February 27, 2009
An auction of two bronze sculptures looted from the Yuanmingyuan drew furious articles in many of today’s newspapers calling for state reprisal against Christie’s, the Paris auction house. But Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post kept its cool. The newspaper today ran an front page headline questioning the value of the rabbit and rat heads, which drew winning bids of 14 million euros apiece.
Luo Zhewen, director of the architecture department at the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and honorary chairman of the Cultural Artifact Association, was quoted in the article as saying that whoever bought the bronzes at such a price, he/she must be an idiot (冤大头).
I have been studying China’s old palace architecture for over 70 years. I think that two out of so many parts of the palace’s enormous structure, the zodiac animal heads from the Old Summer Palace don’t have much value in themselves. There is nothing remarkable about their cost or craftsmanship. They were just water faucets, and very coarse compared with other artifacts from the Old Summer Palace kept at Peking University and other places. These days, they can be easily manufactured at small factories in Beijing or Guangzhou. The artistic value is just not very high.
Reflecting on the situation a few years ago when China companies and businesspeople from Macao bid on other heads, Luo said, “We were fooled at that time,” but the Chinese people won’t be fooled again, because “now we all know that their only value is as criminal evidence, not as art.” Christie’s “was making money by trading in criminal evidence.”
So in Luo’s eyes, what is the real value of the two heads? “Less than one million RMB. More than that, and the buyer should figure that he’s been cheated.”
- Oriental Morning Post (Chinese): Expert says that the only value of the head is that they are criminal evidence