million yuan.
As for the head of the snake, the head of the sheep, the head of the chicken and the head of the dog, these four animal heads have disappeared since the burning of the Yuanmingyuan by the British and French forces in 1860, perhaps in the basement of a collector, perhaps in a forgotten corner.
Maybe, maybe it's gone.
Restoration of Haiyan Hall in the Yuanmingyuan
Explore the international cooperation of lost cultural relics to return home
According to an incomplete statistics by UNESCO, among the collections of more than 200 museums in 47 countries around the world, a total of 1.64 million Chinese cultural relics are collected, while the number of Chinese cultural relics in private collections is about 10 times that of the collections.
In other words, even according to the most conservative statistics, China has lost at least 17 million cultural relics overseas!
The humiliating history of the modern century, the country is poor and weak, the people are in a state of flux, how much energy can we have, how much ability can we have to protect our historical relics, and countless treasures have been looted and plundered, or sold by ignorance, or stolen and smuggled overseas.
With the rejuvenation of the country and the nation, the cultural relics lost overseas are returning to the motherland in various ways such as repurchase, donation and recourse.
Obviously, buyback is one of the important ways, according to statistics, more than 90% of the lost cultural relics are returned to China through the way of repurchase, and a special fund has been set up in China to buy Han Huang's "Five Bull Diagram" and Mi Fu's "Yanshan Ming" hand scroll. But turning an irregular outflow into a legal circulation is unacceptable, and the huge cost of rising water is becoming more and more unbearable, and worse, it has stimulated a large number of smugglers to take risks and test the law by example.
It is more appropriate and self-respecting to be a recourse for international exchanges and cooperation, such as diplomatic and academic channels.
Although it is very difficult, the most fundamental is the legal approach.
UNESCO and other bodies have also successively developed a series of international laws and conventions, including the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, the International Convention on the Method of Transferring Ownership of Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects, the Convention of the International Institute on the Stolen or Illegal Export of Cultural Objects and the Convention on the Illegal Export of Cultural Objects, etc.
For example, under the Memorandum of Understanding on Anti-Smuggling and Excavation, countries such as the United States, Sweden and Japan have inspected and returned some cultural relics.
Not long ago, in November 2020, the National Administration of Heritage recovered 68 artifacts from the UK. This batch of cultural relics was discovered by the British police in 1995, when the State Administration of Cultural Heritage sent personnel to the United Kingdom for identification, confirmed as a prohibited smuggling of Chinese cultural relics, because one of the cultural relics buyers in the case refused to negotiate, the cultural relics involved in the case have been seized by the British authorities. During this period, the China Administration of Cultural Relics did not give up its efforts until 25 years later, the whereabouts of the purchasers of cultural relics were unknown, the seizure time exceeded the prosecution period, and the cultural relics involved in the case were defined as unowned, and the British side returned the cultural relics to China.
The British returned some of the Chinese cultural relics
It can be seen that even the official cultural relics recovery activities are extremely difficult and the time span is extremely long. There are still a large number of Chinese cultural relics that have been lost overseas, which is a witness that takes time.
But we shouldn't give up!