China is thoroughly unimpressed with Christie's for auctioning off a pair of bronze animal heads--a rabbit and a rat--in Paris this week. The government's State Administration of Cultural Heritage issued a statement earlier today condemning the sale and threatening "serious effects" on "Christie's development in China" if it went ahead.
Apparently this means Chinese customs is going to be extra wary when checking antique-y stuff Christie's representatives try to take out of the country. What exactly they were doing before with potential cultural relics, I'm not sure.
The story has been all over CCTV for the past couple of days, playing on a loop on the mini televisions in buses across the city. Christie's probably never got so much Chinese airtime.
Behind the beef is the claim the items were looted from Beijing's Summer Palace in 1860, when Anglo-French invaders sacked and looted the place at the end of the second Opium War.
This brings up interesting issues of relic ownership, especially because much of the artsy historical stuff at most European and North American museums has been looted from somewhere (*cough* Greek marbles, Haida canoes). If an item originated in one place and was pilfered half a dozen times before falling into the hands of a rich museum or philanthropist, who gets to keep it? At what point does the colonial douchebaggery end?
As the Telegraph's Richard Spencer points out, it's even more complicated in this case: Although the Summer Palace's looting was a colossal mistake, those bronzes were designed by Europeans to adorn a fountain built for a Chinese emperor. It isn't clear whether they were looted by Europeans or Chinese.
Plus, let's face it: Those heads are pretty ugly.
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