It is difficult for the British Museum to return China cultural relics for free, but the voice should not stop.

　　Last Friday, the director of the British Museum, Hartwich Fisher, resigned because of the recent exposure of a major collection theft. The ability of the British Museum to protect cultural relics was questioned again. At present, many countries and regions have requested the return of their cultural relics.

　　"Please ask the British Museum to return China cultural relics free of charge" also rushed to the hot search. The British Museum has the largest collection of cultural relics lost in China, with more than 23,000 pieces at present. These cultural relics cover almost all art categories and span thousands of years of China history.

　　Perhaps, people’s appeals can’t recover several collections from the exhibition hall or warehouse of the British Museum, but such voices should never stop.

　　On August 16th, local time, the British Museum announced awkwardly that a batch of "gold jewelry, semi-precious stones and glass products from 15th century BC to 19th century AD" were found to be "lost, stolen or damaged". They were not on public display and were mainly used for academic and research purposes.

　　Theft on this scale is obviously not committed by a group of thieves who suddenly attacked, but stems from long-term inside job theft. Peter higgs, a 56-year-old senior curator, is one of the current suspects in the theft case. He has worked for the British Museum for more than 35 years, and was fired immediately after finding the jewels missing in the museum.

　　Higgs is also one of the authoritative experts on ancient Greek and Mediterranean cultural relics, and a member of the "monuments men" team in charge of tracking looted cultural relics in the British Museum. Of course, Higgs’s son insisted in an interview with the British media that his father was innocent and denied that he had anything to do with the lost items. The British Museum declined to comment further, claiming that it is still under criminal investigation.

　　In fact, as early as 2021, the British Museum has been reminded that some cultural relics that may be treasures in the collection are being sold privately. Professor Martin henig, a gem expert from Oxford University, once told the media that he and his colleagues had found a part of the ancient signet ring collected by the British Museum in a private dealer. "The history of this signet ring can be traced back to the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus."

　　Henig informed the British Museum that this ancient ring with a history of 2,000 years was quickly recovered. However, things didn’t end there. As time went by, experts and scholars noticed more cultural relics for sale, and some cultural relics were even directly hanged on the e-commerce website eBay for public sale.

　　An antique expert who asked not to be named revealed to the media that he found semi-precious stones and glass products for sale on eBay from 2016 or earlier, and the prices of some items were far below their true values.

　　In February, 2021, Yitai Gradel, an art dealer, contacted the British Museum, saying that he also saw the cultural relics in the museum’s collection online, but it took jonathan Wilhemlms, then the deputy curator of the museum, several months to reply that "there were no improper signs".

　　The incident was also confirmed by george osborne, chairman of the British Museum, who added that the museum "could have taken more measures" after the first warning of cultural relics being stolen in February 2021. But why not? Osborne’s explanation is that even he doesn’t want to believe that museum executives have "cover-up" behavior.

　　Now that things have reached this point, we really have to wait for the big fight before paying attention to … … Archaeologist Crystal Zyro Dzhanis, the head of the UNESCO team dedicated to combating illegal cultural relics trafficking, described the theft as "the most serious theft in modern history".

　　However, if we push the timeline forward again, if we want to talk about the "most serious theft in modern history" of cultural relics, isn’t it the British Museum itself, one of the protagonists who took in stolen goods?

　　This is universally acknowledged. The British themselves face it frankly — — I grabbed it with my skill. Why should I return it? More than a decade ago, when David Cameron, then British Prime Minister, visited India, he also left an inspiring "golden sentence" on this topic.

　　When he was interviewed by India’s NDTV TV, he was asked: When can Britain return the famous "Mountain of Light" diamond?

　　This huge diamond weighs 105.6 carats and was once the largest natural diamond in the world, worth 591 million US dollars. According to the Indian Archaeological Investigation Bureau (ASI), this diamond was collected in the Golconda mine in south-central India in the 12th and 14th centuries, and the earliest literature can be traced back to 1304.

　　The "Mountain of Light" diamond has always been full of mystery, and its successive owners have suffered bad luck and even died. There was a passage in the history of India: "Whoever owns it will own the whole world. Whoever owns it will have to bear the disaster it brings. Only God or a woman has it and will not suffer any punishment. "

　　According to the Royal Collection Trust, in 1849, as part of the Lahore Treaty, this diamond was "presented" to Queen Victoria by Dhuleep Singh, the last monarch of the Sikh Empire at the age of 11. Since then, it has been passed down all the way and is now embedded in a crown worn by the late Queen Elizabeth II.

　　But in the eyes of Indians, this diamond was taken away by Britain. After independence in 1947, India has been calling on Britain to return this diamond.

　　In the face of the Indian media’s old story, Cameron rudely refused again, and took the British Museum as an example: "Once you say yes to a country, you will soon find that the British Museum will become empty." This sentence also proves from another angle that most of the precious collections in the British Museum are not owned by Britain.

　　Hartwich Fisher, the former curator who resigned because of this theft, had previously made it clear that the cultural relics in the collection would not be returned. His words are: "These treasures from all over the world in the British Museum can let the audience enjoy different cultural relics from all over the world and at the same time in the same space, so that they can experience ‘ Cultural relevance ’ 。”

　　The British may agree with this sentence, but other countries may not. Greece and Britain have the most intractable cultural heritage dispute in the world — — The dispute of Elgin marble statue in British Museum.

　　The statue, also known as the Parthenon statue, once decorated the famous Parthenon in the Acropolis of Athens. At the beginning of the 19th century, Lord Elgin, a British aristocrat, got permission from the Ottomans, the then Greek ruler, to peel off these statues from the walls of the temple, ship them back to Britain and sell them to the British government in 1816.

　　These statues have been placed in the British Museum as the core exhibits in the Greek exhibition hall. The Elgin marble statue has caused a long-standing dispute between the two countries. So far, the limit of Britain’s "letting go" is — — Consider letting these statues return to Greece temporarily in the form of "borrowing exhibitions" in the future.

　　In 1970, UNESCO adopted an international convention (namely, the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illegal Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property), stipulating that ancient cultural relics entering other countries after 1970 must have an export license granted by the government of the country where the cultural relics originated.

　　According to Xu Jie, director of the Asian Art Museum, 1970 was regarded as an important "watershed" for museums all over the world. "For example, the large-scale outflow of cultural relics from ancient civilizations such as Greece, Egypt, Turkey and China in the 18th and 19th centuries has basically come to an end."

　　Although the continuous outflow stops, it is still more difficult to get back what has been lost. Many experts in the field of cultural relics have mentioned a general principle of property law: if the law changes, the previous legal transactions are still legal. Until the 20th century, art plunder still did not violate international law.

　　What is exciting is that with the general trend of global liquidation and reflection on colonialism in recent years, a momentum of pursuing cultural relics has been formed, and successful cases have been reported frequently.

　　Take Benin, a small African country, as an example. In February, 1897, British troops stormed the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin (now in Nigeria) and took away a large number of treasures, including thousands of exquisite and distinctive bronzes, totaling more than 10,000.

　　Since 2020, museums in many countries, including Britain (mainly European museums), have begun to return the bronzes looted from Benin in the past year. Although it is only a few, it has at least released a positive signal.

　　How many China cultural relics have been lost overseas? According to the incomplete statistics of UNESCO, at least 1.64 million pieces of China cultural relics are distributed in more than 200 museums in 47 countries around the world, and the foreign folk collections are about ten times more than the collections.

　　The British Museum has the largest collection of cultural relics lost in China, with more than 23,000 pieces at present and more than 2,000 pieces on long-term display. These cultural relics cover almost all artistic categories and span thousands of years of China history.

　　One of the core collections in China Pavilion, Zhen Tu of Women’s History (copy of Tang Dynasty), has flowed into the people since the war in the late Tang Dynasty, then returned to the court in the Northern Song Dynasty, and spread all the way to the Qing Dynasty. It was the court treasure that Emperor Qianlong loved very much, and was moved to the Summer Palace during the reign of Empress Dowager Cixi.

　　In 1900, when Eight-Nation Alliance invaded Beijing and burned the Summer Palace, Captain Clarence K Johnson of the First Bengal Cavalry of the British Army took advantage of the chaos to steal a picture of women’s history. When Johnson returned to London in 1902, he didn’t realize the value of the painting. At the beginning of 1903, he took a picture of a woman’s history to the British Museum, and wanted the other party to evaluate the jade buckle on the painting axis. The staff valued the whole painting at 25 pounds. In this way, the British Museum bought the painting for only 25 pounds, and the Millennium national treasure has since been exiled to a foreign country.

　　In 2002, National Cultural Heritage Administration, China set up a "special fund for the collection of national key precious cultural relics", with an annual allocation of 50 million yuan to purchase representative treasures with high artistic value. However, it cost nearly 29.99 million yuan just to buy back a handwritten scroll of Yan Shan Ming by Mi Fei, a famous calligrapher in the Northern Song Dynasty.

　　Obviously, it will be an overwhelming project to recover cultural relics only by means of high-priced repurchase. Xie Chensheng (1922 ~ 2022), a famous expert on cultural relics in China and honorary president of China Cultural Relics Society, made it clear during his lifetime that we can only pursue those cultural relics that were robbed by naked fire through legal and official channels under the framework of international conventions, and we must never buy them. Buying them is tantamount to recognizing the legality of the looting in that year.

　　In February, 1995, the British police discovered a suspected China cultural relic in the process of detecting an international cultural relic crime, and informed the Chinese Embassy in Britain. National Cultural Heritage Administration was initially identified as a cultural relic prohibited from leaving China. In March of that year, the British police intercepted and detained a large number of cultural relics that arrived in Britain. After National Cultural Heritage Administration sent a Commissioner to Britain for identification, it was confirmed as a smuggled cultural relic, and the relevant departments immediately pursued it in various ways.

　　In May of the same year, more than 3,000 returned cultural relics were shipped back to Beijing. In August, a suspect in the case reached a settlement with National Cultural Heritage Administration and returned seven cultural relics. Another cultural relic buyer refused to negotiate, so the cultural relics involved have been detained by the British police. In this way, until 2020, because the buyer’s whereabouts were unknown, and the detention time exceeded the prosecution period, this batch of cultural relics involved was defined as ownerless, and finally returned to China in October of that year, with a total of 68 pieces, more than half of which were secondary and tertiary cultural relics.

　　From the initial understanding of the situation to the final recovery, it took 25 years. The difficulty of transnational recourse of cultural relics can be seen.

　　Although persistence may be futile, giving up is doomed to nothing. This arduous task is worthy of unremitting efforts. As Dan Jixiang, former director of the Palace Museum in Beijing, said, "Cultural relics are most dignified only when they are displayed in their original places. If you are lost overseas like a ghost, you have no dignity. Don’t expect outsiders to really give you dignity, because these cultural relics are the spoils they have snatched back. "