BEIJING • A well-known treasure from Yuanmingyuan, or the Old Summer Palace, finally came home to Beijing 159 years after it was looted.
A red bronze horse head statue was returned by the donation of 97-year-old collector and Hong Kong-Macau business magnate Stanley Ho, whose daughter Pansy Ho handed the statue over to China's National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA) in Beijing last Wednesday.
As a surprise for visitors to the National Museum of China, it appeared there last Wednesday and joined an exhibition displaying hundreds of priceless cultural relics that have been returned from overseas since 1949. The exhibit will run through Nov 27.
Built in 1707, Yuanmingyuan – the former imperial resort of the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1911) – was often referred to as "the garden of gardens" for its lush landscapes and numerous temples, palaces and pavilions. It covered a 350ha area, about five times the size of the Forbidden City.
However, Anglo-French troops rampaged through the compound and set it on fire in 1860. Numerous national treasures, including 12 animal head statues within the Chinese zodiac, were looted in the mayhem.
Yuanmingyuan fell into ruins after the ransacking.
According to NCHA director Liu Yuzhu, the newly returned statue will be transferred to the administration of Yuanmingyuan ruins.
"The return of the statue marks a broken link of collective historical memory being reconnected," Mr Liu said.
The horse head bust was one of 12 decorative taps – in the form of 12 Chinese zodiac signs – that were for a fountain in the Old Summer Palace.
It appeared in Hong Kong for a Sotheby's auction in 2007 and NCHA immediately contacted the auctioneer to register its disagreement at the auction, arguing it was stolen. The administration expressed hope that it would be returned to its home "in a suitable way in the future".
To save it from being taken abroad again, Mr Ho negotiated with the seller and spent HK$69.1 million to get the statue in September 2007 and publicly exhibited it in Hong Kong and Macau to promote the protection of China's cultural relics.
"In the past 70 years' effort to reclaim lost Chinese cultural relics from overseas, Hong Kong and Macau compatriots have always contributed," Mr Liu said. "Ho is an outstanding representative among them."
The bust is the seventh of the 12 animal statues from the Yuanmingyuan fountain to be returned to Beijing from overseas.
In 2003, a donation by Mr Ho also returned a pig head statue to Beijing-based Poly Art Museum.
"After the opening of the exhibition, my colleagues and I wrote to Mr Ho exploring the possibility of letting the horse heaRead More – Source
