February 27, 2009
How China could regain its lost relics
Following the attention drawn to the sale of Chinese artefacts formerly owned by Yves Saint Lauren, a number of possible solutions to the issue have been suggested.
From:
UPI Asia
How China can regain its lost relics
By Wu Zuolai
Guest Commentator
Published: February 26, 2009Beijing, China — A Paris court Tuesday rejected a petition by a group of Chinese lawyers to stop the auction house Christie’s from auctioning off a pair of Chinese antiques. The bronze heads of a rat and a rabbit were looted more than 150 years ago by Anglo-French allied forces during the Second Opium War in 1860.
As the court allowed the bidding to go forward on these Chinese cultural relics, stolen from Beijing’s Summer Palace, I began to worry that the Chinese people would respond with emotion rather than reason. As a result, a cultural issue would become a political issue between France and China; imagined, politicized feelings would become real national and racial feelings.
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