Losing Their Heads
On 9 October 2007 Macau gambling tycoon Dr. Stanley Ho Hung-sun proudly put his latest acquisition on display in one of his casinos there.
It was another bronze head from a set of the 12 creatures of the Chinese zodiac and the second ‘national treasure’ of its kind Ho had bought in order to donate it to the nation (the previous one was in 2003).
As with earlier sales, the Chinese media brandished claims that the feelings of all Chinese had been hurt at the prospect of the auction of the heads, and before the sale to Dr. Ho demands were issued for the instant and unconditional surrender of the bronze on the grounds that it was looted during the Anglo-French burning of Beijing’s Summer Palace in 1860, a source of ‘national humiliation’ and much finger-pointing (see Architecture and Xenophobia).
But the story told by the Chinese media was as incomplete as China’s collection of the heads, and in borrowing official language of ‘long memories’ and ‘humiliation’ foreign media sometimes also turned themselves into amplifiers for nationalist propaganda.
Nothing about this story, from arson to auction, was quite as it seemed, and if Chinese memories were long, they were also selective.
At a vast area of gardens and pavilions now known as the Old Summer Palace, assembled by his grandfather to the northwest of the city, the Qiánlóng emperor employed assorted Jesuit artists and others to design and supervise the construction of a mini Versailles, completed around 1760.
One of the site’s elaborate fountains had 12 seated figures with human bodies but with the heads of Chinese zodiac animals, each in turn spouting a jet of water from its mouth for two hours so that the fountain also functioned as a clock. It was these figures that were decapitated by the Anglo-French forces, the heads ending up in art museums and private collections around the world.
Commissioned by an alien Manchu overlord, and produced by Italian and French Jesuits, they make a very odd choice of Chinese ‘national treasure’. Curiously, other genuinely Chinese items looted from the palace regularly change hands on international markets without the slightest fuss being made.
The precise cause of the Anglo-French armies’ presence in the Qīng capital, vastly outnumbered and with tenuous lines of supply, is never mentioned. But they came to Běijīng to avenge the incarceration and murder of their envoys, which importantly at least provides a reason for the destruction of the Summer Palace, although not an excuse.
Four heads are already on display at the Poly Art Museum, while the fifth remains in Macau. Owned by the arms-trading Poly Group, the museum has an acquisitions policy of repatriating Chinese treasures from overseas, although in fact has little choice, as that’s where most of them are to be found. The great treasures in private hands in China itself are few, and those already in China’s other museums are not up for sale.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the looting of treasures by foreigners was the least of China’s problems. Far more in the way of valuables walked out of the country with Chinese emigrants, were smuggled out for sale in Hong Kong and beyond (in a constant stream until the recent increase in wealthy domestic buyers for looted goods made cross-border smuggling unnecessary), or vanished in political upheavals such as the organised destruction of the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution, sometimes sold en masse by weight. So much for patriotism.
The scale of the destruction the Chinese visited on their own heritage at that time, while in no way excusing the foreign looting a century earlier, renders it almost completely insignificant in comparison. But self-criticism is not in the government’s repertoire of rhetoric.
Paradoxically, the merit of the bronze animal heads lies almost entirely in the story of their theft. Although they are not entirely unattractive, Jesuit Benoist (Benoît) was being honest when he swore to his lack of ability in making them.
At the Poly Art Museum they look clumsy among a fine collection of bronze wine goblets, tripod cooking vessels, bells, and more, all truly Chinese and some predating the heads by as much as 34 centuries.
The latter might truly be labelled national treasures, although the very best Chinese bronzes are mostly in Taipei’s National Palace Museum as part of the imperial collection that ended up there in 1949 after the civil war. And the problem about treating the repatriation of the bronze heads as a triumph of patriotism is that the sellers have mostly been from what the media are instructed to call ‘Taiwan Province’, or ‘China’s Taiwan’.
So clearly not all Chinese have had their feelings hurt by the sale of the heads, and if the Taiwanese seller of Dr. Ho’s 2007 acquisition felt any pain, it was no doubt soothed by walking away with US$8.9 million, more than 22 times the amount he paid for the head in 1989.
The head was originally to be sold at an auction, which Ho short-circuited by approaching the seller directly, amid widely-expressed fear that it might go somewhere other than China. An official of China’s Special Fund for Rescuing Lost Cultural Relics from Overseas was quoted on the state-run china.org.cn website as saying that, while his organisation had the resources to buy the head, ‘it would violate the original intention of the auction if anyone intended to raise the price to an unreasonable level’.
Of course the ‘original intention’ of any auction is precisely to realise a price that’s as ‘unreasonable’ as possible, and it’s the Chinese government’s own rhetoric that has driven prices ever higher. The China Poly Group paid around US$4 million for its three heads for in 2000, and Ho himself paid less than US$1 million for one head in 2003. But in 2007 he had to part with US$8.9 million for another.
So what exactly did Dr. Ho have to celebrate? Paying too much for a foreign artefact of historic but very limited aesthetic value, ‘repatriated’ from supposedly elsewhere in China as an act of patriotism and revenge for an incomplete account of events long-forgotten by all but the masters of nationalist propaganda.
In 2009 two more heads came up for auction, triggering exactly the same sequence of absurd responses from the Chinese authorities as on the three previous occasions since 2000. Partly as a result, this time each head went for US$14 million, nearly twice the absurd sum previously paid by Ho.
No fewer than 85 Chinese lawyers brought a suit to stop the auction — a project whose failure was known from previous examination of the legal issues to be inevitable. But it was strange, given the supposedly nationwide sleeplessness over the auction, that they had difficulty in finding someone to name as plaintiff. They eventually (and rather comically) settled on a surviving descendant of the Manchu imperial Aisin Gioro family, thereby tacitly admitting the Manchu rather than Chinese claim to the items, and giving entirely the wrong message.
Despite this supposedly principled appeal to international law, once the case was lost a further demand was made for the return of the heads, and threats were issued against the Chinese operations of the auctioneer, Christie’s. This not only cast further doubt on the effectiveness of the rule of law in China and the wisdom of doing business there, but also indicated the Chinese government’s lack of interest in anything except getting its own way, legally or not.
For a few days after the end of the auction the identity of the winning bidder remained obscure. Some had expected Stanley Ho to buy these heads, too, but if he was gambling that his earlier expenditures of nearly US$10 million altogether would earn him merit in Běijīng he must have been greatly disappointed.
New government restrictions on crossings from mainland China designed to prevent officials from gambling with public money had assisted a plunge in Macau casino business and casino stock alike. According to Forbes magazine, this had reduced the size of Dr. Ho’s personal fortune by 80%.
After a period of silence the winning bidder revealed himself to be one Cài Míngchāo (蔡铭超), an agent of the National Treasures Fund, the very same quasi-governmental organisation that had earlier rejected an offer to buy the heads before the auction for only US$10 million each. But he spoke out only to say that his intention had been to sabotage the auction and that he would not be paying the US$14 million per head he had bid.
Official media quoted a spokesman for the 85 lawyers saying that they admired Cài’s fraudulent action, thus demonstrating that even some Chinese lawyers have little interest in law. Other voices suggested that Cài’s behaviour was at best improper and reflected poorly on the Chinese in general.
As a result, Cài has been banned from further bidding at international auctions, and the bona fides of subsequent mainland Chinese buyers are given careful scrutiny, with deposits sometimes required before they are allowed to bid: a loss of face all round.
Furthermore, the deceitful sabotage of the auction revives foreign observers’ concerns, not so much over the events of 150 years ago as intended, but over other more recent deceits the Chinese would prefer were overlooked: tainted milk, pet food, toys, and building materials; and unfulfilled pre-Olympic promises on human rights, breaches of WTO rules, and questions over the ages of Olympic competitors.
In retaliation for the auction shenanigans it seemed that Pierre Bergé, the seller of the last two heads, would retain them indefinitely. But now over 80 years old, the partner of the late Yves Saint Laurent (of whose estate the heads were part) is himself no spring collection, and he subsequently parted privately with the heads to François-Henri Pinault for an undisclosed sum.
Pinault is head of both Christie’s auction house and luxury goods maker Kering (formerly PPR), whose fastest growing market for its Gucci, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, and many other brands is China. In April 2003, in a move widely interpreted as a naked attempt to buy preference, Pinault announced that he would donate the two heads to China. And if that wasn’t sufficiently grovelling, he released a statement praising ‘the forward-looking vision of China’s new leadership’. It was perhaps a coincidence that in the same month as M. Pinault’s announcement Christie’s became the first foreign auction house to be given a licence to operate independently in China. But like Dr. Ho, he will likely find he makes little return on his investment in the long term.
In the meantime the Chinese government has spent ¥45 billion (US$6.5 billion) on an expansion of Chinese media operations overseas, including a 24-hour Chinese ‘news’ channel.
The propaganda chiefs have shown no sign of improvement at overseas PR. So if any more heads are discovered and come up for sale will they simply have a larger stage on which to blunder even more spectacularly?
A stone replica of the Jesuit fountain from which the heads came can be found in Běijīng’s Grand Hotel, manufactured by Hong Kong craftsmen from Jesuit sketches to symbolise not humiliation but the joint efforts of the Europeans and Chinese investing in the hotel.
Perhaps all parties should pay a visit.
▶ The heads collected in Běijīng may be seen at the Poly Art Museum. There’s one more in the lobby of the Grand Lisboa casino-hotel in Macau.
Next in North and East of the Imperial City: Imperial Granary
Previously: Poly Art Museum
Main Index of A Better Guide to Beijing.
For discussion of China travel, see The Oriental-List.
