Advanced Search

The story appears on

Page A3

February 12, 2014

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Nation

Museum donation secures return of historic columns

By Li Qian | February 12, 2014, Wednesday | Print Edition

Seven marble columns from Beijing’s Yuanmingyuan imperial garden are to be returned to the country after Chinese billionaire Huang Nubo donated US$1.6 million to a Norwegian museum.

KODE Art Museums of Bergen will use the money to repair a gallery for its Chinese collection, badly damaged during a burglary in January last year,

Under an agreement with Huang, known for his attempt to buy property in Iceland and develop it into a tourist resort in 2011, the museum will return the carved columns to China later this year.

They had been acquired more than a century ago by a former Norwegian cavalry officer who had settled in China, The New York Times reported.

The columns are part of a  2,500-piece collection of Chinese artifacts in the KODE donated by Johan Munthe between 1907 and 1935.

Munthe came to China in 1886 and served with the then China customs service. Later he fought for China in the first Sino-Japanese War between 1894 and 1895.

It’s not known how Munthe came by the columns.

“I am very moved to know that all of their board members agreed to return the columns,” Huang told The Beijing News.

He is to give the columns to Peking University, where he graduated, because the current campus had once been part of the garden, also known as the Old Summer Palace.

The columns will go on public display in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art & Archeology on campus.

Huang said there were no plans for the return of other Chinese treasures kept by KODE.

Huang, chairman of Beijing-based Zhongkun Investment Group, is estimated to have a net worth of US$890 million.

Known for its extensive collection of gardens, architecture, and other works of art, the Old Summer Palace was built in the 18th century but burned down by Anglo-French forces during the Second Opium War in 1860.

China’s Cultural Relics Association estimates that more than 10 million cultural relics were taken overseas between 1840 and 1949. About 1.5 million of them from the Old Summer Palace are now spread across more than 2,000 museums in about 50 countries.

“Though these relics definitely belong to China, our search this time isn’t aimed at getting them back,” said Chen Mingjie, an official at Yuanmingyuan. “We’ll just take pictures of them for cataloging.”

Some treasures have returned. The most notable success being 12 bronze animal heads forming the zodiacal clepsydra (water clock) at the Old Summer Palace of Emperor Qianlong (1736-1795).

In 2000, China Poly Group bought the ox, monkey and tiger heads for almost HK$33 million (US$4.25 million) at auction.

Macau billionaire Stanley Ho bought the pig head for 6 million yuan (US$990,600) in 2003 and the horse head at HK$69.1 million at an auction in 2007.

Last year, French billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault returned the rat and rabbit heads.

All seven are now in China.

The dragon is reported to be in Taiwan while the other four pieces — rooster, snake, dog and goat — are missing.

 

Nation


 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend