Chinese artefacts in repatriation row were ‘given willingly’ to British Museum

The British Museum boasts one of the biggest collections of Chinese antiquities in the west, but it has faced repeated calls to return them to China. Now historical documents reveal that many of the antiquities were acquired with the full cooperation of Chinese officials in the last century.

US historian Justin M Jacobs has unearthed evidence that shows the Chinese government “willingly and enthusiastically helped them remove these treasures from their lands” because they wanted closer ties with the west and appreciated new scholarship.

He said: “These things did not have priceless valuations that we project on to them today… I have found new evidence that hasn’t been looked at before that will change our view of objects in the British Museum and other institutions.” There have been calls in recent years for the British Museum to return artefacts including the Parthenon marbles – also known as the Elgin marbles – the Rosetta Stone and the Benin bronzes .

Last year’s revelations of thefts of 1,500 museum items sparked renewed international repatriation requests, among them, by China’s state-run English-language newspaper Global Times .

In an editorial, the paper said: “Most Chinese collections were certainly looted or stolen by Britain … As long as Britain cannot prove which collection was acquired legally and honestly, then the mother country of these collections has the right to seek their repatriation.”

Jacobs, a professor of history at the American University in Washington, said he had unearthed evidence showing that, far from seeing the acquisition of antiquities by outsiders as morally dubious, the Chinese authorities believed that professional and social relationships with well-regarded foreigners were more valuable than what they were removing.

He said: “[I have seen] letters and recollections of Chinese officials, Chinese dealers, Chinese scholars talking about what they think of western archaeologists, who came into the country and removed tens of thousands of objects. It’s usually social and diplomatic capital – ‘If we help him out, then this will sweeten diplomatic negotiations with Great Britain the next time we have some sort of diplomatic issue to work out.’

“Or they see having a friendship and connections with a foreign scholar to be more valuable. The Chinese material should be categorised as a form of diplomatic gift.”

He added: “I conclude that most of today’s moral outrage over western museums and their collections is the result of projecting today’s values backward in time to an era in which our values today were not shared, either by westerners or nonwesterners.”

Jacobs’s research will feature in his book, Plunder? How Museums Got Their Treasures , which will be published next week.

The book, which covers objects ranging from ancient Egyptian antiquities to the Parthenon marbles, challenges the widely accepted assumption that many western museum treasures were acquired by imperialist plunder and theft, arguing for a nuanced understanding of how they reached western shores.

Jacobs believes that other objects such as the Benin bronzes – looted during the British military expedition to Benin City in 1897, – were military plunder and “have a case for restitution”.

But he said: “We should not jump from that to say that everything in a museum was acquired in the exact same immoral way that military loot was acquired. Military plunder actually represents a fairly small amount of the materials that you see in a museum.”

The British-Hungarian archaeologist Aurel Stein acquired thousands of Chinese antiquities that ended up in the British Museum and other collections.

Among artefacts that the Chinese officials knew he was removing at the time – “as they recorded their thoughts in Chinese about that removal”, Jacobs said – is a painted panel, believed by some experts to date from between the 7th and 8th century, depicting the legend of how silk-making technology left China . It is now in the British Museum.

Jacobs found unpublished material among Stein’s vast archive in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It includes a 1914 letter from a Chinese magistrate who said to Stein: “You practise archaeology with a stunning perseverance and thoroughness that is unheard of.”

Jacobs said: “This is awkward. After all, Stein has become something of a nationalist pinata among Chinese critics of western imperialism today.”

The evidence contradicts that image, he said, as it shows Chinese officials knew what Stein and other archaeologists were taking abroad. Those officials looked forward to hearing about new scholarly discoveries that would result from transporting these antiquities to a site for their preservation and study.

Jacobs said: “Just one century ago, the most highly educated and prosperous Chinese in the entire country saw in Stein’s expedition not a sinister imposition of foreign imperialism, but rather an altruistic and admirable display of the scientific keys to catching up with the leading western powers of the day.”