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 [转帖]华盛顿邮报有关李春平的报道, 没提及好来坞明星 |
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Diamondhorse
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加入时间: 2005/11/01
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作者：Diamondhorse 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Relics Sold by Christie's Unit In October Hong Kong Auction
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, May 28, 2003; Page A11
BEIJING, May 27 -- A Chinese investigation of an antiquities auction last year in Hong Kong has uncovered the illegal sale of statues of Buddha from Beijing's Forbidden City leading to the detention of a Chinese American collector and a museum official who allegedly transferred the artifacts, official sources said today.
Hong Kong police are cooperating in the probe of an auction on Oct. 28 entitled "Imperial Devotions, Buddhist Treasures for the Qianlong Court," at Christie's Hong Kong Ltd. Officials said that many of the auction's 49 lots were looted from the Eight Outer Temples, a unique collection of monasteries that was part of an 18th-century summer hideaway of emperors in the Qing dynasty.
While the illegal trafficking in relics most recently gained prominence with the looting of National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad, experts say that China, with its porous borders and easily corrupted officials, has become a center for questionable sales on the international antiquities market.
Police investigating the case detained, then released on bail, Li Chunping, a wealthy Chinese American antique collector, authorities reported. An official at the monastery complex located in Chengde, 120 miles northeast of Beijing, and several other individuals also were detained in the investigation, police said.
The detentions occurred in December, but Chinese authorities kept the case secret until now. Chinese officials said they were trying to avoid embarrassing both Li, who has close relations with the Chinese government, and the city government where the monastery-museum complex -- a UNESCO World Heritage site -- is located. Chinese- language newspapers in Hong Kong first reported in mid-May that Hong Kong police were cooperating in the investigation.
Contacted by telephone in Beijing, Li acknowledged he had been detained for five days in December because "the police told me that they needed my help in some investigation." "Those people who sold me the antiques never said that these treasures were stolen. Instead, they said that they inherited them from their ancestors," Li said. "I wouldn't have bought them if I knew they were of questionable origin."
Chinese experts said the case raises questions about whether Western auction houses have permitted the trafficking in antiques from China. Hong Kong's government, meanwhile, has refused to sign a 1970 U.N. convention banning the illicit trade in cultural relics.
Victoria Cheung, a spokeswoman for Christie's Hong Kong, said the auction house was "cooperating with the Hong Kong police" and called the incident "an isolated case." Buyers of the auctioned lots have been asked not to take the artworks out of Hong Kong, official sources said. Considered most valuable among the auction material was an 18th-century enameled statue called the Buddha of Infinite Life that sold for $295,000.
The antiquities case developed after a Chinese art specialist, visiting Hong Kong from Beijing, discovered the stolen antiques during preparations for the Christie's auction, according to a Chinese source. Many of the items still had stickers from the Palace Museum, as the Forbidden City is now called, which is a major world tourist site. The art specialist, who once worked at the museum, recognized the handwriting of her bosses from the 1970s on those stickers and contacted China's Cultural Relics Bureau.
The government investigation confirmed that the objects once belonged to the Palace Museum, the sources said. Most of the relics were Buddhist statues made of bronze, gilt and gold; some of them were gifts from the sixth Dalai Lama to the Emperor Qianlong, who reigned in the 18th century. But a museum official said that the Chinese government in the 1970s ordered the Palace Museum to transfer ownership of the pieces to the Eight Outer Temples in Chengde. Such transfers were commonplace in China at the time, often done because senior officials in certain regions sought the prestige of having priceless relics nearby.
The investigation also determined that an official at the Eight Outer Temples had been selling the relics to Li, the Chinese American, one by one between 1995 and 2002. The complex of eight temples, whose construction began in the 18th century, represents the different ethnic groups in imperial China. Authorities have since closed the site.
Li is one of the biggest individual donors to Chinese charities and the vice president of the Beijing Charity Society, officials said. Li recently donated $361,000 to fight the SARS outbreak in China and another $361,000 to a police Good Samaritan crime fighters fund. Li posted a $1.46 million bond and offered to buy back the items and return them to Chengde in order to avoid prosecution, a government official said.
Chinese sources said that when police from Chengde first sought to question Li they were blocked by police in Beijing, who only allowed them to detain Li once they were assured that Li would be given first- class treatment.
"We treated him as if we were his grandsons," said Li Jinsheng, the director of the Chengde cultural relics department. "We arranged for him to stay in the most luxurious hotel here." He said he did not believe Li Chunping's protestations of innocence. "He has been involved in antiques all his life," the cultural relics director said. "Of course, he knew these items belonged to the imperial family."
Chinese experts said that over the past 20 years, the looting of China's cultural treasures has surpassed the destruction of China's relics during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. At that time, bands of radical Red Guards roamed the country torching old paintings, smashing ancient pottery and gutting temples. Headless stumps are seen today in ancient Buddhist temples because the busts have been lopped off and smuggled out of China. The area that will be flooded next week by the Three Gorges Dam in the Yangtze River valley has been a smuggler's paradise. In 1998, a 2,000-year-old, four-foot- tall candelabrum was auctioned for $2.5 million at the Asian Art Fair in New York and was deemed to have been smuggled from that region. During a wave of smuggling in the early 1990s, antique dealers said that freelance grave robbers and plunderers of excavation sites often sold their goods to dealers or diplomats who smuggled the relics out of the country. In the current wave of looting, most of the crimes have been inside jobs -- museum and government officials selling goods from warehouses. Record-keeping at those institutions is so poor that it can take years to notice a theft, experts said.
The government has said it stepped up attempts to halt antique smuggling and has even executed some smugglers, including two farmers who dug up 256 relics from ancient tombs last year.
In May 2000, the Christie's and Sotheby's auction houses auctioned three bronze animal heads, all representing the Chinese zodiac, that had been looted following the sacking of the Qing dynasty's summer palace by British and French troops in 1860. Christie's and Sotheby's refused a government request to return the items. Finally, the Poly Group Corp., an arms-trading wing of the People's Liberation Army, bought the three pieces for $6.3 million -- almost three times the appraisal price.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/
作者：Diamondhorse 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 [转帖]华盛顿邮报有关李春平的报道, 没提及好来坞明星 -- Diamondhorse - (7637 Byte) 2006-7-28 周五, 12:05 (2322 reads)
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