Is the West afraid? – Country sent inspectors to scout for looted relics

Is the West nervous that China has sent a team of inspectors to its part of the world to catalogue looted national treasures? Global Times, an English paper run by the People’s Dail Group, answered “yes” in a cover story on October 22, although the government has said it does not mean to seek the recovery of those relics.

A team of experts were sent abroad to catalogue the treasures looted from China.

The government has sent a team of artifact hunters to nearly 50 countries to track down thousands of treasures looted by foreign armies 150 years ago.

The experts will scour museums, libraries and private collections in Britain, the US, France, Japan and elsewhere to photograph and catalogue what was taken from the Old Summer Palace, or Yuanmingyuan, after British and French armies sacked it in 1860 then picked through what remained in 1900.

“We hope to build  complete database of the Old Summer Palace’s lost relics so we can have a clearer view of the historical royal garden, then known as the Garden of Gardens, before it was looted and burnt,” Chen Mingjie, the director othe imperial garden, said.

He was not sure how many treasures had been pillaged from the palace, a summer pleasure ground for emperors in the 18th and 19th centuries. “Based on our rough calculations, about 1.5 million elics are housed in more than 2,000 museums in 47 countries,” Chen said.

“We have clarified that this is an attempt to document rather than to seek the return of those relics. We do hope some previously unknown relics mght surface and some might be returned to our country during our investigation.”

(The Times)