Chinese Make a Bid for Own Antiquities

Nearly eight months after a contentious auction of Chinese cultural relics shook the world of Asian art, one fact seems clear: The rules for trading in this popular and prodigious area of antiquities are changing fast.

Shock waves from last spring’s public auction in Hong Kong of three Qing Dynasty bronze animal heads, which were looted by British and French forces 140 years ago from the Old Summer Palace near Beijing, have reverberated through the region.

The incident angered Communist authorities in Beijing, who tried in vain to halt the sale. It also increased tension in the regime’s uneasy relationship with the regional government here, which allowed the auction to go forward.

The spectacle of a large Chinese state-owned commercial enterprise stepping in to pay $6 million--far over the expected price--for the relics sent chills through Western museum directors and collectors of Chinese art. They feared that the purchase might be the start of a global offensive by Beijing to reclaim much of the vast trove of its antiquities sold, stolen or smuggled from the mainland over the years.

The Poly Group, a former commercial arm of the People’s Liberation Army that now deals in real estate, marketing and other areas, said it made the purchase out of a patriotic duty to return the treasures to the motherland.

The world’s two biggest auction houses--Sotheby’s, which sold one of the heads, and Christie’s, which sold the other two--were surprised and embarrassed by the controversy.

While concerns here have eased about the possibility of a major Beijing reclamation campaign, gallery owners, dealers and other experts familiar with the world of Chinese antiquities believe last spring’s incident brought several important developments into focus.

Chief among them is the emergence of mainland buyers as players in the global market for Chinese antiquities. This comes nearly a generation after foot soldiers of China’s Cultural Revolution destroyed thousands of precious artworks they saw as little more than symbols of a decadent imperial past.

The Poly Group is seen as one--albeit unusual--example of this trend.

Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby’s managing director for China and Southeast Asia, noted that dealers in Chinese artifacts have returned to their old haunts in Beijing’s Liu Li Chang Street as domestic demand builds. There are also signs mainland Chinese buyers are venturing beyond their own borders, he said.

“We’re beginning to see elements of this outside China--not just in Hong Kong, but elsewhere too,” Howard-Sneyd noted.

On a Similar Path as Japan, South Korea

He and others suggested China may be on a path very similar to that taken by Japan and South Korea during the post-World War II era, in which citizens became global buyers of their own cultural relics once economic development had generated the necessary wealth and currency regulations were lifted.

Howard-Sneyd added: “There are individuals and companies with plenty of money. They now have whatever basic comforts they need and are beginning to cast around for things that can represent a higher pleasure.”

Indeed, the strong economic development of Hong Kong and, more recently, Taiwan, have spawned new communities of collectors who have helped generate a counter-flow of Chinese art back toward Asia.

Another trend exemplified by the antiquities furor is what Beijing-based arts writer Bruce Doar calls “a mood for cultural restitution that’s going on everywhere.” With a growing number of nations pressing for the return of antiquities held in the West, the boundaries of political correctness are shifting in their favor.

One reason the organizers of last spring’s auctions were caught off guard by Beijing’s objection was the fact the bronze heads that triggered the controversy had all been sold previously at public auction--the tiger’s head nine years ago in Hong Kong.

Some believe the new heightened sensitivities will drive underground any transactions that carry even a whiff of potential controversy.

“This is the way things are going,” said Elizabeth Knight, publisher and editorial director of the respected Asian art magazine Orientations. “It’s very touchy selling what some consider a national treasure.”

Knight believes if this occurs, art education and understanding will be the losers. “If these sales are forced underground, then there’s less awareness, and if we don’t understand a culture--either ours or others--where are we?”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Hong Kong auctions was the Poly Group’s decision to spend $6 million for the three bronze heads, which observers say reflects a new understanding among China’s business leaders of the finer elements of free market capitalism: Corporate philanthropy combined with solid public relations can be as good for the bottom line as it is for the soul.

In some ways, the sale was reminiscent of a Japanese insurance company’s 1987 purchase of Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Sunflowers” at auction for more than $39 million, though the latter transaction did not have a patriotic dimension.

In an interview, the vice director of the Poly Group’s art museum in Beijing, Ma Baoping, said the purchase was driven mainly by patriotism.

“It’s a question of the country’s face and the nation’s dignity,” he said. “We’d have bought them even if they were more expensive.”

However, the group also was quick to exploit its purchases, sending them on tour around the country that included photo ops in front of company ads and storefronts.

In the months since the Poly Group’s aggressive purchase, fears have subsided that it constituted the beginning of a government-orchestrated effort to reclaim the most sensitive of the Chinese antiquities currently held outside the country, a figure estimated at about 1 million objects by the State Cultural Relics Bureau in Beijing.

Media reports in Hong Kong referring to such a campaign generated a denial from Beijing. Several antiquities experts believe added confirmation came during the fall auctions in Hong Kong, when China failed to act as a Ming Dynasty porcelain jar, described by one critic as “an extremely important piece,” was sold for a record $5.7 million.

There is also little evidence of a crackdown on the brisk smuggling trade that brings mainland antiquities to Hong Kong, where they can be legally sold.

Under the 1997 agreement that returned Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, the former British colony enjoys considerable autonomy. Nowhere is this autonomy more visible than in the world of antiquities, where bronze and porcelain artifacts banned by law from leaving the mainland openly beckon foreign buyers from window displays of upscale galleries along Hong Kong’s Hollywood Road.

“There would be trouble smuggling out a terra-cotta warrior, but less conspicuous items still aren’t hard to get through,” said Warren I. Cohen, a China specialist at the University of Maryland’s Baltimore County campus who has written on the trade in antiquities.

Several reasons would appear to work against any crackdown soon. There are Chinese officials involved in the smuggling and reluctant to end a lucrative source of income. In addition, a huge volume of artifacts remains inside the country, reducing the urgency for any draconian action. Major economic development projects such as the Three Gorges Dam project are constantly turning up new archeological finds.

Summed up Cohen: “China’s [museum] curators are fighting to keep these [antiquities], but too many others are profiting.”

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Times researcher Anthony Kuhn in Beijing contributed to this report.