MCLC: Save the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (3)

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Save the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (3)
In response to Lily Lee's posting: Are you sure you were in Stockholm, and not in Berlin? The items you describe sound a lot like they might have been seen in Berlin, but in the Ostasiatische and in the Pergamon museums respectively. Can you remember?
As for the spirit of your suggestion to return things, I am sympathetic in principle even though in many cases the "country of origin" no longer exists or is no longer the same.
I have published and spoken a lot about these issues, f.ex. in the piece on "world culture" I cited already, and in other publications such as "Chinese collections outside China: Problems and hopes," Public Archaeology [London] 5.2 (2006), 111-26. This was revised from a lecture at the inauguration of the International Centre for Chinese Heritage and Archaeology, University College London, in March 2005, where I argued for the first principle of care of world culture, and for certain distinctions between objects meant to travel and to be collected (painting scrolls, and such), and objects meant to form part of a context in a particular physical site, such as murals and architectural elements. (I once engineered the return to China of such an object, a funerary horse that had reached Sweden by the usual way of smuggling and auction-houses -- which are booming in China today, very likely fueled by domestic looting that is breaking up contexts in the very same way, destroying the sites and the knowledge ... )
And then, to really complicate all this, there is partage, by which principle the Stockholm MFEA's huge founding archaeological collections from China were legitimately obtained by scientific excavation and taken to Sweden with official Chinese permission, and encouragement.
Of course, whatever you say, many Chinese people will tell you it's a good thing those foreigners stole all those things, because otherwise the stuff would have been smashed up by us Chinese, under Mao.
Indeed, the archaeological items that our museum's founder Johan Gunnar Andersson duly returned to China as per their partage agreement, in multiple shipments 1927-36, all vanished in China. They have never been found again. In the 2000s I myself tried to look in many places (Nanjing, Beijing, Tokyo, Taipei, etc.), sending copies of Andersson's detailed checklists around to ask for help. The collections, hundreds of large Yangshao vessels, did survive the war with Japan (there is a strong indication that they were still seen in Nanjing afterwards), but, not the civil Chinese war. They may have been bombed to pieces, or buried somewhere.
Or, knowing what we know about museums, they may also be stowed away in some messy basement, such as that of the Nanjing museum (a museum that abruptly discontinued a correspondence with me as director, on the trail of the lost items. They acknowledged having some stone tools marked with Andersson's pen, but then would not say more and stopped corresponding).
Museums, including in China, oftentimes either don't know what they have, or they don't want to talk about it, because of the enormous embarrassment over the mess everything is in, if outside people knew about it would hurt the prestige of the museum and maybe more. So maybe that's what is going on: The psychological trauma of the burden of collections.
Whatever the case, those returned-but-lost objects include one of the most spectacular, earliest human figures in Chinese archaeology and art, a ceramic lid in the shape of a human head. Only black-and-white photos survive. Read about him and the other returned-but-lost objects in my book co-authored with Chinese archaeologist Chen Xingcan, on the history of the beginning of Chinese archaeology and of the creation of the MFEA, China Before China: Johan Gunnar Andersson, Ding Wenjiang, and the Discovery of China’s Prehistory / Zhongguo zhi qian de Zhongguo: Antesheng, Ding Wenjiang he Zhongguo shiqianshi de faxian. With Chen Xingcan. Bilingual (English-Chinese). Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 2004. ISBN: 9197061638.
Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42 at cornell.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 8, 2016
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